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REVIEW
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
By GEORGE PACKER
The New Yorker reporter chronicles the pride and ignorance he blames for the war.
The Real Mao
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
A magnificent biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.
New Art City
By JED PERL
In midcentury Manhattan, art passed from romantic, art-history-minded revolutionaries to eclectic individualists.
The Year of Magical Thinking
By JOAN DIDION
A powerful, persuasive account of the crisis of mortality after the sudden death of the author's husband.
Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
By DAVID MARGOLICK
A heavyweight chronicle of good's symbolic clash with evil in the ring.
The Assassins' Gate: America in IraqBy GEORGE PACKER
The New Yorker reporter chronicles the pride and ignorance he blames for the war.
The Real MaoBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
A magnificent biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.
New Art CityBy JED PERL
In midcentury Manhattan, art passed from romantic, art-history-minded revolutionaries to eclectic individualists.
The Year of Magical ThinkingBy JOAN DIDION
A powerful, persuasive account of the crisis of mortality after the sudden death of the author's husband.
Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the BrinkBy DAVID MARGOLICK
A heavyweight chronicle of good's symbolic clash with evil in the ring.
Recently reviewed books of particular interest.
Clear: A Transparent NovelBy NICOLA BARKER
This novel's hero takes his existential cue from a stunt about living inside a box, as don't we all?
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems, 1973-1993By LAWRENCE JOSEPH
A poet (and lawyer) works out his place in the world.
The Days of Abandonment
By ELENA FERRANTE
An Italian woman whose rat husband has decamped has a hard time understanding herself.
The Great StinkBy CLARE CLARK
A dark novel set in the sewers of Victorian London, where engineer and scavenger struggle.
Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance
By SCOTT BRADFIELD
A satirical story collection by an inventive stylist who seems to understand ducks.
In Case We're Separated: Connected Stories
By ALICE MATTISON
The stories concern a family whose members couldn't lose each other if they tried.
In the Fold
By RACHEL CUSK
The narrator of this novel hopes that visiting upscale friends will restore his self-confidence, but they just make him picky.
The Last Days of Dogtown
By ANITA DIAMANT
A novel that follows the decline and death of an unpromising village.
Missing Mom
By JOYCE CAROL OATES
A novel that peers into the void left by the sudden absence of a 56-year-old housewife in Mount Ephraim, N.Y.
Mission To America
By WALTER KIRN
In his new novel, Kirn invents a religion whose believers hit the road to recruit.
Shalimar the Clown
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
Beauty loses out as Kashmir and Rushdie's characters turn brutal.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories
By YIYUN LI
Fiction that offers subtle and original perspectives on China and its turbulent history.
Veronica
By MARY GAITSKILL
A novel that ruminates on beauty and cruelty, told by a former Paris model now sick and poor.
Waterloo
By KAREN OLSSON
All values are religious values in this melancholy comedy about Texas politics.
Wolf Point
By EDWARD FALCO
A thriller about a curious businessman and an irresistibly menacing young couple.
NONFICTION | FICTION
Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine
By HOLLY MORRIS
The author's quest to film intrepid women from other cultures for her TV series.
Ahmad's War, ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq
By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
A memoir of a good man murdered for his decency.
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
By KEN EMERSON
How New York songwriters thrived between Elvis and the Beatles.
America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity
By ROBERT WUTHNOW
A sociologist examines America's remarkable religious civility.
Blood RelationBy ERIC KONIGSBERG
A journalist renders the life story of his great-uncle, a violent criminal and, if volume counts, a successful one.
Caravaggio: Painter of MiraclesBy FRANCINE PROSE
A fresh eye on perhaps the greatest, certainly the most transgressive, Italian artist of his day.
Curse of the NarrowsBy LAURA M. MAC DONALD
A wrenching, detailed account of the 1917 explosion that destroyed Halifax, Nova Scotia, and killed nearly 2,000 people.
Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850
By MAYA JASANOFF
A historian rethinks imperialism and the inauspicious seeds it grew from.
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created HerBy MELANIE REHAK
Rehak brings to life the people who invented and maintained this influential series.
Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
By ADAM PHILLIPS
A psychoanalytic unraveling of what it is to be not mad in a culture that romanticizes madness.
James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism and James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A
Death in the Family, and Shorter Fiction By JAMES AGEE
Agee (1909-55) drank and smoked himself to death in only 45 years, but his monuments as a critic (especially of movies) a documentary reporter ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men") and novelist ("A Death in the Family") are elegantly collected here.
The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" BryantBy ALLEN BARRA
A sprawling but thoughtful biography of the legendary head coach of Alabama's Crimson Tide.
Letters From New Orleans
By ROB WALKER
Discoveries of untouristy corners and inexplicable practices that now may be gone forever.
Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue
By SPALDING GRAY
Typically dark and funny living matter, unfortunately suspended by Gray's suicide last year.
The Life of David
By ROBERT PINSKY
A poet's effort to interpret as a living person the central figure of the Hebrew Bible and of millennial hope.
Lincoln's Melancholy
By JOSHUA WOLF SHENK
In an era before the relentless good cheer of modern politicians, Lincoln passed through shadows to triumph.
Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank WilliamsBy PAUL HEMPHILL
The course of the country singer (1923-53) who managed to die at 29 after every kind of troubled existence.
Mark Twain: A LifeBy RON POWERS
A wise and lively biography of an American paradox, always lively, rarely wise.
Melville: His World and Work
By ANDREW DELBANCO
An acute critical biography of the author of "Moby-Dick," richly related to the times and places of his life.
Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
By Anthony Shadid
An Arabic-speaking reporter on life in the Red Zone, outside American control.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
By TONY JUDT
An inquiry into why the condition of Europe is so much better than anyone would have dared hope in 1945.
Shakespeare: The Biography
By PETER ACKROYD
A demystification that shows Shakespeare in the contexts of 16th-century arts and commerce.
The Tiger In The Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English
By EDITH MILTON
A German Jew's memoir of growing up in a British Catholic family during World War II.
Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town
By NATE BLAKESLEE
How 38 people, mostly black, were convicted of grave drug charges on virtually no evidence but the word of a single cop.
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
By LISA RANDALL
Advanced cosmological theories for lay folk who are a bit baffled by the idea of 10 dimensions.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The fate of the Greek superpower of its day.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
By JAMES SHAPIRO
A scholar's fine-detail approach to a crucial year for Shakespeare and his work.
