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 . '/' . substr('9780811220316',-6,3) . '/' . '9780811220316' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
$22.95
 . '/' . substr('9781844674510',-6,3) . '/' . '9781844674510' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Nick Turse (Editor)
$22
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By Robin Shamburg — David Schmahmann, in the era of Spitzer, Edwards, Weiner and Schwarzenegger, has written a novel about a powerful man who risks his reputation and career for illicit sex and ends up in an unlikely relationship with a Bangkok bar girl. “The Double Life of Alfred Buber” may in some ways feel like a mystery novel, but it’s much more than that.
Posted on Jul 21, 2011
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In David Schmahmann’s new novel, Alfred Buber is a respected man with a secret. Telling his boss and colleagues that he’s going to Paris, he regularly travels instead to Southeast Asia to go whoring in the squalid back alleys. And then on one of his trips to Bangkok, he falls in love.
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In fledgling author Ryan Quinn’s coming-of-age novel, three friends meet in their senior year at an isolated New England university, forming an unlikely triangle that changes the course of their lives in a story about identity, first love and contemporary friendships. Here’s a snippet from the book’s beginning, courtesy of the author.
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By Nick Turse — The lone living top commander implicated in a slaughter of civilians and cover-up has written a history of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam, and what his book does not say could have grim and far-reaching consequences.
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Despite drawing the wrong kind of attention to themselves over the last two-plus years with news of murky dealings in “structured products” and concern over the bank’s role in the subprime mortgage crisis, execs at Goldman Sachs apparently ...
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By Richard Schickel — I don’t know when the practice began or who had the initial brainstorm, but it is now written in fiery letters that at the end of every year that movie reviewers must set aside the really fun stuff and spend a day or two tripping down short-term memory lane to concoct a list of the year’s 10 best movies.
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imdb.com
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By Richard Schickel — As its title forthrightly states, writer-director Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” simply records the spring-to-spring passage of the annual round of days in these very ordinary lives. I think, for reasons difficult to explain, that it is a near-to-great film.
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By Michael Dirda — There can’t be many newspapermen whose work bears rereading after more than 80 years, but Mencken is one. The six volumes of his collected “Prejudices” are cocksure about everything, but whether they are right or boneheaded, one hardly cares.
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By Allen Barra — Garry Wills, the greatest political commentator of our time, belongs to no trendy circles unless the circle could extend backward in time to one of his most profound influences, G.K. Chesterton.
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By Nomi Prins — Berman pulls no punches in laying bare the truths about who we are, not just as a nation, but also as individuals wrapped up in the destructive pursuit of material excess. In the unswerving style of his other writings, he rips apart the national illusion of greatness.
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Does the notion of remote-controlled soldiers—the fully human kind—seem only a sci-fi vision or the product of someone’s paranoid imagination? Guess again: There’s a project in the works as the military and big business join forces to make privacy a thing of the past.
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By Cherilyn Parsons — “Freedom” is about something important, but the hubbub about how the critical establishment favors male literary writers like Franzen is also significant. Why has everyone cared so much? Because fiction matters.
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20th Century Fox
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By Richard Schickel — The inherent problem with Oliver Stone’s follow-up to his 1987 classic is that it does not have the courage of its own nastiest convictions.
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By John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer —
“This book really began around the kitchen table at the rectory with crock-pot stew.” Eliza Griswold—with a poet’s eye for the telling, homely image—is tracing the genesis of her new book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.
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When a high-profile politician is in office, self-disclosure comes at too high a price, however carefully orchestrated it might be. But now that Blair has left 10 Downing Street, the former British prime minister is telling his story—and trying to protect his legacy—in a new memoir.
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By Allen Barra — You have every right to pick up “Bob Dylan in America” with skepticism—or at least you would if you didn’t know how deep Sean Wilentz’s background in traditional American music goes.
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Developing an appreciation for jazz is partly a matter of understanding how it is influenced by other forces of life, as this review of a new book by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux notes, and how the music plays—and breaks—with form.
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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With civilian casualties in Afghanistan up sharply this year, President Hamid Karzai has asked President Obama for a “strategic review” of the way the war there is being fought.
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Flickr / Nahuel31 (CC-BY)
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In Tom Chatfield’s “Fun Inc.,” the case is made that far from corrupting popular culture and turning its addicted users into “blinking lizards,” video games can help us be happier and live better.
