Review This Online

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Jeffrey Rosen on Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis: "In the 21st century, the heroic First Amendment tradition may seem like a noble vision from a distant era, in which heroes and villains were easier to identify. But that doesn’t diminish the inspiring achievements of First Amendment heroism. Conservative as well as liberal judges now agree that even speech we hate must be protected, and that is one of the glories of the American constitutional tradition. Anthony Lewis is right to celebrate it."
• Sylvia Brownrigg on Darkmans by Nicola Barker: "But to suggest that this dazzling, complex novel has anything quite as conventional as a plot would be misleading. There are plenty of mysteries — Who hung a bell on Beede’s cat? How did Beede come to be almost £40,000 in debt? Why was Kane’s car dented by a dead bird, frozen solid? — but Barker enjoys the journey of her storytelling too much to worry about when she’ll arrive at her destination. So great are her humor, wit and erudition that she’s able to charm us into sharing her tolerance of uncertainty and confusion."
• Charles Taylor on Sway by Zachary Lazar: "Lazar has taken territory, the 60s, where the individual blades of grass have long been trampled into the mud by legions of literary, sociological and critical boots, and found something new. What he evokes is unlikely to please either those who condemn the decade as a body blow to decency and authority, or those who celebrate it as a trippy carnival of raised consciousness and experimentation. Lazar’s is a book that has no time for preconceived ideas, that tells the reader exactly the things likely to disturb any cozy notions. He’s a bad-news bear and thus the most valuable kind of cultural commentator."
• Judith Warner on The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller: "I somehow feel that if I were a right-on woman, I would identify deeply with Miller’s hurting, bleeding, lactating heroines and greet her sensuous descriptions of fruit and soft rain with a great sigh of satisfaction. But I’m not and I don’t. For me, the world of her lushly invoked senses seems intensely claustrophobic, as precious and cloying as a purple-painted, patchouli-scented room."

Washington Post:

• Raymond Arsenault on Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore: "Gilmore makes a strong case that Cold War insecurities have promoted the false impression 'that middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation.' ... By ignoring the movement's radical origins in the ideologically charged political and economic struggles of the early 20th century, she insists, 'we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle class, and male roots.' Misled by conservative politicians and the mainstream media, we have accepted a truncated and distorted version of civil rights history."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jesse Cohen on Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin: "Those head bones were to evolve in all sorts of interesting ways. Some of the jawbones of fish and reptiles became, in humans, the bones within our ears that allow us to process sound across a range of frequencies. This repurposing has its downside, however. Nerves that extend from facial muscles to our brain take complicated paths -- paths that reflect primitive skeletal placement. ...  'We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price,' Shubin writes. We choke, succumb to hiccups, develop hemorrhoids and hernias and fall prey to heart disease all because our bodies are spruced-up versions of primitive models, and the kludges and patches that have developed over millions of years of evolution, like all kludges and patches, inevitably break down."

Globe & Mail:

• Gale Zoe Garnett on The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley: "Reading the letters of the Mitford sisters is like living inside a vibrantly written, erudite and witty Masterpiece Theater series about six extraordinary (or, to use a Mitfordian word, extraorder) Englishwomen.... If all their epistolary exchanges had been included, we would have had more than four million words. And I would have spent much of the rest of my life reading them, because, with this enormous book, I have entered Mitfordland and connected to its people."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Jonathan Keates on A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (not yet available in the US): "Throughout Benjamin Markovits’s consummately successful realization of the most controversial protagonist in the Byronic drama, apart from its hero, he never loosens his control of stylistic resources or relaxes his often chilling scrutiny of the motives and aspirations governing the Regency caste to which both Byrons belonged. A Quiet Adjustment achieves authenticity through the refinement of its emotional discourse rather than set-dressing period details. Such artistry allows us to read it as both a resonantly modern novel and as a fiction whose truth has been stifled for almost 200 years."

The New Yorker:

• Adam Gopnik on This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust: "To deal with these horrors, a new set of social rituals, designed not so much to 'blind' survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble, came into being. The beauty and originality of Faust’s book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover ("The Islam Issue"): Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the Enlightenment by Lee Harris: "To argue, as Harris seems to do, that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism and create phalanxes of alpha males are doomed — and will doom others — to an existence governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West’s own past.... Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it."
• Eric Ormsby on God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis: "Lewis’s own examples show that civic harmony in Umayyad Spain was more the result of shrewd statecraft and common sense than of some vague and anachronistic ideal of 'tolerance'.... Though well aware of the overly rosy picture often painted of Muslim Spain, Lewis sometimes accepts it himself. Nowadays, we know all too well that the enforced wearing of badges to signify religious affiliation is hardly a sign of tolerance. That was true in Muslim Spain too."
• William Dalrymple on The Adventures of Amir Hamza: "'The Adventures of Amir Hamza' is the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' of medieval Persia, a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga.... At this perilous moment in history, the Hamza epic, with its mixed Hindu and Muslim idiom, its tales of love and seduction, its anti-clericalism (mullahs are a running joke throughout the book), its stories of powerful and resourceful women, and its mocking of male misogyny, is a reminder of an Islamic world the West seems to have forgotten: one that is imaginative and heterodox — and as far as can be from the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that the Saudis have succeeded in spreading throughout much of the modern Middle East."
• Maslin on In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan: "In this lively, invaluable book ... he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion."

