Begley the Bookie

As Russian tanks rumble through South Ossetia and into Georgia, should we heed the advice of Slavoj Žižek, the hip Slovene theorist, who tells us that "to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence"? (The idea being that violence is "fundamental" to the capitalist status quo.)

Clever Mr. Žižek has published his new book, Violence (Picador, $14), just in time—not because of the bombs falling in Transcaucasia, but because his treatise is an acrobatic feat of theorizing worthy of the Olympics.

A random sampling:

"Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.  read more »

Literary biography has been wandering in curious directions, with fresh perspective the ever-receding goal.

When I talk about books, I preach and practice a superficially naïve gospel that puts characters from literature on equal footing with characters we encounter in real life (Elizabeth Bennet means more to many people than any number of living, breathing relatives), but I nevertheless had difficulty adjusting to Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), which is essentially a biography of the first and most famous nymphet, Nabokov’s Dolores Haze. It traces her ancestry and her afterlife (think porn sites), and lists with acrobatic precision the "facts" of her short, unhappy terrestrial existence.  read more »

Every summer house should have on its dusty potluck shelves, in among the Agatha Christie and the John D. MacDonald and the J. K. Rowling, a copy of Paul Collins’ Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (Picador, $15), an almanac of delusion, failure and heroically misguided enterprise. Isn’t vacation the best vantage from which to contemplate the sheer waste of epic flops?

The eponymous Banvard was a 19th-century American painter who grew rich with a vast moving panorama of the Mississippi—then went bust in a senseless commercial dogfight with P. T. Barnum. Among the other forgotten dreamers and maniacs celebrated by Mr.  read more »

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn—but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection.  read more »

Andrew Delbanco, the distinguished critic and biographer of Melville, gives Barack Obama two thumbs up in The New Republic (www.tnr.com), explicitly allowing his favorable literary judgment on Mr. Obama’s two books to shade into a political endorsement ("this man—to my ear, at least—is the real deal"). It’s a strange, leapfrogging idea, to think that a politician’s prose opens a window into his heart. "It is hard for any writer," says Mr. Delbanco, "no matter how selective his memory or guarded his words, to conceal himself in his writing. I suspect (I’ve never met him) that the weaknesses and strengths of Obama’s writing reflect those of his character—a virtuosity that tempts him to be pleased with himself and impatient with others, but also an awareness of human complexity.  read more »

Self-indulgence, that famous boomer trait, is stamped all over Geoffrey Douglas' The Classmates (Hyperion, $23.95), a brooding memoir of the St. Paul's School class of 1962—the class that brought us John Kerry and therefore, roughly four years ago, began to think of itself as somehow significant: One of their own was very possibly on the verge of being elected president. I'll spare you Mr. Douglas' personal problems, which he writes about in detail, and the travails of other obscure boys from '62—the ones who suddenly had to measure their ordinary selves against a classmate who was "almost president"—and concentrate on the young John Kerry, who was, to put it delicately, not popular with his peers.  read more »

For a subtle, impressively intelligent discussion of a topic that’s on just about everybody’s mind these day, see David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (Princeton, $29.95). Mr. Runciman, a lecturer in political theory at Cambridge, begins with the assumption that hypocrisy is inevitable in politics, and eventually argues that it’s also salutary, if only in the limited sense that hypocrisy implies a private sphere where the government can’t, or shouldn’t, reach. (When no one has anything to hide, he warns, "that is where terror lies.") He looks at individual thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to George Orwell, and even individual politicians (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), but the passage I want to share is a shrewd appraisal of Orwell’s opinion of two fellow writers, P.  read more »

It's hard to get your book properly reviewed when the critics are only interested in sizing you up as Barack Obama’s running mate. For Jim Webb, who is, as Elizabeth Drew insists in the June 26 New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), "a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side," it must be especially galling.

Or maybe not.

