Begley the Bookie

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, $16.95), a selection of 11 essays from the past 60 years edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians. All the essays (with the exception of a chapter from Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore) are by eminent professors of history, among them Richard Hofstadter, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin and James M.  read more »

It's never too late to come up with a literary stocking stuffer, at least as long as your neighborhood bookstore is open on Christmas Eve. What you’re looking for, of course, is something not too big that packs a punch. Isn’t that precisely the definition of a novella?

Melville House, the small press based in Brooklyn with a bookstore at 145 Plymouth St. (closed for the holidays, alas, from Dec. 23), has a first-rate series of 25 classic novellas, astutely selected and attractively packaged, each one $10 or less. You can play it safe with indisputably great works (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Joyce’s The Dead, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno); or spring a surprise with a neglected gem (George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Chekhov’s My Life, Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled); or risk a curiosity such as Conrad’s Freya of the Seven Isles (odd for Conrad because it features a tragic heroine) or Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs, which features, yes, a pair of chatty canines.  read more »

NOT EVERY KENNEDY BOOK (see page 39) is about a sinister, implausible conspiracy that ends in violent death and wrenching national tragedy. Margaret Leslie Davis’ Mona Lisa in Camelot (Da Capo, $24.95), which was excerpted in last month’s Vanity Fair, brings back all the glamour and high hopes of the Kennedy White House with the story of Jacqueline’s successful campaign to import Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to the United States.

Getting the painting to these shores meant seducing, so to speak, France’s eminent cultural minister, André Malraux, just the man to overcome bureaucratic intransigence and the fussy caution of museum curators. Jackie went at it with tremendous style.  read more »

Is it just me, or is there a kind of suspended-animation feel to these mid-December weeks? Santa Claus is coming to town, but he’s not here yet; Barack Obama is coming, too, but that’s not till January. ’Tis the season to be waiting—and to help us understand our predicament, we have Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting (Routledge, $21.95), which approaches the subject from a “broadly phenomenological perspective.” Mr. Schweizer consults Homer (Penelope’s 20-year wait for Odysseus), Henry James (Kate Croy waiting for her father in The Wings of the Dove), Elizabeth Bishop (“In the Waiting Room”), the French philosopher Henri Bergson and, of course, Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot is nothing but.  read more »

What to give literati who have everything? Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (Thames & Hudson, $45). If the reader in question is already hooked on Proust, Mr. Karpeles’ gorgeous book is guaranteed to please; and if he or she has yet to plunge into the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, it may provide the needed push.

The idea is simple and inspired: Every time a specific painting is mentioned in the novel, reproduce the painting, with relevant detail enlarged (the famous “little patch of yellow wall,” for example, in Vermeer’s View of Delft).  read more »

If things had gone the other way in the presidential election, who’d be buying a book urging us to take pride in our country? Luckily, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had the good sense to bet on Obama and a boom in patriotism among bookish folk. Their apple pie anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco, $29.95), feels just right: Matching 50 writers (most of them young and hip) with 50 states (yes, even the reddest of them) in an attempt to get at the multiplicity of the nation in all its rich peculiarity suddenly seems not only clever but good—a sign of progress, a ray of hope.  read more »

Vintage is celebrating Holly Golightly’s 50th birthday by issuing a special anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Vintage, $12.95). I hate to quibble, but she was actually two months shy of 19 when the novel came out in 1958—so by that count she’s pushing 70. Or if you want to get persnickety about it, when we first meet her, it’s the summer of 1943 (“There’s a war on”), so the bad news is that by now she’s 84 if she’s a day.

Either way, let’s raise a glass to Holly Golightly, who’ll always be “anywhere between sixteen and thirty.” It should be a martini glass, of course, and in it should be a White Angel (“one-half vodka, one-half gin, no vermouth”).  read more »

Just a little less than half the population will be disgruntled come Wednesday morning. What exactly do I mean by that? Will they have lost their gruntle along with the election? Not at all. Attend to the irreplaceable Roy Blount Jr., whose Alphabet Juice (FSG, $25) is both useful and a delight:

“Illogically, given its negational force in most compound words, the prefix dis- is sometimes, as here, regarded as an intensifier. To gruntle, colloquially, was to grumble, or as [the New Oxford American Dictionary] puts it, to “utter little grunts.”

