Begley The Bookie | The New York Observer

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:43 -0400

A bonus from Blake Bailey’s Cheever (Knopf, $35): When William Faulkner won the Nobel prize in 1949, Cheever amused himself by imagining what Hemingway would have to say about it:

“I think it’s fine that Bill Faulkner got the Nobel Prize. … The Nobel Prize is like that purse they give in Verona for the shot who bags the most sitting ducks on a clear day. There are other kinds of shooting, but they...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Jonathan Littell Ties Critics in Knots with The Kindly Ones

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:26:39 -0500

Not found time yet to digest Jonathan Littell’s 992-page Holocaust novel, The Kindly Ones (Harper, $29.99), which won two major literary prizes when it was published as Les Bienveillantes in France in 2006? Confused by the fact that it was written in French by an American (a Yale graduate, no less) and then translated into English by someone else? (English rights sold for around $1 million.) Unsettled by the news that it’s narrated by...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Gone with the Wind Decoded; Flannery O’Connor’s Feathered Friends; and Amazonian Adventure

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:53:20 -0500

Exuberant is the best word for Molly Haskell’s Frankly, My Dear (Yale, $24), a slim, unfailingly intelligent, fact-filled book that sets out to explain why Gone With the Wind (both book and movie) exercises such a potent and enduring hold on our imagination. Ms. Haskell, who’s married to The Observer’s own Andrew Sarris, argues convincingly that the power of the Gone With the Wind archetypes—their “extraordinary human resonance”—derives principally from the deeply divided natures...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Divine Sculptures; Heavenly Hogwash; and the Immortal Ian McEwan

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:26:49 -0500

Amazon seems to think it’s a children’s book (“Reading level: Ages 9–12”); the publishers’ classification over the bar code mentions African-American Studies—but I’d say that Elizabeth Spires’ I Heard God Talking to Me (FSG, $17.95) is a stunningly handsome art book, a fine tribute in poems and photographs to the sculpture of William Edmondson, the first black artist to be given a one-man show at MoMA. (That was in 1937, when Edmondson was about...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet On Current Reading: David Ogilvy Admired; Memoirs Miniaturized; and Sexual Perversity Embraced

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:13:38 -0500

Is there still room in our hearts for a business hero? Wall Street buccaneers are toxic for now, but what about a business titan safely segregated from high-finance chicanery? Kenneth Roman’s The King of Madison Avenue (Palgrave Macmillan, $27.95) is an admiring but clear-eyed portrait of David Ogilvy, arguably the greatest advertising man ever—and a character so compelling, so vibrant and unusual, that it would be a pleasure to read about him even if...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Rabbit Remembered—McEwan, Amis and Others Wave Goodbye

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:32:44 -0500

Among the many tributes to John Updike, perhaps the most expansive and detailed is Ian McEwan’s fine essay in The Guardian. Mr. McEwan has been publicly praising Updike—the “reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility”—for decades. Here he trains his craftsman’s eye on the mechanics of Updike’s method:

“Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Obama's Inaugural Stealth; Guantánamo by Foot; the Sad Truth About Benjamin Button

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:39:40 -0500

Jonathan Raban, a British novelist and travel writer surveying the political landscape of the United States from his adopted home of Seattle, wrote some of the sharpest commentary on the presidential election. He continues his run of excellent essays with a canny reading of President Obama’s Inaugural Address in the Jan. 24 Guardian. He argues, convincingly, that “Obama was able to get away with murder.”

To get to the analysis of the speech, skip Mr....

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: The Triumphant Return of Jayne Anne Phillips

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:02:38 -0500

In a sidebar in the Jan. 12 issue of The New Yorker, Hilton Als quotes Paul Celan about surviving the Nazi death camps:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

In the first dozen pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ remarkable new novel, Lark & Termite (Knopf, $24), an American soldier caught up in the surreal and deadly chaos of the...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Lincoln 24/7; Bush and The Great Gatsby; Smith's Self-Absorption

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:21:14 -0500

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, $16.95), a selection of 11 essays from the past 60 years edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Short and Sharp from Melville House; Wallace Stevens’ Deep Freeze; and Obama’s Muse

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:02:15 -0500

It's never too late to come up with a literary stocking stuffer, at least as long as your neighborhood bookstore is open on Christmas Eve. What you’re looking for, of course, is something not too big that packs a punch. Isn’t that precisely the definition of a novella?

