- Books: “Believing Is Seeing” review.
Morris frames these conversational essays as “a collection of mystery stories,” casting himself as a detective charged with investigating the contested reality behind a photograph or set of photographs. He is drawn to documentary images—for example, of the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Depression . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Street Sweeper” review.
A short list of subjects addressed in this six-hundred-page novel would include the Holocaust, the civil-rights movement, Upton Sinclair, the American justice system, and the debilitating quest for academic tenure. That a major character is a history professor does not excuse the occasionally hectoring tone. The strands . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Relentless Revolution.”
In this stimulating history, Appleby insists that, far from being inevitable, the advent of capitalism was “a startling departure from the norms that had prevailed for four thousand years,” and required a radical reconception of human nature. Her early chapters, which trace the peculiar factors that caused capitalism . . ....
- Books: “The Greater Journey.”
8220;I was not yet twenty. I was quite alone. I did not speak a word of French . . . but I was in Paris and the world was before me.” These recollections of an American art student express the sense of awe and exuberance that fills McCullough’s history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Memory of Love.”
This ambitious novel, set in Sierra Leone, examines the lives of three men as they face the lingering consequences of civil war. Surrounded by both victims and perpetrators of violence, each man fashions his own refuge: a retired academic carefully rearranges the past through narration; a British psychologist finds sustenance . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Caleb Crain: Did principle or pragmatism start the American Revolution?
What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” he wrote. This uncanny visage appears in Hawthorne . . ....
- Books: “American Uprising.”
In January, 1811, hundreds of slaves from the sugar fields on Louisiana’s German Coast banded together and marched toward New Orleans, carrying out what Rasmussen identifies as the “largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States.” He places the revolt . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Sabbath World.”
When Edmund Wilson set out on his various intellectual spelunking adventures, he would say that he was “working up” Hungarian poetry or Russian revolutionaries, the literature of the Civil War or Iroquois culture. Judith Shulevitz, a deeply intelligent journalist in her forties dissatisfied with the frenzied quality of . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Books: “Mr. Speaker!”
This biography of Thomas B. Reed, who spent three terms as Speaker of the House in the late nineteenth century, memorializes its subject as “the Man Who Broke the Filibuster.” At the time, America was suffering the material and political fallout of the Civil War, and Congress was . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.”
Abandoned by his wife and rebuffed by his estranged father, a middle-aged salesman named Maxwell Sim—“like a SIM card”—finds he has “lost all appetite” for “human contact.” Leaving behind seventy Facebook friends and the fake e-mail address he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Daring Young Men”
8220;The American people will not allow the German people to starve,” Colonel Frank Howley, one of the top American commanders in Berlin, said in June, 1948, after the Soviets cut off all supply routes except an air corridor to the Western sectors of the city. But when the . . ....
- Books: “The Secret History of Costaguana,”
8220;All Colombians are liars,” the narrator of this turbulent novel declares. He is, of course, Colombian, as is the author, who aims at a corrective to the fictionalized portrait of Colombia in Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo.” Vacillating between polemic and farce, Vásquez presents . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Jealousy.”
Millet’s previous memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” was a graphic résumé of her history in libertinism, including trysts with, by her own count, at least forty-nine partners. This follow-up is a chronicle of the “irreversible unravelling of my . . ....
- Books: “Little Boy Blues.”
This affecting memoir recounts a Southern childhood during the fifties and sixties. Jones comes from a broken home that is too distracted by its problems to notice the civil-rights movement happening around it. His father is a reliably unreliable alcoholic. “I’d uncover an unfinished bottle weeks . . ....
- Books: Carlina Di Robertis’s “Perla” review.
In this haunting second novel, Perla, a privileged Argentinean student, shoulders the legacy of the period in which tens of thousands were “disappeared” by the Argentinean military dictatorship. Struggling to balance her love for her father, a Navy officer, with the knowledge that he was complicit in horrific . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Blood’s a Rover”
The final novel of Ellroy’s “Underworld U.S.A.” trilogy, following “American Tabloid” and “The Cold Six Thousand,” is a fittingly crazed and violent account of the years 1968 to 1972. Alternating chapters follow three henchmen with ties to a labyrinth of interconnected schemes . . ....
- Books: “The Golden Empire.”
Partway through this omnivorous history of the middle period of Spain’s conquest of the Americas, the reader becomes inured to the manifold brutalities, as perhaps were the perpetrators themselves. One characteristically gruesome report is of a black slave “who was scrubbed to death” by Indians “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Invisible Line.”
This popular history makes vivid use of primary documents to reconstruct the sagas of three families who crossed the color line from black to white. They negotiated this transition by means of legal challenges and such racial categories as “Melungeons” and “Black Dutch,” or simply by . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Peter Schjeldahl: “Your History Is Not Our History,” at Haunch of Venison.
8220;Your History Is Not Our History” is a smart, odd show of vintage works by an ecumenical array of twenty New York art stars of the nineteen-eighties, from the turbulent Julian Schnabel to the icy Louise Lawler. What’s peculiar is the site: high in a . . ....
- Peter Schjeldahl: “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” at the Met.
If the title of the Met’s “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” suggests a unit in social studies, that’s apt. The survey of more than a hundred pictures flogs themes of national history and, well, “character.” Pedagogical wall texts loom. But . . ....
- Joan Acocella: Why do people love Stieg Larsson’s novels?
Having got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books—“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’ . . ....
- David Denby: “The American,” “Heartbreaker,” and “Hideaway.”
In “The American,” a professional assassin (George Clooney) known as Jack, and sometimes as Edward, and sometimes not as anyone, enters a medieval hilltop town in the Abruzzo region of Italy and tries to lie low. In his wariness and his silence, Jack resembles those mysterious gunmen who . . ....
- Books: “Saladin” by Anne-Marie Eddé, review.
In 1187, the Muslim military ruler Saladin captured Jerusalem from the descendants of crusaders. The news electrified Europe, and England and France imposed a “Saladin tithe,” to fund the Third Crusade. Eddé’s book portrays Saladin amid a medieval world in motion: He dispatches sons and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” review.
The first sign that this is not an orthodox history is the “cast” list up front, in which real people mingle with fictional ones. This hybrid approach, Spufford argues, befits the “fairytale” nature of his subject: the Soviet Union’s attempt—via a centralized . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “No Such Thing as Silence.”
In this concise survey, Gann, a composer and music critic, examines John Cage’s famously noteless composition “4′33″” from origins to afterlife. He lucidly catalogues the “specifically American mix” of influences—Duchamp, Zen, Erik Satie, Thoreau, Robert Rauschenberg—that fed . . ....
