Monday, April 16 2012
The Best Thing About ‘UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realties’ Is the Title
John Alexander reports that he has family members who’ve had experience with UFOs. He swears by this, asking the eternal question, “If you can’t trust your family, who can you trust?” And it's downhill from there.
Misplaced Redemption and Bittersweetness in Esi Edugyan’s ‘Half-Blood Blues’
This is not a work about the tragedy and horror of the darkest days of the Second World War, but rather, a tale of the sword that twisted in the backs of so many in the years leading up to it.
Thursday, April 12 2012
Guitar Wank for the Smart Set: Mark Dery’s ‘I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts’
Mark Dery’s central assumption is that beneath the surface of contemporary American culture, strange and unsettling narratives are playing themselves out with largely unrecognized consequences for our shared social and political life.
Imagine Being Contentedly Cashless: ‘The Man Who Quit Money”
“There was no poverty in the jungle until they introduced money,” Daniel Suelo says. “And all the sudden there’s poverty.”
Wednesday, April 11 2012
‘The Book of Madness and Cures’ Can Be a Bit Like Oliver Sacks, Transported to Renaissance Italy
"Lapsus, A Predicament Where a Woman Abruptly Forgets Her Place of Origin and Conceives an Intense Longing for the World at Large" and other such maladies spice this overarching travel narrative in unexpected ways, lending thematic resonance.
Innovation at Bell Labs: ‘The Idea Factory’
For generations of industry research executives, AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories were filled with youthful scientists and engineers assigned to go where their intellects took them, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way.
Tuesday, April 10 2012
The Search for Self: Ellen Ullman’s ‘By Blood’
Ellen Ullman is known by too few as author of the cult novel The Bug and Close to the Machine, her memoir of being one of the earliest female computer programmers in a then-nascent industry. Her third work, By Blood, leaves computers in favor of the soul.
‘The Escape Artists’ and ‘Confidence Men’
Perhaps, once historians get their turn, the true task for analysis will turn out to be not the roots of failure, but how, against heavy odds, an inexperienced, young president escaped Hoover’s fate.
Monday, April 9 2012
In from the Cold: ‘George F. Kennan: An American Life’
George F. Kennan, diplomat and intellectual, in many ways resembles a character in a John le Carré novel. John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War historian at Yale, places his life in perspective.
A Subversively Traditional Passover Retelling: ‘New American Haggadah’
The English, the Western, the larger world, rubs up against the Hebrew, the Semitic, the narrower place, the Egypt from where the slaves dare to flee. The text presents the conflict.
Friday, April 6 2012
Tell No One: A Novelist’s Brave Response to a Father from Hell: ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’
Edward St. Aubyn's Melrose novels narrate the journey of one boy from unspeakable horror to a productive, occasionally happy, adult life.
Murder, Mayhem, and Book Collecting: ‘The School of Night’
Early modern books and their collectors are the unlikely subjects of this smart, well-crafted thriller.
Thursday, April 5 2012
In Search of Rome’s Notorious Boy Emperor: Martijn Icks’ ‘The Crimes of Elagabalus’
Though his debaucheries became legendary, the reign of Elagabalus may have been less remarkable than once believed.
Rebuilding a Home and Sense of Self : Pulitzer Prize Winner Anthony Shadid’s ‘House of Stone’
The place Shadid was “usually headed to was no longer the one with which I had once been so enamored,” he writes. “The Middle East that had fascinated, preoccupied, and saddened me for decades was gone.”
Wednesday, April 4 2012
The Quantum Mind-Boggle: ‘The Quantum Universe’
Quantum mechanics is a knotty tangle of mathematical, practical, and philosophical threads, itching to be unravelled.
Much Like Ree Drummond’s Recipes, ‘The Pioneer Woman’ is Simple, Yummy Fun
If you are one of the thousands (or to be truthful millions) who follow her blog or make her recipes (or just enjoy looking at…
Tuesday, April 3 2012
Eternal Life Is the Destination, the Journey is Merely Prologue: ‘Moira Crone’s ‘The Not Yet’
Malcolm de Lazarus is on a journey to live forever in Moira Crone's science fiction New Orleans, where money can buy a centuries-long life.
A Master of Prose, a Master of Challenge: ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books’
Intellectual culture: Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays is powerfully thought-provoking.
Monday, April 2 2012
A Mosaic of WWI: ‘The Beauty and the Sorrow’
This massive book on WWI finds the personal side. It's not a study of what the war was, but of what it was like, and it does it brilliantly.
Hits and Misses on Marty Robbins’ Biography, ‘Twentieth Century Drifter’
Twentieth Century Drifter leaves the door open for more critical appraisals of Marty Robbins and his work.
