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Published on April 28, 2017 17:57

Vows: For Two Writers, the Road Not Taken Beckons Anew

This content was originally published by VINCENT M. MALLOZZI on 27 April 2017 | 6:05 pm.
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Michael Ruhlman long had a literary crush on Ann Hood. And now, at last, they are husband and wife.

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Published on April 28, 2017 02:39

Sketchbook / Graphic Review: Simone de Beauvoir Imagined Contemporary Womanhood in the 1960s

This content was originally published by PÉNÉLOPE BAGIEU on 27 April 2017 | 6:32 pm.
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Five decades ago, Simone de Beauvoir wrote “Les Belles Images.” The 1967 novel explains modern womanhood in a nutshell.

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Published on April 28, 2017 00:36

April 27, 2017

Paperback Row – The New York Times

This content was originally published by JOUMANA KHATIB on 27 April 2017 | 7:00 pm.
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Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Adam Hochschild. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.99.) Hochschild, the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost,” structures this account of the conflict as a collective biography of Americans who fought for the Republican side. He investigates the romantic appeal of the cause and the reasons for its failure.

HYSTOPIA, by David Means. (Picador, $18.) In this novel within a novel — framed as a manuscript by a fictional Vietnam veteran, Eugene Allen, written shortly before he committed suicide — John F. Kennedy is entering his third term as president and has founded a program, the Psych Corps, to treat traumatized soldiers. Allen’s story centers on two corps agents who have fallen in love and set off to recover a young woman who has been abducted.

LOUISA: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, by Louisa Thomas. (Penguin, $18.) Born in London, the woman who married John Quincy Adams lived across Europe with her family, then her diplomat husband, before coming to the United States. These experiences helped set her apart, as did the trove of writing she left behind. Thomas draws on Louisa’s memoirs, travelogues and extensive correspondence to offer a rich interior portrait.

FOR A LITTLE WHILE: New and Selected Stories, by Rick Bass. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In this collection of tales, humans act on their animal natures, and the natural world is suffused with the holy; in one story, an ice storm and powerful arctic front leads a dog trainer and her client to an encounter with the sublime. As our reviewer, Smith Henderson, put it, Bass, “a master of the short form,” writes not only “to save our wild places, but to save what’s wild and humane and best within us.”

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, by Tom Vanderbilt. (Vintage, $16.95.) Vanderbilt, a journalist, has written a guide to the invisible forces shaping personal preferences — and the companies trying desperately to understand, and profit from, taste. Taste is both contextual and categorical, he argues, leading to a baffling capriciousness in what people like and why.

ELIGIBLE, by Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $17.) A retelling of “Pride and Prejudice” unfolds in the Cincinnati suburbs: Liz, a magazine writer in New York, comes home to find her family in disarray, and meets Darcy, now in the guise of a neurosurgeon from San Francisco who is profoundly underwhelmed by the Midwest. Sittenfeld’s version seamlessly transplants Jane Austen’s story to a modern American setting.

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Published on April 27, 2017 22:32

10 New Books We Recommend This Week

This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 7:28 pm.
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HAM LET GLOBE TO GLOBE: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play, by Dominic Dromgoole. (Grove, $27.) To celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, London’s Globe Theater performed “Hamlet” all around the world. Dromgoole’s witty account of the ambitious two-year tour — “a compulsively readable, intensely personal chronicle of performances in places as various as Djibouti and Gdansk, Taipei and Bogotá,” in the words of our reviewer, Stephen Greenblatt — offers insight about the play and its enduring appeal.

ONE OF THE BOYS, by Daniel Magariel. (Scribner, $22.) After a brutal custody battle, two brothers watch their father drift into addiction in a gripping and heartfelt first novel that brims with wisdom about the self-destructive longing for paternal approval. For all the betrayal and resentment that binds them, Magariel’s characters feel neither typecast nor pitied.

A RABBLE OF DEAD MONEY: The Great Crash and the Global Depression, 1929-1939, by Charles R. Morris. (PublicAffairs, $29.99.) This overview of the policy response to the Great Depression is a deft synthesis, blending colorful accounts of the past with the scholarly literature of the present and stretching beyond U.S. borders. Instead of focusing on Wall Street, Morris turns his attention to the other side of the Atlantic, arguing that “All of the tangled threads that twisted together to create the catastrophe of the Depression originated in Europe.”

THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. (Riverhead, $28.) Two cognitive scientists argue that not only rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth, and that humans think in groups. That’s not necessarily bad news, writes Yuval Harari in our review: “Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world.… From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for humans.”

MY CAT YUGOSLAVIA, by Pajtim Statovci. Translated by David Hackston. (Pantheon, $25.95.) Statovci’s strange, haunting and utterly original exploration of displacement and desire interweaves the stories of a Kosovan woman and her son roiled by the aftershocks of exile. A singing, dancing cat encountered in a gay bar plays a role. In our review, Téa Obreht writes that the book is “a marvel, a remarkable achievement and a world apart from anything you are likely to read this year.”

