Jonathan Liu

Reborn: Journals and
Notebooks, 1947-1964
By Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
304 pages, $24

Whither the Dear Diaries, the PRIVATE—KEEP OUTs, the flimsy locks and matching steel keys?

Some day, when historians settle on what exactly was wrought by this decade’s personal technologies, atop the list might be the transubstantiation of the adolescent journal, evaporated as it has into the server cloud of Tumblrs and Twitters and non-Euclidean MySpaces. No self-respecting teenager these days bothers with anything as quaint as the bounded discretion of ink (or quainter still, graphite) on paper; in exchange for the psychic risk of a permanent Google trace, she gains a trillion-dollar infrastructure predicated on her inalienable, inexhaustible right to public self-definition—and the deal must seem more than fair.  read more »

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for
Civil Rights in the North
By Thomas J. Sugrue
Random House, 688 pages, $35

Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North was published on Nov. 4, 2008. Imagine toiling more or less monomanically for the better part of a decade in minor libraries, provincial archives and the “field”—that’s 688 pages and roughly 1,100 endnotes of toil—only to watch one seismic event send your doorstop opus crashing into apparent obsolescence. Barack Obama’s election is a historical fact—how still exhilarating and disorienting to type those words!—whose aftershocks may take generations and centuries to play out.  read more »

At around 1 o'clock Thursday morning, Morgan Entrekin decided it was time to extract himself from the dance floor at Socialista and head home. "I'm having an excellent time!" he said, half empty beer in hand. "I wish I were 20 years younger! I could dance all night."

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.  read more »

In an age where Damien Hirst errata have joined gold and United States government bonds in the shrinking pantheon of safe investments, can contemporary art still be dangerous?

More to the point, can contemporary art be dangerous when it's held in something of a polyurethane uterus, a haute-culture billboard designed by deconstructivist goddess Zaha Hadid, deposited on Rumsey Playfield in Central Park (after stints in Hong Kong and Tokyo), and paid for by Chanel—in these hard times is Lagerfeld really the Teutonic Karl we need?—whose iconic quilted handbag the melting plastic womb is said, implausibly, to resemble?

In a word, yes, if the traumas suffered by the Daily Transom at last night's opening party for the so-called CHANEL Contemporary Art Container—styled "Mobile Art"—are any indication.  read more »

Question: What did polite city-dwellers do, say, the weekend of November 2, 1929, with the markets fully imploded but the world-historical ramifications not yet clear and the breadlines not yet formed?

Answer, if that depression was great like this one: Attend a screening of the latest teen sex comedy (or is that teen-sex comedy?) at the Tribeca Grand.

This past Sunday it was Sex Drive, an oddly restrained little composition in the American Pie school whose craftsman-like simulation of raunch almost made up for its workmanlike impression of heart. The thrill might be gone (surely as much the Daily Transom's problem as the film's), but the mileposts were reached with unimpeachable alacrity: virginity, semen-involving hijink, astonishingly attractive best-friend girl understood as edgy due to darkness of hair, improbable set-up of road trip leading to sex-opportunity (sexportunity?), execution of said road trip, sight gag involving an elder gentleman's scrotum, an imbecilic Seth Green as Amish mechanic, complications to said road-trip and said sex-opportunity, mutual realization of unspoken more-than-friend status with best-friend girl.  read more »

The China Lover
By Ian Buruma
The Penguin Press, 394 pages, $26.95

The China Lover is a tough book to stay mad at. One of the most probing and ecumenical of our long-form journalists, Ian Buruma has had the good fortune to summon—or the better fortune to stumble upon—a truly fantastic subject for a novel, in this, his second work of fiction. Its scope encompasses nearly half the 20th century in a part of the world—Japan and East Asia more generally—that Mr. Buruma has for many years made less foreign with his steady, sensitive reporting and commentary. What a pity, then, that somewhere in the transition from nonfiction, his words begin to ring untrue.  read more »

If Gossip Girl didn't exist, it—or rather, She—would have to be invented. With barbarians at the crossings and cultural turpitude rotting the very Manhattan schist beneath our feet, She alone upholds Truth and Beauty and Order. In the postlapsarian moral universe of today's New York, God, and Wharton and Fitzgerald and Bradshaw, are dead; long live Gossip Girl.

