Book Review

Epilogue: A Memoir
By Anne Roiphe
Harper, 214 pages, $24.95

Reading the opening lines of Epilogue, Anne Roiphe’s memoir about the death of her husband, I felt the same exasperation that I experienced upon learning, also via memoir, that Katha Pollitt can’t drive a car. Ms. Roiphe, apparently, doesn’t know how to open the locked door of her own apartment: "For the 39 years of our marriage, my husband always pulled out his key and opened the door when we returned from an evening out. During the day I left the door unlocked. We had a doorman." (Is it possible that over the span of four decades, Ms.  read more »

Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America
By Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 438 pages, $27.95

There’s always been a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to Thomas Friedman’s work—one moment he’s smart and decent, the next smarmy, belligerent and glib. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has one of the more irritating styles in American punditry, combining regular-guy banalities, endlessly repeated neologisms and subtle condescension (such as when he refers to Doha, Qatar, as a city "you may have never heard of"). He opines against the destructive insanity of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, then urges an even more destructive and insane American approach to the Arab world.  read more »

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do
By Andrew Gelman
Princeton University Press, 233 pages, $27.95

I realized while reading Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State that I hadn’t seen a book with so many charts and graphs since I struggled though economics and statistics—and that if the textbooks back then had been as interesting as Andrew Gelman’s analysis of the American electorate, I might have done better in college.

The aim of his book, Mr. Gelman tells us, is to debunk the media’s oversimplified account of what happened in red and blue states in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  read more »

Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan … and the World
By Courtney Humphries
Smithsonian, 196 pages, $24.95

Writing teachers always say that a crucial element of the craft is to know your audience. Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And the World is a cultural, historical and biological study of the timeless human-pigeon relationship, but its raison d’être is a thinly veiled—though well-supported—argument: Courtney Humphries cajoles us into agreeing, after 184 pages of anecdotal and scientific evidence, that there’s much more to the invisibly ubiquitous pigeon than the "rats with wings" tag affixed by Woody Allen. Though Ms. Humphries’ pitch is plenty persuasive, her challenge is to find an audience willing to pick up a book about an animal widely regarded as a filthy nuisance.  read more »

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Harper, 464 pages, $26.95

Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors. This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It’s also thanks to his—not style, exactly; Mr. Mendelsohn’s a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he’s more or less mastered the form.  read more »

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
By Rebecca Miller
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 239 pages,$23

I really wish that idle, procrastinatory Googling hadn’t informed me that The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is going to be a movie starring Robin Wright Penn, the Princess Bride who wed pugilistic Sean Penn and then basically dropped off the face of the earth; Julianne Moore, every credible indie director’s favorite choice of beatific mom; those goofy early-’90s slackers Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves … and the cherry on top, the very blond Blake Lively of Gossip Girl. With apologies to my beloved colleague, Rex Reed, currently en vacances, this might very well be the ghastliest ensemble cast in the history of motion pictures.  read more »

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
Harper, 432 pages, $27.95

With little warning and less explanation, Ron Suskind has written the year’s most brazenly experimental novel. It’s not entirely successful, but then the boldest experiments are often inconclusive. Mr. Suskind summons deceased aesthetic forms as an intervention on the now—but he’s not indulging in ironical pastiche. Moving, manipulative, maudlin, The Way of the World reanimates the conventions and contrivances of 19th-century realism with a seriousness too deadly to be a matter of mere style.

It’s all here: a cast of characters that sprawls across class and circumstance to represent the totality of a historical moment; central moral truths restated so often as to be less repetition than incantation; an all-seeing narrator who intrudes at regular intervals to tell the reader what it all means.  read more »

The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld And the Fight Over Presidential Power
By Jonathan Mahler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $26

Had you been asked to assemble the legal team to brief and argue before the Supreme Court a case that would result in "the most important decision on presidential power ever"—as one noted court observer called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld shortly after it came down in 2006—your first choice probably wouldn’t have been the odd couple that found itself at the center of this particular constitutional storm: an irreverent, long-winded defense lawyer with attention-deficit disorder who graduated at the bottom of his Navy class, and a brilliant, bullheaded young law professor who didn’t even know where he was supposed to sit in a courtroom.  read more »

Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of A Literary Forger
By Lee Israel
Simon and Schuster, 128 pages, $19.95

In exams, girls beat boys. We all know this. Recently, British psychologist Guy Claxton presented a paper admonishing Western educational establishments for creating a system responsible for a generation of high-achieving girls who feed off quantified success—be it academic, sporting or musical—but live in fear of failure. In the real world, Mr. Claxton concluded, "bright girls go to pieces."

