Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, By Neil Gross; University of Chicago Press, 367 pages, $32.50.
When my daughters are ready for college, I’ll tell them a story they’ll scarcely believe: that when their father was first a graduate student, he attended a university where the most electric presence on campus was a Read More
THE UNCOMMON READER
By Alan Bennett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 128 pages, $15
To read is to be slightly ill. And the symptoms only worsen when reading something good. A 19th-century novel, a Bleak House or an Anna Karenina, commits us to its pages with a consumptive fatigue. Moral vitaminists assure us Read More
The world is a scrim, left blank for the tints and whorls of the ego. Void an object of its quantum of human aspiration, and you might as well annihilate it. I think, therefore I am. Fine, but even better: I desire, therefore you, he, she or it is, according to a mobilized army of Read More
Thanks to the auteur theory, instead of a lot of antiquated factory product and the studio P. and L. of yesteryear, we have the greats-Ford, Hawks, Lubitsch, Sturges, Cukor, Wyler, Lang, Wilder, Fuller, Hitchcock (and this is just a quick Monday-morning skim off the top of one’s head). And then we have near-greats, like Michael Read More
God having lavished so much on the exterior, Natalie Portman doesn’t deserve an inner life. Only a supernal emptiness could do her justice, and might spare her from the ravages visited on her one true precedent, the young Liz Taylor, a woman smart enough to seek revenge on her own God-given perfection. Ms. Portman is Read More
Darryl Zanuck loved the story but hated the choice of writer-director-an “arrogant bastard” with “four flops” to his name already, as he blustered to the producer, Sol C. Siegel. Zanuck wanted Ernst Lubitsch for the job, but Lubitsch already had three heart attacks to his name; and so, judged the better risk, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Read More
Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton. Pantheon, 306 pages, $24.
Alain de Botton approaches every subject like it’s virgin territory. At first this, can be disorienting: Am I reading a book, or grading the essay portion of the SAT? After a while, though, it gets a little
sad, like watching Vasco da Gama Read More
Blue
Blood , by Edward Conlon.
Riverhead, 562 pages, $26.95.
The
notable first-person genres of the past 10 years or so-spoiled-child memoir,
abuse memoir, depression memoir (did I mention spoiled-child memoir?)-attest to
a world in which high literacy and genuine hardship no longer go together quite
as commonly as they once did. War once Read More
Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, by Geoffrey O’Brien. Counterpoint, 328 pages, $27.50.
All pop criticism is bad. Like a boring dinner guest, it’s garrulous and name-dropping. Under the pretense of informing you, it glories in your ignorance. It reeks of junk-strewn garrets and a degrees in semiotics from Brown. Read More
Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind , by James Buchan. HarperCollins, 340 pages, $29.95.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the city of Edinburgh was little more than a filthy medieval backwater-as James Buchan paints it in his wonderful new book, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment Read More