Melville House, the small press based in Brooklyn with a bookstore at 145 Plymouth St. (closed for the holidays, alas, from Dec. 23), has a first-rate series...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Jackie and La Joconde; Gore Vidal On Air; and a Long Lost Campus Novel

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:27:44 -0500

NOT EVERY KENNEDY BOOK (see page 39) is about a sinister, implausible conspiracy that ends in violent death and wrenching national tragedy. Margaret Leslie Davis’ Mona Lisa in Camelot (Da Capo, $24.95), which was excerpted in last month’s Vanity Fair, brings back all the glamour and high hopes of the Kennedy White House with the story of Jacqueline’s successful campaign to import Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to the United States.

Getting the painting to...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Waiting for Santa; Sontag on Writers; and Milton’s Misery

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:43:52 -0500

Is it just me, or is there a kind of suspended-animation feel to these mid-December weeks? Santa Claus is coming to town, but he’s not here yet; Barack Obama is coming, too, but that’s not till January. ’Tis the season to be waiting—and to help us understand our predicament, we have Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting (Routledge, $21.95), which approaches the subject from a “broadly phenomenological perspective.” Mr. Schweizer consults Homer (Penelope’s 20-year wait for...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Proust Junkies’ Delight; Luscious Love from the Louvre; and Brooklyn Bridge Adored

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:48:10 -0500

What to give literati who have everything? Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (Thames & Hudson, $45). If the reader in question is already hooked on Proust, Mr. Karpeles’ gorgeous book is guaranteed to please; and if he or she has yet to plunge into the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, it may provide the needed push.

The idea is simple and inspired:...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: America the Multiple; Pet Peeves from Across the Pond; Martian Pick-Up Lines

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:37:19 -0500

If things had gone the other way in the presidential election, who’d be buying a book urging us to take pride in our country? Luckily, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had the good sense to bet on Obama and a boom in patriotism among bookish folk. Their apple pie anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco, $29.95), feels just right: Matching 50 writers (most of them young and hip) with 50...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Truman Capote’s Ageless Girl-About-Town

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:39:44 -0500

Vintage is celebrating Holly Golightly’s 50th birthday by issuing a special anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Vintage, $12.95). I hate to quibble, but she was actually two months shy of 19 when the novel came out in 1958—so by that count she’s pushing 70. Or if you want to get persnickety about it, when we first meet her, it’s the summer of 1943 (“There’s a war on”), so the bad news is that...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Roy Blount’s Way With Words; Gottlieb’s Gargantuan Dance Anthology

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:59:04 -0500

Just a little less than half the population will be disgruntled come Wednesday morning. What exactly do I mean by that? Will they have lost their gruntle along with the election? Not at all. Attend to the irreplaceable Roy Blount Jr., whose Alphabet Juice (FSG, $25) is both useful and a delight:

“Illogically, given its negational force in most compound words, the prefix dis- is sometimes, as here, regarded as an intensifier. To gruntle, colloquially,...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Jonathan Franzen Remembers David Foster Wallace; Mencken Disses Joe Sixpack

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:30:49 -0400

At the Oct. 23 memorial service for David Foster Wallace at N.Y.U., speaker after celebrated speaker (Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders) remembered a fellow writer with evident fondness and il-miglior-fabbro humility. Wallace’s sister’s tribute was devastatingly sad; Mark Costello’s was sad and very funny; Donald Antrim’s was deeply personal and not funny in the least. And Jonathan Franzen’s was different from the others, sad and funny and personal, but also contentious. He was...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Three New Memoirs, Three Branches on the Tree of Grief

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:28:19 -0400

All good memoirs involve suffering—how could it be otherwise? Only trauma junkies want to be steeped to their weeping eyes in misery, and yet if there’s no pain at all, just rosy recollection, the phony factor kicks in and you begin to suspect that someone’s fudging it. Three new memoirs, all of them potentially morose to the max, are ranked below from mildly grim to majorly woeful. The trick is to find the right...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Veep Sweep; and the Reading Habits of Bulls and Bears

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:43:38 -0400

This is the week for reading about vice presidents and vice presidential hopefuls. In The New Yorker, there’s “Biden’s Brief” (Oct. 20, $4.50), Ryan Lizza’s long, friendly account of Joe Biden’s journey to the bottom half of the Obama ticket. Mr. Lizza registers a curious Biden tic: During the course of their interview, the senator from Delaware repeated five times some variation of the phrase “presumptuous for me to say.…”

Two terms of that could...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Spiegelman’s Self-Portrait; Wisdom Begins at Sixty-Five

