- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->BARNES & NOBLE
The novelist Umberto Eco reads from his latest book, “The Prague Cemetery,” and talks with the filmmaker and critic Antonio Monda. (33 E. 17th St. 212-253-0810. Nov. 15 at 7.)
“SELECTED SHORTS”
The writer, performer, and filmmaker Miranda July . . ....
- Books: Liz Moore’s “Heft,” review.
Arthur Opp is a morbidly obese recluse. Inside his stately Brooklyn brownstone, he feasts on “bagels, laden with heavy coats of butter and cream cheese, and topped with a lonesome tomato slice, red & bleeding with juice.” His only connection to the outside world, save daily deliveries of . . . (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: 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The title of McCarthy’s début novel, previously unpublished in the United States, refers, in one sense, to a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.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: “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: “The Tragedy of Arthur.”
Did Arthur Phillips’s father, a convicted forger who was also named Arthur Phillips, discover, in the private library of an English manor house, a previously unknown early Shakespeare play called “The Tragedy of Arthur”? This is what Arthur Phillips the younger both suggests and frantically denies . . . (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: “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: “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: Thomas Mallon’s “Watergate” review.
Historical fiction that unfolds with the urgency of a thriller, this novel about the Watergate scandal is narrated from multiple points of view, from the President’s to the Plumbers’—a technique that reveals the schizophrenic medley of allegiances and power dynamics that contributed to the downfall . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Peter Caddick-Adams’s “Monty and Rommel” review.
This dual biography draws many parallels between the British and German commanders at El Alamein. Near-contemporaries, both men were wounded in the First World War and became Field Marshalls in the Second. Both, Caddick-Adams suggests, were master communicators, and perhaps should not have been promoted from the battlefield . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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.)...
- Anthony Lane: Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest.”
The chance to see Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” from 1951 (at Film Forum Feb. 25-March 10), should not be passed up; it is an enterprise of great pith and moment in the history of cinema. Boiled down, the tale seems grim and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “An Infinity of Things.”
In 1913, the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum opened in London. Its founder, the wealthy pharmaceutical pioneer Sir Henry Wellcome, had spent years amassing a collection that reflected “the great history ‘of the art and science of healing,’ ” but the more Wellcome collected the more his museum . . ....
- Books: “Supreme Power.”
In February, 1937, F.D.R., frustrated by a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that had struck down one New Deal law after another, tried to increase the number of Justices from nine to fifteen. “Tell your President, he has made a great mistake,” Justice Louis Brandeis said when told of . . ....
- Books: “A Book of Secrets.”
This elegant and quietly powerful book—part social history, part literary study, part memoir—takes its title from a diary and scrapbook, resembling a “dilapidated saddle of a horse,” kept by the minor British aristocrat Eve Fairfax, whom Holroyd describes, with a distinctive combination of empathy . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Mark Singer: Josef Koudelka’s “Invasion 68 Prague” in Moscow.
On August 21, 1968, in Prague, Josef Koudelka—a man with a camera, thirty years old—received a middle-of-the-night phone call from a friend. Soviet tanks had crossed the border into Czechoslovakia. Simultaneously, transport planes were delivering paratroopers, light tanks, and other artillery to Ruzyne . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Wooden Hat”
In this understated novel, Gardam returns to the successful barrister and judge Sir Edward Feathers, the protagonist of her deliciously acerbic “Old Filth.” The complementary tale, told largely from the point of view of Feathers’s wife, Betty, a fellow-“Raj orphan,” begins as the . . ....
- 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.)...
- John Kenney: “What Happened.”
WASHINGTON—On Monday, the Obama administration said that Osama bin Laden had been killed after a firefight with Navy Seal commandos, and that he had used his wife as a human shield. On Tuesday, the administration said that bin Laden was not armed at all, and that his wife . . ....
- 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: “Emma Goldman” review.
Gornick’s arresting portrait of the anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), whom J. Edgar Hoover called “the most dangerous woman in America,” is less a political history and more an illumination of “the existential drive behind radical politics.” Goldman, a Russian immigrant who taught herself English . . . (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: “The Sense of an Ending” review.
In Barnes’s elegant, playful, and remarkable novella, Tony Webster, divorced and retired, confronts the “imperfections of memory” as he recalls his youth in sixties England. He recalls his school days as being like “kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Trotsky”
8220;I hate Trotsky!” Winston Churchill told the Soviet Ambassador in 1938. “It’s a very good thing that Stalin has got even with him.” Trotsky, even before one of Stalin’s agents found him in Mexico and assassinated him with an ice axe, was . . ....
- 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: 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.)...
