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Christopher Hitchens
Love him or hate him (and to know his work typically meant doing both), Christopher Hitchens was among the last of a dying breed: the educated generalist. Fiercely intelligent, he had a driving interest in literary criticism but never succumbed to the faddish temptation to couch his reading in quasi-scientific jargon. Well read, he never felt the postmodern injunction to explode the traditional canon or claim any specialized area of expertise. Hitchens provided commentary in the old school, driven by the authority of his own learned voice and his unwillingness to compromise when he felt, on any given subject, that the rest of us had gotten it all wrong. Hitchens captivated the right and disaffected the left by supporting the 2003 Iraq War, while doing the exact opposite with his dogged embrace of atheism and hostility toward the Judeo-Christian tradition. Though his endorsement of the Iraq invasion rankled me, he never exploited the fear of the ignorant or questioned the patriotism of the skeptical to justify it. If Hitch didn’t trouble much with civility, his commitment to sincerity, his own as well as others, was unerring. This is why Arguably, his final collection of essays, is so invaluable. It may be quite a while before we witness his like again. 
Michael Ward
Babysitter: An American History
Miriam Forman-Brunell
Forman-Brunell explores the economic and demographic realities of babysitting… and how the image of the babysitter became a source or fear and fantasy in middle class life. She finds that “child tending” had its beginnings in the ‘20s, triggered in part by the increased American emphasis on leisure time and the need for married couples to have a night on the town, unencumbered by the kids. The author argues that this trend coincided with the emergence of the “teenage girl” as a definable demographic. Adolescent girls soon became the focus of all manner of angst about the changing nature of family, sexuality and the household. Along these lines, sh unearths one of the more bizarre moral panics in American history. During the Second World War many middle class moralists claimed that teenage girls had become “patriotutes”, hanging around military bases with their newly acquired make-up and “sassy” attitudes in hopes of snaring a serviceman. In general, the author is at her best showing how anxiety about young women’s growing autonomy became conflated with worries about the intrusive and possibly dangerous young adolescent watching the children. By the ‘60s, urban legends of babysitters in danger offered ways for a nervous society to attempt to exhort “good behavior” out of the increasingly independent teenage girl. W. Scott Poole
The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait
Daniel Mark Epstein
This paints an impressionistic biography of Dylan that draws its inspiration from the numerous other impressionistic images of Dylan in American popular culture. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back plays a significant role here, as does Dylan’s own Chronicles. Epstein does something a bit different than most, combining the creation of a solid biographical exploration of the human being bundled up with the cultural myth. His previous work as a historian of figures as diverse as Nat King Cole and Abraham Lincoln serves him well.This book is in every way aptly titled, as it often works as a meta-narrative about Dylan, truly a ballad of Bob Dylan but also a ballad about the many ballads composed about him before. In this biography, Dylan gets the poet he deserves. W. Scott Poole
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
On 26 August 2005, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, daughter of writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, died at age 39. Her father had died less than two years earlier, on 30 December 2003.Blue Nights is Didion’s attempt to grasp the enormity of her loss. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she refers to her writing’s “increasingly impenetrable polish”. That polish is stripped now. So is any pretense of hope. Didion is flatly despairing, fearful, blunt about her own aging and health problems, which have left her frail. Recent photographs depict the familiar thinness, now reduced to translucency. Didion worries she was an insufficient parent, one who said shush I’m working too often. She writes of Quintana’s fragile mental health, medications and too much drinking. She admits her failure to recognize Quintana’s anxiety over abandonment, no matter how much her adoptive parents loved her. Didion is now 77. Her New York apartment is stuffed with lifetimes of mementoes she no longer needs. She repeatedly mentions “inadequately appreciating the moment”. As if doing so would have changed the outcome. Diane Leach
Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown
David Yaffe
This is my kind of Dylan book: fun, funny, learned as hell as well as plain smart, and subjective in the best possible sense. Yaffe clearly takes his Dylans to heart, and I say his Dylans because there’s more than one and everyone has their own. Dylan Studies is a Never Ending Tour, to be cute about it, the critical gift that keeps on giving. Yaffe mentions the “hunger there [is] from the genre of writing Dylan arguably inspired as much as anyone—even the Beatles”, and the most recent Dylan releases alone attest to that hunger. They could fill a few shelves, or gigs or whatever, so I won’t list them here, but this genre includes and/or combines new- or old-fangled biography, lit. crit. academicism, cultural and philosophical discourse, and stylish critical prose. “This book is for people who want to revisit Dylan’s past in the present tense, for mongrel dogs who teach, writers and critics who prophesize with their pen, mothers and fathers throughout the land, and everyone who cares or is just curious.” I’m in there, somewhere. For his part, Yaffe sees Dylan as “a text, yet he is still a moving target…”, and Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown follows suit. This is Dylan as shifting text, not just layered like pages, back or front, or over-laid like a palimpsest, but cross-wise, and motile as a termite. Guy Crucianelli
