• review • July 10, 2012

    Jennie Erin Smith

    The Florida Everglades is now home to an expanding population of introduced Burmese pythons. Nowhere else in the world has a species of python established a large breeding population outside its native range. The snakes, native to Southeast Asia and a common pet-trade import in the 1990s, are not the only invasive reptiles in southern Florida: three species of frogs, four of turtles, forty-three of lizards and four other kinds of snake have become established, half of them traceable to the pet trade by way of accidental escapes or deliberate releases. But Burmese pythons are the most imposing of southern

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  • review • July 6, 2012

    Elizabeth Kolbert

    With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge

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  • review • July 5, 2012

    Rachel Nolan

    The year was 1911 and Sam Zemurray, a penniless Russian immigrant, was on his way to becoming an American business mogul. Zemurray had gained a modest foothold in the fruit business by selling “ripes”—bananas that arrived in the US too bruised and brown for the United Fruit Company to sell. Investing his profits, he bought a slice of land along the Cuyamel River in Honduras where he planned to grow and export his own fruit. After bribing his way to tax-free exports and exemption from import duties on equipment, Zemurray was poised to strike it rich, but he had a

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  • review • July 4, 2012

    Uzodinma Iweala

    When I was in college, after a discussion of Chinua Achebe at the tail end of a survey course in English literature, I got into an argument with a classmate who suggested that plenty of African literature was good but could never be great because it was so political. Leaving aside the obviously problematic use of “African” as a catch-all classification for literature from 1 billion people in 52 countries (and a decidedly Eurocentric bias), my classmate’s musings did identify a tension at the very root of the Western world’s interaction with so-called African literature. Can literature be both overtly

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  • review • July 3, 2012

    Jeremy Kessler

    Clyde Snow, a cigar-sucking Texan anthropologist, once remarked that “bones make good witnesses . . . they never lie and they never forget.” Snow rose to something like prominence in the mid-1980s when two South American exhumations linked the morbid skills of forensic anthropology to the increasing prestige of international human rights. In the wake of Argentina’s 1982 defeat in the Falklands War, human rights activists opened the graves of several desaparecidos—men and women “disappeared” by the military governments that had ruled the country from 1973 to 1983. A year later, Brazilian authorities acting on West German tips unearthed the

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West • Jacob Silverman

    Blaine Harden’s chronicle of Shin Dong-hyuk’s life in a North Korean prison camp and his eventual escape is a slim, searing, humble book—as close to perfect as these volumes of anguished testimony can be. Shin is a child of the camp system in the most literal sense—he was born in 1982 in Camp 14, one of the half-dozen secret facilities that dot the country, forming a modern gulag archipelago holding up to two hundred thousand prisoners. And while some of the camps allow for rehabilitation and release (albeit with lifetime monitoring), Shin was born into a “complete control district,” a

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  • review • June 29, 2012

    Paul Krugman and Robin Wells

    In the spring of 2012 the Obama campaign decided to go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that had specialized in taking over companies and extracting money for its investors—sometimes by promoting growth, but often at workers’ expense instead. Indeed, there were several cases in which Bain managed to profit even as it drove its takeover targets into bankruptcy.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    the Supreme Court’s health-care follies • Dahlia Lithwick

    Over the last week of March, the United States Supreme Court heard three days of arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—President Barack Obama’s historic health-care reform law. This means that sometime during the last week of June 2012, the justices will hand down a decision in that case that, regardless of the finding, will move the court to the epicenter of the national debate about government and power. Based on those oral arguments, the high court seemed prepared to strike down at least the “individual mandate”—the requirement that nearly all Americans obtain health insurance or pay

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  • review • June 28, 2012

    Sam Biederman

    Why do Los Angeles’s storytellers keep dreaming of the apocalypse?