We’re also familiar with the group of graduates from elite universities who, on approaching life in the job market, consider it rather a chore to leave their lazy lifestyles and abandon their delusions of grandeur.  read more »

A Better Angel
By Chris Adrian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $23

Chris Adrian, like Chekhov, is both a physician and a short story writer, and while we need not hold him to Chekhov’ s standard, I think he could learn a little from the master. Neither a humanist nor a postmodern craftsman, the talented Mr. Adrian is gorgeously adrift in a no man’s land.

His stories very often feature precocious "damaged" children who’ve suffered tragedies and are tortured by angels and ghosts or their own extreme behavior. In "Stab," a 10-year-old girl goes around stabbing animals and, eventually, her best friend, a 10-year-old boy, presumably because her parents died in a car accident.  read more »

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States
By George Stewart
NYRB Classics, 544 pages, $19.95

A young man, let’s say, finds himself in the attic of his grandmother’s house in Ancram, N.Y., on a rainy afternoon in the late autumn, looking for a book to read. In a pile of dusty volumes under one window, between bound volumes of a previous generation’s women’s magazines and moldering French cookbooks, he finds George Stewart’s classic Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States. (A toponymist, English professor and expert on ballads, Stewart was also a prolific, best-selling novelist, whose 1941 novel Storm inspired the now universal practice of giving women’s names to storms.  read more »

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Metropolitan Books, 224 pages, $24

Although John McCain wants U.S. forces to stay in Iraq until the mission really has been accomplished, an army of conservatives remains implacably opposed to the war and the occupation. Andrew Bacevich is among the most outspoken of them. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who became a professor of history and international relations at Boston University after he retired from the Army, Mr. Bacevich warned back in March 2003 that if the United States encountered greater resistance than the architects of the Iraq invasion had promised, the nation would be tested "in ways that will make the Vietnam War look like a mere blip in American history.  read more »

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books, 384 pages, $25

Call it the Thomas Frank Problem: Since What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2005), the journalist and polemicist has become a figure of irresolvable promise and consternation to the American left. Kansas, of course, put in straight and strident words what liberals previously felt compelled to dance around: that the conservative revolution was won, in large part, by convincing anxious citizens to vote directly against their economic interest. Four years later, and the Problem raises clamors on least two fronts.

The first is factual. As a number of academic number-crunchers have discovered, class—and especially the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses issue of "relative deprivation"—remains a fairly good indicator of political behavior, as long as you’re asking the right questions.  read more »

Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex and Starting Over
By Cathy Alter
Atria Books, 336 pages, $24

"How to lose 10 pounds in a week.” “Six ways to simplify your life.” “Never feel guilty about saying ‘No’ again.”

Every independent, educated, well-adjusted, dare I say even feminist-leaning female has a side of her that can’t resist reading women’s magazines, which promise to enhance the reader’s sex life, earn a raise, find inner happiness, get rid of cellulite. We know we won’t find salvation and confidence, let alone acceptance, stuffed inside 300 slick pages tightly bound between a gorgeous face and an ad for wrinkle-filling foundation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t fork over $20 a year for 12 monthly installments, or guiltily stock up on the magazines at neighborhood bodegas or Hudson News before a trip.  read more »

I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage
By Susan Squire
Bloomsbury, 272 pages, $25.99

In the beginning, men and women were equal, because our cave-dwelling ancestors hadn’t figured out that sex—a communal pastime unencumbered by futuristic notions like coupledom—makes babies. It would take, according to Susan Squire’s riveting new book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage, "hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years"—until the advent of agriculture and the insights that accompany animal husbandry—before men experienced an "electrifying epiphany."

Unfortunately, "once the mystery of conception is solved and the idea of ownership is born … organized communal sex will never work again—and not for lack of trying," writes Ms.  read more »

Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School
By Philip Delves Broughton
The Penguin Press, 288 pages, $25.95

Most of the graduates of the Harvard Business School go on to lucrative careers in banking or management. Not Philip Delves Broughton, author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School; his big postgraduate move was penning a tell-all account of his experience at HBS. The fruit of his labors is simultaneously invigorating and infuriating—and finally pointless.