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:15:43 -0400

Knowing something about comics—and something about Art Spiegelman—is a prerequisite to enjoying Breakdowns (Pantheon, $27.50), a reissue of some of the artist’s edgy early work, prefaced by new comics of a simultaneously autobiographical and theoretical nature (“The fetid odor of his self-absorption made me gag”), and capped off with an autobiographical and historical afterword. In short, whether or not you enjoy Breakdowns—which is in roughly equal parts provocative, funny, sad and self-indulgent—you’ll learn a...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Michael Herr’s Heroic Honesty; Hemingway’s Unhappy Soldier

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:52:57 -0400

Robert Stone, on his way to giving a glowing review in The New York Times Book Review to Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, nominates Michael Herr’s Dispatches (Vintage, $12.95) as “the most brilliant exposition of the cultural dimension of an American war ever compiled.” He notes, moreover, that Mr. Filkins’ book is “in the tradition of Dispatches.” He’s right, of course—but to give the comparison the weight it deserves, we need to remind ourselves...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Booker Judges Blow the Whistle; Richard Hell Crowns Lou Reed

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:06:40 -0400

To mark the 40th anniversary of the prestigious Booker prize, The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) asked 40 judges—one judge per year—to tell “the inside story of how the winner was chosen.” Some of the judges obliged with literary tittle-tattle, but more amusing, and much more revealing, was the steady drumbeat of scorn for the whole business of picking a winner. Here are some highlights:

“[T]he absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Gilead Revisited; Nabokov Does YouTube; and the Honey Bee Blues

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:56:18 -0400

Devout fans of Marilynne Robinson—those still astonished, nearly three decades later, by the poetry of Housekeeping (1980), and those who made the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) into an unlikely best seller—will be thrilled by Home (FSG, $25), which is essentially a second serving of Gilead, though a trifle less intense, softened by the gentle presence of a female protagonist. We’re back in Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s, and we’re as drenched as ever in...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Another Auster Pretzel; Malcolm’s Burdock Moment; and a Wallace Stevens Masterpiece

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:53:45 -0400

Summer’s almost over, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to go back to school, back to work, back to the shriek and clank of the city.

Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $23) is set in the "great American wilderness"—or anyway Vermont—and strains, late in the game, to strike a cheery note, but it’s basically dark (see the portentous title) and urban in character, a striving, unhappy, crowded book that wants to do...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Žižek’s Triple Somersault; Plastic Absolutism; and Co-op City Remembered

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:12:40 -0400

As Russian tanks rumble through South Ossetia and into Georgia, should we heed the advice of Slavoj Žižek, the hip Slovene theorist, who tells us that "to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence"? (The idea being that violence is "fundamental" to the capitalist status quo.)

Clever Mr. Žižek has published his new book, Violence...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Biography of a Nymphet; Dickinson’s Dalliance; and an Orwell-Waugh Amalgam

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:42:33 -0400

Literary biography has been wandering in curious directions, with fresh perspective the ever-receding goal.

When I talk about books, I preach and practice a superficially naïve gospel that puts characters from literature on equal footing with characters we encounter in real life (Elizabeth Bennet means more to many people than any number of living, breathing relatives), but I nevertheless had difficulty adjusting to Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), which is essentially a...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Brilliant Mistakes; Sheep-Farming Sociopaths; and Egotistical Giants

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:50:19 -0400

Every summer house should have on its dusty potluck shelves, in among the Agatha Christie and the John D. MacDonald and the J. K. Rowling, a copy of Paul Collins’ Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (Picador, $15), an almanac of delusion, failure and heroically misguided enterprise. Isn’t vacation the best vantage from which to contemplate the sheer waste of epic flops?

The eponymous Banvard was a 19th-century American painter...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Hitchens Dunked; Patricians Behaving Badly; and Ehrenreich to the Rescue

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:46:25 -0400

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Barack the Scrivener; Opaque Pelosi; Hilary Mantel in History's Kitchen

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:28:38 -0400

Andrew Delbanco, the distinguished critic and biographer of Melville, gives Barack Obama two thumbs up in The New Republic (www.tnr.com), explicitly allowing his favorable literary judgment on Mr. Obama’s two books to shade into a political endorsement ("this man—to my ear, at least—is the real deal"). It’s a strange, leapfrogging idea, to think that a politician’s prose opens a window into his heart. "It is hard for any writer," says Mr. Delbanco, "no matter...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Kerry as a Kid; Scratch ‘n’ Sniff; and High/Low Heaven