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
Robert K. Massie
The last lines of Massie’s book refer to the life of Catherine the Great, but these lines could just as easily apply to the biography itself. Massie ends the approximately 570-page story by stating: “It was a long and remarkable journey that no one, not even she, could have imagined when, at fourteen, she set off for Russia across the snow.” That’s part of the magic of this biography. Most readers probably know that Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst is going to become Catherine the Great or, as Massie notes, her preferred title: Catherine the second. Readers recognize that the child they meet in the opening section of the book is going to, at some point in time, rule Russia, become a major patron of the arts, correspond with Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Marie Antoinette and John Paul Jones, and just generally become one of the most powerful women in the world. The magic also comes from Massie’s ability to transport his audience to another time and place. His description of Catherine having a tooth pulled was enough to make me set down the book and wish the image away. Massie’s description of a winter scene will most likely stay with readers for another (more pleasant) reason… but you’ll have to read it, to find out. Catherine Ramsdell
Charles Dickens: A Life
Jane Smiley
Smiley, whose book A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992, puts her own spin on Charles Dickens’s life. Analyzing his world and works perhaps only as a fellow author could, Smiley blends literary criticism with biographical information. Her aim: “to evoke Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporary audience, to friends and relatives, to intimate acquaintances, to himself, filling in the background only as he became willing to address it in his work”. And Smiley does it all in beautiful prose. Taking the untraditional route of not recording Dickens’s life in chronological order, Smiley relates “No author’s life is a strand of pearls, with books or plays or poems strung in a neat sequence upon a smooth string of personal events, but Dickens’s life is even less sequential than most”.This is a beautifully written, wonderfully surprising look at the thoroughly modern Charles Dickens. Catherine Ramsdell
Civilization: The West and the Rest
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson gets a lot of flack, some of it actually deserved. His combination tome-TV documentaries like The Ascent of Money and War of the World are generally well received but his pugnacious nature, quickly forgotten neo-con enthusiasms, and generally pro-Western cheerleading have earned him brickbats aplenty from established intellectuals. They will probably find plenty to despise in this quick spin through the reasons why Western civilization triumphed over the rest of the world for so many centuries. He boils it down to six points: competition, science, the rule of law (property rights), consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. Ferguson is certainly given to TV-friendly glibness (calling these six traits the “killer apps” of Western civilization is unfortunate), but the insights here are genuine, and hardly triumphalist. Eschewing the chest-thumping of ethnocentric neo-Spengler types like Pat Buchanan—who argue for the primacy of not “The West” as Ferguson would define it, but a narrow view of white Christian supremacy—Civilization is closer in spirit to Jared Diamond’s gloomier Collapse. The West might have been on top for centuries, but Ferguson argues that period is coming to a close, and it’s time to prepare for what’s coming next. In a time when nobody seems interested in writing clear, witty, wide-ranging, thoughtful middlebrow history, Ferguson is a rarely acknowledged treasure. Chris Barsanti
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
Jonathan Lethem
Lethem invites us to the ecstasy of intertextuality, to the intertwining of thousands of words with our selves.While he avoids moralism, some readers will be surprised to learn he is a serious moralist and writes seriously about race, economic equality and the “War on Terror”. He would hate the phrase “serious moralist” and respond to being denominated as such with a fairly complex joke at my expense. This does nothing to quench the fire that comes out of his essay on Norman Mailer and why American culture decided to turn him into a joke and stop listening. Or how his discussion of subway graffiti gives voice both to marginalized art and to marginalized people. Or how his writings in the very immediate aftermath of 9/11 manage to demand that, as we crawled into our fetal balls of terror or up onto our soapbox of equal terror, we find some way, for God’s sake, to be human and to think. There is much to love here and very little to disparage. There are times when the author drags us a bit far down into his own rabbit holes, both of language and of his own thought experiments. I say stay with him and you will find a new world opened up for you.This guy is a great writer—and a great reader. W. Scott Poole