So … if you’re hearing a chorus of little grunts intensified, that’s the sound of the disgruntled minority of the electorate.  read more »

At the Oct. 23 memorial service for David Foster Wallace at N.Y.U., speaker after celebrated speaker (Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders) remembered a fellow writer with evident fondness and il-miglior-fabbro humility. Wallace’s sister’s tribute was devastatingly sad; Mark Costello’s was sad and very funny; Donald Antrim’s was deeply personal and not funny in the least. And Jonathan Franzen’s was different from the others, sad and funny and personal, but also contentious. He was grappling in a serious way with Wallace’s absence and the meaning of the work he’d left behind:

“And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind Midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life, and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote Infinite Jest), ‘So yo then, man, what’s your story?’

“One good, simple, modern story would go like this: ‘A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain.  read more »

All good memoirs involve suffering—how could it be otherwise? Only trauma junkies want to be steeped to their weeping eyes in misery, and yet if there’s no pain at all, just rosy recollection, the phony factor kicks in and you begin to suspect that someone’s fudging it. Three new memoirs, all of them potentially morose to the max, are ranked below from mildly grim to majorly woeful. The trick is to find the right dose: How many grains of hope to balance out a load of grief?

Donald Hall has already tested the limits of memoir despair with The Best Day the Worst Day (2005), an account of the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.  read more »

This is the week for reading about vice presidents and vice presidential hopefuls. In The New Yorker, there’s “Biden’s Brief” (Oct. 20, $4.50), Ryan Lizza’s long, friendly account of Joe Biden’s journey to the bottom half of the Obama ticket. Mr. Lizza registers a curious Biden tic: During the course of their interview, the senator from Delaware repeated five times some variation of the phrase “presumptuous for me to say.…”

Two terms of that could be a bit much, but consider the alternative.

In the London Review of Books, there’s Jonathan Raban’s “Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill” (www.lrb.co.uk), a long, unfriendly profile of Sarah Palin written with the kind of panicky resolve that’s born of a frankly confessed fear: Mr.  read more »

Knowing something about comics—and something about Art Spiegelman—is a prerequisite to enjoying Breakdowns (Pantheon, $27.50), a reissue of some of the artist’s edgy early work, prefaced by new comics of a simultaneously autobiographical and theoretical nature (“The fetid odor of his self-absorption made me gag”), and capped off with an autobiographical and historical afterword. In short, whether or not you enjoy Breakdowns—which is in roughly equal parts provocative, funny, sad and self-indulgent—you’ll learn a lot about Art Spiegelman.

My own interest in Mr. Spiegelman is mostly limited to Maus (1991), his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book that made the Holocaust new and freshly horrible, and shlepped the horror across the Atlantic to Rego Park, Queens, where Mr.  read more »

Robert Stone, on his way to giving a glowing review in The New York Times Book Review to Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, nominates Michael Herr’s Dispatches (Vintage, $12.95) as “the most brilliant exposition of the cultural dimension of an American war ever compiled.” He notes, moreover, that Mr. Filkins’ book is “in the tradition of Dispatches.” He’s right, of course—but to give the comparison the weight it deserves, we need to remind ourselves of just how comprehensively brilliant Mr. Herr’s book is. Endlessly quotable (“Airmobility, dig it”), packed with stories and scenes that will stay with you permanently—though you may want to forget some of them—Dispatches, as Mr.  read more »

To mark the 40th anniversary of the prestigious Booker prize, The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) asked 40 judges—one judge per year—to tell “the inside story of how the winner was chosen.” Some of the judges obliged with literary tittle-tattle, but more amusing, and much more revealing, was the steady drumbeat of scorn for the whole business of picking a winner. Here are some highlights:

“[T]he absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favorite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favorite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides.  read more »

Devout fans of Marilynne Robinson—those still astonished, nearly three decades later, by the poetry of Housekeeping (1980), and those who made the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) into an unlikely best seller—will be thrilled by Home (FSG, $25), which is essentially a second serving of Gilead, though a trifle less intense, softened by the gentle presence of a female protagonist. We’re back in Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s, and we’re as drenched as ever in religion; once again there’s a father figure who’s a preacher, and a complex father-son bond—but this time there’s also Glory, a 38-year-old daughter who’s come home to care for her father, and ends up caring for a black-sheep brother who’s drifted home, too.  read more »

Summer’s almost over, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to go back to school, back to work, back to the shriek and clank of the city.

Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $23) is set in the "great American wilderness"—or anyway Vermont—and strains, late in the game, to strike a cheery note, but it’s basically dark (see the portentous title) and urban in character, a striving, unhappy, crowded book that wants to do more than it does. A pastoral idyll it ain’t.