His most surprising revelation is the utter banality of the aspiring millionaires and billionaires: The author’s HBS class consists almost entirely of students fed to the school through the so-called "three Ms" —Mormons, Military, and McKinsey (the consulting firm).  read more »

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life—His Own
By David Carr
Simon and Schuster, 400 pages, $26

For most of us, David Carr is the goofy-looking Midwesterner most often seen unrolling a red carpet with his foot on NYTimes.com during Oscar season. He calls himself the Carpet Bagger. He has a blog and a column, too. In his gravelly twang he explains the ins and outs of Hollywood like some sort of benevolent avuncular muppety Richard Attenborough. With his slightly lost-looking pale blue eyes, his open vowels and his dorkiness, David Carr—like David Pogue, the Times technology writer fond of starring in his own iPhone musicals—brought hope to us slightly off writers.  read more »

Occupational Hazards
By Jonathan Segura
Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $14

The 11-page first chapter of Occupational Hazards, a wildly foul-mouthed, mostly derivative, modestly suspenseful and ultimately likable debut novel by Jonathan Segura (an editor at Publishers Weekly), includes the words "fuck," "fucking," "fuckers," "fucked," "goddamned," "hell," "shit," "suck," "fart," "pisser," "prick," "blowjob," "jerk off" and "sumbitch."

But coarsest of all is our pill-addled, flake-shouldered, chain-smoking, un-smiling boozehound hero and narrator, whose name happens to be Cockburn, though that’s not pronounced like it looks.

Cockburn speaks in icy little sentences. He writes half-heartedly—no, eighth-heartedly—for the Omaha Weekly News-Telegraph, headquartered in a yellowing basement. The sign on the office door is written in marker.  read more »

The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s
By G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot
The Penguin Press, 422 pages, $27.95

These days "liberal" is a word rarely used as anything but a pejorative in American politics. In the 1960s, however, it was the dominant political philosophy in Washington. President Lyndon B. Johnson ran his election campaign in 1964 as a liberal against archconservative Senator Barry Goldwater and won in a landslide. There were overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a solid Supreme Court majority led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that viewed itself as a liberal, activist vanguard.  read more »

Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter
By Rick Shenkman
Basic Books, 210 pages, $25

I remember an uproarious night almost seven years ago at Shay’s Pub and Wine Bar in Cambridge, Mass.—my local hangout. I was entertaining a friend, also an historian, who was in town doing research. He told me that earlier in the day, he’d wandered into a nearby radical bookstore, where he spotted a title by Bob Avakian, the creepy, reclusive and mercifully irrelevant chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. The book was called (get this), Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?

We both burst into snarky laughter.  read more »

Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
By Susan Quinn
Walker, 325 pages, $25.99

Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable froufrou, or as dangerous provocateurs, but as crucial contributors to a nation’s psychological and moral health.

Imagine, then, a country like the United States in 1935, when desperation impelled a government to do things that no American government would do today no matter how desperate.

Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation—a great title for an excellent book, a model of narrative history—tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, an offshoot of F.  read more »

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.  read more »

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
By Jim Holt
W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95

The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs, the dog makes it into the quadrennial World Shaggy Dog contest—which he loses badly, prompting the boy to remark, "Well, maybe he wasn’t so shaggy."

Depending on how it’s delivered, a shaggy-dog joke can be either a cruel prank at the listener’s expense, or a sort of joyous exercise in silliness, in which the punch line, a joke’s nominal destination, serves only as a pretext for the journey.  read more »

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.  read more »

Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction
By Lisa Chamberlain
Da Capo, 212 pages, $25

In Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, Lisa Chamberlain examines the changing cultural and economic landscape that has defined—and been defined by—Generation X’s reluctant, late-onset adulthood. The elusive subtitle is the first hint of the economic vagueness to come. (After 188 pages I was still unsure of the precise meaning of "creative destruction," which—and I am frantically thumbing through my copy of the book here—was used by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to refer to the process by which a capitalist economy constantly destroys and reinvents itself.  read more »

Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the Twentieth Century and How they Shaped Modern America
By Michael A. Cohen
Walker & Company, 562 pages, $16.99

When Barack Obama accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, he will deliver his speech the way John F. Kennedy did in 1960: in a stadium.

