Books Articles: January 2008

Hanging people is a messy business, and most of those in the trade, however eager they may have been to take the job at first, before long would be traumatized by the scenes they were forced to witness and take part in.

With any luck, this deeply affecting posthumous memoir, centered on the awful process of watching his elderly mother die, will expose de Hartog to at least a few more American readers.

Those in the satire business have been fed a steady and highly nutritious diet of Bush's stubbornness, lack of curiosity, cockiness, managerial incompetence, blatant corruption, and verbal ineptitude.

The cynic in me desperately wants to make fun of this book. Can someone throw out the word “utopia” again?

To Siegel, the Internet is a font of convenience but also a perturbing wasteland of mindless babble, where the simple-minded wile away their days.

Offers a fascinating glimpse of an odd brain doing its work, as well as an enjoyable sweep through America's pop culture past.

There is sheer virtuosity and beauty in Pynchon's prose, its poetry and jazz rhythms, which he uses to build up a sense of artistic wonderment and then discharges with that little laconic snap of emotion at the end.

Reading Suspects made me want to go back and watch the movies it celebrates.

Stack this book next to Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and McCloud's Understanding Comics -- or rather, don't stack it at all, but keep it right next to your desk where you can find it at a moment's notice.

Because this book is organized geographically, it can only be used if Russia is thought of as a literary geography.

An entertaining and informative book, but rather like leafing through a fashion magazine: visually stimulating, but intellectually unsatisfying.

This densely plotted novel explores love, the meaning of family, and man's search for the divine.

What matters isn’t whether you or I agree with Jones, of course, but whether his writing offers new insights into the films and directors at hand.

Sewall was a devout and prosperous Puritan whose diligently kept and richly detailed diary gives us an unrivaled view of life in colonial New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

This is a welcome novel that tries to humanize the story of Bangladesh's birth, a country born not of one, but two, civil wars in the last 60 years.

Brooks’ use of this damaged child is unrealistic, ultimately, and adds nothing to the text, unless you needed a reminder that war is bad for children and other living things.

Between the Civil War and World War I, an old world began to die.

Historian A.J. Langguth chronicles this exciting and uncertain period in a riveting account of the construction of American society.

Nureyev defied the barrier that separated classical dance from modern and popular forms of the art, building bridges that are now familiar pathways.

Thompson had a talent for writing and self-destruction, both equally strong.

This collection cleanly articulates the value of owning a book more for history’s sake than for enjoyment.

Excellently written, with a thesis rich enough to make you think, and enough supporting factoid snippets to keep you armed for dinner parties or pub quizzes.

If Nicholls can only describe the shadow of the event, the echo of the song, then it is to his credit that he succeeds. The book places these experimental pieces in a context outside of the assumed joke or prank.

Coetzee's odd 'new work of fiction' is no prize.

What is surprising is that so little of 20th-century art criticism has focused on humor in art.

Irish Noir treads into malefic waters with Ken Bruen's American Skin.

Holt discusses the all-importance of 'genre' in music studies, yet argues that no one knows what 'genre' really means.

Silverstein’s travel pieces, commissioned by Playboy Magazine, are like some of the fringe countries and cultures that he explored: not essential, but worth a visit.

Fans of Chabon will want to know that questions of identity here are sexual as well as religious and that these matters are artfully twined into the action.

This debut novel by English professor Tipton is a well-researched view of life in the Loire Valley during the Revolution.

Though the novel and film versions of McCarthy's story share the same long, desolate stretch of road, they provide differing ways of encountering and interpreting the signs along the way.

"When the forces of order are revealed to be a malign conspiracy," Hine suggests, "it's a good time for a party." In the 1970s, America fragmented without falling apart.

Unlike many guides which limit themselves to DVD or video releases, the writers say "our film selections have not been dictated by availability".

In sports there is no shortage of flamboyant champions who, by virtue of their triumphs on the field, the court, or in the ring, rise to the mantle of celebrity.

Twelve Greek gods are transplanted into a rundown north London existence, lamenting the decline of their influence in the human sphere even as they misuse their powers for trivial purposes. Hilarity ensues.

Ultimately, the "nanny state" is about control, as shown in David Harsanyi's new book, which compiles numerous examples of what he terms the "tyranny of the busybody."

Economical and considered out of necessity, this is so meticulously crafted that there isn’t a wasted passage or a superfluous phrase.

Story of a Sound isn't just the story of a sound. It's a piece of jazz criticism that passionately questions and enhances the role of jazz criticism.

Coulter has rightly calculated that a healthy dollop of GOP-championing and Dem-bashing can bait true believers into a bookstore.

Dialogic exploration of belief in heaven or its alternative, or a tepid exploration of the human tendency for connection and closure?

On censorship he says: "It tended to be assumed in European films that human beings were born with sexual organs and at a certain point in their lives began to use them, not always in socially approved ways."

Two polar, persuasive stands on reproductive genetics.

It must surely be daunting for any young film scholar with an interest in trash to come face to face with the volume of academic work that’s been done on once-disreputable movies.

Cultural critic and scholar George Steiner meditates on seven books he planned to write, but never did.

The title of Craig A. Williams' memoir just about sums it all up. It's worth reading anyway.

Writer of 'male confessionals' turns his talent to a teen.