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  • excerpt • June 27, 2012

    Alec Hanley Bemis

    I have a bad habit. (No it’s not that I read Tucker Max’s books for pleasure.) My bad habit is that I often begin books by taking a peek at the ending. The best test of a book is not the seduction of a well-planned first sentence; it is how well the book satisfies expectations at the bitter end. By this measure, Tucker Max’s third book, Hilarity Ensues, is a great read. The epilogue begins, “When I got to the literary world, it was like a great big pussy, just waiting to get fucked—and I stepped up and fucked the

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Have Americans contracted their souls out into the digital ether? • Siva Vaidhyanathan

    In his manual for a better (or, at least, for his own) life, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, self-help guru and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss outlines his secrets to a productive and wealthy life. One of the book’s central tenets is to “outsource everything.” Ferriss suggests we hire a series of concierges to triage our correspondences, arrange travel and restaurant reservations, contact old friends, and handle routine support tasks in our lives. Ferriss contracts with concierge companies in India to handle much of his data flow. He suggests we hire local people

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  • review • June 25, 2012

    Alix Ohlin

    A married couple laugh together in a restaurant. They’re playing a game, making up stories about the strangers around them. Because they take the game so very seriously, we come to understand how little fun they are otherwise having. If only I can keep this going, the husband thinks, if only, if only… He can’t. This is “Don’t Look Now,” the story that made me fall in love with Daphne Du Maurier’s work, and it is lovely and wistful and unsettling. Though she’s best known as a novelist, Du Maurier’s strange, often beautiful stories deserve to be more widely read

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  • review • June 22, 2012

    Margaret Eby

    It’s no coincidence that the title of Killer on the Road, Ginger Strand’s analysis of the interstate system and the violence intertwined within it, sounds familiar. That phrase echoes throughout the past sixty years of American pop culture, from Jim Morrison’s breathy warnings in “Riders on the Storm” to James Ellroy’s pulpy noir of the same name about a Manson-obsessed schizophrenic. “If a song or book title contains the word Interstate or Freeway, expect mayhem,” Strand warns. And the book demonstrates why this is the case. Killer is a titillating, clever volume that mixes the sweeping sociological assertions of an

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  • review • June 21, 2012

    Carolyn Kellogg

    More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields — he’s the founder of McSweeney’s, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. He’s the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store. For his work, he’s been awarded the TED Prize, the Heinz Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Yet inside all of that is Eggers the writer, who’s publishing his first

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Maureen N. McLane’s My Poets • Parul Sehgal

    Readers are not created equal. Frances Ferguson observed, rather dolorously, that the “reader can only read the texts that say what he already knows,” but let’s be frank: There are gifted—or maybe just thirstier—readers among us who, by dint of stamina or plain need, won’t be stymied by boredom, offense, incomprehension. There are varsity readers, and then there is Maureen N. McLane, a poet, professor, and prizewinning critic. To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay

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  • review • June 19, 2012

    Rose Lichter-Marck

    The body is absurd. The sounds, smells, textures, impulses, tics, blemishes, engorgements, excretions of our organs—these make up the outrageous conditions of our animal existence, from infancy to old age. We suffer the daily indignities, surprises, and wonders of the flesh because we are stuck with this imperfect vessel. No wonder we make so many dick jokes.

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  • review • June 15, 2012

    Adam Kirsch

    There is nothing like like a novel set in the recent past to remind you of how quickly things change. In 2005, if a novelist had published a book that hinged on the murder of a Jewish American journalist by Islamic terrorists in Iraq, it would have been read as a political novel, a war novel, a post-9/11 novel—and, of course, a roman a clef about Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in 2002 in Pakistan. Seven years later, Joshua Henkin has published just such a book in The World Without You, which is set in 2005 on the anniversary of

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  • excerpt • June 14, 2012

    Michael Coffey

    Often, we make sense of our lives by making sense of other people’s lives. We strive to understand our mother or father or sister or spouse; sometimes a child; even a stranger, someone we never actually knew. Sometimes we turn to places—a city, a town, a country—home. Sometimes we turn to things—substances, a hobby, a game. And sometimes we turn to books.

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  • review • June 14, 2012

    Adam Mars-Jones

    To rate his achievement at its least, Martin Amis has been for upwards of 25 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to his generation. In Money (1984) he achieved something that was as much of a breakthrough for our insular literature as Bellow’s had been in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) for American writing, a manner electric, impure and unimpressed, except sometimes by itself, mixing refracted slang with swaggeringly artificial cadence. If it seems astonishing that Money is now nearly as old as Augie March was when Money itself was published, then the reason must be the

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama • Sara Marcus

    The graphic “novel” may be the ideal form for memoir. On the one hand, it offers immediacy, a fusing of reading time and narrative time: We can experience an epiphany at the same moment as the character in the frame, who may break suddenly into a wide-eyed look of surprise. On the other hand, it makes room for a polyphony of time and space and story: The text on a page may be paired with drawings of something else entirely, creating a visual metaphor or, in more discordant cases, mirroring the way the mind can think and feel multiple things

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