The image of a stadium full of people waiting to hear a speech—a political speech, no less—underscores a somewhat overlooked aspect of the American scene: Speeches matter. In a day when comments muttered into an open microphone, or a distasteful joke captured on YouTube (macaca!) can alter the course of a campaign, it’s still the vision and policies outlined in speeches that shape our political landscape.  read more »

OUTLAW JOURNALIST: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON
By William McKeen
W. W. Norton, 448 pages, $27.95

More than any other American writer in recent memory, Hunter S. Thompson demonstrated that, yes, sometimes the road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom—just before it dead-ends at the cul-de-sac of regret. After a stunning, swift period of brilliance, his style, as the old joke goes, became substance abuse; it was seductive, it was fun, and for the type of person who confuses a drinking problem with literary talent, it was intoxicating. But as even the most casual observer knows, the persona soon eclipsed the writing.  read more »

THE DARK SIDE: THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW THE WAR ON TERROR TURNED INTO A WAR ON AMERICAN IDEALS
By Jane Mayer
Doubleday, 392 pages, $27.50

In the autumn of 2000, I was visiting the United States and watched the televised debates with keen interest. Of the four men—two presidential candidates and two running mates—the one I really took to was Dick Cheney. Maybe the competition wasn’t so strong, what with the inarticulate George W. Bush, the well-meaning but wooden Al Gore and the smirking Joe Lieberman. By contrast, Mr. Cheney seemed relaxed, bien dans sa peau, with a faraway smile playing on his lips as if to say, You mean you’ve just discovered that America is a plutocracy? Tell me about it!

What a long time eight years can seem: We have since been disabused of many illusions.  read more »

ELECTING FDR: THE NEW DEAL CAMPAIGN OF 1932
By Donald A. Ritchie
University Press of Kansas, 274 pages, $29.95

It’s a presidential election year. The Republican incumbent is intensely unpopular. The Democrats are waging a tough fight for the nomination pitting an experienced New York politician against a candidate perceived as not tough enough to be president. Americans are frightened about the economy, and a new communications medium is being aggressively used for the first time by a presidential candidate.

I’m talking about 1932, not 2008.

Don’t think of it as ancient history. In his new book, Electing FDR, Donald Ritchie provides a meaningful lesson that today’s candidates should heed.  read more »

DECEMBER
By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Alfred A. Knopf, 239 pages, $23.95

A chamber-piece in a minor key, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s literally muted new novel introduces 11-year-old Isabelle Carter, who hasn’t spoken in nine months—"280 days," she reminds herself, since "February 29, not a real day, anyway, a day not to get out of bed, to eat, to drink, to speak." Wilson and Ruth, her well-to-do father and mother, have appealed to countless therapists, consulted manuals on autism and quarreled with school officials; after meticulously assessing Isabelle’s classroom performance, the principal complains that she’s been patient "to the max," an expression that would rightly alarm legions of Manhattan private-school parents.  read more »

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building.  read more »

ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
By Ted Widmer
Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $25

Ted Widmer has carved out the kind of heroically peripatetic career in entertainment, politics and scholarship that gives young men hope and older men heartburn. Widmer? If the name doesn’t yet ring a bell, that could be because he’s had more than the average 44-year-old’s share of names.

Connoisseurs of high-concept mid-’90s glam metal know him as Lord Rockingham, dandy guitarist of the Upper Crust, a Boston band known for performing AC/DC-style anthems in powdered wigs and associated ancien régime regalia. (Their tongue-in-jowl celebrations of aristocracy include "Let them Eat Rock" and "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class.  read more »

DIRTY WORDS: A LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEX
Edited by Ellen Sussman
Bloomsbury, 291 pages, $19.99

I wasn’t a fan of Charles Bowden’s boozy, frantic examination of American life in his part-essay, part-memoir Blues for Cannibals: The Notes From Underground (2002). But I marked this passage, which has stayed with me over the years: "[L]ove is essential even if I do not know the words that give it flesh and scent. That is why we find it so difficult to write about sex. Not because we are so inhibited and prudish but because when we write about sex, we get acts and organs, a breast, a vagina, a cock, juices, tongues and thrusts—and wind up with recipes but no food.  read more »

SAVE THE MALES: WHY MEN MATTER
AND WOMEN SHOULD CARE
By Kathleen Parker
Random House, 215 pages, $26

In Save the Males, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defends that least likely of underdogs: the American Man. Parodied in pop culture, disenfranchised by the family courts, emasculated by Lamaze class and forced to endure crazy, empowered women "rhapsodizing about their vaginas and swooning over their inner goddesses," men today are raised in a culture that has turned against them, claims Ms. Parker.