Ms. Drew herself seems much less engaged by the Virginia senator’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America (Broadway, $24.95), than by the man himself (a "warrior-intellectual," she calls him) and his zigzag career. In fact, I think she’s smitten:

   read more »

The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.  read more »

WHEN GORE VIDAL is on a tear, outrage and wit blend to produce a new, delicious and deadly substance, like sulfuric Champagne or a napalm martini. Consider, for example, an especially corrosive—and funny—essay on the twinned destiny of gays and Jews, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," originally published in The Nation in 1981 and newly reprinted in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50). Here’s a sample:  read more »

HOW VERY UNGENEROUS of Joan Acocella. In her long New Yorker essay about hangovers, "A Few Too Many" (May 26, $4.50), she cites Kingsley Amis several times, quotes him at length and mentions (without naming them) his three books on drinking but she fails to point out that Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $19.99) is being published this week. It’s those same three books gathered in a single volume and introduced by Christopher Hitchens (like Amis, a dedicated booze hound), and it’s riotously funny, at least for the first 100 pages. Here’s a taste:

"Alcohol science is full of crap. It will tell you, for instance, that drink does not really warm you up, it only makes you feel warm—oh, I see; and it will go on about alcohol being not a stimulant but a depressant, which turns out to mean that it depresses qualities like shyness and self-criticism, and so makes you behave as if you had been stimulated—thanks. In the same style, the said science will maintain that alcohol does not really fatten you, it only sets in motion a process at the end of which you weigh more. Nevertheless, strong drink does, more than anything else taken by mouth, apart from stuff like cement, cram on the poundage."

Amis’ chapter "The Hangover" makes sheer delight out of a painful subject. Sadly, Ms. Acocella’s essay, which is full of "alcohol science," doesn’t quite pull off the same trick.

USEFUL AND RELIABLY SENSIBLE, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (Broadway, $22) is one of those rare reference books that’s a pleasure to read; look up one word because you need to, and you’ll find yourself browsing, seduced by Bill Bryson’s quiet wit—and curious, too, about his choices. He admits upfront that this "guide to the problems of English spelling and usage" is a "personal collection," that it reflects his own taste and experience (is that why there’s an entry for Barack Obama, but none for Hillary Clinton or John McCain?), and he makes his dislikes apparent with blunt admonishment:

"Pique. Resentment. 'Fit of pique' is a cliché."

"Time, at this moment in. Unless you are striving for an air of linguistic ineptitude, never use this expression. Say ‘Now.’"

You’d expect that the author of a tome called A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) would have a wide range of interests, but I was nonetheless impressed when I found out on one page that Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg and on the next that gentoo is a breed of penguin.

One last entry:

"Kudos is a Greek word meaning fame or glory. Though often treated as a plural, it is in fact singular. Thus, it should be 'the kudos that was his due.’"

OR PERHAPS THE KUDOS that was her due. The PEN American Center is handing out literary prizes this week, and two of the cleverest women in New York are to be honored: Janet Malcolm, who won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for her biography Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale, $25); and Cynthia Ozick, who won the PEN/Nabokov Award for the splendid entirety of her work. Hats off.

Suze Rotolo, the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is not a writer, and it's unfair to expect anything more from her memoir, A Freewheelin' Time (Broadway, $22.95), than a peek or two into the life of a very young Dylan on the brink of stardom. Unfortunately, we get a great deal more: flat-footed accounts of Ms. Rotolo's unhappy family life, her banal sociological insights into the '60s, her predictable lefty politics and her (still) undigested thoughts about the role of the muse in the creative life of a great artist. So what could have been a intimate eyewitness account of the Greenwich Village folk music scene from 1961 to 1963 (roughly the dates of her brief time with Mr. Dylan) is instead a bloated and boring ramble. Except of course when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, late of Hibbing, Minn., makes one of his mercurial appearances.

Ms. Rotolo dishes no dirt at all, but she does share snippets from the letters her lovelorn boyfriend sent her in 1962, while she was away for eight months studying in Italy:

"There is a Peter Sellers movie on at 5 o'clock—I promised myself that I would see Taylor Mead's "The Flower Thief" … don't think I'm really loving movies—It's just that I'm hating time—I'm trying to push it by—I'm trying to stab it—stomp on it—throw it on the ground and kick it—bend it and twist it with gritin' teeth and burning eyes—I hate it I love you—"

Nothing else in the book comes close to the fierce kinetic force of that fragment.

The shelves are sagging under the weight of Dylan books, some of them excellent. Three sentences from Mr. Dylan's own Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, $14)—quoted by Anthony DeCurtis in his friendly New York Times profile of Suze Rotolo—remind us again of Mr. Dylan's weird, unstoppable talent and show us the muse from the artist's perspective: "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves."

If you want to see the same Village scene through the eyes of an intelligent, impartial, gratifyingly gossipy critic, go back to David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street (North Point, $17); if it's Mr. Dylan's lyrics that send you, check out Christopher Ricks' heroic close reading in

Dylan's Visions of Sin (Ecco, $15.95); if it's the music, try Greil Marcus' two Dylan books, The Old, Weird America (Picador, $14) and Like a Rolling Stone (PublicAffairs, $14).

