The Tools We Need

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The Tools We Need

The panic that arose across the country as the incredible reality of a Trump presidency began to sink in hit the book world with particular force. In his temperament, style and values, the new president seems almost purpose-built to oppose everything Barack Obama has stood for and accomplished. (The only things they appear to have in common are a love of golf and an on again-off again friendship with Hillary Clinton.) In few aspects is the gulf wider than in their respective attitudes to reading. 

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The Great Apes: A Short History by Chris Herzfeld

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The Great Apes: A Short History by Chris Herzfeld

Christ Herzfeld's Petite histoire des grands singes appeared originally in 2012 and now has an English-language translation from Yale University Press by Kevin Frey that ably captures both Herzfeld's sweeping viewpoint and his sharply inquisitive tone; the book presents readers with a fast-paced and engaged history of humanity's historical and scientific encounters with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees and broadens whenever it can to larger issues of ethology and primatology.

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Book Review: Christopher Hitchens - The Last Interview

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Book Review: Christopher Hitchens - The Last Interview

The thriving “Last Interview” series from Melville House features slim volumes collecting the final public comments made by a wide variety of public figures – geniuses, charlatans, comedians, artists, successful frauds, and the occasional transcendent intellectuals. Here we get reflections in winter (whether they knew it or not) from such people as David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Hannah Arendt, Philip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut, and this month the series takes in the late Christopher Hitchens, political commentator, outspoken atheist, and author of the bestselling God is Not Great.

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The Twilight(ing) of the Superhero

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The Twilight(ing) of the Superhero

The principle of sexual selection, wrote naturalist Charles Darwin, deals with “the advantage which certain individuals have over others of the same sex and species solely in respect of reproduction.” A peacock’s tail, its marvelous length and iridescence sculpted by female choice, is the iconic example. Beetle horns, the elaborate nests of bower birds, and even the human brain, engine of art, music and speech, further illustrate the power of a positive feedback loop. The more refined a trait, the better suited to attracting mates shall a specimen be. Life, when not about brute struggle, becomes both beauty pageant and talent show.

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Marilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy

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Marilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy

Marilynne Robinson began her novel Housekeeping while completing a dissertation on Shakespeare as a graduate student. Initially she wrote what now form the book’s preliminary scenes as exercises in extended metaphors. Evoking her childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho, a lake town in the panhandle of the state (in the book she renames it Fingerbone) and remotely drawing off her ancestors, Robinson simply wanted to see if she could still write something other than scholastic essays. Also, she has said, she wanted to impress her friends.

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Worlds Undone

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Worlds Undone

A pseudonym, though it obscures, is not always successful as a bid for obscurity. Witness Elena Ferrante: while her work stands on its own, the added mystery of authorial absence has no doubt contributed to the years-long international firestorm of publicity and speculation.

Nevertheless, a pen name may still give personal shelter to the author who chooses it.

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Both Sides, Now

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Both Sides, Now

To the naysayers who complain that critics are nothing more than parasites of art and culture, A. O. Scott has dismaying news: You too are a critic, that very opinion constitutes criticism, welcome to the club, pull up a chair. The premise of his new book Better Living Through Criticism is that the act of criticism is synonymous with the act of thinking, in the manifold ways this can done—wondering, questioning, investigating, examining, shaping ideas, forming judgments. You might imagine criticism to be a more professional pursuit—in Scott’s case, for instance, in his capacity as a film critic for the New York Times, it sometimes involves writing in-depth excurses on the latest superhero blockbuster.

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Not One to Eschew the Everyday

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Not One to Eschew the Everyday

Daniel Brown is, if his poetry is any indication, a very patient man. “I’m as open as the next guy,” he writes in “The Biggie,” a poem from his latest collection, What More?, “to the counterintuitive.” This he proves again and again, in both openness and unexpectedness. What More? begins with Brown asking an honest question, one so honest that an animating tension is introduced between the candor of the content and the art of its presentation.

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All Our Revels Ended

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All Our Revels Ended

After a long career spent in the throes of literary battle, Harold Bloom wants to tell us that he is done fighting.

He began his combat in the mid-fifties by defending the English Romantics against the New Critics who, inspired by T.S. Eliot, maligned Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and others to such an extent that study of them was virtually banned in American universities until Bloom took up the call.

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Reading Poetry

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Reading Poetry

Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter Professor at Harvard University, begins her new book with what she calls an “account of [her] life as a critic” – a reasonable subject for an introduction, given that, at the time this review is published, Vendler will have just passed her 82nd birthday. More relevant, though, is that The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar is the latest of nearly 30 books authored or edited by Vendler since the 1960’s, over the course of which, in addition to hundreds of reviews and essays, she has become known as perhaps the finest living critic of poetry in America.

