- Books: “The War Lovers.”
Before embarking for Cuba, in 1898, the Rough Riders, led by Theodore Roosevelt, chanted, “Rough, tough, we’re the stuff / We want to fight and we can’t get enough / Whoopee!” In Thomas’s telling, that spirit—manliness so loudly asserted that it’ . . ....
- Books: Tom McCarthy’s “Men in Space,” review.
The title of McCarthy’s début novel, previously unpublished in the United States, refers, in one sense, to a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. His extraterrestrial predicament provides the novel’s guiding metaphor: below, in Prague, characters move in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Trita Parsi’s “A Single Roll of the Dice,” review.
From leaked cables, confidential documents, and dozens of interviews, Parsi reconstructs the history of political trauma that underlies the United States’ relationship with Iran. Memories of coups, hostage crises, and the denunciations of the Bush Administration have left bad faith on both sides, which seems to preclude any hope . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “American Egyptologist” by Jeffrey Abt, review.
Born in Illinois in 1865, James Henry Breasted turned an early interest in the ministry and a talent for languages into a remarkable career as America’s first formally trained Egyptologist. He specialized in the recording of inscriptions and wanted nothing less than “the recopying and republication of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: 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.)...
- Books: “The Great Oom.”
The health guru Pierre Bernard popularized yoga in the United States, and became one of the Jazz Age’s sensational impresarios. Dubbed “the Omnipotent Oom” by the tabloids, he legitimately mastered Hatha Yoga and Vedic texts and then promoted his pedagogy in classic American fashion: publicly demonstrating . . ....
- Books: “Unfamiliar Fishes”
In 1898, as Congress pondered a resolution to annex Hawaii, one representative warned that this would lead to statehood for the multicultural island nation. “How can we endure our shame,” he asked, when a pigtailed Chinese senator, “pagan joss in his hand,” talks pidgin to worthies . . . (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: “Mr g” review.
A note at the end of this concise but ambitious novel about God’s, or Mr g’s, creation of life, the universe, and everything else assures the reader that its narrative adheres to “the best current data and theories in physics, astronomy, and biology.” Lightman . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Toby Lester’s “Da Vinci’s Ghost” review.
This short, engaging book provides historical and intellectual contexts for one of the world’s most famous drawings, Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” in which a male figure is inscribed in both a circle and a square. Lester traces the conceptual origins of the drawing back to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Mudwoman” review.
Because M. R. Neukirchen, the protagonist of Oates’s powerful novel, is a philosopher who plumbs “the perimeters of ‘knowing,’ ” it is no surprise that the book often misleads and confounds. At a young age, M.R. was abandoned by her Christian-fanatic mother in a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” review.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Zona” (better known in English as “Stalker”), an outlaw-cum-shaman known as Stalker escorts two men, named Writer and Professor, through an uncanny, Chernobyl-like Zone in order to reach The Room, where innermost wishes are supposedly granted . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Betrayal” review.
The effects of repression replace those of deprivation in this sequel to Dunmore’s “The Siege,” which was set during the long siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. It’s now 1952, and Anna and Andrei have made a happy life for themselves and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Outlaw Album” review.
In this collection’s twelve stories, Woodrell expands upon the unremittingly bleak portrait of Ozark life drawn in his novel “Winter’s Bone” and in the acclaimed film based on it. In one, a young woman tends to a rapist who was brain-damaged when she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Haiti” review.
8220;There are tons of idiots who have never used their ten fingers for anything, and who wander around constantly repeating, inanely: ‘Haitians are very lazy,’ ” the Haitian writer Louis-Joseph Janvier wrote in 1882, in a long and passionate rejoinder to his nation’s critics . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” and Barack Obama’s White House.
If the United States is one big book club, and sometimes it feels that way, then the White House must have been hoping that this would be the week when everyone was talking about “The Rogue,” Joe McGinniss’s much ballyhooed takedown of his erstwhile Alaska neighbor . . ....
- Books: “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War”
As he did unforgettably in “A Bright Shining Lie,” Sheehan here tells the story both of a warrior and of a war, in this case a cold one. The warrior is Bernard Schriever, a pilot who was “the handsomest general in the United States Air Force,” . . ....
- Books: “Stalking Nabokov” review.
Boyd writes that as a high-school student he began reading Nabokov “so intensely that his way of seeing the world partly shaped mine.” He isn’t kidding. Boyd seems to have been put on this earth to savor, and annotate, Nabokov’s lavish, many-minded . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- Books: Roger Crowley’s “City of Fortune,” review.
Crowley, a historian of Mediterranean conflicts, offers a brisk account of the rise of the Venetian Republic, which in the Middle Ages was “a shifting, supple matrix of interchanging locations, flexible as a steel net.” Venice’s power, at its height, extended along both shores of the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Sarah Manguso’s “The Guardians” review.
In 2008, the poet Sarah Manguso’s friend Harris escaped from a mental hospital, and jumped in front of a Metro-North train. In this elegy, Manguso rejects a narrative arc (“My friend died—that isn’t a story”) and instead composes spare, anguished episodes . . . (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.)...