Eager for more? Last month Simon & Schuster confirmed that Chronicles: Volume Two is on its way—there's even a chance it will be published before the end of the year.

If you're after a memoir pure and simple—a life exposed with intelligence and feeling—you could hardly do better than Pig Candy (Free Press, $24), in which Lise Funderburg takes us down to Monticello, Ga. (pop. 2,500), the place her father, a light-skinned black man, had escaped from, the place he came back to in his prosperous late middle age. The story is built around her father's attachment to his 126-acre farm—an attachment that grows stronger even as metastasized prostate cancer weakens him. Pig Candy—the title refers to barbecued pork—wears its somber themes lightly. Yes, it's about mortality, race and filial duty, but Ms. Funderburg never lectures, never preaches, never prettifies. She unspools her story with quiet candor and an unpretentious faith in the significance of what she has to say.

The scary YouTube videos of televangelist and McCain ally John Hagee don’t quite do justice to his talent as a preacher, at least according to Matt Taibbi’s vicious, funny, heartbreaking tour of the American scene, The Great Derangement (Spiegel & Grau, $24):

By any standard, Pastor John Hagee is an orator of unusual ability. His physical form is clownish; apart from the central-casting head of white, swept-back preacher hair, he has short, stubby arms and the body of a beach ball. He is one of those perfectly round fat men whose whole body seems like a platform for a straining top suit button that might at any moment shoot out skyward like a champagne cork. But when it talks, this beach ball has tremendous oratorical range, zooming back and forth from wry folksy humor to humility to booming fire-and-brimstone hellfire and back to humor again with effortless ease. When he asks for money, he sounds like he’s asking you the time. John Hagee could, as they say down here in Texas, talk a dog off a meat truck.

No wonder John McCain was eager for Pastor Hagee’s endorsement—despite his awkward habit of linking the Roman Catholic Church with Adolf Hitler and explaining that Hurricane Katrina “was, in fact, the judgment of God against ... New Orleans” for planning a gay pride parade.

If Mr. Hagee is the archvillain of Matt Taibbi’s villain-filled book, another preacher, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, pops up in the last chapter of Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange (Holt, $27.50) in the more flattering role of Benign Sage. A breezy, peripatetic history of European exploration of the New World, Mr. Horwitz’s book begins and ends at Plymouth Rock (which is housed in a columned enclosure known to the locals as “the Greek Outhouse”). Why, Mr. Horwitz repeatedly wonders, are the Pilgrim Fathers credited with “historic primacy” when Europeans had in fact been exploring the continent for centuries before the Mayflower sailed into the shallow bay near Plymouth? “Why elevate the Pilgrims to iconic status and ignore all the others who came to America before them?” Mr. Gomes has the answer:

Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.

 

He adds that the story of Plymouth Rock “may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It’s like religion—beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will.”

Fresh, friendly, charming, Robert L. Bowden’s Manhattan in Detail (Universe, $17.95) may be the prettiest new book on sale. It consists of 44 watercolors by Mr. Bowden—scenes of the city’s most famous monuments (the Met, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron building) mixed with glimpses of spots only locals are likely to care about (Elaine’s, Striver’s Row, a brownstone on St. Luke’s Place). The title is a bit of a misnomer: Watercolor is never the best medium for showing off detail. In fact, Mr. Bowden’s Manhattan is airbrushed, idealized, flattered by a warm, scrummy palette. It’s the city we carry with us in our hearts.

Oscar Wilde, on his tour of America in 1882, made not one but two pilgrimages to Camden, N.J., to see Walt Whitman—whose poetry he claimed to have known “from the cradle.” Afterward, the Good Grey Poet told a reporter that Wilde was “genuine, honest, and manly.” He added, for emphasis, “He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly.” Wilde, in return, compared Whitman to Goethe and Schiller: “There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry; it is so universal, so comprehensive.”

