Woody Allen: A Biography , by John Baxter. Carroll & Graf, 492 pages, $27.
To those of you leery of back-jacket “advance praise,” let me say straight off that British biographer John Baxter’s nearly 500-page deconstruction of Woody Allen amply lives up to the adjectives that adorn its hindquarters. “Often hilarious”? You betcha! How else Read More
It’s not surprising that much of the attention focused on the newly refurbished Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been lavished on the building rather than the art-on New Yorkers, that is, rather than the Greeks. Michael Kimmelman declared in The New York Times that the renovated wing is “the Read More
The Tesseract , by Alex Garland. Riverhead Books, 273 pages, $24.95.
O.K., so what’s a tesseract? No, it’s not expensive Italian flooring, nor is it the new Meredith Monk performance piece. It is, as we learn about 20 pages from the end of this complex and intriguing novel, a four-dimensional object-a hypercube-which, when unraveled and Read More
The Treatment , by Daniel Menaker. Knopf, 269 pages, $23.
Who’d be crazy enough to see a shrink whose name means “earnest morals”?
Fortunately for the readers of The Treatment , Daniel Menaker’s enjoyable if flawed first novel, Jake Singer is, and does. A youngish Jewish teacher at a tony uptown prep school for Read More
The Page Turner , by David Leavitt. Houghton Mifflin, 244 pages, $24.
The act of literary larceny that tells you something really interesting about David Leavitt’s writing isn’t the one you probably already know about. That, of course, was the case in which the author appropriated a central episode from Stephen Spender’s autobiography to Read More
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge , by E.O. Wilson. Knopf, 332 pages, $26.
Some ungenerous souls may object that there is something just the tiniest bit passive-aggressive about choosing a word that 99.9 percent of all humans will not know as a title for a major work about the unity of all human knowledge. But Read More