Does this city deserve a muse and creator who imagines it better, stronger, nobler than it's been in untold generations, or ever? Unveiled last autumn, the first episode of the series opened with the return of Serena van der Woodsen—the once and future dauphine of Park Avenue; her surname, a plaintive lament for the town's old Dutch aristocracy, long ago suppressed by the arrival of vulgar Britons—after a semester abroad at a New England boarding school.  read more »

Spotted—also, striped, plaid, and fringed: all said looks were spied Sunday night in a display window at the Henri Bendel flagship on Fifth Avenue. The mannequins, as much as mannequins can be, were less silently bored than articulately, deliberately insouciant: the one on the far left held in her bent left hand a petite Sony Handycam; it was noticeably turned off, and angled at five o'clock, as if the spectators gathered on the sidewalk were obvi(ously) nothing worth committing to tape. Two places to her left, a blond had conjured the year's most fraught sartorial heresy: turquoise thigh-length stockings with color-matched open-toed pumps.  read more »

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism
By Ron Suskind
Harper, 432 pages, $27.95

With little warning and less explanation, Ron Suskind has written the year’s most brazenly experimental novel. It’s not entirely successful, but then the boldest experiments are often inconclusive. Mr. Suskind summons deceased aesthetic forms as an intervention on the now—but he’s not indulging in ironical pastiche. Moving, manipulative, maudlin, The Way of the World reanimates the conventions and contrivances of 19th-century realism with a seriousness too deadly to be a matter of mere style.

It’s all here: a cast of characters that sprawls across class and circumstance to represent the totality of a historical moment; central moral truths restated so often as to be less repetition than incantation; an all-seeing narrator who intrudes at regular intervals to tell the reader what it all means.  read more »

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books, 384 pages, $25

Call it the Thomas Frank Problem: Since What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2005), the journalist and polemicist has become a figure of irresolvable promise and consternation to the American left. Kansas, of course, put in straight and strident words what liberals previously felt compelled to dance around: that the conservative revolution was won, in large part, by convincing anxious citizens to vote directly against their economic interest. Four years later, and the Problem raises clamors on least two fronts.

The first is factual. As a number of academic number-crunchers have discovered, class—and especially the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses issue of "relative deprivation"—remains a fairly good indicator of political behavior, as long as you’re asking the right questions.  read more »

ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
By Ted Widmer
Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $25

Ted Widmer has carved out the kind of heroically peripatetic career in entertainment, politics and scholarship that gives young men hope and older men heartburn. Widmer? If the name doesn’t yet ring a bell, that could be because he’s had more than the average 44-year-old’s share of names.

Connoisseurs of high-concept mid-’90s glam metal know him as Lord Rockingham, dandy guitarist of the Upper Crust, a Boston band known for performing AC/DC-style anthems in powdered wigs and associated ancien régime regalia. (Their tongue-in-jowl celebrations of aristocracy include "Let them Eat Rock" and "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class.  read more »

BREACH OF PEACE: POTRAITS OF THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
By Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co., 239 pages, $45

The slog was slow and messy, but the Democratic primary season at least left us with a handy object lesson in the principles and perils of proportional response. One suspects that for the Clinton and Obama shock troops alike, the defining episode will be the May 31 meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, one of the few chapters of late capitalist civic life deserving of the old 20th-century catch-all epithet "Kafkaesque."

There, stammering and shaking on the dais, was Harold Ickes—veteran of 1964’s Freedom Summer and namesake of F.  read more »

THE AMERICAN RESTING PLACE: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY THROUGH OUR CEMETERIES AND BURIAL GROUNDS
By Marilyn Yalom
Houghton Mifflin, 297 pages, $30

IT'S A GOOD TIME to be alive if you’re interested in the American way of death.  read more »

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria. W. W. Norton, 292 pages, $25.95.