This comical instance of brazen late-19th-century logrolling comes from Michael Robertson’s Worshipping Walt (Princeton, $27.95), which introduces us to a handful of the “hot little prophets” who made a cult of Whitman, and also reminds us of the religious purpose of his poetry—with Leaves of Grass as gospel.  read more »

Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), compares Barack Obama’s speech on race last month in Philadelphia with the address Abraham Lincoln delivered at the Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860. In fact, the two speeches are very different, the glaring distinction being that Lincoln’s knotty, cerebral discourse appeals principally to reason, whereas Mr. Obama’s forthright simplicity appeals principally to the emotions. But Mr. Wills’ first few paragraphs are nonetheless astonishing for the parallels drawn between the 19th- and 21st-century candidates:  read more »

It’s spring at last, and girls are pushing up everywhere like daisies.

PLAYWRIGHT THERESA REBECK showcases a Brooklyn trio in her lively, entertaining and accurately titled first novel, Three Girls and Their Brother (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), a romp through the looking-glass world of fashion shoots and instant celebrity. Amelia (14), Polly (17) and Daria (18), red-haired beauties all, granddaughters of the celebrated literary critic Leo Heller, rocket into the limelight when The New Yorker features them in a photo spread. (Remember that vampy portrait of the Hilton sisters in the “Next Generation” issue back in 1999? )  read more »

Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”  read more »

In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.”  read more »

A Brit writing in a British literary journal has put his finger precisely on the pulse of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening,” Jonathan Raban proclaims in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk):

“The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’—is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism.  read more »

You know exactly what you’re going to get when you open the latest New Yorker (March 24, $4.50) and see an excerpt from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which is due out in mid-May, a few weeks after the release of Mr. Morris’ documentary of the same name. It’s a recurring nightmare, starring Specialist Sabrina Harman—the MP with the camera—and the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A of the military intelligence block at Abu Ghraib. The account is direct, detailed and unambiguous in its implications. Is there any part of the passage below that’s in any way unclear?  read more »

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95) is the latest from “gender expert” Susan Shapiro Barash. I picked it up out of idle curiosity (are women’s reasons for lying really different from men’s?) and would have put it straight back down (the writing is shockingly bad), but I was struck by the bold amorality of Ms. Barash’s approach: “I neither condemn nor condone the lies women tell,” she solemnly declares. Turns out that’s a lie. In fact, she thinks fibs are fab. Here’s the final sentence of her book, the sum of the wisdom she’s squeezed from “extensive personal interviews with women and experts in the field of psychology and counseling”:

“In my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I’ve come to recognize lying as an inestimable weapon in the female arsenal as women search for personal retribution and satisfaction.” Inestimable weapon? Female arsenal? Personal retribution? Looks like the gender wars are heating up.  read more »

The subtitle of Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, $22) is out of touch with the times: We’re more than merely excited, and as for winning—well, yes we can.

Consider the pace of book publishing: Mr. Steele shops his proposal about a year ago and delivers his manuscript in midsummer. Pause for four or five months while the machinery grinds invisibly. At last, in early December, the book appears in stores—by which time the “plausibility of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate” is old news. And two months later—now that plausible is probable—it’s safe to say that nobody shares Mr. Steele’s concern about Mr. Obama finding his own voice and becoming “an individual rather than a racial cipher.”  read more »

Plucked from the tragic stack that teeters on a distant corner of my desk—vain hopes piled on top of crushed ambition and dreams deferred—here are five first novels published in the last month. Five brave souls who have shouted out into the deafening roar. Five voices that should be heard.  read more »

Samantha Power has a new book out this week: Chasing the Flame is a posthumous valentine to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic United Nations envoy who was killed four and a half years ago by the massive truck bomb that destroyed the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. A handsome Brazilian who worked for the U.N. for 34 years, posted to hot spots like Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo and East Timor—an atlas of humanitarian disaster—Vieira de Mello was described to Ms. Power before they met as “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.” According to Ms. Power, “He brought a gritty pragmatism to negotiations, yet no amount of exposure to brutality seemed to dislodge his ideals.”  read more »

Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.

We've seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:  read more »

Is it still schadenfreude when it’s the indestructible Martin Amis getting kicked around? His new book, a collection of essays and stories about militant Islam, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007, won’t be published over here until April Fools’ Day, but it’s already out in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape, £12.90) and was greeted last weekend with a one-two punch that would have left any ordinary writer reeling. On Saturday the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) ran a review by the talented Christopher Tayler that concludes bluntly that “the writings collected here add nothing to [Amis’] reputation.” On Sunday, the London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) let loose historian William Dalrymple, who declares Amis’ book to be “not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings”; and again, in case we were in any doubt: “not just wilfully ignorant … but … at its heart disturbingly bigoted.”  read more »

Happy Monica Day.