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:10:42 -0400

Self-indulgence, that famous boomer trait, is stamped all over Geoffrey Douglas' The Classmates (Hyperion, $23.95), a brooding memoir of the St. Paul's School class of 1962—the class that brought us John Kerry and therefore, roughly four years ago, began to think of itself as somehow significant: One of their own was very possibly on the verge of being elected president. I'll spare you Mr. Douglas' personal problems, which he writes about in detail, and...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Hypocrisy Weighed; the Kamasutra Commodified; and Pestilence Personalized

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:21:12 -0400

For a subtle, impressively intelligent discussion of a topic that’s on just about everybody’s mind these day, see David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (Princeton, $29.95). Mr. Runciman, a lecturer in political theory at Cambridge, begins with the assumption that hypocrisy is inevitable in politics, and eventually argues that it’s also salutary, if only in the limited sense that hypocrisy implies a private sphere where the government can’t, or shouldn’t, reach. (When no one has anything...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Jim Webb Unvarnished; Move Over Mitt Romney, Here Comes Stephenie Meyer

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:47:02 -0400

It's hard to get your book properly reviewed when the critics are only interested in sizing you up as Barack Obama’s running mate. For Jim Webb, who is, as Elizabeth Drew insists in the June 26 New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), "a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side," it must be especially galling.

Or maybe not.

Ms. Drew herself seems much less engaged by the Virginia senator’s new book, A...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Rummy Disses the Pentagon; Unreliable Narrators; and Psychedelic Living

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:11:34 -0400

The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Gore Vidal vs. Midge Decter; Sodomy Laws; and Dan's Hamptons

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:39:00 -0400

WHEN GORE VIDAL is on a tear, outrage and wit blend to produce a new, delicious and deadly substance, like sulfuric Champagne or a napalm martini. Consider, for example, an especially corrosive—and funny—essay on the twinned destiny of gays and Jews, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," originally published in The Nation in 1981 and newly reprinted in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50). Here’s a sample:

"A racial or religious or tribal identity...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Kingsley Amis Drinks; Bill Bryson Admonishes; and PEN Bestows Prizes

Mon, 19 May 2008 14:31:11 -0400

HOW VERY UNGENEROUS of Joan Acocella. In her long New Yorker essay about hangovers, "A Few Too Many" (May 26, $4.50), she cites Kingsley Amis several times, quotes him at length and mentions (without naming them) his three books on drinking but she fails to point out that Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $19.99) is being published this week. It’s those same three books gathered in a single volume and introduced by...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Dylan Falls in Love, Goes Bananas; Delicious Pig Candy

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:22:56 -0400

Suze Rotolo, the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is not a writer, and it's unfair to expect anything more from her memoir, A Freewheelin' Time (Broadway, $22.95), than a peek or two into the life of a very young Dylan on the brink of stardom. Unfortunately, we get a great deal more: flat-footed accounts of Ms. Rotolo's unhappy family life, her banal sociological insights into the '60s,...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: McCain’s Scary Hagee; Plymouth Rock; Manhattan Watercolors

Mon, 05 May 2008 14:53:51 -0400

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):

By any standard, Pastor John Hagee is an orator of unusual ability. His physical form is clownish; apart from the central-casting head of white, swept-back preacher hair, he has short, stubby arms and...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Oscar and Walt Scratch Each Other's Backs; Pep Pills; Lisbon Flattened!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:34:48 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Abraham Obama; The Call of the Wild; A Gem from Richard Bausch; No Bun = No Burger

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:18:20 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: 'It' Girls; Manhattan Schoolgirls; and a Murdered Medici Princess

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:03:21 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Against the Semicolon; Vonnegut in Dresden; Women at War

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:56:14 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Osama's Siblings; Osama's Whereabouts; and the War on Osama

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:52:15 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: The Darker Side of Obama; The Largest Human Being of Our Time

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:35:34 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet On Current Reading: The Crimes of Abu Ghraib; Pin the Tail on the Donkey; John Updike Goes Down

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:46:58 -0400

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Female Fibs; Liebling at War; Mailer and Auchincloss, Separated at Birth

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:45:54 -0500

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Obama the Probable; Machiavelli for Hillary; Thomas Mann as Pick-Up Ploy

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:28:59 -0500

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Five Debut Novels

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:41:15 -0500

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.

LAUREN GROFF’S THE Monsters of Templeton (Voice, $24.95) sports blurbs from both Stephen King and...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet On Current Reading: The Next Secretary of State; A Valentine From Eugenides; Love Lessons From Larkin

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:04:34 -0500

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet on Current Reading: Tom Wolfe's Steamy New York; The Nation's Gastric Obsessions

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:51:07 -0500

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...

Our Critic's Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Amis on Islam; Harvard's Hot President; James Wood on Character

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:42:33 -0500

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...