Adam Begley

The scary YouTube videos of televangelist and McCain ally John Hagee don’t quite do justice to his talent as a preacher, at least according to Matt Taibbi’s vicious, funny, heartbreaking tour of the American scene, The Great Derangement (Spiegel & Grau, $24):

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Oscar Wilde, on his tour of America in 1882, made not one but two pilgrimages to Camden, N.J., to see Walt Whitman—whose poetry he claimed to have known “from the cradle.” Afterward, the Good Grey Poet told a reporter that Wilde was “genuine, honest, and manly.” He added, for emphasis, “He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly.” Wilde, in return, compared Whitman to Goethe and Schiller: “There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry; it is so universal, so comprehensive.”

This comical instance of brazen late-19th-century logrolling comes from Michael Robertson’s Worshipping Walt (Princeton, $27.95), which introduces us to a handful of the “hot little prophets” who made a cult of Whitman, and also reminds us of the religious purpose of his poetry—with Leaves of Grass as gospel.  read more »

Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), compares Barack Obama’s speech on race last month in Philadelphia with the address Abraham Lincoln delivered at the Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860. In fact, the two speeches are very different, the glaring distinction being that Lincoln’s knotty, cerebral discourse appeals principally to reason, whereas Mr. Obama’s forthright simplicity appeals principally to the emotions. But Mr. Wills’ first few paragraphs are nonetheless astonishing for the parallels drawn between the 19th- and 21st-century candidates:  read more »

It’s spring at last, and girls are pushing up everywhere like daisies.

PLAYWRIGHT THERESA REBECK showcases a Brooklyn trio in her lively, entertaining and accurately titled first novel, Three Girls and Their Brother (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), a romp through the looking-glass world of fashion shoots and instant celebrity. Amelia (14), Polly (17) and Daria (18), red-haired beauties all, granddaughters of the celebrated literary critic Leo Heller, rocket into the limelight when The New Yorker features them in a photo spread. (Remember that vampy portrait of the Hilton sisters in the “Next Generation” issue back in 1999? )  read more »

Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”  read more »

In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.”  read more »

A Brit writing in a British literary journal has put his finger precisely on the pulse of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening,” Jonathan Raban proclaims in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk):

“The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’—is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism.  read more »

You know exactly what you’re going to get when you open the latest New Yorker (March 24, $4.50) and see an excerpt from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which is due out in mid-May, a few weeks after the release of Mr. Morris’ documentary of the same name. It’s a recurring nightmare, starring Specialist Sabrina Harman—the MP with the camera—and the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A of the military intelligence block at Abu Ghraib. The account is direct, detailed and unambiguous in its implications. Is there any part of the passage below that’s in any way unclear?  read more »

THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
Pantheon, 369 pages, $30

Asked by Ford Maddox Ford to contribute to a memorial supplement to the Transatlantic Review in honor of the recently deceased Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway groused about friends who disparaged Conrad; he complained that most of the people he knew thought Conrad a bad writer and T. S. Eliot a good one. Papa disagreed: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave, Mr. Conrad would shortly appear … and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”  read more »

Would you be surprised to hear that a surging tide of books about politics is about to engulf us?

Later this month we’ll get a chance to peruse War and Decision, by Douglas Feith (HarperCollins, March 25). Mr. Feith, a neocon promoter of the Iraq War, was famously identified by Gen. Tommy Franks as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.” It’s unlikely that Mr.  read more »

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95) is the latest from “gender expert” Susan Shapiro Barash. I picked it up out of idle curiosity (are women’s reasons for lying really different from men’s?) and would have put it straight back down (the writing is shockingly bad), but I was struck by the bold amorality of Ms. Barash’s approach: “I neither condemn nor condone the lies women tell,” she solemnly declares. Turns out that’s a lie. In fact, she thinks fibs are fab. Here’s the final sentence of her book, the sum of the wisdom she’s squeezed from “extensive personal interviews with women and experts in the field of psychology and counseling”:

“In my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I’ve come to recognize lying as an inestimable weapon in the female arsenal as women search for personal retribution and satisfaction.” Inestimable weapon? Female arsenal? Personal retribution? Looks like the gender wars are heating up.  read more »

The subtitle of Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, $22) is out of touch with the times: We’re more than merely excited, and as for winning—well, yes we can.