The British, who love to linger over American embarrassment, started celebrating early, with a Times story last week guaranteed to make any U.S. citizen squirm. Damian Whitworth’s “Oral History: The Monica Lewinsky Scandal Ten Years On” (timesonline.co.uk) revisits some of our old friends, and the result, when not actively painful, is surprisingly amusing. Mr. Whitworth gives Paula Jones a call; she’s not willing to meet with him but doesn’t mind chatting on the phone. She’s working for a real estate agent in Little Rock, wondering why she’s the only party to the scandal(s) who didn’t score a book deal. He has tea with Kathleen Willey, who’s still plenty mad, mostly at Hillary. And he has an hilarious encounter with the loathsome Linda Tripp—who pretends not to be Linda Tripp but is so loathsome that you know right away it’s her. Ms. Lewinsky, alas, proves even more elusive: Mr. Whitworth fails to track her down.

Just in case you’re under the mistaken impression that these strolls down memory lane are always “cracking fun,” as the Brits would say, check out Ms. Willey’s Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton (WND Books, $25.95), which comes with Ann Coulter’s endorsement (“an important read”) and jacket copy dictated word for word by the vast right-wing conspiracy. There’s still a whole lot of hate out there.

AND HAPPY M.L.K. Day.

In his admiring new biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop (Hill and Wang, $25), Harvard Sitkoff wants to remind us of his subject’s subversive agenda, and to banish the “airbrushed” portrait of a “moderate, respectable ally of presidents.” King called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power”; and he was, by 1968, a vehement critic of the Vietnam War. Mr. Sitkoff argues that the more militant King is the more relevant King. And he’s right. What we need today, 40 years after his death, is the King whose antiwar sermons caused L.B.J. to rage, “What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?” What we need is the King who said he dreamed of “a world in which men no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxury to the classes.”

IMAGINE A WRITER’S voice as settled and calm as a Vermeer canvas. Now imagine that voice quietly “draped” over seven of Vermeer’s paintings (including one that hangs in the Frick: Officer and Laughing Girl). This is the wonderfully pleasurable effect of Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury, $27.95), a book that makes us look closely at intimate scenes from the artist’s hometown of Delft, and think broadly about how the wide world passed through those still, luminous interiors. Here’s a taste:

“In no less than eight of his pictures, Vermeer paints women wearing pearl earrings. And on these pearls, he paints faint shapes and outlines hinting at the contours of the rooms they inhabit. No pearl is more striking than the one in the Girl with the Pearl Earring. On the surface of that large pearl—so large that it was probably not a pearl at all, but a glass teardrop varnished to give it a pearly sheen—we see reflected her collar, her turban, the window that illuminates her off to the left, and, indistinctly, the room where she sits. Look closely at one of Vermeer’s pearls, and his ghostly studio floats into view.

“This endless reflectivity, writ large, nods toward the greatest discovery that the people in the seventeenth century made: that the world, like this pearl, was a single globe suspended in space.”

Could Hillary’s New Hampshire comeback mean that the groaning shelf of 30-odd Hillary books will also get a second look? An encouraging sign: In his Op-Ed piece this week, Frank Rich quotes approvingly from Sally Bedell Smith’s comprehensive and precise history of the Clintons’ White House years, For Love of Politics (Random House, $27.95). And coming next week: Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, edited by Susan Morrison (HarperCollins, $23.95), in which an all-star cast of women writers—including Lorrie Moore, Roz Chast, Lionel Shriver and Kathryn Harrison—reflect on the politician who may become our first female president. I wonder: Did any of them consult “Hillary Rodham Clinton as ‘Madonna’: The Role of Metaphor and Oxymoron in Image Restoration,” a scholarly study published six years ago by Karrin Vasby Anderson?  read more »

Need another excuse for ditching Hillary? She goose-steps through a long chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (Doubleday, $27.95). Mr. Goldberg concedes that “Hillary is no führer, and her notion of the ‘common good’ doesn’t involve racial purity or concentration camps”—but he can’t help concluding that she’s bent on “tyranny.” Sieg Heil!