Washington Post:

• Jonathan Yardley on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and literature. Brooks tells a believable and engaging story about sympathetic but imperfect characters -- 'popular' fiction demands all of that -- but she also does the business of literature, exploring serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose. She appears to be finding readers and admirers in growing numbers, and People of the Book no doubt will increase those numbers."
• Ron Charles on How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet: "How the Dead Dream surprises in the other direction, largely avoiding the hectoring, lecturing tone of those big-name, environmentally self-conscious novels. For one thing, Millet doesn't spend a lot of space on the old news that the ecosystem is slipping into a silent spring. Instead, How the Dead Dream focuses on the quiet existential crisis that arises from living in a dying world."

Los Angeles Times:

• Thomas Lynch on Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir by David Rieff: "Some see death as a transition while others see it as extinction. [Susan] Sontag studied in this latter school and tutored her only son in its grim lessons. What is clear from his book ... is that while she battled cancer, she waged war on mortality. That we get sick was acceptable to her. That we die was not. Pain, suffering, the awful losses her disease exacted, were all endurable so long as her consciousness remained animate."

Globe & Mail:

• Peter Behrens on Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford: "Millions of stories that made no sense at all, even in the context of a world deranged by war, were happening every hour of every day in 1945. Stafford has found his way to some them by sifting the memoirs, journals, letters and archives of a handful of individuals - U.S., British and Canadian infantrymen, commandos, intelligence officers, BBC reporters, a UN Refugee Relief administrator, a concentration-camp survivor - who were on the ground.... There are no groundbreaking revelations. The larger story of the war's end in Western Europe has been told before, but Stafford's witnesses are up close and personal, and their stories have freshness and pungency."

The Guardian:

• Michel Faber on Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: "On December 31 2007, Peter Pan passed into public domain, freeing Lost Girls to be sold in UK bookstores.... Moore's greatest strength, apart from the prodigious fertility of his imagination, is structure. A work of pornography that is 16 years in the making ought to be plotlessly incoherent, fitfully improvised and full of premature climaxes. Lost Girls is a sophisticated, cunningly conceived narrative that builds with Tantric sureness towards its finale."

The New Yorker:

• No full-length review, so here's a bit of a Briefly Noted review of Staring Back by Chris Marker: "The images are both global and intimate, capturing political demonstrations at home and abroad, along with the faces of friends and strangers encountered in the course of making movies in Paris, Havana, Guinea Bissau, and Tokyo. Accompanied by text in Marker’s inimitable voice, the collection stands as further testimony to his commitment to record not just social struggle but the poetry behind it."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "What changes for Coetzee’s readers between 'Disgrace' and 'Diary of a Bad Year' is our opinion of the author. In this most recent 'novel,' we are deliberately manipulated by a form that is coy as well as playful, and it’s hard not to conclude Coetzee is more invested in his relationship with his readers than in his characters’ credibility and interactions with one another.... After all, how riveting can fictional entanglements be when compared with the more immediate and real relationship between a writer and his audience."
• Lee Siegel on Modernism by Peter Gay: "If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including 'The Enlightenment,' 'Weimar Culture,' 'Freud' and the towering multi-volume study 'The Bourgeois Experience.' Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment."
• Tom Shone on The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman: "The author of four novels, Freeman is, you realize, a little more in love with mysteriousness than with mere mysteries, or their resolutions, and while the same could be said for Chandler, who never could keep track of who did what to whom in 'The Big Sleep,' this makes for a woozy kind of book, in which the blurry latitude afforded by long-distance 'obsession' consistently cuts against the more painstaking task of bringing the marriage into any kind of focus."
• Mark Costello on An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg: "Ruttenberg, the narrator, is a bit like the text, a sutured and negotiated personality. He can view his spying in heroic terms, hoping 'to protect and promote freedom.' But he is, at heart, a company man.... He is a team player for the evil C.I.A., that boogeyman of history. Yet the boogeyman seems to have the office culture of a savings bank in Cleveland. Among its other satisfactions, this book is surely the best portrait of the working C.I.A. we have had in many years."

Washington Post:

• Book World is on a New Year's holiday.

Los Angeles Times:

• Emily Barton on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "Geraldine Brooks has ... half-found and half-invented a swashbuckling book and, despite occasional quirks, woven a tale that's haunting and satisfying. Her Sarajevo Haggadah embodies both the story of the survival of the Jews against terrible odds and the story of all thinking people's relationship to the past."
• Sarah Weinman on Salt River by James Sallis: "When Sallis' characters do make choices ... he doesn't always give the reader a sense of closure. Rather, he invites chaos back in, as when a major character is never seen again, his or her fate left outside the scope of the book.... Conventional crime fiction craves resolution, but by looking inside order's hairline fractures for any fleeting sense of chaos, the author creates a texture that is both comforting and quietly disturbing."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Gatenby on The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller: "Throughout his book, and especially in the last chapter, Heller questions the morality of the tactics used by Watson, and even, albeit politely, questions his sanity. In other words, while no fan of whaling, Heller remains objective about his subject, and it is that relative aloofness that gives this account its authority. I have hundreds of whale books in my library, but this title easily earns a place among the top 10."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Joyce Carol Oates on Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis: "It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking, with a novelist’s skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject; yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts etc, that the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on Kahlil Gibran: The Collected Works: "Gibran was familiar with Buddhist and Muslim holy books, and above all with the Bible.... In 'The Prophet' he Osterized all these into a warm, smooth, interconfessional soup that was perfect for twentieth-century readers, many of whom longed for the comforts of religion but did not wish to pledge allegiance to any church, let alone to any deity who might have left a record of how he wanted them to behave. It is no surprise that when those two trends—anti-authoritarianism and a nostalgia for sanctity—came together and produced the sixties, 'The Prophet' ’s sales climaxed."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: David Leavitt on Henry James: The Mature Master by Sheldon Novick: "Like its predecessor, 'Henry James: The Mature Master' strives to supplant the common view of James as 'a passive, fearful man, a detached observer of the life around him' with one of the writer as a gregarious, sometimes heroic, often troubled citizen of the world. Far from a sniffy celibate living comfortably on independent means or a 'little boy with his nose pressed against the glass of a shop window,' Novick’s James was an authentic cosmopolite who led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction."
• Matt Weiland on Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place by Will Self and Ralph Steadman: "As with Self’s novels, the ideas behind his long walks can be more engaging than the walks themselves. This may be because on the page Self is a sprinter, not a distance man; certainly he is at his most perceptive and convincing when writing short and focused little pieces. Which is to say: Self is a natural and excellent columnist. So skip the introduction and proceed directly to the short pieces, all of which originally appeared as the Psychogeography column in the London newspaper The Independent."
• William Grimes on Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson: "The book is a savagely funny act of revenge for years spent servicing the travel fantasies of gullible readers.... A cloud of guilt envelops Mr. Thompson as he writes, conscious that he and his travel-porn colleagues have strip mined the earth of its most precious resource: pleasant, undiscovered destinations. 'We venerate what we destroy,' he writes. 'But first we destroy.'"
• Kakutani on Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg: "the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book that captures the chaos and confusions of her youth, the daughter of an unpredictable pill-and-coke addicted mother and a brilliant, self-absorbed father, neither of whom had the faintest idea of how to be a parent."

Washington Post:

• Jason Roberts on Stanley by Tim Jeal: "Jeal's biography is an unalloyed triumph, not only because it is painstakingly researched and eminently readable, but because it never loses sight of the abandoned child in the man, driving him forward, 'able to frighten, able to suffer, but also able to command love and obedience.' Such a personality, Jeal notes, is 'an extinct species, and all the more remarkable for that.'"
• Jonah Lehrer on The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker: "The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can 'transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations.' It's a nice try at a happy ending, but I don't buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can't even comprehend."

Los Angeles Times:

• Matthew Sharpe on It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature by Diane Williams: "What, then, is good about depicting egregious feelings and behavior in language that is resolutely strange? Couldn't one, a reader might ask, be coaxed from one's habits of perception by stories written in more quotidian language and depicting more kindness and politeness? Perhaps, but the extremity that Williams depicts and the extremity of the depiction evoke something akin to the pity and fear that the great writers of antiquity considered central to literature. Her stories, by removing you from ordinary literary experience, place you more deeply in ordinary life. 'Isn't ordinary life strange?' they ask, and in so asking, they revivify and console."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Buium on Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff: "Ratliff ... could easily have written something persnickety and parochial; music writers too often adore the equivalent of inside baseball. Instead, he's turned a real jazz book into an immediate declaration of relevance. Coltrane is about artistic influence and American culture, and Ratliff uses perhaps the toughest matter at a critic's disposal to tell this story: a musician's sound."
• Claire Berlinski on Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk: "For page upon page, Pamuk stresses in these self-enamoured tones that he is a man who really likes to read books. Good ones, too, by famous writers like Dostoyevsky and Borges - not, you know, easy ones. He's different from other Turks, you see. But he's not like the Europeans, either. He's an outsider, eternally apart, rejected by all, accepted by no one (the Nobel committee aside)."

The Guardian:

• Tibor Fischer on The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman: "The novel won awards in Hungary, and it's easy to see why. It's the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights, but one that manages to put the world of the adults firmly into focus as well. The first few chapters struggle in a sort of Joycean-Beckettian straitjacket (as an indication of his intellectual weight, Dragomán translated Watt into Hungarian for fun), but then Dragomán forgets all that and lets the narrative rip, shifting the characters around like he's Stephen King or Elmore Leonard."

The New Yorker:

• No new issue this week, so go back and read more of the Fiction issue.

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Edward Hirsch on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage: "'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it. You can tear through it in a night or two — I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable new verse translation — and linger over it for years."
• Jennifer GIlmore on Love Falls by Esther Freud: "The expectation is obvious: this girl will come to know her elusive father; she will break out from her troubled, tentative girlhood and become a confident woman. Will she find a fairy-tale love as well? While Esther Freud’s sixth novel, 'Love Falls,' follows this all-too-familiar arc, her depiction of Lara is so charming and observant, her writing so dynamic, that all the clichés of a youthful summer of self-discovery are transcended."
• Mark Kamine on Charm City by Madison Smartt Bell: "A standard tourist itinerary can be gleaned from the handful of walks Bell describes, but Frommer would serve better for those interested in simply seeing the sights and eating fine food. Bell’s Baltimore is a real city: complex, ever changing, often gritty and dangerous, always interesting.... Guides to cities are easy enough to come by. Guides to cities’ souls are not. 'Charm City' is both."
• P.J. O'Rourke on Starbucked by Taylor Clark: "I never came to like 'Starbucked.' But I grew very fond of its writer. Most books about social and business phenomena give the reader something to think about. This book gave the author something to think about.... I experienced the pleasure a teacher must feel when he watches a kid with promise outgrowing the vagaries and muddles of immaturity (and the jitters of too many coffee-fueled all-nighters) and coming into his own as a young man of learning, reason and sense."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura: "There's nothing perfunctory or dryly academic about American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura writes a lean, impassioned prose, chockablock with anecdote and information.... [H]is exciting, even eye-opening book shows us that from 1830 to 1850 a group of New England preachers and intellectuals confronted what has proved to be the great polarizing tension in American history, that between hyperindividualism and the claims of social justice and human brotherhood."
• Ron Charles on Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips: "Marie Phillips's first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, hovers somewhere between Pride and Prejudice and an episode of 'Bewitched.' I'm not complaining; I have an unusually high regard for Elizabeth Montgomery's oeuvre. And Austen got off some good lines, too."