Consider the pace of book publishing: Mr. Steele shops his proposal about a year ago and delivers his manuscript in midsummer. Pause for four or five months while the machinery grinds invisibly. At last, in early December, the book appears in stores—by which time the “plausibility of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate” is old news. And two months later—now that plausible is probable—it’s safe to say that nobody shares Mr. Steele’s concern about Mr. Obama finding his own voice and becoming “an individual rather than a racial cipher.”  read more »

Plucked from the tragic stack that teeters on a distant corner of my desk—vain hopes piled on top of crushed ambition and dreams deferred—here are five first novels published in the last month. Five brave souls who have shouted out into the deafening roar. Five voices that should be heard.  read more »

Samantha Power has a new book out this week: Chasing the Flame is a posthumous valentine to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic United Nations envoy who was killed four and a half years ago by the massive truck bomb that destroyed the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. A handsome Brazilian who worked for the U.N. for 34 years, posted to hot spots like Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo and East Timor—an atlas of humanitarian disaster—Vieira de Mello was described to Ms. Power before they met as “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” According to Ms. Power, “He brought a gritty pragmatism to negotiations, yet no amount of exposure to brutality seemed to dislodge his ideals.”  read more »

THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD
By David Shields
Alfred A. Knopf, 225 pages, $23.95

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” — Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

A book marked by naked Oedipal conflict, a book stuffed with quotations from great writers, ought to have Stein’s beauty stashed somewhere between the covers, and though I waited for it all the way through The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, I came away disappointed. I wouldn’t say the omission ruined the book for me (it deals in more pressing disappointments, like mortality and the alternative: old age), but I did feel a little cheated. I mean, if David Shields insists on making me watch while he buries his 97-year-old dad in “a shower of death data,” couldn’t he at least throw in my favorite line?

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Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.

We've seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:  read more »

Is it still schadenfreude when it’s the indestructible Martin Amis getting kicked around? His new book, a collection of essays and stories about militant Islam, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007, won’t be published over here until April Fools’ Day, but it’s already out in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape, £12.90) and was greeted last weekend with a one-two punch that would have left any ordinary writer reeling. On Saturday the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) ran a review by the talented Christopher Tayler that concludes bluntly that “the writings collected here add nothing to [Amis’] reputation.” On Sunday, the London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) let loose historian William Dalrymple, who declares Amis’ book to be “not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings”; and again, in case we were in any doubt: “not just wilfully ignorant … but … at its heart disturbingly bigoted.”  read more »

Happy Monica Day.

The British, who love to linger over American embarrassment, started celebrating early, with a Times story last week guaranteed to make any U.S. citizen squirm. Damian Whitworth’s “Oral History: The Monica Lewinsky Scandal Ten Years On” (timesonline.co.uk) revisits some of our old friends, and the result, when not actively painful, is surprisingly amusing. Mr. Whitworth gives Paula Jones a call; she’s not willing to meet with him but doesn’t mind chatting on the phone.  read more »

Could Hillary’s New Hampshire comeback mean that the groaning shelf of 30-odd Hillary books will also get a second look? An encouraging sign: In his Op-Ed piece this week, Frank Rich quotes approvingly from Sally Bedell Smith’s comprehensive and precise history of the Clintons’ White House years, For Love of Politics (Random House, $27.95). And coming next week: Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, edited by Susan Morrison (HarperCollins, $23.95), in which an all-star cast of women writers—including Lorrie Moore, Roz Chast, Lionel Shriver and Kathryn Harrison—reflect on the politician who may become our first female president. I wonder: Did any of them consult “Hillary Rodham Clinton as ‘Madonna’: The Role of Metaphor and Oxymoron in Image Restoration,” a scholarly study published six years ago by Karrin Vasby Anderson?  read more »

There’s something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely aware of the fug of felt life, all the while getting ready to give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a book that records a mother’s desperate losing battle against disease and her son’s numb grief when she dies. I am in the realm of the living, foolishly taking it for granted as most of us do; David Rieff has been immersed in death ever since the day nearly four years ago when his mother, Susan Sontag, was diagnosed with a rare, particularly lethal cancer of the blood. Who am I to pass judgment on her mortal struggle, on his howl of pain?  read more »

Need another excuse for ditching Hillary? She goose-steps through a long chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (Doubleday, $27.95). Mr. Goldberg concedes that “Hillary is no führer, and her notion of the ‘common good’ doesn’t involve racial purity or concentration camps”—but he can’t help concluding that she’s bent on “tyranny.” Sieg Heil!

