Although I’ve styled this section of my blog “Book Reviews,” I’ve thus far eschewed any kind of rating system, and, with few exceptions, have generally tended to offer unqualified praise to the books I’ve been reading. This is, I hope, […]
Category » Book Reviews
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
-Alexander Pope
George Saunder’s CivilWarLand In Bad Decline
by on June 12, 2013
George Saunders is an unlikely candidate for celebrity, and not merely because he is a writer. Soft-spoken and self-deprecating, dark and humorous all at once, he is a writer of nightmares, worlds peopled with ghosts and mutants that are nonetheless […]
Karl Marx’s Dispatches For The New York Tribune
by on June 4, 2013
Few historical and political figures inspire ire and admiration quite like Karl Marx. While he lived, he was a tireless social critic, exposing the hypocrisies of governments and ministers and shining a light on the glaring social injustices of his […]
Wisława Szymborska’s Poems New And Collected
by on May 31, 2013
I have to begin by thanking my aunt Sandra, both for recommending Wisława Szymborska to me, and for the gifting of this book. Wisława Szymborska (I have given up attempting to pronounce her name) was a Polish poet, born in 1923 […]
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night
by on May 25, 2013
Francis Scott Fitzgerald completed Tender Is The Night in 1934, six years before a heart attack took his life prematurely, to the surprise of no one who was familiar with his drinking habits. It was his last finished novel. His correspondence up […]
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
by on May 17, 2013
In the history of the written word, few documents have proven more incendiary than Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Published anonymously in January of 1776, at the very beginning of the American Revolution, Paine’s pamphlet was a call to arms that […]
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle
by on May 6, 2013
The Wapshot Chronicle was John Cheever’s first published novel and established many of the themes he would become known for: the disconnect between a character’s private and public life, the sense of community fostered by small towns vs. the anomie and […]
William Hazlitt’s Selected Writings
by on May 1, 2013
William Hazlitt was a 19th century political radical, art and theater critic, amateur philosopher and lover of literature. He is also widely considered one of the greatest essayists to ever live, a judgement that jars uncomfortably with the fact that […]
Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater
by on April 26, 2013
Roth has a talent for provocation, amply testified to in his superb and uproarious Portnoy’s Complaint, and honed to devastating effect in Sabbath’s Theater. First, in the interests of intellectual honesty, a caveat: I abhor those critics who cannot honestly confront a […]
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
by on April 16, 2013
In her collection of essays Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith describes a line delivered by the actress Katharine Hepburn in the movie The Philadelphia Story as being her lodestar for fiction writing: “The time to make up your mind about people is […]
Albert Camus’ The Plague
by on April 12, 2013
Albert Camus’ The Plague is the fictional account of a coastal Algerian town’s battle against a plague epidemic in an unspecified year in the 1940s. There are early warnings of an outbreak – rats surfacing from the sewers to die and numerous […]
Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems
by on March 31, 2013
Larkin is the most beloved English poet of the post-war era and a major influence on a wide community of writers, in prose and verse, on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading his Collected Poems, comprising his four publications The North Ship […]
Milan Kundera’s The Joke
by on March 29, 2013
First, an apposite quotation from Christopher Hitchens: “The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.” The free intelligence (in truth, a tautology, but a useful one nonetheless) admits of no […]
Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
by on March 20, 2013
Richard Feynman was America’s best-known theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate and, according to a 1999 poll of 100 of the world’s most highly esteemed scientists, one of the ten greatest physicists to ever live. It is difficult to comprehend intellect […]
P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves
by on March 19, 2013
Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, less a novel than a group of chronologically-linked short stories cobbled together into a coherent whole, is the third Wodehouse work I have read thus far, and the final in my particular compendium of Wodehouse’s “Jeeves stories.” […]