Books Articles: February 2008

A strict focus on the personal makes Hari's account of the hell that Darfur has become something more than just an exercise in despair.

Classics professor Mary Beard marshals evidence like a good forensic specialist out to solve a crime.

Although mediums change, it is ultimately the message that remains important.

This isn’t the stuff of best sellers, but it is great fun, especially for record-happy types like myself.

There's lots of rain, fog, and shadowy mists, as if a sunny day might wreck the storyline -- and then there's the "hand problem".

Percy's stories are brave and fresh and -- because they reflect a nearly institutional violence all too easily identified as realistic -- scary.

An engaging look at the final years of the city's reign as the left-wing capital of America.

McLynn has a keen eye not only for history, but for storytelling and the importance of artfulness in writing. This is everything a historical biography should be.

A new biography of Wallace Stegner lauds his realistic writing and his career teaching it.

The good stories are terrific reads and the not-so-good stories are never dull.

Revisionist study of James Baldwin's life fails to provide useful context.

A work of skill, even daring in its ability to both sympathize with and indict those affected by events that have such symbolic weight.

The colorful, compelling story of a deadly medical faker and the Chicago doctor who helped stop him.

The women all feel stuck in comfortable lives, but their alarming lack of agency is what keeps them there and derails the novel.

Too much of The Reserve feels like it was written following too many late nights spent watching Turner Classic Movies marathons.

Rather than trying to explain the album as a whole, Smay roots through the details to find dubious truths about the man, not the artist.

These books may not change your mind, but they pay you the supreme compliment of assuming that you have a mind, and that it will respond to an accumulation of evidence and a fair and forceful presentation.

The idea of education as liberation is a poor one; education might allow a critical perspective on cultural practices, but asserting that ironic frame helps an individual grieve, or mourn, or live a richer and fuller life, is a mistake.

A dedicated Fleshtones record consumer myself, I’ve grown accustomed to reading about the guys only in the form of generic, hair-toussling capsule reviews – 'til now.

A veritable talking book of everything you wanted to know about the Replacements but were afraid to ask: great tales and a wealth of visual treats.

You may desire 30 views on Clinton, but what you get instead are 30 accomplished writers, most from the East Coast, who are primarily obsessed with Clinton's appearance.

This book's very existence is a defiant blow against governments, regardless of ideology or political affiliation, who seek to manipulate the past for self-serving motives.

Convinced as I was by Marcus' readings, I couldn't help noticing that the primary subjects of all four chapters were works produced by white men: Philip Roth, David Lynch, Bill Pullmanm and David Thomas.

Billed as “a memoir of food and family”, the book is truly about the suffocating English class system, where people are judged by the contents of their cupboards.

With echoes of the Clinton marriage, Miller's latest explores changing lives, emotional truths.

This book serves as a shotgun blast, peppering the uninitiated with information as broadly and deeply as possible, and as a crash course in the genre.

Did you know there was science in poetry?

This amusing book is an interesting commentary on our own overly complicated civilizational arrangements.

Having come of an age in a scene known best remembered for howling guitars played in basement shows, Graham's work pays testament to those bands.

O'Donnell assesses the process whereby individual artists become celebrities, and what it's like when they and their audiences start to lose their sense of perspective in the midst of such intense, superficial media scrutiny.

Hummers make for such hulking, imposing targets as physical stand-ins for all-American arrogance and mindless anti-environmentalism including here, in a series of essays about these beasts.

This succeeds not as a narrative tour de force, but in the way it uses a simple story to illuminate the complexity and paradoxes of present-day Zimbabwe.

Believing in something: An atheist makes a self-indulgent case for embracing the spiritual life.

When Reisler focuses on the game itself, his knack for storytelling takes over, and he convincingly recreates the sights and sounds of October 13, 1960.

Holes and all, it's a hard book to put down, especially with wild tales of Scientology spilling forth page after page.

Sectarian strife, an historical constant, and its images of suicide bombings, occupation, and crumbling civil societies are sadly ubiquitous and have fueled the passions of the “New Atheism”. This will not soon abate.

I was so annoyed with Hector’s inability to make a single mature decision that I was glad when he became a monster and the blood started splattering.

Throughout Wax Poetics there is the sense that hip-hop was built on secret, sacred knowledge.

British historian explores the development of nuclear weaponry and its impact on society in Doomsday Men.

Alas, this entire book amounts to a collection of blurbs on various artists that might easily have been gleaned from program notes, dust jackets, or the brief commentary one reads on museum walls next to paintings.

This book urges us to be more aware of the way we consume aesthetic products, to question their true functions