I CAN NEVER hear the name of the man who built the V-2 rocket without reciting the lyrics of the great Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/ That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” In his review of a new von Braun biography in The New York Review of Books (Jan. 17, $5.50), British-born physicist Freeman Dyson takes a more serious attitude: “The author of this book condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the United States government for covering up the evidence of his collaboration. Here I beg to differ with the author. War is an inherently immoral activity. Even the best of wars involves crimes and atrocities, and every citizen who takes part in war is to some extent collaborating with criminals. I should here declare my own interest in this debate. In my work for the R.A.F. Bomber Command, I was collaborating with people who planned the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, a notorious calamity in which many thousands of innocent civilians were burned to death. If we had lost the war, those responsible might have been condemned as war criminals, and I might have been found guilty of collaborating with them.” A rare and admirable instance of the kettle claiming kinship with the pot.

A DASH OF wit and a dollop of innuendo help Simply Irresistible (Running Press, $12.95) transcend its how-to mission. Who knows whether it will help you to “unleash your inner siren and mesmerize men”—it will at least amuse and possibly instruct. Ellen T. White has organized 30-odd sirens, most of them plucked from the history books, into five categories, and chosen for each a representative figure. There’s the goddess (Evita Perón); the companion (Lady Randolph Churchill); the sex kitten (Marilyn Monroe); the competitor (Beryl Markham); and the mother (Wallis, Duchess of Windsor). Other sirens are deployed to teach specific lessons about how to have and hold the man of your choice: Cleopatra (a competitor) shows how to “make an indelible first impression”; Pamela Harriman (a mother/companion) suggests that you “make him the center of the universe”; Mae West (a competitor/goddess) offers tips on how to “talk dirty”; and Jackie Onassis (a goddess/companion) advises that you “strive to be chic.” The biographical sketches are sharply focused and well researched, and the illustrations are copious and eye-catching—but most of them are defaced by jokey speech bubbles. As the author herself counsels, “Don’t add raisins to your martini, or you’ll ruin the taste.”

Doc Humes is back. The late, legendary co-founder of The Paris Review and one-man pharmacological research lab is the subject of a documentary by his daughter, Immy Humes (opening in New York on Jan. 23 at the Film Forum); and his two cult novels from the late 1950’s, The Underground City (Random House, $15.95) and Men Die (Random House, $13.95), have been reprinted as handsome paperbacks—you’ll find them under “H.L. Humes” at your neighborhood bookstore. Here’s the first paragraph of his first novel, a view from an airplane approaching Paris (setting of The Underground City) on a cold January dawn: “The eastern sun, full and fiery orange, just risen clear of the horizon, began slowly to sink back into the gray ocean of clouds as the plane started down; the sky altered; clouds changed aspects. To the southeast, delicate as frozen breath, an icy herd of mare’s tails rode high and sparkling in the upper light of the vanishing sun; they were veiled in crystalline haze as the plane descended through stratocirrus, the sun in iridescent halo at its disappearing upper limb. And below, slowly rising closer, the soft floor of carpeting clouds gradually changed into an ugly boil of endless gray billows, ominous, huge. Against the east, rayed out in a vast standing fan: five fingers of the plummeting sun. …” Nice—and you can see why Doc’s old pal Peter Matthiessen calls it “heroically overwritten.”

OH, GOD—another God book. Slot this one near the middle of the now very long shelf that stretches from Christopher Hitchens to Mother Teresa—it wants to claim the narrow, contested patch of ground “between the fanaticism of some … and the nihilism of others.” Not surprisingly, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (Viking, $19.95) is mildly, calmly argued. What I found most peculiar is not that André Comte-Sponville, a French philosopher and committed atheist, should go to bat for spirituality, but that his rhapsodic description of a God-free mystical experience (it happened at night, in a forest, when he was about 25) eerily echoes the famous in-the-woods passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature.” The Frenchman found that his “ego had vanished”; Emerson found that “all mean egotism vanishes.” The difference, of course, is that the American also claimed to have become “a transparent eye-ball” (immortal phrase)—and “part or particle of God.”

WE HAVE MET the enemy and he is us: Daniel J. Solove’s frightening The Future of Reputation (Yale, $24) explores how the very human tendency to gossip and spread rumor is amplified by technology: Tittle-tattle is exponentially more powerful and damaging when blogged on the Internet. Though Mr. Solove worries about our sharp, wagging tongues and our eagerness to cast the first stone, he also points out the danger we pose to ourselves, the trap we set for ourselves with every item of personal data we post on the Web. He calls it “the self-exposure problem.” In my house, we call it Facebook.