Los Angeles Times:

• Debby Applegate on Gura's American Transcendentalism: "Gura untangles this complex web of ideas and characters and weaves them into a clear, coherent and compelling tale of America's first, and maybe greatest, major intellectual movement.... 'American Transcendentalism,' brilliant as it is, will not be easy or particularly enjoyable for the casual reader. But students, scholars and those who are thrilled by the intellectual chase will be grateful to Gura for many years to come."
• Will Self on America from the Air by Daniel Mathews and James S. Jackson: "My hunch is that the way in which every aspect of air travel is trammeled by the ineffably dull -- tedious airport architecture, monotonous Muzak, anodyne announcements, superfluous consumer opportunities -- is the result of an unconscious collective denial. After all, if the flight crew wore winged helmets and 'Ride of the Valkyries' were blasting over the PA as the plane picked up speed on the runway, and then, when the oily behemoth slipped the surly bonds of gravity, the captain cried 'Wheeeee!' the latent anxieties of every passenger would be unleashed.... Set against this mass willing of ennui, "America From the Air" comes as a heaven-sent corrective: I urge you to buy it. I think it might, quite possibly, be the best book I have ever read."

Globe & Mail:

• Merilyn Simonds on The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett: "At a stage when the novel has grown almost claustrophobically interior, The Air We Breathe is a refreshing examination of human connectedness.... [T]he pieces of this novel settle brilliantly into what amounts to an allegory of what America is and what it could be. It is, unequivocally, her best work yet."

The Independent:

• Katy Guest on The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford: "[T]he short story is alive and well and mostly living in America. Not that you would immediately guess it, to read Richard Ford's introduction. In it, he laments 'the cold, suffocating hands of the American writing-program industry on our faltering national literary 'product'; [and] the sad decline of the traditional story form'. If such an authority as Ford insists that American literature is being straitened by a creative writing sausage factory, it would take a brave critic to contradict him. But if that is the case then he must have searched long and hard to find 44 vibrant, shocking, fresh and classic stories such as he presents here."

The New Yorker:

• The Fiction Issue, featuring stories by Junot Diaz, Anne Enright, Lore Segal, and Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as a remarkable section on Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver's stories, including Carver's original text of "Beginners" (and Lish's edits that turned it into "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") and an intense series of letters from Carver to Lish: "I think I had best pull out, Gordon, before it goes any further. I realize I stand every chance of losing your love and friendship over this. But I strongly feel I stand every chance of losing my soul and my mental health over it, if I don’t take that risk. I’m still in the process of recovery and trying to get well from the alcoholism, and I just can’t take any chances, something as momentous and permanent as this, that would put my head in some jeopardy. That’s it, it’s in my head. You have made so many of these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I’m liable to croak if they came out that way."
• James Wood on Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "Coetzee’s chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity.... Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation."
• John Updike on The Art of the American Snapshot: "Without a felt connection to one’s own mortal course through a lifetime of circumstance, snapshots become baffling and boring.... The prints in 'The Art of the American Snapshot' are reproduced at their actual modest size, with lots of blazingly white space, and have taken their riddles into oblivion with their anonymous creators. Is the baby, for instance, lying on an open packed suitcase, apparently asleep, alive or dead?"

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Lee Siegel on Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life by Philip Davis: "Davis is out to remove the slur of moral uptightness and narrow virtue from Malamud’s reputation. Gratifyingly, he wants to restore him to the pantheon of great American writers in which Malamud, in our flash-in-the-pan culture, once belonged."
• Benjamin Friedman on A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark: "Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark’s is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let’s hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he’s wrong."
• Maslin on Person of Interest by Theresa Schwegel: "Last year Ms. Schwegel herself became a person of interest when she won the Edgar Award for best first novel (“Officer Down”) from the Mystery Writers of America, a group that’s especially savvy in picking prizewinners. Her new book confirms that its confidence in Ms. Schwegel was well placed.... 'Person of Interest' quickly escalates into a high-stakes story of risk and suspicion, told with rich, insightful detail. Some actress is destined to have a field day with Leslie, who vacillates deliberately between playing mother and vamp, plotting her moves while also spiraling out of control."
• Christopher Sorrentino on Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace: "How exhilarating ... to discover David Peace through his brilliant, perplexing, claustrophobic and ambiguous seventh novel, 'Tokyo Year Zero.'... Above all, 'Tokyo Year Zero' portrays a rigidly hierarchical culture recovering from the near chaos brought on by its defeat. One of the marvelous things about the novel is Peace’s depiction of a country on its knees but relying for order upon the maintenance of elaborate everyday formalities and ceremonies."

Washington Post:

• Anthony Swofford on Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It: "The resulting oral history ... is a searing document, one of the most revealing chronicles of the war yet published. It is as though correspondents are talking late into the night, trying to explain what it was like, what sights and smells haunt them, what they're proud of and what they regret, what they saw coming and what they didn't."
• Karen McPherson on The Wall by Peter Sis: "Part memoir, part history and part graphic novel, The Wall makes irresistible reading. Sis, one of the few children's authors to win a MacArthur 'genius' Fellowship, combines a well-paced text, detailed line drawings, family photographs and snippets from his childhood journals and early artwork to produce a book that offers young readers a personalized glimpse into history."

