But would Bruce come? The question echoed, soft but insistent, on the evening of Friday, Sept. 18, in a converted yoga studio on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, N.J. The rock photographer Danny Clinch was celebrating the opening of “Be True,” his first single-subject exhibit: Bruce Springsteen, in his natural habitat. Several hundred people had Read More
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
By Dan Baum
Spiegel & Grau, 335 pages, $26
About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect Read More
Mark Bittman, the New York Times food columnist and best-selling cookbook author, was ambling unnoticed through the tight aisles of the Fairway at 74th Street and Broadway on a mild Friday evening earlier this month, shopping for dinner. He nosed briefly around the fish counter before settling on a two-pound slab of monkfish. He had Read More
Lyrics: 1964-2008
By Paul Simon
Simon & Schuster, 408 pages, $35
"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”
These are the Read More
Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
By Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño
Alfred A. Knopf, 260 pages, $24.95
I’m proud to say that I’ve never been thrown out of Shopsin’s General Store. This is due primarily to the fact that I’ve never visited it, neither in its two hallowed West Village nooks Read More
The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld And the Fight Over Presidential Power
By Jonathan Mahler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $26
Had you been asked to assemble the legal team to brief and argue before the Supreme Court a case that would result in "the most important decision on presidential power ever"—as one noted court Read More
The only vegan member of Congress, Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), was drifting calmly through Cipriani Wall Street on Saturday, May 17, wearing a patterned bow tie, a gold-embossed flag pin and a strangely youthful glow. “I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in,” said Mr. Kucinich, 61, who stopped eating meat decades ago to combat Read More
On Friday, May 9, counterintuitively lewd comedian Sarah Silverman appeared at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall in a benefit show for Project A.L.S., which raises money for the study and treatment of a not-very-hilarious neurodegenerative disease. Instead, her monologue evoked an old favorite: starving African children. “I don’t send them money,” Ms. Silverman deadpanned, tugging Read More
GREETINGS FROM BURY PARK
By Sarfraz Manzoor
Vintage, 269 pages, $13.95
Among the vast library of written material produced in the wake of Bruce Springsteen’s three-plus decades of superstardom—biographies, hagiographies, magazine profiles, fan testimonials, academic treatises, lyric exegeses, blog and private journal entries—Greetings From Bury Park may be the first to blame Read More
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Twelve, 291 pages, $24.99
I ordered lunch today from the go-to Chinese restaurant around the corner from my office. It came in a large plastic bag that held a large paper bag filled with all sorts of containers: a Read More
