Subscribe
new subscription
gift subscription
renew subscription

Review

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. January 08, 2009 09:00 AM

    All in the Family

    The Bacardi saga encapsulates Cuba’s turbulent history

    By Mirta Ojito

    Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

    By Tom Gjelten

    Viking

    480 pages, $27.95

    Over the years, I’ve had my share of Cuba Libres, the cocktail Americans know as rum-and-Coke and many Cuban exiles know as “mentirita,” or little lie because Cuba isn’t free and hasn’t been for a long time. Yet I never knew...

    Continue reading
  10. January 07, 2009 01:15 PM

    Brief Encounters

    Short reviews of books about public confession and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

    By James Boylan

    The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America

    By Susan Wise Bauer

    Princeton University Press

    352 pages, $26.95

    We are living, writes Susan Wise Bauer, in an Age of Public Confession, now at least forty years in duration. Confession, she makes clear, differs from apology. Apology is easy (“I am sorry”), but confession is hard...

    Continue reading