Mr. Auster has been trying for decades to squeeze emotional zing into his cerebral concoctions—he succeeded best in Leviathan, 16 years ago.  read more »

As Russian tanks rumble through South Ossetia and into Georgia, should we heed the advice of Slavoj Žižek, the hip Slovene theorist, who tells us that "to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence"? (The idea being that violence is "fundamental" to the capitalist status quo.)

Clever Mr. Žižek has published his new book, Violence (Picador, $14), just in time—not because of the bombs falling in Transcaucasia, but because his treatise is an acrobatic feat of theorizing worthy of the Olympics.

A random sampling:

"Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.  read more »

Literary biography has been wandering in curious directions, with fresh perspective the ever-receding goal.

When I talk about books, I preach and practice a superficially naïve gospel that puts characters from literature on equal footing with characters we encounter in real life (Elizabeth Bennet means more to many people than any number of living, breathing relatives), but I nevertheless had difficulty adjusting to Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), which is essentially a biography of the first and most famous nymphet, Nabokov’s Dolores Haze. It traces her ancestry and her afterlife (think porn sites), and lists with acrobatic precision the "facts" of her short, unhappy terrestrial existence.  read more »

Every summer house should have on its dusty potluck shelves, in among the Agatha Christie and the John D. MacDonald and the J. K. Rowling, a copy of Paul Collins’ Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World (Picador, $15), an almanac of delusion, failure and heroically misguided enterprise. Isn’t vacation the best vantage from which to contemplate the sheer waste of epic flops?

The eponymous Banvard was a 19th-century American painter who grew rich with a vast moving panorama of the Mississippi—then went bust in a senseless commercial dogfight with P. T. Barnum. Among the other forgotten dreamers and maniacs celebrated by Mr.  read more »

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn—but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection.  read more »

Andrew Delbanco, the distinguished critic and biographer of Melville, gives Barack Obama two thumbs up in The New Republic (www.tnr.com), explicitly allowing his favorable literary judgment on Mr. Obama’s two books to shade into a political endorsement ("this man—to my ear, at least—is the real deal"). It’s a strange, leapfrogging idea, to think that a politician’s prose opens a window into his heart. "It is hard for any writer," says Mr. Delbanco, "no matter how selective his memory or guarded his words, to conceal himself in his writing. I suspect (I’ve never met him) that the weaknesses and strengths of Obama’s writing reflect those of his character—a virtuosity that tempts him to be pleased with himself and impatient with others, but also an awareness of human complexity.  read more »

Self-indulgence, that famous boomer trait, is stamped all over Geoffrey Douglas' The Classmates (Hyperion, $23.95), a brooding memoir of the St. Paul's School class of 1962—the class that brought us John Kerry and therefore, roughly four years ago, began to think of itself as somehow significant: One of their own was very possibly on the verge of being elected president. I'll spare you Mr. Douglas' personal problems, which he writes about in detail, and the travails of other obscure boys from '62—the ones who suddenly had to measure their ordinary selves against a classmate who was "almost president"—and concentrate on the young John Kerry, who was, to put it delicately, not popular with his peers.  read more »

For a subtle, impressively intelligent discussion of a topic that’s on just about everybody’s mind these day, see David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy (Princeton, $29.95). Mr. Runciman, a lecturer in political theory at Cambridge, begins with the assumption that hypocrisy is inevitable in politics, and eventually argues that it’s also salutary, if only in the limited sense that hypocrisy implies a private sphere where the government can’t, or shouldn’t, reach. (When no one has anything to hide, he warns, "that is where terror lies.") He looks at individual thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to George Orwell, and even individual politicians (including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), but the passage I want to share is a shrewd appraisal of Orwell’s opinion of two fellow writers, P.  read more »

It's hard to get your book properly reviewed when the critics are only interested in sizing you up as Barack Obama’s running mate. For Jim Webb, who is, as Elizabeth Drew insists in the June 26 New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), "a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side," it must be especially galling.

Or maybe not.