Of course, she’s not the first to ride to the rescue: Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000) covered much of the same terrain—men’s broken psyches—without blaming it all on feminism.  read more »

BREACH OF PEACE: POTRAITS OF THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
By Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co., 239 pages, $45

The slog was slow and messy, but the Democratic primary season at least left us with a handy object lesson in the principles and perils of proportional response. One suspects that for the Clinton and Obama shock troops alike, the defining episode will be the May 31 meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, one of the few chapters of late capitalist civic life deserving of the old 20th-century catch-all epithet "Kafkaesque."

There, stammering and shaking on the dais, was Harold Ickes—veteran of 1964’s Freedom Summer and namesake of F.  read more »

LAW AND THE LONG WAR: THE FUTURE OF JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF TERROR
By Benjamin Wittes
The Penguin Press, 305 pages, $25.95

This book’s importance rides on the accuracy of its titular assumptions. Are we now fighting "the long war"? If not, then Benjamin Wittes merely charts a sensible course for mopping up messes of George Bush’s making.

If, on the other hand, we really are living through "the age of terror," the book delivers a blueprint for salvaging both our security and the Constitution’s integrity in the face of towering legal dilemmas.

A Brookings Institution fellow and former Washington Post editorial writer, Mr.  read more »

A TIME TO FIGHT: RECLAIMING A FAIR AND JUST AMERICA
By Jim Webb
Broadway, 255 pages, $24.95

Jim Webb is often mentioned as a possible running mate for Barack Obama. As a former Republican, his presence would lend substance to Mr. Obama’s talk of bipartisanship; as a senator from red-trending-purple Virginia, he might give Democrats a chance to take some electoral votes from the Republican column. He’s for an expedited withdrawal from Iraq, but he has the same—if not more impressive—military bona fides than those we all thought would save John Kerry, and without the taint of careerism.

But the strongest argument for a Webb vice presidency is the entertaining possibility that he’d eventually break off and start his own republic.  read more »

GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 244 pages, $23.95

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.  read more »

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS: GLENN GOULD'S OBSSESSIVE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT PIANO
By Katie Hafner
Bloomsbury, 259 pages, $24.99

More than 25 years after his death, the most iconic and extensively documented pianist of the last century continues to generate enormous curiosity, and no wonder. Glenn Gould is a biographer’s dream, with a career path as extraordinary as his many eccentricities, from extreme hypochondria—resulting in an aversion to shaking hands, and wearing coat, gloves and hat in the full heat of summer—to traveling with his comparatively ancient and battered Steinway and a low stool (a pygmy chair) that in time lost its upholstery, leaving Gould seated just on the wooden crossbar.  read more »

GAMEBOYS: PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGAMING'S RISE FROM THE BASEMENT TO THE BIG TIME
By Michael Kane
Viking Books, 288 pages, $24.95

Having read Michael Kane's Gameboys, I now know almost all there is to know about professional videogaming, certainly more than the average American and definitely more than I ever cared to know. Example: College dropouts can make up to $40,000 a year playing video games. That fact, depending on your disposition, is either a sure sign of America’s imminent demise or the advent of a technological golden age. Mr. Kane warmly endorses the latter view, and lays out a fairly persuasive argument over nearly 300 pages.  read more »

AMERICA AMERICA
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 458 pages, $27

America America. Terrible title, right? Grandiose and sentimental. (And Elia Kazan got there first.) That’s what I thought, too—but it’s grown on me, and now I see that it’s suitably ambitious for a novel about ambition, suitably redundant for a novel that takes as its twinned themes American capitalism and American politics, and suitably ambiguous (is it a boast or a lament?) for a bittersweet success story about an epic failure. Ethan Canin could hardly wish for higher praise than this: His big, carefully crafted novel earns the right to its name.

