- 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: “Private Life.”
Margaret Mayfield, a bookish Missourian coming of age around the turn of the twentieth century, is the center of this masterly novel. Pressed into marriage by her mother, Margaret follows her astronomer husband to the naval base on Mare Island, near San Francisco, where she slowly realizes that his intellectual . . ....
- 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: “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness,” by Alexandra Fuller
Fuller’s latest memoir asks what it means to come from somewhere, and to care about where you come from as much as her mother, Nicola, does. Nicola grew up in colonial Kenya, the descendant of a Scottish clan known for slaughtering its rivals in church. In 1967, she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Financial Lives of the Poets”
The protagonist of Walter’s first novel since the National Book Award finalist “The Zero” is a former financial journalist turned proprietor of poetfolio.com, an ill-conceived Web site featuring investment advice written in verse. Having gambled everything on this quixotic idea, he finds himself hobbled by . . ....
- 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.)...
- John Lahr: Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” Daniel Talbott’s “Yosemite.”
In 2008, nine years after Margaret Edson won the Pulitzer Prize for her rookie play, “Wit,” she addressed the graduating class of Smith College, her alma mater. She spoke about her lifelong passion for performing, which she called “a physical, breath-based eye-to-eye event.” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Intimates.”
This first novel traces the lives of two friends, Robbie and Maize, from high school to their first post-college year. Sassone focusses on discrete episodes in the lives of his characters: Maize’s deflowering by a college interviewer; Robbie’s trip to Rome to visit his father . . . (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: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” review.
In this engaging investigation of the “systematic errors in the thinking of normal people,” Kahneman gently interrogates the reader with questions from his career as a research psychologist, leading us along to his own rather dismaying conclusions about human rationality: we misunderstand the present and learn the wrong . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Hero.”
Korda opens his biography of T. E. Lawrence with two full chapters about the Arab Revolt of 1917, in which Lawrence, an archeologist turned officer, played a crucial, if disputed, part. Only then comes the proper biography—as if readers, unless first fed some highlights from the David Lean . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Hero.”
Korda opens his biography of T. E. Lawrence with two full chapters about the Arab Revolt of 1917, in which Lawrence, an archeologist turned officer, played a crucial, if disputed, part. Only then comes the proper biography—as if readers, unless first fed some highlights from the David Lean . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Man in the Moon” review.
This gorgeously strange picture book, the first in a projected series, traces the origins of the Man in the Moon, who, after losing his parents in a battle with the King of Nightmares, is raised by a retinue of giant glowworms and mice in tasselled sailor caps. Joyce’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Pearl Buck in China.”
Emphasizing the imagination’s power to “make bearable things too ugly to confront directly,” Spurling sensitively traces the biographical background of Buck’s writing. Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent nearly all of the first forty-two years of her life in China, and her childhood . . ....
- 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 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: 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: “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: 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: “A Great Unrecorded History.”
This affectionate, though misconceived, biography of E. M. Forster is less about his writing than about the nearly fifty years of silence that followed the success of “A Passage to India,” in 1924—taking too seriously the idea, put forth by one of Forster’s friends . . ....
- John Lahr: Terence Rattigan’s “Man and Boy” review.
For the nearly two decades between his first hit, “French Without Tears” (1936), and his 1954 play “Separate Tables,” Terence Rattigan was the West End’s most successful playwright: according to Geoffrey Wansell’s 1995 biography, two of his plays ran for more than . . . (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: 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: “Joan Mitchell”
8220;I’ve always painted out of omnipotence,” the renowned Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell wrote. Albers’s ambitious, capacious biography channels the notorious bravado of a woman it casts as an “eidetic synesthete,” who suffered from alcoholism, depression, and seasonal affective disorder. As we follow . . . (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: Alexander Masters’s “Simon” review.
This unusual biography profiles the author’s neighbor and landlord Simon Norton, a former math prodigy, who by middle age was unemployed and lived alone in a cavelike apartment littered with tens of thousands of out-of-date bus timetables. With wild hair and a variety of odd habits . . . (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: “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.)...