Los Angeles Times:

• Erika Schickel on Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee by Alex Frankel: "[I]t's nice that he gets to quit before the dullness becomes unbearable. It's less good for the book, though, because there's little at stake.... After 'Nickel and Dimed,' Barbara Ehrenreich's harrowing account of subsistence wage-earning, this kind of shallow dip into the job pool is almost shocking. It's also somewhat insulting to the millions of hourly-wage earners who aren't lucky enough to parlay university degrees into exciting free-lance careers and for whom the drudgery of clock-punching is all too real."

Globe & Mail:

• Randy Boyagoda on The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux: "This is very much a book written in mind of Forster's humane and hard-eyed sense of what happens when white people caught between good intentions and self-involvement try to play out their internal crises in an intensely foreign country. This is a book also written in mind of all these door-stopper novels about India, books that these days occupy in every sense so much of literary fiction's shelf-space, about which Theroux is refreshingly caustic."

The Guardian:

• M. John Harrison on My Tango with Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban: "Over the past few years his characters have become less than ghosts. Scenes fade even as they repeat, absorbed into the walls, trapped by the graffiti written on trains, sucked back in like old breath by the cultural references, fixed or transient, from which they were derived. My Tango With Barbara Strozzi is a haunting: exasperating, funny, sad and elegiac. Catch it before it disappears."

The New Yorker:

• Malcolm Gladwell on What Is Intelligence? by James Flynn: "Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. ... To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."

--Tom

New York Times:

• No cover review (it's the Holiday issue), so let's start with Toni Bentley on Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh: "Kavanagh’s exhaustive book is best when she’s writing about Nureyev’s first years of poverty and suffering and his last years of wealth and suffering. He feels human. But in between, when he was a meteor shattering all expectations onstage and off, and something definitely beyond human, the biography becomes a somewhat leaden laundry list of his prodigious comings and goings. The book reads more like the biography of a celebrity than an artist, and they are not the same thing."
• Joe Queenan on The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (On a Shag Rug) in the Seventies by Thomas Hine: "Hine has succeeded in writing a thoughtful, fair but somewhat derivative book about an era that was completely outrageous. A wild and crazy guy, he is not.... Though he never minimizes the bizarre atmosphere of the era, Hine never captures the widespread feeling that America had taken a totally wrong turn in the ’70s." And tomorrow Kakutani says, "Not only are Mr. Hine’s sociological observations ponderous and clichéd, they can also be muddle-headed and perplexing."
• Leah Hager Cohen on The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Artists by Donald Friedman: "When we think of such heavyweights as Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Yeats and Proust — all represented in these pages — we may think of them with reverence; certainly we view their works as being abidingly and immutably rooted in language, founded on words. Yet words, it seems, are not the thing. This is Friedman’s essential conceit, and it is a subversive jewel of an idea, sparkling audaciously on every page of this well-designed book." [See our exclusive video clip of the author interviewing Kurt Vonnegut about his art on the page for the book.]
• Stephanie Zacharek on The Completely Mad Don Martin: "Martin’s cartoons are still weird. If anything, in a world where our sprawling media attempt to explain everything to us and yet end up spitting out so much chatter and noise, they’re weirder than ever — their very obliqueness is satisfyingly direct.... These are joyously disreputable cartoons."
• Robin Marantz Henig on Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy: "In making his case, Levy cites the gradual shift in the public view of what is acceptable in terms of sexual pairings.... All he wants is for us to open our minds a tiny bit more, and make room for the idea of having sex with the domestic robots that will soon be part of all our lives. In fact, he argues, the human/robot sex of the future promises to be better than most sex between humans is today."

Washington Post:

• Eugenia Zuckerman on Symphony by Jude Morgan: This "tale could make for a torrid romance novel, but the brilliant historical novelist Jude Morgan has turned it into a deeply empathic exploration of obsession and art, genius and madness. The author's narrative flows musically. The text is scored for many voices, the operatic cast is large, and Morgan's ability to bring each character to life is virtuosic."

Los Angeles Times:

• Dick Lochte on T Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton: "She's not the first crime novelist to arrive at the 20 mark in a popular series, but she may be the first to do so without a strong reliance on formula. Whodunits Who-done-its, body-guarding, recoveries, manhunts, hostage negotiation -- all have been grist for Kinsey's mill."
• Richard Reyner on The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler: "Critics argue about whether Hammett developed his terse style from Ernest Hemingway or the influence went the other way. It doesn't really matter. The hard-boiled idiom was in the air, a feature of the times, and it had to be learned, or caught, like a disease -- it was a shotgun marriage between the western and themes taken from Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. The stripped-down prose owed as much to hard-hitting tabloids as to the blue pencils of Gertrude Stein or Ezra Pound."

Globe & Mail:

• Robert Wiersema on Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis: "It takes a perverse talent to write a novel practically guaranteed to offend every potential reader; it takes a gift to make that same novel completely compulsive, impossible to put down. With Crooked Little Vein, British writer Warren Ellis manages both feats with a smarmy aplomb deserving of both applause and a strong disinfectant."

The Guardian:

• Simon Callow on Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf by Simon Louvish (coming to the US in March as the less thrillingly titled Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art): "This man, you cannot help feeling, is barking. But his psychopathology is fascinating: there is no neurosis, no self-doubt. He seemed to know from the outset what he wanted to do and be, and he simply went out and did it and was it."