On a local level, America America is the story of Corey Sifter, a 16-year-old boy who in the spring of 1971 is hired to work on the estate of the vastly rich and powerful Metarey family.  read more »

THE TREMENDOUS WORLD I HAVE INSIDE MY HEAD: FRANZ KAFKA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
By Louis Begley
Atlas & Co., 208 pages, $22

This year marks the bicentenary of Faust, Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday and, somewhat less tidily, 86 years since Franz Kafka abandoned his final novel. As anniversaries go, it isn’t especially momentous, but it has occasioned a splendid new Kafka retrospective from Louis Begley, the lapidary novelist whose eight works of fiction, among them Wartime Lies (1991) and About Schmidt (1996), signal a keen eye for detail and an abiding empathy for the underdog. Novelists routinely fumble when they try their inky hands at criticism (see: Amis, Martin), but Mr. Begley evinces some unusual biographical parallels with his subject: Both men were born to Jewish families in Eastern Europe (Kafka in Prague, Mr. Begley in Poland); both trained as lawyers; both would produce fiction pitting besieged heroes against the implacable forces of fate. And now, with clarity and good humor, Mr. Begley has assessed an icon of forbidding stature and infinite, infamous neurotic heft, and teased out a study as lively, lucid and flat-out enjoyable as any literary biography this year. Given Kafka’s legacy as a chronicler of "tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self-doubt, and unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers," this is no mean feat.  read more »

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE: A ONE-NIGHT STAND, MY UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD, AND LOVING THE BEST MISTAKE I EVER MADE
By Mary F. Pols
Ecco, 272 pages, $24.95

A few years ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children sparked a media firestorm by arguing that many women end up husband-less and childless—and by extension miserable—because they’re too focused on their careers during their 20s; they put off husband-finding and baby-bearing until it’s too late.

I was 26 when that book came out, and what didn’t sound right to me was the implication that women in their 20s were too caught up in their careers to think much about dating or relationships. For better or for worse, it seemed to me that most women I knew, myself included, were very interested in dating. The women I’m talking about, fellow journalists for the most part, were by no means boy-crazy slackers. We worked long hours; many of us moved to faraway cities to advance our careers. Yet when my cell phone flashed with the number of one of my girlfriends late at night, not once did I think the caller was wracked with worry over an article she was writing. No, it was bound to be about relationship trouble or its inverse, loneliness, which might as well be called lack-of-relationship trouble.  read more »

FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
By Leni Zumas
Open City Books, 168 pages, $14

Open City Released a new book of stories last month. It’s called Farewell Navigator. It’s written by Leni Zumas. They’re not really stories. They’re also not gargoyles, but they’re more like gargoyles. They’re delicate tone poems that, however, center most often on the cruel, the disgusting or the sad.

This reviewer wonders whether that’s inevitable, whether stories (which are not stories) that are driven by the small-scale interplay of language, rather than by narrative traditionally conceived or by their broader conceits, will drift as a matter of necessity toward the flashy and the shocking. Must 50 brilliant sentences, constructed only as sentences, add up to one grotesque? There are only so many ways for a single sentence to be arresting.  read more »

BROCCOLI AND OTHER TALES OF FOOD AND LOVE
By Lara Vapnyar
Pantheon, 148 pages, $20

Lara Vapnyar doesn't write about particularly naughty food in her latest collection of stories, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. She’s no stereotype of an Oprah-watching food addict, mooning over pints of Ben & Jerry’s or sleeves of Oreos. Her European immigrants—from a homesick carpenter to two women in an ESL class—are grappling with culture shock in New York City through life-sustaining, almost bland food. Sprigs of broccoli. White asparagus. Purple beets. Boiled potatoes. No artificial colors or flavors. Ms. Vapnyar’s prose is just as authentic; it’s simple, charming, even witty.  read more »

WHILE THEY SLEPT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE MURDER OF A FAMILY
By Kathryn Harrison
Random House, 304 pages, $25

A transcript of a 911 call begins Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family. It’s 1984, and 16-year-old Jody Gilley reports that her older brother, Billy, has murdered their abusive parents and 11-year-old sister with a baseball bat in the small town of Medford, Ore. This opening, and Ms. Harrison’s self-confessed "addiction" to true-crime stories, seems to augur an understated book of cold, hard facts. Instead, what we get is a dutifully exhaustive, though overwrought, account of a crime, filtered through the prism of Ms. Harrison’s own incestuous affair with her father.  read more »

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS
By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Yale University Press, 293 pages, $26

SWAY: THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR
By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Doubleday, 206 pages, $21.95

THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES
By Leonard Mlodinow
Pantheon, 252 pages, $24.95

