- Books: “Alice Neel.”
Born in 1900, the celebrated painter Alice Neel packed the century into her career, and Hoban’s cluttered but entrancing biography captures its subject’s Zelig-like qualities. Neel worked as a W.P.A. artist during the nineteen-thirties, emerged as a “feminist heroine” in the seventies . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bicycle Diaries”
Since the nineteen-eighties, Byrne, the co-founder of the band Talking Heads, has been using a folding bicycle to get around the world’s major cities, and his new book is both a travelogue and a reflection on gentrifying urban landscapes. A passionate cycling advocate, Byrne rates the . . ....
- Books: “Lola, California.”
Lana and Rose, teen-agers living in Berkeley in the early nineteen-eighties, call themselves the Lolas: free-spirited, adventurous, sirenic. Such an intense friendship is bound to have a breaking point, and it comes when Lana’s father, Vic, a self-actualist philosopher whose cult-like followers the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Laura Miller: What’s behind the boom in dystopian fiction for kids?
Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to . . ....
- Books: “The Lonely Polygamist.”
Set in the nineteen-seventies, this expansive novel focusses on Golden, the patriarch of a four-wife, twenty-eight child, three-house family, part of a fundamentalist Mormon sect in a small town in Utah. Trailed by a sharp loneliness made all the keener by his boisterous family, Golden commutes . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Movies
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OPENINGS
CARLOS
A film about Carlos the Jackal, who was responsible for terrorist attacks in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Edgar Ramirez. Opening Oct. 15. (IFC Center, three-part extended cut; Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, theatrical cut.)
CARMO, HIT . . ....
- Books: “The Good Soldiers”
Finkel’s sad and wonderful account of soldiers’ experiences of war follows the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, which was thrown into one of Baghdad’s worst districts as part of the 2007 surge. The average age of its eight hundred soldiers was nineteen. Finkel, who spent eight . . ....
- Daniel Mendelsohn: Why do we love the Titanic?
In the early nineteen-seventies, my Uncle Walter, who wasn’t a “real” uncle but had a better intuition about my hobbies and interests than some of my blood relatives did, gave me a thrilling gift: membership in the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. I was only twelve . . ....
- Books: “The Golden Mean.”
This vivid imagining of the encounter between Aristotle and the young Alexander the Great casts the philosopher as a manic-depressive, veering “from black melancholy to golden joy.” At the novel’s start, Aristotle is in his early forties, his major treatises still ahead of him. He . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Hitch-22.”
As contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author’s incessant output, this memoir is an effective coming-of-age story, regardless of what one may think of the resulting adult. The picture is highly selective: key areas (Hitchens’s two marriages; the nineteen . . ....
- Books: “City Boy”
White’s second volume of memoirs covers the sixties and seventies, when living in New York was “something like a religious vocation, full of obvious penances and rarefied rewards.” White relished the artistic and social freedom afforded by the city’s isolation from the rest of . . ....
- Alice Munro: “Haven.”
All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver. The boys’ hair was longer than it had been, but not straggling down their backs . . . (Subscription required.)...
- American Symphony Orchestra: “Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’” @ Avery Fisher Hall
Of all the great musical adaptations of Goethe’s play (the efforts of Berlioz, Gounod, Liszt, and Mahler among them), Schumann’s is the least often performed and least well understood. (In the nineteen-seventies, Benjamin Britten was a lonely champion.) Leon Botstein undertakes yet another of his rescue missions by bringing it to Avery Fisher Hall, conducting a performance that...
- Books: “You Are Not a Gadget.”
In the nineteen-eighties, Lanier belonged to what he calls a “merry band” of Internet pioneers who believed that the digital revolution would mean a groundswell of creativity. But, he argues in this manifesto, around the turn of this century the dream was hijacked by “digital Maoists . . ....
- Joan Acocella: Bill T. Jones brings “Fela!” to Broadway.