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is one of those peculiar volumes public thinkers of a certain disposition, upon reaching a certain popular standing, seem compelled to write: an omnibus summation of the recent trajectory of their thinking—and, by extension, the state of the world.  read more »

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc modifications and additions, so that by 1972, the same basic car had become a 3,300-pound, 375-horsepower V-8 behemoth.  read more »

THE COMPLEX: HOW THE MILITARY INVADES OUR EVERYDAY LIVES
By Nick Turse
Metropolitan, 271 pages, $23

Give Nick Turse credit: It’s not every would-be polemicist who has enough faith in the message to irrevocably—and hilariously—undermine himself two pages into his first book. Yet there they are, in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph of the introduction to The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, three words embalmed parenthetically in a text that (the reader will soon discover) rather persistently confuses parentheses for exclamation points.  read more »

ON EMPIRE: AMERICA, WAR, AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY
By Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 97 pages, $19.95

What a difference a decade makes in the course (and discourse) of empire!

In the year 303, the emperor Diocletian issued the Edict Against the Christians, which ushered in the great persecution that still bears his name. Across the Roman Empire, it was martyrs, martyrs everywhere; churches were razed and imperial offices purged—it was the harshest crackdown in Roman history.  read more »

FANON
By John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin,
229 pages, $24

Is it high tribute or snarky takedown to say that a novelist’s prose reads like verse? The “poetry of imagination,” scolded Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, precedes the “prose of thought.” Does that notion console the reader of John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as he struggles through five-page thickets of rather disconnected words, praying for the arrival of a period, an inner copy editor demanding the liberal placement of ¶’s in the margins.

“As he turns back,” begins one of Mr. Wideman’s verse-worthy performances, “he widens his eyes and nods, his gaze brushing hers, letting her share if she chooses the information his eyes carry about how rapidly the crowd’s growing for this matinee performance in dismal weather and somewhere in there between glances and glances away he says hi or hello, an English greeting in France, and she responds with the same English word and he repeats it, the echoing maybe a bit too cute, more playful than cute he hopes, aren’t adults allowed to be playful, though there’s a chance someone standing in this line or in the crowd streaming by on the boulevard would, if given the opportunity, torture you, chop off your head. …”  read more »

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 356 pages, $26

A few hundred pages into The Division of Labor in Society, a 1893 tract notable for its eyeball-bleeding tedium and the insouciant unfalsifiability of its categorizations, Emile Durkheim finally addresses a matter the modern reader might care to hear about: namely, “the division of intellectual labor.”

“Science,” Durkheim writes, “carved up into a host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole. … The division of labor cannot therefore be pushed too far without being a source of disintegration.” Durkheim, of course, spent the rest of his life establishing sociology as its own special, separate science.  read more »

AGAINST HAPPINESS: IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY
By Eric G. Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 151 pages, $20

If all productive misery reads like this, give me idle joy.

Americans are plump and satisfied, complains Eric G. Wilson, and the tragedy is that their rose-colored glasses and SSRI’s prevent them from channeling the creative inner torment of noted melancholics such as Coleridge, Keats, Beethoven and Lennon. And, oh yes, Eric G. Wilson.

As he strenuously insists on page after violet page of Against Happiness—the prose is roughly the color of a Grade 3 ankle sprain—Mr. Wilson is just as much a sad sack as the great men of history, and thus much closer to Truth than the so-called “happy types.” (Manic depression is the closest he ever gets to defining his own vaunted “melancholy.”)  read more »

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO
By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 244 pages, $21.95

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto? A churlish title, perhaps—but these days it’s hard not to agree with Michael Pollan that all eating is a political act.  read more »

In Turning Back the Clock, a collection of charming, bite-size missives from the millennial trenches of “Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi,” the good-faith give-and-take of the conscientious translator becomes “the very base of cultural life.”  read more »

"Stephen Colbert" has become one of the most richly textured characters on television. Sadly, none of that makes I Am America (And So Can You!) worth reading.  read more »

The Fall takes a look back in order to move pop music forward.  read more »

In Vanilla Bright Like Eminem, Michel Faber crafts opening sentences like an Edwardian newsman-fop transported to today’s metro section.  read more »

In 1993, three months after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the Ms. Foundation sponsored the first national Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Not that 90’s feminism was particularly feminist—soon enough, American corporations found it worthwhile to let boys know that they too could aspire to work outside the home.  read more »

Five nice New York boys make fun summer anthems.  read more »

On Volta, signature wails collide with Timbaland beats Iceland’s coolest: Björk at Coachella.  read more »