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A new biography of the remarkable writer Lesley Blanch suggests that living well—which may be the same thing as living passionately—is the best way of blunting the force of time’s arrow.
Posted on Jul 29, 2010
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Debra Satz’s new book, “Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale,” raises timely and morally difficult questions about capitalism and free choice and collective and individual rights.
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This is the Paris you never knew: From the Revolution to the present, two new books deliver a series of astonishing stories, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.
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In her rich and nuanced book, Oxford historian Ruth Harris succeeds in restoring a face to a man often seen mainly as a symbol.
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Is it too much to hope that a region once revered by its native people will be respected by those who now seek its riches? Three recent books delve into the matter.
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National Geographic Films / Tim Hetherington
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By Richard Schickel — The documentary “Restrepo” paints an empathetic portrait of U.S. soldiers at an Afghanistan outpost, but it keeps its audience at a distance.
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André Naffis-Sahely looks at three volumes—“A River Dies of Thirst,” “Mural” and “If I Were Another”—that helped make poet/author Mahmoud Darwish a pillar of Palestinian literature.
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Zeitgeist Films
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By Richard Schickel — “Jud Süss” may be the most odious movie ever made. And now we have a talking-heads documentary about it, “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,” the work of Felix Moeller, in which the children and grandchildren of the film’s director, Veit Harlan, are invited to comment on the patriarch’s noxious work.
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Jerry Z. Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, provides in his provocative new book a fresh look at a subject that, to say the least, has been both thoroughly misunderstood and a forbidden, even taboo, topic.
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In her recent book, Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the excesses, delusions and unsupported promises of the positive-thinking movement, tracking both its naive and its corrupt manifestations in the worlds of health, business, religion and psychology.
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Christopher Hitchens reveals a life in contradictions in “Hitch-22,” a brilliant memoir that is at turns comic, self-deflating and sexually frank.
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Lesley Blanch’s “The Sabres of Paradise” tells the illuminating story of Shamyl, the Imam of Daghestan, whose 25-year fight against the Russian empire left a half-million dead, and lessons still to be learned in wars from Chechnya to Afghanistan.
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Can traditional Christianity survive the assault of its critics? Has it really been misunderstood and slandered by its cultural despisers?
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Author Michael Lewis in his best-selling book takes us inside capitalism’s “doomsday machine,” and it’s your worst nightmare come true.
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Using previously inaccessible material from the Russian archives, historian Dominic Lieven offers the truest picture yet of the war made famous in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
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In a short and powerful manifesto, renowned philosopher and critic Martha Nussbaum issues a passionate call to resist persistent efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product.
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What lessons can the West learn by examining the history of the Arab experience through the voices and eyes of Arabs themselves?
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The strange and disturbing story of racist medical ethics and the “benevolent deception” practiced on a nearly forgotten woman who inadvertently continues to live posthumously.
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Is justice an ideal, forever beyond our grasp, or something that may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives?
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Is the noted scholar in residence at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution truly America’s “most original and interesting philosopher,” as Paul Johnson insists?
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Is China on its way toward becoming the feared colossus of the 21st century, surpassing the United States in its imperial ambitions and economic hegemony?
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The irascible poet, journalist and all-around troublemaker’s take on his love affair with the city called El Monstruo, through centuries of rapine and revolution.
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Traditional media is dying, the virtual future is here and a new book takes a close look at what it all means—and it ain’t pretty.
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A best-seller in Israel, Shlomo Sand’s startling book argues there never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and explodes the myth of a unique nation with a special destiny.
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A cautionary tale about youthful self-confidence and indiscretion, compounded by the enmity between conservatives and liberals during Cold War America’s attempt to fix blame for the “loss” of China.
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Four years after Katrina, New Orleans struggles against the odds to preserve its unruly spirit through its unique musical legacy.
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Can the abuse of presidential power over the course of many administrations really be tied to the advent of nuclear weapons?
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A new book by Michael Goldfarb grapples with the fate of a people caught between hope and history.
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You’ve heard of Spartacus, but how many remember the notorious scourge of the Roman Empire, Mithradates, denounced as one of antiquity’s greatest terrorists and rebels?
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Joe Sacco’s graphic treatment of the 1956 massacres of Palestinians by invading Israeli soldiers melds tough-minded journalism with philosophical reflection into a gut-wrenching banquet of a comic book.
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Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
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