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Books
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s Chicago 1890 is a slim, engaging study that places a handful of the city’s first skyscrapers, including The Monadnock, the Masonic Temple, and the Reliance Building, in the context of the raucus decade during which they were erected.
David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power
I’ve just finished David Blumenthal and James A. Morone’s The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (University of California Press), which discusses eleven presidents’ encounters with illness alongside their attempts to influence health care policy. Blumenthal, professor of medicine and health policy at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to Barack [...]
David M. Henkin, City Reading
David M. Henkin’s City Reading (Columbia), the last book I read in 2009, comes close to my current ideal of the historian’s first book, offering a novel and ambitious argument within well-defined parameters.
Some Favorite Books Published in 2009
The editors of Frieze magazine invited me to write about some of my favorite books published this year. My response, posted here, was paired with that of Amit Chaudhuri and is published in issue 128 (January-February 2010).
Mitch Epstein, American Power
Epstein began with a straightforward if ambitious premise—to depict our nation’s varied energy infrastructure—but quickly expanded his remit to include several notions of power that course through American society as invisibly as does electricity through the national grid. Cooling towers and reactors factor in many of the images, yet each kind of power—not only literal, but also political, economic, and the power of nature—impacts upon the others.
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T.J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon
Last night, T.J. Stiles’s new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction from an award committee chaired by Yale historian David Blight. By coincidence I just happened to read a thoughtful, generous (but by no means naive) review-essay about the book written by Steve Fraser. It’s in the [...]
Timothy Egan, The Big Burn
Stewardship of the land remains as contentious an issue today as it was one hundred years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt laid out his vision for conservation and ran into opposition from corporate lumber and mining interests. In The Big Burn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan tells the story of Roosevelt’s prophetic vision for America’s landscape and the debates he gleefully exacerbated. The book focuses, with cinematic flair, on the August 1910 forest fire that ravaged three million acres in the northern Rockies, while providing an opportune challenge to the newborn US Forest Service.
Luc Sante, Folk Photography
My interview with Luc Sante, about his new book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press), has just been published on Artforum.com. Click through not only to read his ruminations on this early-twentieth-century phenomenon, but also to see a slide show of additional images from the book. In the course of our [...]
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Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind
I am a fan of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, so I was happy to learn yesterday that her next book will arrive in 2010. It is an essay collection titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, and it will be released by Yale University Press. It seems likely [...]
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LRB Turns Thirty
After a lapse of about eighteen months, I’ve renewed my subscription to the London Review of Books just as the journal celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and launches a newly redesigned website. John Sutherland, a contributor for three decades, profiles the LRB and its editors for the Financial Times, recounting its “marsupial” early issues (enfolded within [...]
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Nota Bene: Two New Editing Projects
Two books on which I worked as editor and/or copyeditor have just been published. The first is Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat, an anthology of essays and one interview that concerns Anton Vidokle’s artistic practice. It is the eighteenth book in the Lukas & Sternberg series from Sternberg Press. I wrote a preface for the collection; [...]
Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience
Ranging idiosyncratically across the last two centuries, art historian Charlotte Klonk examines the influence of colour theorists, psychologists, businessmen and artists on the design decisions undertaken by museum directors in Europe and the USA. Klonk shows how changing theories of perception and individuality, as well as evolving attitudes toward gallery visitors, were at the centre of some surprisingly intense debates about how to present art.
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge), a sweeping comparative history of slavery and its eradication, is the fruit of Seymour Drescher’s fifty years of scholarship on the topic. As the title indicates, Drescher is particularly interested in abolition, and he therefore examines historical developments based on their effect, whether positive or negative, on the institution of slavery.
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Review of Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters
My brief review of Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters (Yale) appears in the fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Click here (and scroll down) to read it. “[Goldberger] is suitably temperate while discussing the balance of ‘aesthetic ambition’ and ’social purpose,’ exterior form and interior space, architecture’s effects on our emotions and on our [...]
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A Question about Blurbing and Review Quoting
I’ve just begun (and am enjoying) Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. The book has just been released in an attractive paperback edition by Yale University Press, and its back cover presents blurbs from the geographically dispersed but uniformly respected literary intellectuals Azar Nafisi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adam Zagajewski, and Ivan Klima. The [...]
Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat
This idiosyncratic and entertaining history uses five paintings by Johannes Vermeer and two additional artifacts to explore nascent global trade. Small details in the canvases—the officer’s hat in Officer and Laughing Girl, the globe resting on a cabinet in the background of The Geographer, the silver coins about to be weighed in Woman Holding a Balance—act as “doors,” in Brook’s phrasing, that open onto the seventeenth century.
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit agrees with one aspect of commonplace thinking about disasters: once a hurricane’s winds subside, an earthquake’s upheavals abate, or an explosion’s concussive force dissipates, the trouble is far from over. But the premise of Solnit’s forceful new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, is that nearly everything else we are told about the aftermath of such events is wrong…
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Three Interviews with Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s new book A Paradise Built in Hell is receiving a fair amount of press attention, including reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the B&N Review, and elsewhere. Most have been positive; Christine Stanstell’s review in the current New Republic, not yet available at the magazine’s poorly redesigned website, dissents from [...]