By sad coincidence, my first ever book review (published in the London Review of Books nearly two decades ago) was of Raymond Carver’s last book, Elephant and Other Stories. Carver died, age 50, while I was working on the piece. In the light of the Carver-Lish editing controversy, and with The New Yorker fanning the flames in the fiction issue (Dec. 24 and Dec. 31, $4.99), I reread that maiden effort, and was surprised to find that without knowing it, I’d already taken sides. I was clearly rooting for the fuller, longer, warmer, pre- and post-Lish Carver. Here’s my vintage 1988 opinion of Carver’s very last story: “Great writers, Carver once said, leave their ‘particular and unmistakable signature’ on everything they write. In ‘Errand’ he demonstrates that his signature is neither brevity nor the bleak realities of damaged working class lives, but rather the accuracy and authority of his prose.” I was quoting from an essay Carver published in The New York Times in early 1981, when he was still very much Lish’s creature. In the same essay, he makes a point of praising judicious omission: “What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.”

By publishing parts of the painful Carver-Lish correspondence and the pre-Lish version of the story now variously known as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Lish) and “Beginners” (Carver), The New Yorker is clearly giving a boost to the anti-Lish, anti-minimalist brigade, but the magazine’s attitude is otherwise carefully balanced. Which version of the story is better? Let the reader decide, says The New Yorker. They’ve even provided on the Web site (www.newyorker.com) the astonishing Lish edit, an ocean of blue ink. This reader thinks the cuts are brutal—and that Mr. Lish vastly improved “Beginners.”

HA JIN, WHO WON a National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting (1999), is not a decorative writer. He puts the facts in front of the reader plainly, as though the thing itself were an amazement. It would be a mistake to call this approach artless—the art is not in the prose but in the unfolding of the tale. His new novel, A Free Life (Pantheon, $26), is an immigrant’s story in a plain brown wrapper: Nan Wu and his wife, Pingping, and their son, Taotao, come from China to the U.S. and … well, you know how it goes. An early chapter finds Nan in New York, working at Ding’s Dumplings on Pell Street. Here’s his first glimpse of the neighborhood: “What was amazing about Chinatown and Little Italy was that every street corner smelled different. … Nan enjoyed sniffing the air, especially the smells of popcorn, fried onion and pepper, and Italian sausage, though now and then a stench of rotten fruit would pinch his nose. … Walking along Canal Street, he felt as if he were in a commercial district in Shanghai or Guangzhou. Signs in Chinese characters hung everywhere. … The seafood stalls were noisy and had many fishes on display. Salmon, red snapper, bighead carp, pomfret, sea bass, all lay on crushed ice and looked slimy and no longer fresh, with collapsed eyes and patches of lost scales. There were also crabs, oysters, lobster, quahogs, sea urchins, razor clams. Though all the fish were dead, some of the stalls flaunted signs claiming SEAFOOD, ALIVE AND FIERCE!”

A fond farewell to the late Elizabeth Hardwick, who gave New York readers heaps of pleasure over the past six decades. Here, by way of tribute, is her meditation on the death of a great New York writer (it appeared in a brief, passionate biography she published seven years ago, when she was already 84): “He died at home in his own house with a wife to care for him in his great distress and need. It appears he came to be grateful for her long years as Mrs. Melville, a calling certainly unexpected in her youth. Old age and habit, a settling down, a relief from the active ‘writhing’ D.H. Lawrence named the condition of Herman Melville’s soul. If so, this ornament and pride of our culture was to end his days with a sigh, a resigned, bearable, pedestrian loneliness.”

HAROLD BLOOM, SELF-PROCLAIMED “latter-day Gnostic,” has a heroic capacity for peddling nonsense, as his latest book, Fallen Angels (Yale, $16), amply confirms. We are all, he tells us, fallen angels. He also tells us that because of our obsession with the visual, we are forgetting how to read, and can no longer distinguish between the fallen and the unfallen. Never mind. Skip the text of this ultra-slim volume of voodoo theology and literary waftings; linger instead over the bold, instantly appealing “illuminations” by Mark Podwal. Yes, it’s a visual gratification—but then Fallen Angels is, after all, an illustrated book.

FALLEN ANGELS, FALLEN gods. Maria Phillips had an ingenious idea: What if the Olympians were alive among us today—sharing a shabby apartment in London, in fact, their powers sadly depleted and their legendary bickering unabated? Gods Behaving Badly (Little Brown, $23.99) begins brilliantly, bubbles along pleasantly and then nearly sinks under the weight of a cataclysmic plot. No one who has met Artemis in her current incarnation (she’s now a dog walker), or Apollo (TV psychic), will mind in the least.

