The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
By Alexander Waugh
Doubleday, 366 pages, $27.50
With apologies to his cult, here’s a sound bite version of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: A concept is good when it’s exactly as rigorous as it needs to be. If your concept is too vague, it will Read More
Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age
By D.J. Taylor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 361 pages, $27
British tabloids of the 1920s bestowed the sobriquet “Bright Young People” on the generation born near the turn of the century, a generation alienated from older siblings traumatized and decimated by the Great War, and Read More
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about
Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
By Adam Gopnik
Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24.95
Banquet at Delmonico’s:
Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the
Triumph of Evolution in America
By Barry Werth
Random House, 362 pages, $27
“Fifty years ago no one would have chosen Darwin Read More
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
By Denis Dutton
Bloomsbury Press, 243 pages, $25
Soon after Denis Dutton, a professor of the philosophy of art at a New Zealand university, founded the Web site Arts & Letters Daily in 1998, it became known as the Internet’s most reliable source of the type of Read More
Beat the Reaper
By Josh Bazell
Little, Brown, 320 pages, $24.99
A good thriller writer shares two things with a con man: He tricks you into trusting him, and he takes you for all you’re worth. If he’s good, you fall for the hustle. And if he’s really good, you’ll be entertained even as you’re Read More
College Girl
By Patricia Weitz
Riverhead, 328 pages, $24.95
College girls know not what they do, or whom they do it with. So we keep hearing, anyway: Most recently, a New York Times Op-Ed introducing the concept of “hooking up” to old people informed us that girls want relationships but guys don’t. Other fretful accounts Read More
The Case for Big Government
By Jeff Madrick
Princeton, 224 pages, $22.95
Brother, have you heard the news? Big government is back in fashion. Decades of deregulation and cuts to social programs have left a sour taste in people’s mouths; the credit crunch has made pragmatists out of even the staunchest ideologues. The idea that Read More
Music Quickens Time
By Daniel Barenboim
Verso, 184 pages, $24.95
Daniel Barenboim, director of the Berlin Staatskapelle and a pianist whose recordings of Beethoven’s Sonatas have become a touchstone of their modern interpretation, has written a slim but substantial new volume that borrows (conveniently enough for the summarizing book reviewer) the sonata’s three-part structure of Read More
Wishful Drinking
By Carrie Fisher
Simon & Schuster, 176 pages, $21
Carrie Fisher may have inspired a generation of Princess Leia Halloween costumes with her signature movie role, but as she tells it in her memoir, Wishful Drinking, she’s never been at ease as an actress. Resolutely “anti-elegant,” she parlayed her celebrity into a rewarding Read More
The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia
By Laura Miller
Little, Brown, 311 pages, $25.99
We live in an age of relentless fascination, even obsession, with what we might as well call Middle-youth, that achy, anxious period of early adolescence marked by overpuffed independence, sexual confusion and passion for sweet soda pop and brightly Read More
