Category: Book reviews
I’ll Have What He’s Having
If you’ve never heard of Drew Nieporent, it’s okay, even if you’re something of a foodie. Stick with me to the end of this review, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll want to read this delicious memoir from a pioneering figure of the New York restaurant scene. Once you’ve read the book, it’s all but certain you’ll wish you could have dinner with him.
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Tolstoy’s Last Novel
Leo Tolstoy is the greatest writer in the Western world—greater, yes, than Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. In evidence I would submit his two masterpiece novels War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878), and 20 or so magnificent novellas and short stories, among them “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “Father Sergius,” “Hadji Murad,” and “Master and Man.”
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Cuckin’ in the Free World
The sun rises also. God’s taunt: the relentlessness of repetition; the unyielding promise of possibility. So gentle, yet so violent. A brown box lingers on the front steps, aching for evisceration’s gift. Begging to unburden itself. A soul ensconced within—laid bare in literary flesh, fixed in ink, and marketed for mass consumption. A cry for help. The sound of an American flag being raped.
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Our Man in Amman
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown that was invented by the British and then funded by the Americans. Constantly lies the head of state who claims to protect the Palestinians while cooperating with the Mossad. Abdullah II is the fourth king of Jordan, the state that Winston Churchill lopped off the Palestine Mandate in 1921 with, he said, “the stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo.” The plan, as proposed by Lawrence of Arabia in 1918, was to install the three sons of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, as the Hashemite emirs, Britain’s proxies in the states it was carving out of Ottoman territory. Abdullah is the last Hashemite standing. He has a pronounced facial tic.
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Getting Intimate With Updike
Here’s a nice illustration of the personal and professional range of John Updike, the novelist, poet, essayist, critic, and short story writer who rose to singular fame (appearing twice on the cover of Time magazine, then the ultimate mark of celebrity) in the second half of the 20th century. During the year 1960, he volunteered to teach Sunday school at his local church. Meanwhile, he was fighting his publisher’s lawyers, who worried that the sex scenes in his latest novel, Rabbit, Run, were explicit enough to violate U.S. obscenity laws, which were still a thing.
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Tribe Mentality
The past few years have seen the almost unprecedented intrusion of politics into chick lit. It seems no novel about the life of wives or mothers can be complete without the occasional diatribe about systemic racism or Donald Trump or the genocide launched against transgendered people. For someone who is looking for a little escapism, the proverbial beach read is no longer a place to find it. But just as these authors are clearly under the sway of their political environment—or at least virtue signaling to show that they don’t just care about romance or drama in the PTA—they are also influencing the political environment as well. And they can use the broader audience they attract to plant information about niche ideological hobby horses.
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A Kinder, Gentler Feminism
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, carries with it the subtitle: “A Feminist Manifesto.” Where that word may conjure a certain harshness, however, Sargeant’s book illustrates something much more gentle: a humane vision of the givenness of womanhood.
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The Audacity of Clothes: How Michelle Obama’s Fashion Choices Changed the World
Barack and Michelle Obama have been criticized for trading their activist roots for a post-presidency focused on celebrity networking and voracious wealth accumulation. In an effort to dismiss her critics, Michelle has published a $50 coffee table book about fashion.
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Giving History the Human Touch
America owes all her triumphs to the humans who crawled across battlefields, toiled in factories, blasted through mountains, sermonized on soapboxes, and experimented in labs. American history—world history—is human history more than anything. The late David McCullough understood this as well as anyone, and in the posthumous collection of his essays and speeches, History Matters, this basic idea is a consistent throughline.
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Putting Atheism on the Defensive
Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore.
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