• review • September 14, 2011

    We the Animals by Justin Torres

    Andrew Martin

    Take out the dinosaurs, the formation of the universe, and Sean Penn, and The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s summer anti-blockbuster, is a film about the charged, unspoken bonds of a young family. Through mumblings and mundane interactions, Malick depicts the relationship between the film’s three brothers in a nearly sacred light, and succeeds at making viewers understand that eventually these boys will grow up and tragedy will be befall them. Still, Tree of Life lingers on the fleeting moments they do have together.

    Justin Torres’s first novel, We the Animals, is chasing something similar,

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  • review • September 13, 2011

    The Journalist and the Spies

    Dexter Filkins

    On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.

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  • review • September 12, 2011

    See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody by Bob Mould

    Andrew Hultkrans

    When a young, Boston-based musician named Charles Thompson—soon to be known by the nom de guerre Black Francis—needed a bassist for his fledgling group the Pixies, he ran a classified ad reading, “Seeking bassist for rock band. Influences: Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary.” With hindsight, Thompson’s stylistic coordinates—which must have seemed pretty mystifying when it ran in 1986—could serve as a fairly accurate description of his band’s sonic palette, if you threw in surf music, science fiction, and Puerto Rico. From Hüsker Dü, he took the pulverizing distortion and trenchant chording of

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  • review • September 08, 2011

    Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman by Patricia Bosworth

    Francesca Mari

    For her sixtieth birthday, Jane Fonda decided she wanted to make a short video about her life to “discover its themes.” When she asked her daughter, documentarian Vanessa Vadim, to help her, Vanessa said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?”

    Vanessa wasn’t just being a jerk. Depending on the baby boomer you ask, Jane Fonda, the daughter of American icon Henry Fonda, is a sex-symbol comic book character (Barbarella), a political activist who got duped into posing on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft missile (“Hanoi Jane”), or a breathy workout-video sergeant.

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  • excerpt • September 07, 2011
    Marta Minujin's "Torre de Babel de Libros" in Buenos Aires

    Can a Book Save Our Life?

    Dubravka Ugresic

    On a brief visit to Jerusalem I walked the streets of Mea Shearim, one of the city’s more colorful neighborhoods, and home to Haredi Jews. The ingenuous tourist could be forgiven for thinking that he or she has strayed onto a film set depicting the life of a nineteenth-century Jewish shtetl. But life in Mea Shearim is for real, preserved the way it was a hundred years ago. My eye caught a trio of skinny, pallid-looking men in tall black hats and draped in black frock coats. They stood there in a circle as if mumbling the words of a prayer in unison. One cradled a weighty leather-bound tome. As

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  • review • September 07, 2011

    Busy Monsters by William Giraldi

    Matthew Shaer

    Charles Homar, the hero of William Giraldi’s novel, is a middling memoirist of minor acclaim and a columnist for a popular glossy magazine called New Nation Weekly. Four times a month, this esteemed periodical pays Homar to recount, in majestically baroque language, the various travails that God hath inflicted upon Charles Homar, which include a perpetually dyspeptic father and a stubborn squirrel infestation in his suburban New England home. New Nation Weekly, of course, is a fiction, as is the conceit that any publication would employ Homar to fill its pages. He’s a dolt, this guy, self-centered

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011
    From Achim Lippoth’s 2006 photo series “The Class of 1954”

    Amazing Disgrace

    Following a scandal, an author ponders the connection between humiliation and the desire to write. • Laura Kipnis

    Among the many sources of humiliation I either learned about or was forced to relive while reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador, $14): having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself or virtually any other physical process, writing or being written about, being jealous, being cheated on, being Googled, being mistaken for the wrong gender, being Michael Jackson, electroshock therapy, impotence, hair loss, inadvertent erections in awkward circumstances, smelling like liverwurst, vomiting onstage before a musical performance, voyeuristic curiosity about death, failing to

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011
    Classic Masscult: Jimmy the roller-skating horse, from the pages of Life magazine, 1952.

    Cult Hero

    Masscult and Midcult reveals how Dwight Macdonald became a Macdonaldist • Kerry Howley

    “As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957, “Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” What leads us here, Macdonald asks, to the banal, boxed trifles of popular journalism? What, exactly, is to be gained by a three-hundred-word once-over of “World News”? Do we seek, as Macdonald concedes to be Time’s singular benefit, “practice in reading”? Perhaps we crave immersion in a warm bath of facts, to “have the little things around, like pets,” to collect “them as boys collect postage stamps.” Macdonald

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011

    I Love This Dirty Town

    James Wolcott recounts his coming-of-writerly-age in Gotham • Choire Sicha

    James Wolcott is a carefully absent presence in his memoir of writing his way through the ’70s, despite the trademark right-in-your-ear chattiness of his writing style. The acerbic critic—now best known as a blogger for Graydon Carter’s luxe Vanity Fair—reports in his recollections of New York when it was allegedly fun that he always seemed underdressed for the uptown ballet, overdressed for downtown at CBGB. He was half wanderer-in, half walker-on, and sometimes the guy on the wall watching everyone dirtying the pretty things.

    In his reconstruction of the vaguely dangerous ’70s heyday of the

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011

    Holmes Sweet Holmes

    On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling by Michael Dirda • J. C. Hallman

    The most charming thing about perennial Washington Post literary guru Michael Dirda is his near-on phobic aversion to saying anything other than that a book is wonderful and a pleasure (a word for which he has a long-standing affinity, e.g., Reading for Pleasure, Bound to Please, etc.). If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books. Yet Dirda’s loving take on the legacy of Arthur Conan Doyle reveals that his strength can also be a shortcoming.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011

    I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

    I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards • Siva Vaidhyanathan

    Books about corporations tend to stick to a few tried-and-true formulas. Many read like sports stories: Companies win with visionary leadership and by being smarter and showing more gumption than their competitors. Some of these accounts are anthropological treatments—thick descriptions of what it’s like to work within the unique culture of a firm. Then there are the angry tirades about the damage companies do.

    Google, in many ways the most significant company of our time, has been the subject of books in each of these genres in recent years. Ken Auletta told the “great man” story of the

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2011

    The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

    Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India • Parul Sehgal

    India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells a darker story, focusing on the boom’s seamy side: the scoundrels and profiteers, and the millions of farmers and migrant workers crushed beneath the juggernaut of “progress.” “The modernity of India,” he writes drily, is “an ambiguous phenomenon.” His point is that even as India

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