8220;Fela!,” the musical, directed by Bill T. Jones, that opened Off Broadway last year and just reopened, at the Eugene O’Neill, begins with Fela Kuti, the father of Afrobeat and, in the nineteen-seventies, one of the most popular musicians in West Africa, performing in his . . ....
- John Colapinto: Pat Furlong and the crusade against Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
In the early nineteen-eighties, Pat Furlong noticed that her infant son, Patrick, was “floppy.” He would slip through her hands when she attempted to lift him from under his armpits. “You’d stand him up,” Furlong says, “and he’d just kind . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Night Life
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ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.
B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL
237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—Sept. 12: In the nineteen-seventies, when his fellow-Canadians . . ....
- Books: “Summertime”
In the early seventies, a young unpublished writer returns to his native South Africa after a disgrace abroad. His name is John Coetzee, and he both is and isn’t the Nobel-winning author of this unorthodox book. Where the real Coetzee had a wife and children at the . . ....
- Alex Ross: Philip Glass’s 75th birthday celebrations.
Philip Glass’s place in musical history is secure. His sprawling, churning, monumentally obsessive works of the nineteen-seventies—“Music with Changing Parts,” “Music in Twelve Parts,” “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha”—have fascinated several generations of listeners, demonstrating . . ....
- Books: “Intern Nation”
Since the nineteen-eighties, internships have proliferated, and in this study Perlin estimates that seventy-five per cent of students at four-year colleges now intern at least once. As he shows, the arrangement entails a “curious blend of privilege and exploitation.” The word “intern” has . . . (Subscription required.)...
- “Pioneers of Color” @ Houk
Although this exhibition was clearly designed as a showcase for Joel Meyerowitz (whom the gallery represents), with Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in supporting roles, that’s not an issue when there are so many great photographs in the room. All three men used color in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when art photography was strictly black-and-white, and their work from that...
- Hilton Als: James Rasin’s documentary, “Beautiful Darling.”
Candy Darling was a movie star’s dream of what a movie star should look like. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, in the nineteen-forties, Candy was raised as James Slattery in Massapequa Park, Long Island, during the nineteen-fifties, when the world wasn’t exactly ready for . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: Being Kinky Friedman.
It’s a good time to be Kinky. Prodigious at chess as a child in the fifties, persistently irreverent as a country artist in the seventies, an author of a series of popular detective novels beginning in the eighties, a gubernatorial candidate in Texas in 2006, Kinky Friedman (born . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hisham Matar: The Libyan novelist recounts his father’s abduction.
One night in the early nineteen-eighties, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had a terrible nightmare: he walks into a barbershop, sits down in the padded chair, and closes his eyes. Suddenly, he feels the razor blade prick one side of his cleanly shaven neck. It is driven in deeper, then dragged . . ....
- Philip Gourevitch: Patrick Flanery’s “Absolution” review.
In South Africa in the nineteen-eighties, the military wing of the African National Congress was on the attack. The anti-apartheid guerrillas rarely let a week go without action—dynamite at a fuel depot, a car bomb outside Air Force headquarters in a city center. It was a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Charles Ludlam’s “The Sorrows of Dolores” and “Museum of Wax” at IFC.
In the nineteen-seventies, Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, started to make two films. But by the time he died, of complications from AIDS in 1987, the movies, both silent, were still not finished. “The Sorrows of Dolores” and “Museum of Wax,” . . ....
- James Surowiecki: How Netflix beat Blockbuster.
In the nineteen-eighties, a new kind of chain store came to dominate American shopping: the “category killer.” These stores killed off all competition in a category by stocking a near-endless variety of products at prices that small retailers couldn’t match. Across America, independent stores . . ....
- Books: “The Locust and the Bird”
Al-Shaykh’s poignant family history, narrated in the voice of her mother, Kamila, transports us to Beirut in the nineteen-thirties. At eleven, the beautiful and strong-willed Kamila is illiterate, her family penniless. She falls in love with the handsome Muhammad, but at fourteen is married off . . ....
