Margot Livesey—whose newest opus, House on Fortune Street, you should include in your to-be-read list—writes: When I was almost five my father married my stepmother and we began to spend our summer holidays in Pitlochry, the small Scottish town where my stepmother’s sister lived. There
Iowa Writer’s Workshop guru Ethan Canin (Carry Me Across the Water) has a number of well-regarded books under his belt, most notably his story collection The Palace Thief. His newest effort takes a scion of the working class, Corey Sifter, from estate yard boy to U.S. senatorial
The latest opus from Wang Anyi (Baotown) is set in post-World War II Shanghai, and traces the survival of ghetto girl Wang Qiyao, who is deeply impressed with the incandescence of 1940s Hollywood and must hide her “decadence” from the various ebbs and flows of Mao and Co.’s
A family that includes William and Henry and Alice James is an obvious motherlode of story, information, and speculation—all that remains is for Paul Fisher to build a coherent, insightful narrative about these fascinating siblings. Asked what is new about his James family book, Fisher explains: Until just a
Jim Holt, who writes for a number of smart publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Lingua Franca, and then some—tries to answer the question, “What’s so funny?” Being the engaging and skillful writer he is, he is not obliged to succeed for this book to
There is some quibbling regarding the use of the word “empire” in Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating new history of the powerful and unrecognized Comanche tribe of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Nonetheless, this highly original narrative details the tribe’s accomplishments and impressive geographical reach throughout the 18th and
Physicist Alan Sokal is famous for his 1996 Social Text article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written as a parody of postmodernism (it is included in this book). Of course, it caused much warranted fulmination in academic circles, as well as a stir in the
The Eugene V. Debs story is a moving, albeit instructive one, though he likely will never be given his due as one of the great figures of American history. Jailed for speaking out against the so-called “war to end all wars,” Socialist Debs ran for president in 1920, garnering
This book’s subtitle (“The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror”) aptly synopsizes its content, focusing on the 12 years of naive hope where it was seriously (we thought) suggested there would be a “peace dividend.” Considering this study
On the face of it, human rights is not exactly the most exciting topic, but in this historical survey (apparently the only comprehensive study of its kind), Micheline Ishay has reached back to the Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi and constructed a context with which to view the new, globalized world
