THE SPIES OF WARSAW
By Alan Furst
Random House, 266 pages, $25
IT’S 1937, AND Lt. Col. Jean-François Mercier is the French military attaché in Warsaw. A minor nobleman and former cavalry officer, he’s rather restive in his largely desk-bound assignment—as one would expect from a man decorated with the Croix de Guerre, a passing Read More
THE INVINCIBLE QUEST: THE LIFE OF RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON By Conrad Black McClelland & Stewart, 1,152 pages, $45 NIXON AND KISSINGER: PARTNERS IN POWER By Robert Dallek HarperCollins, 740 pages, $32.50 VERY STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: THE SHORT AND UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF RICHARD NIXON AND SPIRO AGNEW By Jules Witcover PublicAffairs, 412 pages, $27.95 Read More
Author photos are never on oath, but George W.S. Trow’s make you wonder. Trow, who died last week in Naples at 63, possessed one of the more indescribable sensibilities to adorn The New Yorker, that most sensibility-driven of magazines. He was snob, moralist, wit, cultural critic, aesthete, nostalgist, lost boy, citizen. “Wonder was the grace Read More
Years have vintages too: It doesn’t take a sommelier to recommend a 1776, an 1815, a 1989. Conversely, who’d want to lay in a year like, let us say, 1973? It’s the nadir of that supposed nadir of decades, the 1970’s. Watergate roiled the nation. Oil prices skyrocketed. Stagflation made a stumblebum of the economy. Read More
Years have vintages too: It doesn’t take a sommelier to recommend a 1776, an 1815, a 1989. Conversely, who’d want to lay in a year like, let us say, 1973? It’s the nadir of that supposed nadir of decades, the 1970’s. Watergate roiled the nation. Oil prices skyrocketed. Stagflation made a stumblebum of the Read More
The Secret Man: The Story
of Watergate’s Deep Throat,
by Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster. 249 pages, $23.
The Secret Man, Bob Woodward’s absorbingly anticlimactic
Deep Throat book, has two revelations to offer. One is small, though rather
marvelous. The other—hidden in plain sight in the title—is bigger, if also
Read More
