Review
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November 17, 2009 09:00 AM
Glass Half Full?
Two new books with clashing takes on American optimism
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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October 06, 2009 09:24 PM
Raising Keynes
A new book paints the iconic economist as the ultimate realist
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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October 06, 2009 09:19 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books on the Irish Revolution and animal rights crusaders
The News From Ireland:
Foreign Correspondents and The Irish Revolution
By Maurice Walsh
I.B. Tauris
258 pages, £20At 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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October 06, 2009 08:00 AM
Rocket Man
An epic tale of men, missiles, and bureaucratic maneuvering
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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July 14, 2009 12:38 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books on campaign bloggers, tabloids, and a collection of Henry Fairlie’s essays
Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
By Eric Boehlert
Free Press
280 pages, $26in 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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July 13, 2009 08:00 AM
Heart of Stone
A distinguished new biography of a career contrarian
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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May 16, 2009 04:15 PM
Live and Learn
How the meritocratic assembly line has let us down
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
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It wasn’t the best publicized of the many literary feuds that Tom Wolfe conjured up... -
May 16, 2009 04:05 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about William Randolph Hearst and the Arkansas Gazette
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...
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March 02, 2009 05:34 PM
Buyer Beware
A history of redlining and racism in Chicago
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...
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March 01, 2009 05:48 PM
Picture Perfect?
In three new graphic histories, the facts get a visual boost
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...
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March 01, 2009 04:00 PM
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about Fred Friendly and America's early newspapermen
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...
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January 27, 2009 09:00 AM
The Devil Made Them Do It
A new anthology about men (and women) behaving very badly
True Crime: An American Anthology
Harold Schechter, editor
The Library of America
788 pages, $40The 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,...
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January 26, 2009 08:30 AM
Here Comes the Bogeyman
A chaotic portrait of Rupert Murdoch and his discontents
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...
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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.
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...
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Desks
The Audit Business
The Observatory Science
- Saving Corwin’s Creatures MSNBC wades into new territory with environmental documentary 100 Heartbeats
- Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets Times keeps a needed eye on green premiums
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Greg Craig and Transparency
- Not For All the News in China, Part I Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia



