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Review

  1. March 11, 2010 06:00 AM

    The Price of Admission

    Andrew Ross Sorkin’s debut and the limits of access journalism

    By Dean Starkman

    Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves
    By Andrew Ross Sorkin | Viking | 600 pages, $32.95

    “I must admit,” Sorkin wrote us this morning, “I was completely bowled over by the turnout. It was quite incredible to reassemble so many characters from the book in...

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  2. January 13, 2010 07:16 PM

    A Distant Echo

    What Father Coughlin tells us about Glenn Beck

    By Douglas McCollam

    Throughout the initial year of President Obama’s term, there has been much consternation over the administration’s “war” with the conservative press. With commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham taking to the airwaves to label the president everything from a stealth socialist to a crypto-fascist, there is a feeling that an unprecedented, and possibly even dangerous,...

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  3. January 12, 2010 06:53 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books about familial discoveries and coverage of Hillary Clinton

    By James Boylan

    Enemies of the People:
    My Family’s Journey to America
    By Kati Marton
    Simon & Schuster
    272 pages, $26

    For Kati Marton’s parents, living well seemed the best defense—while it lasted. Both of Jewish descent, the Martons managed to survive Adolf Eichmann’s brutal roundup of Hungarian Jews during the waning years of World War II. After the...

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  4. January 11, 2010 07:30 PM

    Friend or Faux

    The sublime fakery of Armando Iannucci

    By Richard Gehr

    "Blimey,” tweeted Armando Iannucci on November 20. “Cameron says Thick is his favourite prog, and Health Sec quotes Malcolm in H of C. I feel queasy and uneasy.”

    Allow me to unpack this tweet for you.

    First, for the leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party to declare Iannucci’s The Thick of It his favorite TV program is equivalent...

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  5. December 09, 2009 05:20 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books on foreign reporting and journalists who risked it all

    By James Boylan

    Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting
    By John Maxwell Hamilton
    Louisiana State University Press
    655 pages, $45

    This tome has the heft of a doorstop and contains more than 200,000 words plus notes, but do not be deterred: Journalism’s Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton, a...

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  6. December 07, 2009 05:57 PM

    Poverty’s Poet Laureate

    A new portrait of Dorothea Lange

    By Julia M. Klein

    Dorothea Lange was an elite portrait photographer, a government-funded propagandist, an artist, and, most famously, a photojournalist who helped invent documentary photography. Like a poet laureate of poverty, she created some of her most enduring images while on the federal payroll. But if her diverse roles and aspirations could be mutually reinforcing, they also produced irony and contradiction, as...

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  7. 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...

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  8. October 06, 2009 09:31 PM

    First Person Singular

    An African master recedes behind his own myth

    By Eula Biss

    In a letter to Chinua Achebe, John Updike once admired the swift and surprising ruin of the hero at the conclusion of Arrow of God. It was an ending, Updike ventured, that “few Western novelists would have contrived; having created a hero they would not let him crumble, nor are they, by and large, as truthful as you in their...

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  9. 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...

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  10. 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...

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  11. 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...

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  12. 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...

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  13. 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...

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  14. 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...

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