- Books: “Rat.”
Rat is a fifteen-year-old girl, “all elbows and moods,” who enjoys a sunburned and barefoot life in the South of France with her eccentric mother and adopted brother. Trouble at home leads to a familiar but finely constructed narrative, as the siblings set out for London . . ....
- Books: Eric R. Kandel’s “The Age of Insight” review.
An exploration of the role of the unconscious and of neuroscience in art, this book is also a love letter to fin-de-siècle Vienna, the city that Kandel’s family fled, escaping the Nazis, when he was nine. Now a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Kandel uses . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Eric R. Kandel’s “The Age of Insight” review.
An exploration of the role of the unconscious and of neuroscience in art, this book is also a love letter to fin-de-siècle Vienna, the city that Kandel’s family fled, escaping the Nazis, when he was nine. Now a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Kandel uses . . . (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: Natalie Dykstra’s “Clover Adams” review.
Born in 1843 to a wealthy, intellectual Boston family, Marian (Clover) Hooper moved in the most illustrious circles of nineteenth-century America. Henry James called her “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats”; Henry Adams married her. In Washington, she became a celebrated hostess, rode horses, and, at the age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “In the Land of Believers”
When Welch, a Berkeley native who grew up “thinking I was born an atheist the way some people are born Italian,” moved to Virginia for graduate school, she was forced to confront her inherent fear of Evangelicals. The best way to conquer her anxiety, she decided, was to . . ....
- Philip Gourevitch: Patrick Flanery’s “Absolution” review.
In South Africa in the nineteen-eighties, the military wing of the African National Congress was on the attack. The anti-apartheid guerrillas rarely let a week go without action—dynamite at a fuel depot, a car bomb outside Air Force headquarters in a city center. It was a . . . (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.)...
- Ben Greenman: Paul Simon’s “So Beautiful or So What.”
paragraph class="noindent">Paul Simon spent the eighties venturing eventfully into African and South American music, but on his twelfth album, “So Beautiful or So What” (Concord), his excursions are more temporal. The lead single, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” partly about a soldier in Iraq . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” and apartheid in South Africa.
The two men look as though they’d crawled out from under a rock into a landscape of broken glass and shit. Their little shack, in the South African town of Port Elizabeth, is less a home than a grim way station, littered with old rags, pots, pans, and . . . (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.)...
- Sasha Frere-Jones: South Africa’s Die Antwoord.
If authenticity is a vampire threatening to suck the fun out of pop music, the South African band Die Antwoord (“The Answer,” in Afrikaans) is a fistful of garlic. Go to the band’s well-designed Web site and you will find a goofy, vibrant ball of . . ....
- 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.)...
- Hilton Als: Penny Arcade’s “Bad Reputation.”
8220;Bad Reputation” is the self-consciously transgressive title of the performance artist and political activist Penny Arcade’s book of interviews, essays, and documentation of her works, but since when was Penny Arcade shy about rubbing our faces in her outlaw status? Born Susana Ventura in 1950 . . ....
- Books: Nadine Gordimer’s “No Time Like the Present” review.
The lives of a mixed-race couple, Steve and Jabu, trace the frustrations of post-apartheid South Africa in this political novel. As former heroes are tarnished and corruption scandals become routine, the couple move from city to suburb, and careers and children edge them into “the normal life . . . (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: “The Magnetic North.”
Fifteen years after braving Antarctica for the book “Terra Incognita,” Wheeler travelled around the Arctic Circle: Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway. “Pollution, plunder, the gleeful killings of the Norse sagas—the Arctic is not a white Garden of Eden,” she writes. Visiting Russian Gulags and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Gustav Mahler,” by Jens Malte Fischer
In this mammoth biography, Fischer recounts how the conductor and beloved composer—born in Bohemia in 1860, to a family of “brandy distillers and soap boilers”—worked his way up to the dizzying heights of the Vienna Court Opera. As its director, he revolutionized production methods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “Nod House” by Nathaniel Mackey, review.
In oblique, elliptical fashion, these poems follow the dispersal of African peoples by half a millennium of catastrophes, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina. Mackey’s narrative concerns the citizens of a dim necropolis called Quag. The wanderings of his characters, who have names like St. Sufferhead, Anuncia, and Huff . . . (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.)...
- Books: “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” review.
8220;Literary criticism is an indispensable stethoscope in the biographer’s bag,” Leibowitz writes, in this sweeping biography of William Carlos Williams, a titan of modernist poetry who also treated patients as a family physician in northern New Jersey. Leibowitz combs the poems for clues to Williams’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Lost Memory of Skin” review.
Banks’s novel gets off to a slow start, introducing the Kid, a young sex offender—his tiny universe prescribed by an ankle bracelet—living with an enormous pet iguana in a shantytown of social outcasts under a causeway in South Florida. After the settlement is raided . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Alice Kaplan’s “Dreaming in French” review.
What do a Catholic débutante, a Jewish intellectual, and an African-American revolutionary have in common? Paris, Alice Kaplan tells us, which molded Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis as much as the three icons subsequently molded the cultural landscape of contemporary America. As young women full . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Driving Home.”
In 1990, Raban left London “on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons.” He met someone, he tells us, and made for Seattle, the “far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career.” The essays collected here describe, among other things, his attempts to get . . . (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.)...