The New Yorker:

• Louis Menand on diaries by Leo Lerman and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: "It’s true that we read the diaries of Virginia Woolf because they were written by Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to being an interesting novelist, was an interesting character. But (a paradox of representation) we would actually feel that we had a more intimate sense of Virginia Woolf if we read about her in someone else’s diary... Inside, everyone sounds, more or less eloquently, like the same broken record of anxiety and resentment. It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct. We read Woolf’s diaries so that we can see other people through Woolf’s eyes."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: John Simon on The Letters of Noel Coward: "Let’s face it: Coward was a genius. Who else was outstanding in the following capacities: actor; author of comedy, drama and farce; also operetta, musical comedy and revue, as both composer and lyricist? Furthermore, novelist, short-story writer, light versifier (independent from music), autobiographer, diarist, travel writer, filmmaker ('In Which We Serve' — a masterpiece) and, as we see here, letter writer extraordinaire."
• Jim Harrison on The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 by Charles Bukowski: "Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder."
• Rachel Donadio on Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano: "A powerful work of reportage, 'Gomorrah' became a literary sensation when it appeared in Italy last year, selling an astonishing 600,000 copies. It started a national conversation, but also won its 28-year-old first-time author uglier accolades: death threats and a constant police escort. He now lives in hiding.... I could not get this brave book out of my head. After reading 'Gomorrah,' it becomes impossible to see Italy, and the global market, in the same way again."
• Walter Kirn on A Free Life by Ha Jin: "The two steps forward, one step back progression of the Wu’s acculturation may be true to the actual experiences of countless naïve, non-native English speakers, but it feels here more like a monastic meditation or a ritual breathing exercise than a fictional documentary. Jin’s simple sentences, familiar sentiments, and uneventful three- to five-page chapters ... appear to derive from a highly refined aesthetic of anti-excitability."

Washington Post:

• David Treuer on Hundred in the Hand by Joseph M. Marshall III: "I've always suspected that cowboys are really Indians in disguise. Joseph Marshall's astonishing new Western is proof.... The publisher claims that this book is reminiscent of the oral tradition of Indian storytelling. But for something to jog the memory, we have to know it in the first place, and this novel doesn't evoke Indian storytelling (whatever that is) as much as the tradition of old Westerns. It sounds and reads like a Western, only facing the wrong direction."
• Charles Kaiser on Boom! by Tom Brokaw: "Combining oral history with the author's own memories, this 662-page tome touches on nearly all the major events of that extraordinary time. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing new about any of them."

Los Angeles Times:

• David Ulin on Bukowski's The Pleasures of the Damned: "One of the benefits of a career retrospective is that it allows us to see how a writer has progressed, how themes and styles are continued or discarded. This collection, though, shows no real growth. A poem from the 1950s reads no different than one from the 1980s; they are part of the same lifelong binge."

Globe & Mail:

• A.L. Kennedy on Born Standing Up by Steve Martin: "The story he tells is engaging, dense, occasionally moving, but - in autobiography as in comedy - the decision that 'jokes are funniest when played upon oneself' means the book's overall tone is what can only be described as courteous.... His prose fiction can occasionally be distorted by a need to prove itself, an unwieldy self-awareness. But here there are only economy, clarity and an intense visual awareness, the keen observation that transfers beautifully from stage to page."

The Guardian:

• It's time for The Guardian's version of the British year-end tradition of, instead of naming your top 100 or some such sum, asking writers what their favorite books of the year were. An idiosyncratic list as usual, with only a couple of books named more than once, and one named three times: Black Mass, John Gray's argument against modern secular utopianism, which John Banville calls "bleakly invigorating" and J.G. Ballard says is a "brilliant polemic."

The New Yorker:

• Bill Buford on "cookbooks for carnivores," including a favorite among the carnivores at Omnivoracious, Pork and Sons, which is "the story of killing a pig—the kind of killing that has been done every year for a very long time—and the many things you can then eat afterward, and it is distinguished by an unusual tranquillity of purpose," and our choice for the best food book of 2007, The River Cottage Meat Book: "I found myself wondering, Doesn’t anyone do the dishes down there at the cottage? Fearnley-Whittingstall’s occasional efforts to explain butchery, like boning a leg of lamb (encouraging his readers not to bother with a professional but to do the 'hatchet job yourself—it’s quite easy to improvise'), reveal a tolerance for chaos ('It’s a bit tricky to explain') that may be without precedent among people who make a living from preparing food."
• John Updike on Jin's A Free Life: "His new novel ... is a relatively lumpy and uncomfortable work.... Unfortunately, the novel rarely gathers the kind of momentum that lets us overlook its language."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Jed Perl on A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years by John Richardson: "John Richardson’s writing is tremendously satisfying, at once easygoing and magisterial. In the third, penultimate installment of his life of Picasso, Richardson is juggling so many people and themes and events with such aplomb that readers may not quite realize what literary pyrotechnics are involved.... While this is in many respects a familiar story, Richardson brings more coiling narrative detail to the life than anybody ever has, so that the biography becomes not only a reconsideration of Picasso but also a reckoning on the art and culture of the century in which he played so essential a role."
• Kakutani on Tomorrow by Graham Swift: "Because its central premise feels so contrived, 'Tomorrow' quickly devolves into a portentous, stream-of-consciousness monologue that sorely tries the reader's patience. Whereas Mr. Swift has proved himself a masterly ventriloquist in earlier books, like 'Last Orders' ..., he not only fails to find a plausible voice for Paula in this novel, but also inadvertently turns her into a self-absorbed drama queen."
• Jay McInerney on How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard: "He wants to show us how much we lie about the way we read, to ourselves as well as to others, and to assuage our guilt about the way we actually read and talk about books.... He proposes, and employs, a new set of scholarly abbreviations to go along with op. cit. and ibid.: UB: book unknown to me; SB: book I have skimmed; HB: book I have heard about; and FB: book I have forgotten."
• Thomas Beller on Maynard & Jennica by Rudolph Delson: "By the end of the book I was wallowing in a state of pleasure but also suspicion — suspicious because much of the novel is just so damn cute. But looking through its pages again I found one tiny comic gem after another, one pitch-perfect rendering of the modern moment after another.... I felt the odd elation that occurs when you read fiction that not only confirms your sense of the modern world but enlarges it, even if in a slightly precious way, and makes you laugh."
• Jim Windolf on Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine: "Unlike the more playful graphic novelists who influenced him, Daniel Clowes ... and the Hernandez brothers..., Tomine isn't given to flights of surrealism, rude jests or grotesque images. He is a mild observer, an invisible reporter, a scientist of the heart. His drawing style is plain and exact. The dialogue appearing inside his cartoon balloons is pitch-perfect and succinct. He's daring in his restraint."