ONE OF THE many reasons for admiring William Trevor’s 12th collection of stories, Cheating at Canasta (Viking, $24.95), is the beautifully simple and direct way he presents his characters. Meet Mallory from the title story: “Bulky without being corpulent, sunburnt, blue-eyed, with the look of a weary traveller, Mallory was an Englishman in the middle years of life and was, tonight, alone.” Or this, from “Old Flame”: “Zoë, now seventy-four, is a small, slender woman, only a little bent. Her straight hair once jet-black, is almost white. What she herself thinks of as a letterbox mouth caused her, earlier in life, to be designated attractive rather than beautiful. ‘Wild’ she was called as a girl, and ‘unpredictable,’ both terms relating to her temperament. No one has ever called her pretty, and no one would call her wild or unpredictable now.” Here’s Wilby from “Folie à Deux”: “He is a spare, sharp-faced man in his forties, clean-shaven, in a grey suit, with a striped blue-and-red tie almost but not quite striking a stylish note.” And, finally, Cahal from “The Dressmaker’s Child”: “He was a lean, almost scrawny youth, dark-haired, his long face usually unsmiling. His garage overalls, over a yellow T-shirt, were oil-stained, gone pale where their green dye had been washed out of them. He was nineteen years old.”

Joseph Conrad turned 150 on Dec. 3. I’d sing “Happy Birthday,” but Mistah Conrad—he dead. Goes to show that books last better than humans. Actually, there was something superhuman about Conrad, starting with the ever-astonishing fact that English was his third language (after Polish and French). He managed to bridge divides often thought unbridgeable: the merchant marine and London literary salons, 19th-century adventure tales and 20th-century modernism. He could do the urban jungle (The Secret Agent) and the jungle jungle (Lord Jim). He could be the scourge of racists, and a racist himself (if you’re foolish enough to swallow Chinua Achebe’s hokum about Heart of Darkness). And his famous manifesto (the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus) is still one of the best descriptions of the task facing “the worker in prose”: “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Conrad did that job as well as anyone born in the last century and a half—and he even offered his mesmerized readers a surprise bonus: “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

SELF-PROCLAIMED “ROGUE travel writer” Chuck Thompson boasts that he’s “watched the travel world spin from more angles than most people know it has.” Smile When You’re Lying (Holt, $15) is his exposé of the travel business and the “pap” that passes for travel writing, “a small effort to correct the … industry’s bias against candor and honesty.” His weapons are wit, a well-oiled subversive reflex and a defiantly unbuttoned prose style. Here he is with a pal in Mexico, hiring a panga (that’s a skiff) piloted by Ernesto (the pangero) to ferry them to a surfer’s paradise: “Ernesto yanked the engine to life, manfully revved the throttle, flashed a wicked two-teeth-missing smile at the black exhaust filing the air, popped open a can of Tecate, sparked up a doobie, and offered us a hit. All before we’d cleared the marina. If there were any “No Wake in the Harbor” signs, we were moving way too fast to see them.”

A SLIM BOOK on a grim topic, Omer Bartov’s Erased (Princeton, $26.95) will never reach a wide audience. But anyone with Jewish relatives from Galicia—the southeastern part of Poland, much of which is now Ukraine—will read it with appalled fascination. Mr. Bartov, a professor of history at Brown, travels from town to town, from L’viv to Stryi (the small city where my father was born) to Ternopil, looking for traces of a vanished Jewish population, noting more often the sinister absence of those traces. He blames this erasure, mostly, on Ukraine’s nationalists, on their “urgent need to create a historical memory cleansed of Jewish life, fate, and genocide.” They’ve very nearly succeeded.

Andrew Sullivan’s love letter to Barack Obama in the December issue of The Atlantic; Roland Barthes’ What Is Sport?; James Geary’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Aphorists.  read more »

Ronan Bennett in the Nov. 19 issue of the Guardian; What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics edited by András Szántó; Bill McKibben's Fight Global Warming Now.  read more »

Adam Begley on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead; The Best of Ogden Nash; Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness.  read more »

Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever; Mark Kurzen's The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood; Steve Martin and Roz Chast’s The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!.  read more »

Molly Ivins’s Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch’s Assault Against America’s Fundamental Rights; Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist; Bernd Brunner’s Bears: A Brief History.  read more »

Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books; Elizabeth D. Samet's Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West P