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DIARY OF A BAD YEAR
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 231 pages, $24.95

Remember Roland Barthes’ distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts? If the answer is no—and especially if the answer is a pointed “no thank you”—then I suspect that J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year is not for you. I enjoyed it, and I admired it, but I was aware as I was reading it that this kind of novel is an acquired taste only a small minority will be interested in acquiring.  read more »

Doc Humes is back. The late, legendary co-founder of The Paris Review and one-man pharmacological research lab is the subject of a documentary by his daughter, Immy Humes (opening in New York on Jan. 23 at the Film Forum); and his two cult novels from the late 1950’s, The Underground City (Random House, $15.95) and Men Die (Random House, $13.95), have been reprinted as handsome paperbacks—you’ll find them under “H.L. Humes” at your neighborhood bookstore.  read more »

By sad coincidence, my first ever book review (published in the London Review of Books nearly two decades ago) was of Raymond Carver’s last book, Elephant and Other Stories. Carver died, age 50, while I was working on the piece. In the light of the Carver-Lish editing controversy, and with The New Yorker fanning the flames in the fiction issue (Dec. 24 and Dec. 31, $4.99), I reread that maiden effort, and was surprised to find that without knowing it, I’d already taken sides. I was clearly rooting for the fuller, longer, warmer, pre- and post-Lish Carver.  read more »

A fond farewell to the late Elizabeth Hardwick, who gave New York readers heaps of pleasure over the past six decades. Here, by way of tribute, is her meditation on the death of a great New York writer (it appeared in a brief, passionate biography she published seven years ago, when she was already 84): “He died at home in his own house with a wife to care for him in his great distress and need. It appears he came to be grateful for her long years as Mrs. Melville, a calling certainly unexpected in her youth.  read more »

Joseph Conrad turned 150 on Dec. 3. I’d sing “Happy Birthday,” but Mistah Conrad—he dead. Goes to show that books last better than humans. Actually, there was something superhuman about Conrad, starting with the ever-astonishing fact that English was his third language (after Polish and French). He managed to bridge divides often thought unbridgeable: the merchant marine and London literary salons, 19th-century adventure tales and 20th-century modernism. He could do the urban jungle (The Secret Agent) and the jungle jungle (Lord Jim).  read more »

Andrew Sullivan’s love letter to Barack Obama in the December issue of The Atlantic; Roland Barthes’ What Is Sport?; James Geary’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Aphorists.  read more »

Ronan Bennett in the Nov. 19 issue of the Guardian; What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics edited by András Szántó; Bill McKibben's Fight Global Warming Now.  read more »

Adam Begley on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead; The Best of Ogden Nash; Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness.  read more »

Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever; Mark Kurzen's The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood; Steve Martin and Roz Chast’s The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!.  read more »

We all fake it from time to time, and we could all use a few practical tips on how to do it better.  read more »

Molly Ivins’s Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch’s Assault Against America’s Fundamental Rights; Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist; Bernd Brunner’s Bears: A Brief History.  read more »

Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books; Elizabeth D. Samet's Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point; Rudolph Delson’s Maynard & Jennica.  read more »

Bob Drogin's Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War; Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature; Thomas Bender’s The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea.  read more »

Melvin Jules Bukiet on the recipe for “Brooklyn Books of Wonder” in The American Scholar; Arthur Goldwag’s All the Movements, Ideologies, and Doctrines That Have Shaped Our World; David Pratt’s The Impossible Takes Longer.  read more »

John Banville's review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost in London Review of Books; Steve Almond's (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions; Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  read more »

Next to The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost seems leaky and limp.  read more »

Bob Harris' Who Hates Whom—Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide; Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God; Michael Sims’ Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination .  read more »

Can writing confer immortality? Let’s hope for at least temporary immortality, because the season’s books are crowded with the dead. David Halberstam, Molly Ivins and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., all three of whom died earlier this year, have books coming out this fall:  read more »

Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice; the movie version of Atonement; Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors; the cover for Kyle MacDonald’s One Red Paperclip: Or How an Ordinary Man Achieved His Dream with the Help of a Simple Office Supply.  read more »

Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review; the launch of n+1's Paper Monument; Ted Hughes' A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse.  read more »

If his Bond novel is as sharp as Engleby, Sebastian Faulks will soon be known as one of the most versatile writers at work today—and one of the most entertaining.  read more »

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke; David Mikics’ A New Handbook of Literary Terms; Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush; Bill Clinton’s Giving.  read more »

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next: First Among Sequels; Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life; Melissa Plaut’s How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab.  read more »

Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service; Emily Flake's These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves; David Rosen’s I Just Want My Pants Back.  read more »

Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung; the screen version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement; Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs.  read more »

A.A. Gill’s The Angry Island: Hunting the English; Samantha Powers in The New York Times Book Review; Daniel Mendelsohn's review of The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman.  read more »

Stefan Kanfer’s The Voodoo That They Did So Well: The Wizards Who Invented the New York Stage; Jonathon Keats’ Control + Alt + Delete: A Dictionary of Cyberslang; the legacy of Leonard Michaels.   read more »

Richard Aleas’ Songs of Innocence; excerpt of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year; Nick Paumgarten's profile of Mort Zuckerman in The New Yorker.   read more »

Sam Tanenhaus essay, “The End of the Journey: From Whittaker Chambers to George W. Bush,” in The New Republic; Don Rickles’ Rickles’ Book; James and Kay Salter’s Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days.  read more »