Janet Maslin was not thrilled about having to review Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. The book is "long and demanding," and it "isn’t invested in its characters." Catton may have won this years Man Booker Prize, but the New York Times critic is not impressed.
Marisha Pessl’s first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a maddening, twisty, eventual knockout of a book. It sparkled with showy erudition and the electricity of a true original. A prestigious, successful debut novel, it’s a tough act to follow. But here she is, in Night Film, thumbing her nose at sophomore slump.
What ethically challenged billionaire would not welcome the journalistic cosseting of Ben Mezrich? With each new book, Mr. Mezrich becomes increasingly adept at how to use his kid gloves. He is expert at making up conversations he did not hear, sexing up parties he did not attend, pumping up the thrills of getting rich quick and playing down the legal liabilities of characters who may have done a teeny bit of innocent law-bending or moral compromising on their ways to the top.
David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.
The author of “Once Upon a Secret,” Mimi Alford, had an affair with President John F. Kennedy before she was old enough to vote. Having kept this story under wraps for almost 50 years, Ms. Alford now sets off a firestorm of gossip about its sordid details. If there is one question that Ms. Alford’s story poses, it is this: How did she end up in bed with the president on her fourth day at work? This may be the hardest part of her adventure to imagine, but it’s what she explains best in the half of this book that reconstructs a 19-year-old’s thinking. She was invited to swim at lunchtime in the
Just One Catch is a soup-to-nuts chronicle of the life of Joseph Heller. It is by Tracy Daugherty, who should not be confused with Mr. Heller’s daughter. Erica Heller’s own book about her father is Yossarian Slept Here, and there are many places where Heller’s daughter and Mr. Daugherty overlap.
The narrator of Emma Donoghue’s “Room” is a 5-year-old boy who leads a busy life. “We have thousands of things to do every morning,” Jack tells the reader, and he seems to mean it. Jack is a smart, eager kid with a great imagination and unlimited energy. But he and his mother have been trapped in the 11-by-11-foot room of the title since the day he was born.
At the beginning of 2000 Little, Brown published “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It was an auspicious time for both the calendar industry and the publishing world. Mr. Gladwell had a deductive style and a teacherly simplicity that would make him one of the new century’s most frequently quoted and widely imitated writers of nonfiction. He went on to write “Blink” and “Outliers,” and all three books went to the top of best-seller lists. What can this tell us about Mr. Gladwell or about the people who read him?