Subscribe
new subscription
gift subscription
renew subscription

Review

  1. November 17, 2009 09:00 AM

    Glass Half Full?

    Two new books with clashing takes on American optimism

    By James Surowiecki

    Given the generally grim mood of the American public these days, it might seem like an odd time for Barbara Ehrenreich to publish a book called Bright-Sided, in which she levels both barrels at the American propensity for positive thinking. After all, with the economy still inching back from the brink of catastrophe and unemployment near double digits, doomsayers...

    Continue reading
  2. October 06, 2009 09:24 PM

    Raising Keynes

    A new book paints the iconic economist as the ultimate realist

    By Jeff Madrick

    How difficult it is to be right. John Maynard Keynes is “an entertaining economist whose bright but shallow dissertations on finance and political economy, when not taken seriously, always provide a source of innocent merriment to his readers.”

    The remark above was published in 1933 by David Lloyd George, British prime minister during World War I, who, Keynes strenuously...

    Continue reading
  3. October 06, 2009 09:19 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books on the Irish Revolution and animal rights crusaders

    By James Boylan

    The News From Ireland:
    Foreign Correspondents and The Irish Revolution
    By Maurice Walsh
    I.B. Tauris
    258 pages, £20

    At the end of World War I, the victorious Allies brought self-determination to Europe, forging whole new nations out of disparate nationalities. The Irish decided that they too were entitled to self-determination, as well as dissolution of the...

    Continue reading
  4. October 06, 2009 08:00 AM

    Rocket Man

    An epic tale of men, missiles, and bureaucratic maneuvering

    By Ryan Grim

    Humanity is now some sixty years into the nuclear age and has, somehow, yet to extinguish itself. How that somehow came to be is the question that drives Neil Sheehan’s new book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon.

    Sheehan has written the best kind of biography, one that tells history through...

    Continue reading
  5. July 14, 2009 12:38 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books on campaign bloggers, tabloids, and a collection of Henry Fairlie’s essays

    By James Boylan

    Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
    By Eric Boehlert
    Free Press
    280 pages, $26

    in his classic The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse showed how a cluster of bigfoot reporters from the old print and broadcast media steered the narrative of the 1972 presidential campaign. In Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on...

    Continue reading
  6. July 13, 2009 08:00 AM

    Heart of Stone

    A distinguished new biography of a career contrarian

    By Robert G. Kaiser

    American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone | By D. D. Guttenplan | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 224 pages, $24.95

    When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, millions of Americans succumbed to a shared sense of despair, but not I. F. Stone. The only radical commentator with a wide audience in the United States, Stone was then...

    Continue reading
  7. May 16, 2009 04:15 PM

    Live and Learn

    How the meritocratic assembly line has let us down

    By Ross Douthat

    Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever | By Walter Kirn | Doubleday | 224 pages, $24.95

    How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them | By Daniel Wolff | Bloomsbury | 352 pages, $26


    It wasn’t the best publicized of the many literary feuds that Tom Wolfe conjured up...

    Continue reading
  8. May 16, 2009 04:05 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books about William Randolph Hearst and the Arkansas Gazette

    By James Boylan

    The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst | By Kenneth Whyte | Counterpoint | 546 pages, $30

    It’s a story told and retold. Dynamic young Willie Hearst came out of the West, challenged the newspaper titans of Park Row, and outdid them all—even the master, Joseph Pulitzer. And in scrambling his way up, he not only got...

    Continue reading
  9. March 02, 2009 05:34 PM

    Buyer Beware

    A history of redlining and racism in Chicago

    By Helene Stapinski

    Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black America | By Beryl Satter | Metropolitan Books | 512 pages, $30

    Every now and then, the zeitgeist smiles down upon a writer and makes the subject she’s been toiling over for a decade a hot topic at the time of publication. Such is the case with Beryl Satter’s Family...

    Continue reading
  10. March 01, 2009 05:48 PM

    Picture Perfect?

    In three new graphic histories, the facts get a visual boost

    By Richard Gehr

    08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail | By Michael Crowley And Dan Goldman | Three Rivers Press | 160 pages | $17.95


    The Beats: A Graphic History | Edited by Paul Buhle | Hill and Wang | 193 pages | $22


    Che: A Graphic Biography | By Spain Rodriguez | Verso | 106 pages | $16.95

    No greater...

    Continue reading
  11. March 01, 2009 04:00 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books about Fred Friendly and America's early newspapermen

    By James Boylan

    Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism | By Ralph Engelman, Foreword by Morley Safer | Columbia University Press | 440 pages | $34.50

    Those who saw Good Night and Good Luck, the 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow’s encounter with Senator Joseph McCarthy, may have come away with the impression that Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly...

    Continue reading
  12. January 27, 2009 09:00 AM

    The Devil Made Them Do It

    A new anthology about men (and women) behaving very badly

    By Wendell Jamieson

    True Crime: An American Anthology

    Harold Schechter, editor

    The Library of America

    788 pages, $40

    The teenage girl gave birth in a Delaware hotel room; she and her boyfriend would later claim that the infant was stillborn. But the coroner said the baby suffered blunt trauma to the head. This was 1996. The young mother and father,...

    Continue reading
  13. January 26, 2009 08:30 AM

    Here Comes the Bogeyman

    A chaotic portrait of Rupert Murdoch and his discontents

    By David Nasaw

    The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

    By Michael Wolff

    Broadway

    446 pages, $29.95

    Michael Wolff’s prose style is sui generis. Unique. Which we know. Sort of. His prose is so hard-edged he uses Fuck You as an adjective. He breaks every rule, and with gusto. With sentences that consist of one-word...

    Continue reading
  14. January 23, 2009 11:49 AM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books about art on the New York Times’s Op-Ed page, the short life of The Chicagoan, and hoaxes in the news.

    By James Boylan

    All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page

    By Jerelle Kraus

    Columbia University Press

    260 pages, $34.95

    On September 21, 1970, The New York Times unveiled a new kind of page called the “op-ed,” displacing the obituaries that had long been printed opposite the editorials. This novel forum was open...

    Continue reading