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Fabergé Monsters

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Fabergé Monsters

One of the main problems for the backyard naturalist who wants to learn about dragonflies is the scarcity of books to turn to on the subject. Novice birders encounter no such difficulty: Bookstores devote entire shelves to both the practical and spiritual aspects of the pastime; field guides are plentiful to redundancy; virtually every ornithological species has at some point been celebrated in a standalone monograph. Layperson lepidopterists have to look a little harder, but even so, butterfly watching is an honored pursuit and handbooks and pocket guides are easily procured. The same goes for lovers of trees, wildflowers, seashells and even mushrooms—go book hunting for the mycophile in your family and you’ll turn up a remarkable selection. Conjure an interest in dragonflies, however, and the pickings are slimmer, and often written for specialists.

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James Wood and The Fall of Man

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James Wood and The Fall of Man

At one point in James Wood’s novel The Book Against God, the spiritually tortured narrator Thomas Bunting is transported to a painful recollection of adolescence. Thomas is the son of a kind and intelligent Anglican priest. His childhood was filled with love and attention. Then one day when he was 14, he says, he walked into his school’s assembly hall and, as though stepping through some kind of portal, entered into a state of self-consciousness:

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Gordon's Alive!

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Gordon's Alive!

Way back in the beneficent 1950s – in 1954, to be exact – there appeared on the metal spinner-rack of Trow's Paper Goods (in a sleepy little Iowa town with neither bookstore nor library) a slim thing of wonder: a new comic book called Jungle Action #1. For the asking price of 10 cents, the reader could thrill to the exploits of Leopard Girl, Jungle Boy, and an enormous and bad-tempered Gorilla named Man-oo the Mighty. But for the real connoisseur of jungle adventure, the star of the issue was a muscular young man named Lo-Zar, Lord of the Jungle.

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Endless Forms Most Brutal

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Endless Forms Most Brutal

At their king’s behest, four grizzled blind men approach an unidentified object. He warns them that it has lain forgotten in an unforgiving place, and is a putrid, clammy thing. They nod, not daring to remind the king which sense they lack. Standing almost nine feet tall, the object forces each man to claim his own portion.

The first man, at the object’s rear, says, “It has a knobby trunk, out of which smooth, hollow tubes run. It must be a sculpture.” Caressing its top, the second man partially agrees. “A sculpture yes, but not an object. It is a soldier, wearing a large helmet, pocked and ridged with the scars of battle.” The third man, who’s been kneeling, waves a finger. “But it is long and jagged, like the skeleton of some legendary beast.” The king smiles. The fourth man does not. He has the misfortune of standing directly in front of the thing. Before he can speak, it wraps a pair of six-fingered claws around his head. The other men hear hissing before hot blood splashes them.

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No Strange Quirk of Fate

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No Strange Quirk of Fate

Time-lapse photography is a miraculous thing. Like a superpower, it changes our relationship to the mundane, revealing life lived at a different pace. Desolate winter, for example, can become lush spring in seconds. Likewise, a teenager can age one day a second for four years (her hair tossing as if in a storm, the minutia of her life cascading across her bedroom walls).

When lovingly executed, time-lapse footage haunts and inspires. Details blur to give us impossible perspectives. Grander patterns and unconventional theories surface in the mind. No matter the subject, we see reflected the familiar elements of life. But what dances before us does so with a strange life of its own.

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Into the Breach: "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games"

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Into the Breach: "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games"

In the back of our ninth grade class, you may or may not recall, there sat a silent, studious boy whom everyone ignored. He wasn’t chubby enough to bully. He didn’t have the acne to scatter female cliques. Even the teacher, busy with students who achieved things or had problems, left him be. Such invisibility worked in his favor. Devoted to fictitious worlds, he wrote and drew continuously. Socials and first kisses, trivialities compared with the act of creating, only wrinkled his nose. His imagination, however, intensified, as he learned to focus it through the noisy social web of the surrounding classroom.

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A Book Every King Should Read

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A Book Every King Should Read

George R. R. Martin, screenwriter, editor and epic fantasist, has so far delivered four of the seven volumes planned in his sweeping A Song of Ice and Fire saga. Book five, A Dance with Dragons, has been eagerly anticipated by fans for at least three years now. Ideally, it will arrive in time for the Spring 2011 premiere of HBO’s television series based on Martin’s books.

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Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War ​​​​​​​by Adam Nicolson

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Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War ​​​​​​​by Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson’s new book Quarrel with the King is a searching, thoughtful brief study of the earls of Pembroke (and their often formidable wives and sisters) through two hundred years, but there is another family drama, somewhat less ancient but no less fascinating, unfolding just beneath its surface.

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