Ms. Drew herself seems much less engaged by the Virginia senator’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America (Broadway, $24.95), than by the man himself (a "warrior-intellectual," she calls him) and his zigzag career. In fact, I think she’s smitten:

   read more »

The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.  read more »

WHEN GORE VIDAL is on a tear, outrage and wit blend to produce a new, delicious and deadly substance, like sulfuric Champagne or a napalm martini. Consider, for example, an especially corrosive—and funny—essay on the twinned destiny of gays and Jews, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," originally published in The Nation in 1981 and newly reprinted in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50). Here’s a sample:  read more »

HOW VERY UNGENEROUS of Joan Acocella. In her long New Yorker essay about hangovers, "A Few Too Many" (May 26, $4.50), she cites Kingsley Amis several times, quotes him at length and mentions (without naming them) his three books on drinking but she fails to point out that Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $19.99) is being published this week. It’s those same three books gathered in a single volume and introduced by Christopher Hitchens (like Amis, a dedicated booze hound), and it’s riotously funny, at least for the first 100 pages. Here’s a taste:

"Alcohol science is full of crap. It will tell you, for instance, that drink does not really warm you up, it only makes you feel warm—oh, I see; and it will go on about alcohol being not a stimulant but a depressant, which turns out to mean that it depresses qualities like shyness and self-criticism, and so makes you behave as if you had been stimulated—thanks. In the same style, the said science will maintain that alcohol does not really fatten you, it only sets in motion a process at the end of which you weigh more. Nevertheless, strong drink does, more than anything else taken by mouth, apart from stuff like cement, cram on the poundage."

Amis’ chapter "The Hangover" makes sheer delight out of a painful subject. Sadly, Ms. Acocella’s essay, which is full of "alcohol science," doesn’t quite pull off the same trick.

USEFUL AND RELIABLY SENSIBLE, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (Broadway, $22) is one of those rare reference books that’s a pleasure to read; look up one word because you need to, and you’ll find yourself browsing, seduced by Bill Bryson’s quiet wit—and curious, too, about his choices. He admits upfront that this "guide to the problems of English spelling and usage" is a "personal collection," that it reflects his own taste and experience (is that why there’s an entry for Barack Obama, but none for Hillary Clinton or John McCain?), and he makes his dislikes apparent with blunt admonishment:

"Pique. Resentment. 'Fit of pique' is a cliché."

"Time, at this moment in. Unless you are striving for an air of linguistic ineptitude, never use this expression. Say ‘Now.’"

You’d expect that the author of a tome called A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) would have a wide range of interests, but I was nonetheless impressed when I found out on one page that Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg and on the next that gentoo is a breed of penguin.

One last entry:

"Kudos is a Greek word meaning fame or glory. Though often treated as a plural, it is in fact singular. Thus, it should be 'the kudos that was his due.’"

OR PERHAPS THE KUDOS that was her due. The PEN American Center is handing out literary prizes this week, and two of the cleverest women in New York are to be honored: Janet Malcolm, who won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for her biography Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale, $25); and Cynthia Ozick, who won the PEN/Nabokov Award for the splendid entirety of her work. Hats off.

Suze Rotolo, the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, is not a writer, and it's unfair to expect anything more from her memoir, A Freewheelin' Time (Broadway, $22.95), than a peek or two into the life of a very young Dylan on the brink of stardom. Unfortunately, we get a great deal more: flat-footed accounts of Ms. Rotolo's unhappy family life, her banal sociological insights into the '60s, her predictable lefty politics and her (still) undigested thoughts about the role of the muse in the creative life of a great artist. So what could have been a intimate eyewitness account of the Greenwich Village folk music scene from 1961 to 1963 (roughly the dates of her brief time with Mr. Dylan) is instead a bloated and boring ramble. Except of course when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, late of Hibbing, Minn., makes one of his mercurial appearances.

Ms. Rotolo dishes no dirt at all, but she does share snippets from the letters her lovelorn boyfriend sent her in 1962, while she was away for eight months studying in Italy:

"There is a Peter Sellers movie on at 5 o'clock—I promised myself that I would see Taylor Mead's "The Flower Thief" … don't think I'm really loving movies—It's just that I'm hating time—I'm trying to push it by—I'm trying to stab it—stomp on it—throw it on the ground and kick it—bend it and twist it with gritin' teeth and burning eyes—I hate it I love you—"

Nothing else in the book comes close to the fierce kinetic force of that fragment.

The shelves are sagging under the weight of Dylan books, some of them excellent. Three sentences from Mr. Dylan's own Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, $14)—quoted by Anthony DeCurtis in his friendly New York Times profile of Suze Rotolo—remind us again of Mr. Dylan's weird, unstoppable talent and show us the muse from the artist's perspective: "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves."

