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Fiction
Operation Anthropoid: ‘HHhH,’ a Novel by Laurent Binet
The nameless narrator of »HHhH« has serious misgivings about the novel he is writing. Like Laurent Binet, the book’s French author, he has spent years examining the murder of the SS general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a view to retelling the story as a thriller...more
Migratory Hearts: 'The Newlyweds' by Nell Freudenberger
Reviewed by Mohsin Hamid At the end of Nell Freudenberger’s second novel, »The Newlyweds,« we encounter the following sentence: »I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community.« A worthy objective, surely...more
Mythic Passions: 'The Song of Achilles,' by Madeline Miller
Reviewed by Daniel Mendelsohn To the long catalog of odd hybrids that inhabit Greek myth – the half-human, half-equine centaurs, the birdlike Harpies with their human faces, the man-eating Scylla with her doglike nether parts – we may now add Madeline Miller’s first novel, »The Song of Achilles...more
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R
Reviewed by Nancy Kline Everyone in Second Empire Paris knows the name of Zola’s celebrated courtesan, Nana, “with all the lilting vivacity of its two syllables.” Not so her sister under the skin, the fallen heroine of Carole DeSanti’s provocative historical novel, “The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R...more
The Lifeboat
Reviewed by Sarah Towers “A singular disadvantage of the sea,” Stephen Crane wrote in his 1897 story “The Open Boat,” based on his experiences on a lifeboat off the coast of Florida, “lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important...more
Waiting for Sunrise
Reviewed by Liesl Schillinger Strolling through Vienna in “lemony sunshine” on a mild August day in 1913, Lysander Rief, a “young, almost conventionally handsome man” with “brown, breeze-blown hair” and a “sportsman’s build,” stops dead, compelled by a luscious but disturbing advertisement for an opera...more
The Beginner’s Goodbye
Over five decades of exuberant shape-shifting across the fictional landscape, Anne Tyler has cut the steady swath of a literary stalwart, writing novel after novel whose most memorable characters inhabit a cosmos all their own, a contemporary metaBaltimore populated by ordinary if idiosyncratic citizens, middle-class homebodies cocooned yet smothered by their families...more
In One Person
“We are formed by what we desire,” says Billy Dean, the fatherless narrator and chief hero of John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person.” Irving likes to track his characters over long stretches of time. “In One Person” begins in the mid-1950s, when Billy is 13, and shadows him until he is in his late 60s, in 2010...more
They Eat Puppies, Don’t They
Reviewed by Alida Becker “Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.” Sun Tzu’s Chinese classic, “The Art of War,” gets quite a workout in Christopher Buckley’s latest uproarious political farce, fervently quoted by strivers and schemers in both Beijing and Washington...more
Home
The first four words of Toni Morrison’s new book greet – or assail – us before the story even begins. They’re from the epigraph, which quotes a song cycle written by the author some 20 years ago and therefore, it seems safe to say, not originally intended for this book, but an indication, perhaps, of how long its themes have been haunting her...more
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories
“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” a dying man says to his daughter in Grace Paley’s “Conversation With My Father.” He asks that she, like Maupassant or Chekhov, create “recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next...more
Non-Fiction
Social Networks of Disease: 'Tinderbox,' by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin
Reviewed by Dennis Rosen In “Partner to the Poor,” the medical anthropologist Paul Farmer writes that “the failure to contemplate social and economic aspects of epidemics stunts our understanding of them.” To this one might add: and hinders our ability to contain and defeat them...more
Breaking Faith: 'Bad Religion,' by Ross Douthat
Reviewed by Randall Balmer From “God’s Controversy With New England,” Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 call to repentance, to the latest campaign autobiography by a presidential aspirant, the jeremiad has been one of the most durable literary forms throughout American history...more
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Reviewed by Bill Clinton “The Passage of Power,” the fourth installment of Robert Caro’s brilliant series on Lyndon Johnson, spans roughly five years, beginning shortly before the 1960 presidential contest, including the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and other seminal events of the Kennedy years, and ending a few months after the awful afternoon in Dallas that elevated LBJ to the presidency...more
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
Reviewed by Timothy Snyder Calories were made to be counted, but they have generally been counted for two very different reasons. We associate calories with excess, but for most of its history this little unit of energy was linked to shortage...more
Imagine: How Creativity Works
Reviewed by Christopher Chabris Have you ever wondered how Nike came by its famous slogan “Just Do It”? Neither have I, but it’s an interesting story. Dan Wieden was searching for a tagline to unify a series of ads his agency was making for Nike...more
Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood
Reviewed by Judith Newman No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood. Men, of course, have their painful sportswriters, fellows who don’t just document the mildew and peeling paint on a boxing gym’s walls but go on to liken it to the weeping of fetid tears over the tragedies they’ve seen...more
The Social Conquest of Earth
Reviewed by Paul Bloom This is not a humble book. Edward O. Wilson wants to answer the questions Paul Gauguin used as the title of one of his most famous paintings: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” At the start, Wilson notes that religion is no help at all – “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” – and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence...more
Farther Away
As we should all know by now, Jonathan Franzen is a serious writer who plays for the highest literary stakes, who is uncomfortable with American TV consumerism, and whose last two novels, “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” have legitimately catapulted him to the front ranks of American fiction...more
Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens
Next time you find yourself grousing when the passenger in front reclines his seat a smidge too far, consider the astronomers of the Enlightenment. In 1761 and 1769, dozens and dozens of stargazers traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon...more
The Lower River
The central character in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, “The Lower River,” is an American named Ellis Hock who decides to return to Africa after an absence of almost 40 years. Life in his own country has become tiresome and frustrating, but there’s a village in Malawi where, during his Peace Corps days, Hock had once been happy and useful...more
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