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Brenda Wineapple Appointed Director of GC Center for Biography
According to an e-mail just sent to the Graduate Center community from President William P. Kelly: “I’m delighted to report that that Dr. Brenda Wineapple has agreed to join us as the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Brenda’s achievements as author, biographer, scholar, and teacher are remarkable. Her most recent book, White [...]
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New Issue of Bookforum Online
The September/October/November issue of Bookforum has been posted online. It contains my brief review of Cecelia Tichi’s Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us) (UNC Press). The issue’s loose theme is “Work in Progress.” As always, the pairing of reviewers and subjects is incredibly sharp, with Gregory Sholette writing about [...]
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A New Literary History of America
Last night I finally spotted Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press) on bookstore shelves. I’ve been curious about the anthology since the dust jacket for Marcus’s last book, The Shape of Things to Come, mentioned he was at work on it. Just how broadly would Marcus and [...]
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Dancing in the Dark
Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, will be on bookstore shelves in two weeks. I’m looking forward to reading it. Advance publicity is trickling out, including a long interview in Humanities, the journal of the NEH. “There are two rival clichés about the culture of the [...]
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Richard Poirier
The literary critic, essayist, and editor Richard Poirier died last Saturday at age 83. After discovering his writing a few years ago, through a collection titled Trying It Out in America, I became enthralled, eventually reading several of his other books and purchasing a complete set of issues of Raritan, the journal he founded at [...]
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Aldo Buzzi
Aldo Buzzi, the delightful Italian essayist, turned ninety-nine yesterday. To mark the occasion, James Marcus, who has translated Buzzi’s writing, has posted an account of his visit to Buzzi’s Milan home nearly two years ago. I came to Buzzi’s writing through the enthusiasm of Patrick Kurp, who has blogged about him several times. (See here, [...]
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Crooked Timber on George Scialabba
This week the website/community Crooked Timber is holding a symposium on George Scialabba’s new essay collection What Are Intellectuals Good For? (available from Pressed Wafer). Here is the introduction; thus far contributions have come from Michael Berubé, Russell Jacoby, Aaron Swartz, Rich Yeselson, John Holbo, and Scott McLemee (who also profiled Scialabba a few years [...]
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John McPhee
This afternoon I chose to stay in rather than venture out into the thick, sweltering New York air. Having finished my work for the day, I picked up my copy of The John McPhee Reader and read excerpts from a few of his books—Oranges, A Roomful of Hovings and Other Portraits, and Pieces of the [...]
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Jonathan Franzen on the Midwest
An interviewer asks Jonathan Franzen about what regionalism means for his work: “If you ask what the Midwest means to me, it’s that myth of an innocence prolonged and then abruptly lost… And somehow this dynamic seems more like a Midwestern thing than a Lower East Side thing or a South Boston thing. I’m not [...]
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“Nonfiction Writers Are the Ellis Island of Literature”
“Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. [...] Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. [...]
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D.D. Guttenplan, American Radical
This patient recounting of I.F. Stone’s career charts two ascensions punctuated by a sharp downturn. First came the meteoric rise from book-obsessed New Jersey boy named Isidor Feinstein to op-ed columnist for the New York Post with easy access to New Dealers throughout FDR’s administration. The second ascent begins approximately with the launch, in late 1953, of his humble four-page newsletter.
Interview: Michael Sorkin
Michael Sorkin is a New York–based architect, urban planner, educator, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Variations on a Theme Park (1991), Exquisite Corpse (1994), and After the World Trade Center (2002). His latest book, which examines the history and changing face of New York through the lens of [...]
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Midwestern Voices of Dissent
Augmenting the work of scholars of New Left history like Paul Buhle, David S. Brown’s Beyond the Frontier (Chicago) posits a Midwestern voice in American history “distinguished by a typology of progressive thought and politics.” The slim volume links Frederick Jackson Turner (b. 1861), Charles Beard (b. 1874), William Appleman Williams (b. 1921), and Christopher [...]
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“Odes to Old-fashioned Hard Work”
Matthew B. Crawford’s popular new book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, has received ample review attention. I’ve been surprised, though, by much of the criticism of the book, which seems to examine it in a vacuum. Distressingly few reviewers—Francis Fukuyama in the New York Times Book Review [...]
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“A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing”
Peter J. Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press, in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “University presses need to foment a content revival astride the delivery revolution, one that stimulates our connection to new intellectual trends, encompasses a broader conception of scholarship, and renews our commitment to the scholarly mission of the university. Such a revival [...]
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Isaiah Berlin’s Centenary
Yesterday was the centenary of the birth of Isaiah Berlin, the British historian of ideas. To mark the occasion, Henry Hardy, keeper of the Berlin flame, has published in England a second selection of Berlin’s letters, titled Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960. The book has been reviewed by John Gray (who published a biography of Berlin in [...]
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Marilynne Robinson wins Orange Prize
Earlier this week, Marilyn Robinson won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her latest novel, Home. I am an ardent fan of Robinson’s writing, and the prize occasioned news stories about and interviews with her. Click here for The Guardian’s full coverage, including an audio interview and an extract from the book. I also admire [...]
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Anthony Grafton on anxiety and deception
“When I sat down to write Forgers and Critics, what I wanted to do was think my way through the long tradition of reasoning about the coherence and character of the past, but I ultimately came to a slightly disturbing conclusion: forgery was deeply rooted in this tradition, as deeply rooted as ways of thinking about [...]