Washington Post:

• Carolyn See on Never Enough by Joe McGinniss: "Readers have a real treat waiting for them in Joe McGinniss's latest book. Besides providing all the requisite gore of a true-crime narrative, Never Enough suggests that no matter how tasteless, mindless and incompetent we may be, we're perfect Einsteins in comparison to the Kissel family, which is capable of committing any maleficence known to man, but utterly incapable of doing it properly."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Schickel on Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture by Peter Kobel: "Some of the silent cinema's greatest films have been preserved and restored, as they should be, and Kobel pays handsome tribute to these efforts. But it is, I think, impossible to restore the silent cinema to a truly vital role in our time. It is especially not possible to do so as Kobel does, with swotted-up factoids and potted-up biographies. What works best in this book are the illustrations, particularly the color reproductions of antique movie posters. They are often direct and passionate responses to the films themselves, executed in the heat of the moment by anonymous but gifted artists eager to convey the essence of works that obviously moved and excited them. They still have the power to tempt us out of our indifference, to engage us anew in the past's sweet cheats."

Globe & Mail:

• William Kowalski on Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon: "Though Chabon confesses that for a long time he hoped to be taken as a 'serious, literary writer,' it would appear that for now, at least, he has mercifully relieved himself of that burden and set out to have some fun, with a Pulitzer Prize-winner's carefree attitude toward the consequences. The result is a story that is a ripping yarn on the surface, and a profound and - dare I say it - 'literary' work underneath."

The Independent:

• Suzi Feay on The Letters of Ted Hughes: "This is a thoroughly exciting and absorbing book, as gripping as a good novel but tragic as only a true story can be. It's a tale rich in dramatic irony; its protagonist is complex and fascinating, laden with contradictions he was seemingly unaware of. Despite what one must assume were the best efforts of Hughes's devoted publishers, he comes across as fairly bonkers."

The New Yorker:

• Dan Chiasson on New Selected Poems by Mark Strand and Time and Materials by Robert Hass: "They sound nothing alike. Strand is almost always suave, while Hass can be disarmingly, even embarrassingly, intimate; Strand is cunning, while Hass is candid. I am sure that they read each other; I have no idea whether they admire each other's work. Comparisons are odious. But the strange fact is that Hass is best when, within his own range, he aspires to a Strand-like coolness, while Strand, in his sublime recent work, has found (always at a slant) a way of sounding like a confidant. Both long ago outgrew the manners that made them famous; their recent poems feel like repudiations of early, too easy mastery."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Caroline Weber on The Discovery of France by Graham Robb: "France is not a unified cultural monolith, but rather 'a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations' each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.... With exhaustive research and a witty, engaging narrative style, Robb corrects this misconception by showing how, even as modern developments like democracy and the steam engine transformed France from 'a land of ancient tribal divisions' into a centralized nation-state, a wealth of regional particularities persisted in 'disparate, concurrent spheres.'" William Grimes on Friday: "France is not what it seems, least of all to its own citizens. Mr. Robb has accomplished quite a feat. He has reintroduced France to itself."
• Kakutani on A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years by John Richardson: "As John Richardson reminds us in the third installment of his magisterial and definitive biography, Picasso not only worshiped the gods Dionysius, Priapus and Mithra (the god of light and wisdom), but also regarded himself as their confrère — an artist so prodigally talented, so daring and so virtuosic that he could reinvent the universe."
• Stephen Metcalf on Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo: "Someone — it's been attributed to everyone from Dostoyevsky to John Gardner — once said there are only two possible stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. To these Richard Russo has added a third: schlub stays put.... Out the window goes the dynamism of American self-invention; in comes something almost more mysterious: a reckoning with an apparently seamless life continuity. If I didn't invent this self, where exactly did it come from? And yet more queasily: This place that nurtured me — did it also stunt me, inhibit me, even, literally, poison me?"
• Stephen L. Carter on Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig: "Donald McCaig's fine novel is not an hommage. In reducing Rhett to a perplexed and worrying Everyman, McCaig reduces the power of Mitchell's original. Readers adore the enigma that is Rhett — because he is an enigma. Probably that was Mitchell's intention: to persuade us to love the world that would produce a man like Rhett. McCaig insists that Rhett is actually a lot like everyone else. That's why, after finishing 'Rhett Butler's People,' it may be impossible to read 'Gone With the Wind' in quite the same way."

