sábado, 11 de junio de 2011

Book Review


Sunday Book Review

‘Illuminations’

Illustration by Hugo Guinness
John Ashbery brings a long and deep familiarity with French life, language and culture to this translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry.
John Sayles

‘A Moment in the Sun’

John Sayles’s novelistic reimagining of America at the turn of the last century nods to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon.

Books About Jane Austen

A memoir of how Jane Austen’s novels transformed one reader’s life, and a study of why we still read the “Lady novelist.”
Tacitus

‘A Most Dangerous Book’

How a long-lost Latin manuscript became a Nazi talisman.
Emma Forrest

‘Your Voice in My Head: A Memoir’

A young writer overcomes her self-destructive behavior with the help of a gifted therapist.

‘In the Garden of Beasts’

How an American ambassador to the Third Reich, and his daughter, gradually realized what a mess they were in.
J. Courtney Sullivan

‘Maine’

In J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel, three generations of a family’s women take guilt, secrets and old wounds on a beach retreat.

‘The Filter Bubble’

A progressive political activist asks whether the personalization of search-engine results is a blessing or a curse.
A piece of clothing torn from a refugee who escaped over the Berlin Wall into West Germany, 1964.

‘Berlin 1961’

An account of the construction of the Berlin Wall asks whether J.F.K. should be blamed for losing the city.

‘My American Unhappiness’

In this novel, a 33-year-old bureaucrat with his own problems sets out to reveal a nation of fake smiles.

Books About Women in the Workplace

Two books offer workplace history and advice, with particular regard to the matter of gender.
Ellen Willis in 1970.

‘Out of the Vinyl Deeps’

Now out of the vault, the collected work of a New Yorker critic who bore eloquent witness to the heyday of rock.
Body scans from a machine at Salt Lake City International Airport.

‘The Rights of the People’

David K. Shipler laments the state of the Constitution in the aftermath of 9/11.
YOUNG ADULT

‘Anya’s Ghost’

A graphic novel about a teenage girl and her friend Emily, a 100-something-year-old ghost who died 90 years earlier.
Book News and Reviews
Jorge Semprún
Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Jorge Semprún
Mr. Semprún was a member of the French Resistance, a Communist organizer, a novelist and a screenwriter.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Travel Writer, Dies at 96

Mr. Fermor crossed Europe on a three-year journey, then wrote about his adventures.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES

‘Dreams of Joy’

In Lisa See’s new novel, a headstrong young woman who grew up in Los Angeles rejects her family and the United States to find out what China is like during the Great Leap Forward.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Patrick French

‘India: A Portrait’

In “India: A Portrait,” a new biography of a sort, Patrick French tries to get his arms around the size and import of this teeming country.
Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, in his offices.

A Heckuva Book Pitch. That’s Putting It Mildly.

A mock children’s book with an obscenity in the title has become a hit for a small Brooklyn publisher, which now has to gear up for what it hopes will be big sales.
AT HOME WITH TOM MCNEAL
Tom McNeal in his home library.

An Imagination With Built-Ins

Tom McNeal’s new novel, “To Be Sung Under Water,” took shape at his home overlooking an orange grove in Southern California.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Roberto Bolaño

‘Between Parentheses’

The excellent thing about “Between Parentheses, ” a collection of Roberto Bolaño’s nonfiction, is how thoroughly it dispels any incense or stale reverence in the air.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Mark Seal

‘The Man in the Rockefeller Suit’

How a 17-year-old immigrant came to America and assumed a succession of identities, eventually passing himself off as one Clark Rockefeller.
Martha Roth, dean of humanities at the University of Chicago, and Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute there.

After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World

Scholars at the University of Chicago have completed a project that includes 28,000 words from ancient Mesopotamia, covering a period from 2500 B.C. to A.D. 100.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Ron Hansen

‘A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion’

In “A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion” Ron Hansen delves into the real-life case of a wife who coaxed her lover into killing her husband for insurance money.
BOOKSHELF

Views of New York, From Past to Present

Stories handed down from father to son, a love letter to the dogs of New York, and guides to the city, sincere and snide.

Book Review Back Page

The Pleasures and Perils of Creative Translation

The French novels I read in my youth were really English novels by translators, based on original ideas by Camus and Cocteau.

Book Review Podcast

Featuring Dorothy Gallagher on Erik Larson’s new best-seller, “In the Garden of Beasts”; and Emily Gould on Emma Forrest’s memoir, “Your Voice in My Head.”
  •  This Week's Book Review Podcast (mp3)
The Times's Critics
Recent reviews by:
Summer Reading

Visuals

A roundup of new art and design books, about screen printing, graffiti lettering, signage in South African townships and pavement chalk artists.

Comics

A roundup of new comics collections and graphic novels on grown-up themes.

‘The Influencing Machine’

A media manifesto from N.P.R.’s Brooke Gladstone, delivered in comics form.
MORE REVIEWS

Summer Reading Special Issue

The complete June 5 Book Review, with roundups of cookbooks, gardening books and travel books; new fiction; books about Hollywood and music; and more.
Book Review Features
Lydia Davis

Up Front: Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is well known for her extremely short, elliptical stories. But in her parallel career, as a translator of French literature, she has tackled wordier writes, including Proust and Flaubert.
TBR
David Eagleman

Inside the List

David Eagleman, who hits the hardcover nonfiction list this week with “Incognito,” is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun.

Paperback Row

Paperback books of particular interest.

Editors’ Choice

Recently reviewed books of particular interest.

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