- 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 . . ....
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Books: “Voodoo Histories.”
Aaronovitch’s survey of conspiracy theories has a sense of humor about its subject, but only up to a point. If there is anyone he disapproves of more than, say, 9/11 Truthers or believers in the murder of Princess Diana (or of Marilyn Monroe or Vince Foster), it is . . ....
- Books: “A Reader on Reading.”
Lectures, columns, and other occasional writings are gathered here to form a meditation on “the art of reading.” Thoughtful interrogations of the value of identity labels like “Jewish fiction” or “gay fiction” and the relationship between writers and editors mix with ruminations on the . . ....
- Books: “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” review.
This lively survey asks “what translation has done in the past and does today,” and “whether it is one thing or many.” In thirty-two wide-ranging chapters, Bellos variously corrects bits of misguided folk wisdom (Eskimo, it turns out, does not have a hundred words . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Lake.”
The narrator of Yoshimoto’s ruminative novel has abandoned her provincial home town, where she was shunned as the illegitimate child of a businessman, and moved to Tokyo, where she can be “just like everyone else.” After her mother dies, she falls into a weightless relationship (“ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Inner Life of Empires.”
The eleven Johnstone siblings of Westerhall, in Scotland, were “a large and disorderly family,” whose lives, playing out on three continents between 1723 and 1813, illuminate what Rothschild calls an “empire of intimate exchanges.” The subject is well chosen and provocatively explored. One brother was a . . . (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: “Coyote at the Kitchen Door.”
DeStefano, a wildlife biologist, examines the expanding field of “urban ecology” in this pithy volume. Urban ecologists study changes in human-animal interactions caused by factors like sprawl, traffic, and noise pollution, in an attempt to understand why some species (the mountain lion, say) are badly disrupted by . . ....
- Books: “A Week in December.”
Set in London during one week in December, 2007, this panoramic satire of modern urban life follows a hedge-fund director who is about to set off an implosion of the global banking system for his own profit; a disaffected Muslim teen-ager embarking on a suicide mission as a . . ....
- Books: “Mr. Toppit.”
This début novel examines the unexpected consequences of literary fame. Luke Hayman is, to his dismay, better known as Luke Hayseed, the young hero of children’s books written by his father, Arthur, now dead. Luke longs to escape his fictional doppelgänger, but the comparisons . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Electric Eden.”
This sprawling, mesmerizing exploration of “Britain’s visionary music” examines the idiosyncratic folk-influenced musicians of the late sixties and early seventies. Young begins with Vashti Bunyan, who wrote plaintive songs while travelling across industrial England by horse and cart, and focusses on performers who drew on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Adam Gopnik: “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and young-adult fantasy books.
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict . . ....
- Books: “Grand Pursuit” review.
This ambitious, sprawling survey of modern economics, from the Victorian era to the end of the twentieth century, tracks the emergence and growth of two parallel arguments against determinism: a rejection of the view of poverty as “a natural phenomenon” and the insistence that market spikes and crashes . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “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.)...
- Books: “The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe.”
The travails of Marilyn, narrated by her precocious pet Maf (short for Mafia Honey), here double as a survey of cultural life in the early sixties. Maf, one of “the aristocrats of the canine world,” comes to Marilyn by way of Vanessa Bell, Natalie Wood, and Frank Sinatra . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe.”
The travails of Marilyn, narrated by her precocious pet Maf (short for Mafia Honey), here double as a survey of cultural life in the early sixties. Maf, one of “the aristocrats of the canine world,” comes to Marilyn by way of Vanessa Bell, Natalie Wood, and Frank Sinatra . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Ticking Is the Bomb.”
Flynn’s memoir, his second after “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” covers impending fatherhood, his mother’s suicide, revelations of torture, and his father’s alcoholism and dementia. The structure—a few pages on each subject—gives the book a jittery energy . . ....
- David Denby: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Chasing Madoff.”
Among the trillions of binary digits skittering across screens this summer, a vibrant minority have been gathered into a shrewd, coherent, and fully felt movie. I’m speaking of the expertly crafted “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” by far the best spectacle movie of the . . ....
- Richard Brody: “The Rules of the Game” on DVD.
Many directors are, in effect, actors who reserve their performances for their cast and crew. The one time that the director Jean Renoir gave himself an onscreen star turn, however—in his panoramic 1939 romance, “The Rules of the Game” (Criterion)—he didn’t just . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “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.)...
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
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Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Cod,” “Salt,” and “The Big Oyster,” among many other books, discusses his latest release, “World Without Fish,” an illustrated assessment of the future of the oceans. (163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. April 20 at . . ....
