Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
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Book Digest: December 18, 2006
Let me just say that I am not a fan of lists and their masquerading as service journalism—though many 21st-century post-industrial homo ludens rely on lists to navigate the...
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Book Digest: December 11, 2006
If you are a book store habitué or are shopping for people who like books, you have noticed that booksellers are loaded up with books that used to be called “...
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Book Digest: November 20, 2006
The issue of how we come to choose the books (and music, art, movies, television, etc.) we attend to is one that I wrestle with continuously, in large part based...
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Book Digest: November 13, 2006
In Richard Powers’s excellent newest novel, The Echo Maker, a brain scientist contemplates the bad reviews attendant to his freshly published book—a novel experience for him. And he...
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Book Digest: November 6, 2006
You should know that Nonrequired Reading, Wislawa Szymborska’s small volume of prose pieces published a few years ago, altered my notion of book notices: I got the idea of...
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Birnbaum v.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about her new book and the Biafran War, being African in America, and the distorted picture of Africa created by the media.
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Book Digest: October 23, 2006
You are forewarned: This is about me. In a rare paroxysm of self-consciousness I recently spent some time going over (in my head, mind you) my contributions to American literary...
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Book Digest: October 16, 2006
Perhaps there is some truth to the old saw that literary squabbles are so vicious and virulent because they are for such small stakes. Assuming that the dispute around Myra...
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Book Digest: October 9, 2006
There was a point at which I experienced great vexation that the steady drumbeat of eyewitness reportage contained by the books of Jon Lee Anderson, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, and...
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Book Digest: October 2, 2006
You don’t need me to make you aware of such new books as those by Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, or Margaret Atwood—the literary press (such as it is)...
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Birnbaum v.
Sean Wilentz
Historian Sean Wilentz talks about social studies versus history, purple prose in founding-father biographies, and how “states rights” started trumping slavery in Jefferson Davis’s memoirs.
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Book Digest: September 25, 2006
Based on the drumbeat of enthusiastic notices it seems that the book of the moment is critic/scholar Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Good news indeed (I will have something...