Washington Post:

• Antony Shugaar on Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano: "Saviano gallops straight into the maw of the inferno, using a hard-boiled style that has only begun to take root in Italian media. Naples is where he grew up, the Neapolitans are his people, and while the eyewitness accounts he brings to the page -- stories of murderous barbarity and devastating debasement -- could have been told by one of Dashiell Hammett's chilly protagonists, Saviano is no cold-blooded cynic. If there is a literary model at work here, it might be the Lamentations of Jeremiah."
• Ron Charles on The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis by Michael Pritchett: "Like Lewis and Clark's epic trek more than 200 years ago, Michael Pritchett's novel about their expedition is an arduous journey. It's difficult and convoluted and full of frustrating detours, but, my God, what a trip this book is!"

Los Angeles Times:

• Donna Rifkind on Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital: "Set amid the "low-level hum of anxiety" that accompanies contemporary life, Janette Turner Hospital's eighth novel is about a musician and is based on a Greek myth. But if this suggests Elysian simplicity, forget it. No book by this nervy, dynamic Australian-born author is ever anything less than intricate and deeply disquieting."

Globe & Mail:

• Jean McNeil on Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica by Tom Griffiths: "a many-layered, sophisticated narrative, not only of the Antarctic, but our relationship with it. Griffiths combines the telescopic gaze of the historian with an aliveness to the detail of human lives - a generally neglected aspect of the Antarctic - in a demonstration of how, as he writes, 'historians move constantly between intimacy and distance.'"

The Guardian:

• Hilary Spurling on Richardson's Life of Picasso, volume three: "It was through the psychic squalor of his marriage that the artist confronted, perhaps more squarely and directly than any other, the 20th century's chaotic and destructive undertow of violence. Richardson's argument, cogent, witty and persuasive, backed up by prodigious research and sumptuous illustrations, makes this herculean biography increasingly harsh, tough and uncomfortable to read."

The New Yorker:

• Jeffrey Toobin on My Grandfather's Son by Clarence Thomas: "throughout his judicial career Thomas has, in the name of anti-élitism, shown a distinct solicitude for certain kinds of élites—say, for employers over employees, for government over individuals, for corporations over regulators, and for executioners over the condemned. Thomas's tender concern for the problems of the powerful reveals itself, in the end, as a form of self-pity."

--Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover ("The Music Issue"): Geoff Dyer on The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross: "'The Rest Is Noise' is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music.... With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, 'The Rest Is Noise' is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement. So much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross's hands."
• Stephen King on Clapton: An Autobiography by Eric Clapton: "Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It's a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton's account of his life. 'Clapton' is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in 'A Million Little Pieces.'"
• Stephanie Zacharek on Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me by Pattie Boyd: "'Wonderful Tonight' ... is a charming, lively and seductive book... Boyd seems like a real person who happened to be lucky enough to live shoulder to shoulder with rock deities. The prose is clear and unpretentious, and although she writes candidly about the pain her husbands' infidelities caused her ... this isn't a bitter tell-all screed."
• Jennifer Egan on Matrimony by Joshua Henkin: "Where coming-of-age novels tend to wave goodbye as their protagonists sally over the threshold to adulthood, Henkin hangs in long after that, tracking his characters for almost 20 years, into their mid-30s, when the weight of their adulthood can be truly felt. It's a coming-of-middle-age novel."
• Janet Maslin on The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin: "To Mr. Goodwin's credit he manages to develop such a large and exotic cast of characters that the human intrigue in the series trumps its much-flaunted expertise. As it revels in Istanbul as a place 'positively overrun with mountebanks, schemers and dealers of every nationality, and none,' this sinuous novel corrals as many of these operators as it can and then sets them to work hoodwinking one another."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: "'Some day,' nearly all serious readers say to themselves, 'I really should sit down and start War and Peace.' For many of us, though, that day never quite comes.... But a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts."

Los Angeles Times:

• Heller McAlpin on The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman: "'The Principles of Uncertainty' is an irresistible book, a graphic diary full of whimsy, worries, philosophical probing, offbeat observations and life-affirming enthusiasms.... Her paintbrush reveals as much agility as her mind, ranging from the flattened, childlike primitives of her dozen children's books to Matissean pink-infused still lifes and penetrating portraiture. Her draftsmanship is remarkable; she captures architectural interiors with the panache of a set designer."

Globe & Mail:

• Melanie Little on The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg: "Rather than strangle the meaning from her anecdotes and examples the way my grandmother could wring every last droplet from a washcloth, Ashenburg is content to let the rich material she's amassed speak for itself. Reading this book, as a result, feels more like participating in a stimulating conversation than attending a lecture. And who doesn't like talking about the strange, telling hygiene habits of others?"

Times Literary Supplement:

• Carolyne Larrington on The Death of Socrates by Emily Wilson: "Wilson has written a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding Socrates' execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock.... Wilson shows very clearly how Socrates' strangeness, his notorious ugliness, and his practice of a profession normally associated with foreigners, all combined to make him a troubling figure for the ordinary Athenian."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran: "Carson ... and Vaitheeswaran ... are 'techno-optimists,' as opposed to the 'eco-pessimists' they sometimes deride. Yet their argument rests on an account of global trends that is nothing short of terrifying.... Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.)"

--Tom