If you want to see the same Village scene through the eyes of an intelligent, impartial, gratifyingly gossipy critic, go back to David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street (North Point, $17); if it's Mr. Dylan's lyrics that send you, check out Christopher Ricks' heroic close reading in

Dylan's Visions of Sin (Ecco, $15.95); if it's the music, try Greil Marcus' two Dylan books, The Old, Weird America (Picador, $14) and Like a Rolling Stone (PublicAffairs, $14).

Eager for more? Last month Simon & Schuster confirmed that Chronicles: Volume Two is on its way—there's even a chance it will be published before the end of the year.

If you're after a memoir pure and simple—a life exposed with intelligence and feeling—you could hardly do better than Pig Candy (Free Press, $24), in which Lise Funderburg takes us down to Monticello, Ga. (pop. 2,500), the place her father, a light-skinned black man, had escaped from, the place he came back to in his prosperous late middle age. The story is built around her father's attachment to his 126-acre farm—an attachment that grows stronger even as metastasized prostate cancer weakens him. Pig Candy—the title refers to barbecued pork—wears its somber themes lightly. Yes, it's about mortality, race and filial duty, but Ms. Funderburg never lectures, never preaches, never prettifies. She unspools her story with quiet candor and an unpretentious faith in the significance of what she has to say.

The scary YouTube videos of televangelist and McCain ally John Hagee don’t quite do justice to his talent as a preacher, at least according to Matt Taibbi’s vicious, funny, heartbreaking tour of the American scene, The Great Derangement (Spiegel & Grau, $24):

By any standard, Pastor John Hagee is an orator of unusual ability. His physical form is clownish; apart from the central-casting head of white, swept-back preacher hair, he has short, stubby arms and the body of a beach ball. He is one of those perfectly round fat men whose whole body seems like a platform for a straining top suit button that might at any moment shoot out skyward like a champagne cork. But when it talks, this beach ball has tremendous oratorical range, zooming back and forth from wry folksy humor to humility to booming fire-and-brimstone hellfire and back to humor again with effortless ease. When he asks for money, he sounds like he’s asking you the time. John Hagee could, as they say down here in Texas, talk a dog off a meat truck.

No wonder John McCain was eager for Pastor Hagee’s endorsement—despite his awkward habit of linking the Roman Catholic Church with Adolf Hitler and explaining that Hurricane Katrina “was, in fact, the judgment of God against ... New Orleans” for planning a gay pride parade.

If Mr. Hagee is the archvillain of Matt Taibbi’s villain-filled book, another preacher, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, pops up in the last chapter of Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange (Holt, $27.50) in the more flattering role of Benign Sage. A breezy, peripatetic history of European exploration of the New World, Mr. Horwitz’s book begins and ends at Plymouth Rock (which is housed in a columned enclosure known to the locals as “the Greek Outhouse”). Why, Mr. Horwitz repeatedly wonders, are the Pilgrim Fathers credited with “historic primacy” when Europeans had in fact been exploring the continent for centuries before the Mayflower sailed into the shallow bay near Plymouth? “Why elevate the Pilgrims to iconic status and ignore all the others who came to America before them?” Mr. Gomes has the answer:

Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.

 

He adds that the story of Plymouth Rock “may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It’s like religion—beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will.”

Fresh, friendly, charming, Robert L. Bowden’s Manhattan in Detail (Universe, $17.95) may be the prettiest new book on sale. It consists of 44 watercolors by Mr. Bowden—scenes of the city’s most famous monuments (the Met, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron building) mixed with glimpses of spots only locals are likely to care about (Elaine’s, Striver’s Row, a brownstone on St. Luke’s Place). The title is a bit of a misnomer: Watercolor is never the best medium for showing off detail. In fact, Mr. Bowden’s Manhattan is airbrushed, idealized, flattered by a warm, scrummy palette. It’s the city we carry with us in our hearts.

Oscar Wilde, on his tour of America in 1882, made not one but two pilgrimages to Camden, N.J., to see Walt Whitman—whose poetry he claimed to have known “from the cradle.” Afterward, the Good Grey Poet told a reporter that Wilde was “genuine, honest, and manly.” He added, for emphasis, “He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly.” Wilde, in return, compared Whitman to Goethe and Schiller: “There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry; it is so universal, so comprehensive.”