ABOUT 30 YEARS AGO, THE WORLD of economics took a zinging slap. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists, published a paper about how we actually make decisions, rather than how we should. If standard economic theory assumes that we’re perfect judges of our own best interests—that more choice leads to better choices, and the market corrects for flaws—these two academics found otherwise. After a series of experiments, they discovered that we’re bumblingly irrational actors: We hate losing more than we enjoy winning; emotion often trumps reason; and our decisions depend on how the options are framed. Essentially, at times we’re a little dumb.  read more »

WAR JOURNAL: MY FIVE YEARS IN IRAQ
By Richard Engel
Simon & Schuster, 377 pages, $28

For all its indictment of a foreign policy gone very, very wrong, Richard Engel’s memoir of the five years he spent reporting for NBC News in Iraq is surprisingly devoid of blame.

"Many of the mistakes in Iraq were made simply because people could get away with them scot-free," he writes, although he’s referring to the contractors and gangs and aspiring rulers on the ground in Iraq, not the Bush administration.  read more »

PERSONAL DAYS
By Ed Park
Random House, 241 pages, $13

I VOLUNTEERED TO REVIEW THIS novel by my former Village Voice co-worker Ed Park because I assumed the conflicts of interest would be so blatant they’d implode—a roman à clef, in which I myself might play a minor role, about the alt-weekly where I got fired the same day young Ed did. But it wasn’t that simple. If this is indeed a roman à clef, nobody gave me the key. Even when I was editing a section there, I never kept up with Voice gossip, and what little I know suggests that aside from a few management butts, who are rendered with admirable sympathy, these young characters are heavily fictionalized, imported from elsewhere or altogether invented.  read more »

ME OF LITTLE FAITH
By Lewis Black
Riverhead, 240 pages, $24.95

LEWIS BLACK IS AN INDIGNANT Paddy Chayefsky character come to screaming, sputtering life, but he has a sneaking admiration for a truly audacious con artist. Jimmy Swaggart won Mr. Black’s heart when the evangelist leaned against his own mother’s tombstone and asked for money, because "I know that she would want you to do that."

"You just had to love a guy who had the big brass nuts to invoke his dead mother as a reason for us to send in our hard-earned cash," writes Mr. Black.

My own tastes run to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and professional wrestling. To live in this country, it helps to have a well-developed taste for the indigenous American grotesque.

Mr. Black’s ever-present outrage and jabbing finger are the necessary punctuation to this survey of religions, communes, popes, higher powers, the whole panoply of cosmic daddy figures we use to compel us to lead a moral life. Most religions are covered except Scientology—because, he writes, "I refuse to consider seriously anything Tom Cruise believes in."

Me of Little Faith—nice title—is an actual book, in that it seems that Mr. Black actually wrote it, as opposed to talked it. In other ways, it’s typical. Like the books of most comedians, it demands to be read while mindful of the voice and rhythm of said comic personality; otherwise, the jokes won’t be funny. A great comic says funny things, a run-of-the-mill comic says things funny.

Mr. Black does both, but in this particular case, he does more of the latter than the former.

He was raised Jewish but has evolved into an atheist who looks askance at most religions’ smug attitude about being the One True Way. "This is all—and I’m going to burst a bubble here—absolute bullshit. … Because that attitude is the spiritual equivalent of having a favorite team you root for. … Because what’s true for you may not be true for the guy standing next to you. We all work differently. Each of us is full of shit in our own special way."

At the same time, there’s just a touch of the spiritual, as when he stands beside the body of his dead brother: "I stared at his ashen, lifeless body and knew that he was gone. Yet his spirit filled the room. I felt it all around me. It was so strong that I knew he was still there. In this moment of extreme loss, I was comforted by him, by his presence. I never expected that."

Mostly, though Mr. Black steers away from the serious. He mentions that Hebrew "is truly a language of phlegm," and pays tribute to the courtly, retiring Amish: "How have they managed to do it? And to do it without bothering anybody? It’s astonishing. Memo to all other religions: Watch and learn. Now."

I’ve seen Lewis Black perform a couple of times and would happily pay cash money to see him again—or for that matter, read him again. My only problem with Me of Little Faith is that, while it isn’t a long book, it still has some padding, particularly a play that Mr. Black wrote for the Public Theater in 1981, which hasn’t aged well.

That said, I laughed out loud a half-dozen times—not Mark Twain, but in these deracinated times, good enough.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at seyman@observer.com.