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 [...]

Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history – Gross makes much of being denied official access to the museum’s archives and its employees [...]

Surrounded by condemned buildings and not yet eager for more human subjects, photography Danny Lyon set out to document the broad swaths of downtown being razed for two major infrastructure projects: a new ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge on the East Side and the World Trade Center on the West Side. [...]

The strongest impression I gathered from The Outermost Dream is one of an editor’s sensibility: ego suppression and attention to the delicate arrangement of material. Written with sympathy for and out of curiosity about his subjects—he avoided writing about fiction, choosing instead to discuss memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and biographies—Maxwell’s essays judiciously arrange for the reader the salient, character-summarizing facts of remarkable lives. [...]

“As with people,” Solotaroff writes, “I find that I have more to say about writers than I admire than about those I don’t. This does not preclude registering judgments that spring from a lessening of interest or esteem, for the point of reviewing an author is to deliver the experience of reading him or her, and to be less than candid is to weaken the conviction that has otherwise come to praise.” Sensible words [...]

“It may well be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of evidence and sources, clarity of presentation.” [...]

“The more I read of Williams, the more I was convinced of his relevance to contemporary ethics, especially (at first) a prominent question in contemporary religious ethics, the relationship between religion and morality. Do we need religion in order to maintain a public morality? Can Christians in particular make a contribution to a vision for public morality without either appearing to endorse theocracy or appealing to a universalistic basis for morality?” [...]

“Melville usually wrote in the mornings and took his family for carriage rides in the late afternoon, after a midday meal. Among their favorite outings were visits to the Shaker settlement at Mount Lebanon.” [...]

Consider this post a bookmark (“book mark”?) meant to spur my own further library research. Early in Thomas Bender’s New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987), he comments briefly on a figure previously unknown to me, Hocquet Caritat. Bender writes, [...]

So says short story writer Gary Lutz, whose address to the students of Columbia University’s writing program, delivered last September, has been reprinted in the January issue of The Believer. Thankfully it is one of the texts reproduced in full online. (Link via The Dizzies.) Here is an excerpt: I can’t remember reading anything with [...]

William Chapman Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College in New York City, is the author of Unreal Cities (1990) and coeditor of Visions of the Modern City (1983). His new book, New York Nocturne (2008), examines images of the city after dark in literature, painting, and photography from 1850 to 1950. To get a [...]

State by State re-creates, in condensed form, the American Guide series, a collection of 48 books published between 1938 and 1941 as part of the Federal Writers Project. Practicality, however, is set aside; whereas the earlier books were published by each state and intended for tourists’ use, this volume offers decidedly personal literary endeavors.

Robert H. Abzug’s engaging study of nineteenth-century reform-movement figures, including those who agitated for temperance, abolitionism, and women’s rights, argues that their aims can only be understood in the context of their religious thinking. [...]

After publishing the post below, I pulled out The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith, edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden. In his introduction, Auden offers this: “Physically, [Smith] was swarthy, sturdy tending to stoutness and suffering in later life from gout. Mentally, like so many funny  men, he had to struggle constantly against [...]

“Writing, depending as it does on those enabling assumptions by which ideas are produced and understood at a particular cultural moment, is also, for the kind of critical intelligence discussed and at work in these pages, an act of resistance to those assumptions.” So suggests Richard Poirier, founding editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review, in [...]

I eagerly await the moment when I can sit down to read Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Home. In the meantime, the media blitz surrounding it is in full swing. Ruth Franklin, writing in the October 8 issue of The New Republic, discusses the absence of God from contemporary American fiction, places Robinson in relation to [...]

Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler no. 14, titled “On the Life of an Author vs. His Writing,” notes: It has long been the custom of the oriental monarchs to hide themselves in gardens and palaces, to avoid the conversation of mankind, and to be known to their subjects only by their edicts. The same policy [...]

“What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of [...]

Robert Pogue Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University, is a literary scholar and translator whose interests include the Italian lyric, Dante, Renaissance humanism, and phenomenology. The University of Chicago Press has just published Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Interview, in the subject’s voice, published on Artforum.com on [...]

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a 1,000-page anthology, represents a Herculean effort on the part of author and activist Bill McKibben, its editor, to bring together the texts most relevant to an audience unfamiliar with the topic. It is matchless in its heft, generous in scope (included are Sierra Club founder John Muir and Marvin Gaye), and, with a detailed chronology in its back matter, serviceable in its depth. [...]

I’ve just finished Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which I enjoyed reading. It is an account of freethought from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to present-day battles between those supporting and fighting the teaching of evolution. The book’s tone remains fairly [...]