Book Reviews
Story Stream
Philip Gefter's 'Cocktails with George and Martha' February 28, 2025
It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was tha...
Failure to Launch February 28, 2025
Some technologies always seem to lie just over the horizon. Where, we ask, are our robot servants, jetpacks and flying cars? Closer to hand, where are the self-driving cars that don’t require a human driver, the VR headsets that don’t make you throw ...
A Bonkers Artist Heart February 27, 2025
Once a year at my Catholic elementary school, all the second, third, and fourth graders would head down to the school chapel, where we’d sit in the pews in alphabetical order and wait for our turn to confess our sins. It was easy to tell when you wer...
On Julia Kornberg’s 'Berlin Atomized' February 27, 2025
I used to play a game when I lived in Moscow in my early twenties. I would see how deep into a flirtation I could get while pretending to be a Russian girl; in actuality, I am American. My Russian-language skills were limited, but in a famously patri...
The Power of American Originals February 26, 2025
“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”Karl Zinsmeister, 2025BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about Ameri...
The Painter Novel February 26, 2025
“IN MY EXPERIENCE painters are far less conventional than writers,” says Rachel Cusk in her 2014 novel Outline. Writers, hesitant about filling their novels with authorial doubles, have a tendency to put their self-inserts in smocks. These painter pr...
Can Economics Explain America’s Gun Violence? February 26, 2025
In the 2022 BBC show Inside Man, Stanley Tucci’s character (Jefferson Grieff), an inmate on death row, says something dramatic about murder: “There are moments that make murderers of us all… all it takes is a good reason and a bad day.”In Unforgiving...
Michael Dirda Is Incredibly Fortunate February 26, 2025
“I keep a button on my desk that says ‘Life?’ Of course I have a life. It’s a life filled with books.” Those are the words of Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Price-winning book critic for the Washington Post.In a recent Post interview, Dirda explained his de...
Don’t Call It a Comeback February 25, 2025
In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, femin...
The Banty, Blustering Genius of Earl Weaver February 25, 2025
The greatest sight in Major League Baseball during the 1970s was almost certainly this one: the Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver storming out of the dugout to remonstrate over some perceived injustice to his players. He would be so incensed at t...
American Renaissance Man February 24, 2025
American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character is mistitled. The title, and the advertising that has accompanied the book, suggests a biography of Buckley and his role in American life. (Something I was still ant...
Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy Offers Timely Lessons February 24, 2025
When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940...
Lorne’s Prime Time February 24, 2025
In a season five episode of the estimable sitcom 30 Rock, itself based on the goings-on of a network television show closely modeled on Saturday Night Live, the writer and producer Aaron Sorkin makes a cameo as himself. Introduced to Tina Fey’s ever-...
Interstellar Ineptitude February 24, 2025
The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of p...
Down and Out in Hollywood February 21, 2025
LOU MATHEWS’S NEW NOVEL Hollywoodski demonstrates that the Hollywood novel is alive and well in the 21st century, albeit as a kind of zombie genre lacking any real sense of direction—a perfect description of the career trajectory of protagonist Dale ...
The Stones That Keep On Rolling February 21, 2025
Most books about the history of rock music are written by people who weren’t there when that history was made. It’s something they have in common with books about World War II: the authors may know all the facts, but they don’t feel the chronology in...
Perfecting the Art of Pedantry February 21, 2025
Who exactly is Eduardo Torres?Any proper answer would have to come in phases. For starters, Torres is (or was—his existential standing is a matter of debate) a provincial literary critic hailing from San Blas, Mexico; an enemy of some and and mentor ...
Samuel Graydon's 'Einstein In Time and Space' February 21, 2025
Laments about the state of education are arguably as old as education is, or close to it. And they’ve always been a waste of time.That’s because knowledge isn’t bestowed on us as much as it’s created. The Wright Brothers didn’t attend college, but it...
A Divorce Memoir With No Lessons February 21, 2025
Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this ...
How Did Law Schools Become Lawless? February 21, 2025
Legal academia has been long overdue for a book-length critique, and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites delivers—released just as Trump’s election victory appears to signal a turning of the tide on wokeness....
Reader, I Divorced Him February 20, 2025
YEARS AGO, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’...
Words Fail Me February 20, 2025
On November 5, 1979, William Gaddis, reticent and guarded, stood at the head of a long narrow room at St Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. He would have preferred to be many other places; he would have preferred, most of all, to have been hom...
Sophie Lewis’s Case Against Feminism February 19, 2025
‘Most people live in a crackpot world where the sky is green,” Curtis Yarvin wrote recently. And while “most people,” of course, don’t, extremists on either side of a given issue often do. This is the case for independent academic and essayist Sophie...
In the Lions’ Studio February 19, 2025
During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” ...
Desperado Dadaism February 18, 2025
Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Light...
