- 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: “Moon.”
In the nineteen-sixties, Pan Am started the First Moon Flights Club, with departures scheduled for the turn of the century and a projected fare of fourteen thousand dollars. Despite having been demoted from its status as a planet by the Copernican revolution, and then revealed by modern technology to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Grandpa Green” review.
In this affecting picture book, a boy recounts the life of his beloved great-grandfather, a landscape artist whose garden serves as a repository of his memories, from young love to old age. The author’s illustrations, a blend of line drawing and sponge painting, have a classic feel . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Lives of Margaret Fuller” review.
This psychologically rich biography traces the brief, quixotic life of the leading female figure of the transcendentalist movement. A child prodigy, Fuller was reared by a father who focussed on cultivating her intellect to the detriment of, as he later ruefully admitted, her “female propriety.” Arrogant and forceful . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “What I Don’t Know About Animals” review.
Neither fish nor fowl, Diski’s book is a compassionate, appealing crossbreed of history, philosophy, and memoir—“a kind of travel book but with animals instead of travel,” as she explains in a letter to a sheep farmer, whom she visits during lambing season. She studies . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->“FREERANGE NONFICTION”
The monthly reading series presents Janice Erlbaum and Meera Nair. (Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St. For more information, call 212-989-9319 or visit freerangenonfiction.com. Feb. 3 at 6.)
“PROJECTION”
At this series, writers read their own work as it is projected . . ....
- Books: “Noon” review.
In this collection of four linked stories, Rehan Tabassum grows up in Delhi with his strong-willed single mother and sets out to “enjoy his strange patrimony”—his father being a Pakistani media tycoon with an array of in-fighting heirs and informers. Tabassum’s sprawling . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Yiyun Li: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”
8220;Here’s a fact for you America-philes,” a certain Major Tang, in the Army in which I had once served, liked to say when he caught us memorizing English vocabulary. “The moon in America is no bigger or brighter than the moon in China.” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “In Red” review.
This latest book by a celebrated Polish novelist is set in an imaginary town, a poor, remote place where winter lasts all year and there is “a darkness that softens contrasts and smooths the sharpness of edges.” Against this bleak backdrop, episodes play out as elusive parables or . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Quality of Mercy” review.
This sequel to Unsworth’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Sacred Hunger,” much of which was set on an eighteenth-century slave ship, trades the high seas for the courtroom, where a series of cases bearing on the legal status of black men in British society plays out . . . (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: 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: “How It All Began” review.
In this mischievous novel, Lively traces the genealogy of randomness that messes up the lives of strangers. A mugging on a London street ripples out into an interconnected urban universe, shaking marriages and ruining businesses. A retired teacher moves in with her daughter to convalesce, the daughter’s employer . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Contested Will.”
In this fascinating study, Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, casts skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works as a “long footnote to the larger story of the way we read now” and traces shifting assumptions about the relation between art and autobiography. Some fifty alternative . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->“HAPPY ENDING @ JOE’S PUB”
The downtown reading-and-music series teams up with the “331/3” series of books about pop music. The authors Geeta Dayal, Christopher R. Weingarten, and Dan Kois read from their works. The musical guest is The Little Death . . ....
- Books: “From the Land of the Moon.”
This spare, fable-like novella tells the story of three generations of a Sardinian family, centering on an eccentric woman, referred to simply as “grandmother,” who, in the years following the Second World War, pursues a brief but enthralling affair with a disfigured veteran before returning to her . . . (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: “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.)...
- D Strange – Marvel Comics Great Mystical – Occult Champion (and More About Strange Tales Comics)
Coming from Atlas Comics (Pre-Marvel -- post Timely) of the 1950's -- the fantasy series by Ditko and Kirby appealed greatly to most of my friends and acquaintances (in my Comic / SF circles) growing up. The natural evolution of this form -- Strange Tales the fantasy comic series-- became Strange Tales the Super Hero series....
- 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: “Instead of a Letter.”
Athill, now ninety-two years old, won admiration here for her recent memoirs “Stet” and “Somewhere Towards the End,” but this book, one of two earlier memoirs that have now been reissued, shows that her talent has been evident for decades. Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions . . ....
- “Can Intervention Work?” review.
Stewart and Knaus conclude their book on the perils of intervening abroad with “an unambiguous and reassuring” yes. Intervention can work, “because it did,” in Bosnia, where a “principled incrementalism” characterized the reconstruction and reconciliation process. One wonders, though, how reassuring this affirmation is . . . (Subscription...
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
goatTitle-->LITERARY LISTENING PARTY
The new anthology “White Riot,” which is named for the Clash song and was edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, traces racial politics in punk music from its origins through to the present with an energetic collection of essays, letters, lyrics, and criticism . . ....
- Anthony Lane: The long, strange history of 3-D.
Did you enjoy “Rottweiler”? How about “Bwana Devil” or “Black Lolita”? Maybe you preferred “International Stewardesses,” although you might know it under the more thoughtful title of “Supersonic Supergirls.” You will not need reminding that these are among the crowning . . ....
- 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.)...
- Wyatt Mason: “The Art of Fielding,” review.
In Chad Harbach’s first novel, “The Art of Fielding” (Little, Brown; $25.99), Henry Skrimshander arrives for his first day at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan,” with a beat-up copy of a book . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->LOWER EAST SIDE TENEMENT MUSEUM
Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History,” discusses her latest book, “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.” (108 Orchard St., at Delancey St. 212-982-8420. Feb. 3 at 6:30 . . ....