This comical instance of brazen late-19th-century logrolling comes from Michael Robertson’s Worshipping Walt (Princeton, $27.95), which introduces us to a handful of the “hot little prophets” who made a cult of Whitman, and also reminds us of the religious purpose of his poetry—with Leaves of Grass as gospel.  read more »

Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com), compares Barack Obama’s speech on race last month in Philadelphia with the address Abraham Lincoln delivered at the Cooper Union in New York on Feb. 27, 1860. In fact, the two speeches are very different, the glaring distinction being that Lincoln’s knotty, cerebral discourse appeals principally to reason, whereas Mr. Obama’s forthright simplicity appeals principally to the emotions. But Mr. Wills’ first few paragraphs are nonetheless astonishing for the parallels drawn between the 19th- and 21st-century candidates:  read more »

It’s spring at last, and girls are pushing up everywhere like daisies.

PLAYWRIGHT THERESA REBECK showcases a Brooklyn trio in her lively, entertaining and accurately titled first novel, Three Girls and Their Brother (Shaye Areheart, $23.95), a romp through the looking-glass world of fashion shoots and instant celebrity. Amelia (14), Polly (17) and Daria (18), red-haired beauties all, granddaughters of the celebrated literary critic Leo Heller, rocket into the limelight when The New Yorker features them in a photo spread. (Remember that vampy portrait of the Hilton sisters in the “Next Generation” issue back in 1999? )  read more »

Last week The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) canvassed writers living and dead—an eclectic selection including Jonathan Franzen, Zoë Heller, George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein—for their opinion of the semicolon. Perhaps the most vehement response came from the late Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”  read more »

In his forthcoming Observer review of The Second Plane, Tom Bissell admires this throwaway Martin Amis line: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product … of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill.” Funny, but not entirely accurate—or so I gather from Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens (Penguin Press, $35), an epic history of the vast and vastly rich Saudi Arabian family that spawned W.’s nemesis. Meticulous and compulsively readable, Mr. Coll’s book has a huge cast of characters, swollen by the legion of Osama siblings—the exact number of which is apparently tricky to establish. (One declassified F.B.I. e-mail from 2003 referred to the “millions” of bin Ladens “running around”—and added, reassuringly, that “99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety.”) Mr. Coll counts 54 children of Mohamed bin Laden, and notes that Mohamed “fathered seven children during the year of Osama’s birth—five sons and two daughters.” His cautious conclusion is that “Osama arrived among the Bin Ladens as somewhere between son number seventeen and son number twenty-one.”  read more »

A Brit writing in a British literary journal has put his finger precisely on the pulse of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. “Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening,” Jonathan Raban proclaims in the London Review of Books (www.lrb.co.uk):

“The light in Obama’s rhetoric—the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’—is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognizable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism.  read more »

You know exactly what you’re going to get when you open the latest New Yorker (March 24, $4.50) and see an excerpt from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which is due out in mid-May, a few weeks after the release of Mr. Morris’ documentary of the same name. It’s a recurring nightmare, starring Specialist Sabrina Harman—the MP with the camera—and the things she did and saw done to prisoners on Tier 1A of the military intelligence block at Abu Ghraib. The account is direct, detailed and unambiguous in its implications. Is there any part of the passage below that’s in any way unclear?  read more »

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95) is the latest from “gender expert” Susan Shapiro Barash. I picked it up out of idle curiosity (are women’s reasons for lying really different from men’s?) and would have put it straight back down (the writing is shockingly bad), but I was struck by the bold amorality of Ms. Barash’s approach: “I neither condemn nor condone the lies women tell,” she solemnly declares. Turns out that’s a lie. In fact, she thinks fibs are fab. Here’s the final sentence of her book, the sum of the wisdom she’s squeezed from “extensive personal interviews with women and experts in the field of psychology and counseling”:

“In my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I’ve come to recognize lying as an inestimable weapon in the female arsenal as women search for personal retribution and satisfaction.” Inestimable weapon? Female arsenal? Personal retribution? Looks like the gender wars are heating up.  read more »

The subtitle of Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, $22) is out of touch with the times: We’re more than merely excited, and as for winning—well, yes we can.

Consider the pace of book publishing: Mr. Steele shops his proposal about a year ago and delivers his manuscript in midsummer. Pause for four or five months while the machinery grinds invisibly. At last, in early December, the book appears in stores—by which time the “plausibility of Barack Obama as a presidential candidate” is old news. And two months later—now that plausible is probable—it’s safe to say that nobody shares Mr. Steele’s concern about Mr. Obama finding his own voice and becoming “an individual rath