PORTRAITS OF COURAGE: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, by George W. Bush. (Crown, $35.) The former president began painting three years after leaving the White House, inspired by Winston Churchill. Now Bush’s portraits of 98 veterans, accompanied by their harrowing stories of injury and recovery, reveal a surprisingly adept artist doing penance for a great disaster of American history.

SIGNS FOR LOST CHILDREN, by Sarah Moss. (Europa, paper, $19.) This fine exploration of a marriage between a doctor in Victorian England and her architect husband feels contemporary in its attention to the competing pulls of work and love, highlighted by distance. Tom’s employer sends him to Japan; Ally works in insane asylum in Cornwall; and the novel juxtaposes their individual quests and the effect on their nascent relationship.

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Published on April 27, 2017 21:31

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl awarded €1m damages over biography | World news

This content was originally published by Philip Oltermann in Berlin on 27 April 2017 | 3:39 pm.
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Helmut Kohl has been awarded a €1m (£842,875) in damages over an unauthorised biography that a judge said had “deeply violated” the former German chancellor’s personal rights.

Judges in the western city of Cologne ordered the book’s two authors and their publisher to pay the damages to Kohl, 87, for breaching his trust and sullying his reputation.

“This is the highest sum ever awarded by a German court in a right to privacy case,” the city’s district court said in a statement.

The bestselling book, Legacy: the Kohl Protocols, is based on more than 630 hours worth of recorded conversations between Kohl and his former ghostwriter Heribert Schwan, recorded between 2001 and 2002.

The interviews were originally intended to feed into a multi-volume memoir project, which was scrapped partway through, when the politician and his ghostwriter fell out after Schwan published another work in which he seemed to partially blame the ex-chancellor for the suicide of his wife, Hannelore.

Schwan went ahead with the project anyway, quoting a number of embarrassing comments and putdowns. Kohl – who during his 16 years in power steered the country through the final years of the cold war and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall – belittled Mikhail Gorbachev’s political achievements and dismissed other party colleagues as “babies” and “traitors”.

The book, co-written with Tilman Jens, also contained a passage in which Kohl commented on the current German chancellor, a former protege of his, in less than flattering terms: “Ms Merkel couldn’t even hold her fork and knife properly. She loitered at state dinners so that I had to repeatedly tell her to pull herself together.”

The Kohl Protocols was published in 2014, but Kohl had already managed to block its sale, and the reprinting of 116 passages based on confidential conversations – a ruling upheld by the Cologne court on Thursday.

Schwan argued that he had given Kohl the option of switching off the tape recorder when discussing matters he did not want published.

Lawyers for Schwan and Jens as well as the Heyne publishing company, a unit of Random House, said they would appeal against the ruling.

Kohl, described as the father of German reunification, left active politics in 2002. Since a fall in 2008, he has suffered from impaired speech and uses a wheelchair.

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Published on April 27, 2017 20:30

B&N Names Demos Parneros CEO

This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 4:00 am.

Barnes & Noble has named its current COO, Demos Parneros, its new CEO. Parneros replaces Len Riggio, who has held that position on an interim basis since Ron Boire was dismissed last summer.

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Published on April 27, 2017 19:29

3 Books Tell the Legacies of Legends

This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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The book contains as much autobiography as portraiture, and it begins with an arresting anecdote. Traveling to Washington, D.C., as a high school student, Fiss visited the court to observe his first oral argument. Who should he see at the lectern but Thurgood Marshall himself, arguing Brown. Marshall is one of three judges profiled here, along with Brennan and the Israeli jurist Aharon Barak. John Doar and Burke Marshall represent the practical idealism of the 1960s Justice Department. In 1963, Doar gained fame by helping to quell a brewing riot in Mississippi after the assassination of Medgar Evers. A photo of that tense moment appears on the book’s cover.

Fiss’s entries on his fellow scholars, by contrast, can unfortunately veer into small-stakes law school politics, or worse, arcane theories and stale hypotheticals that have little application outside Yale’s lofty walls. Much is made of the clever titles of law review articles. And somewhere between Fiss’s account of “fundamentality without fundamentalism” and the well-worn “ticking time-bomb” scenario to discuss torture, many readers will find their attention wandering. The early chapters of this book are best.

GEORGE WASHINGTON
The Wonder of the Age
By John Rhodehamel
353 pp. Yale University, $32.50.

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This biography of the nation’s first president stands out for its rich prose. Rhodehamel writes of Washington’s “legendary courage and his splendid person,” and explains that he possessed “that rare and inexplicable power to make others trust and obey him. Many discovered that they actually loved him.” Rhodehamel’s jaunty writing makes for a highly entertaining book. Here he is on the Continental Army’s surprise attack at the Battle of Trenton: “The Americans charged aggressively, emerging out of the swirling snow. Washington led from the center.” The general’s instinct to find the middle of the action worried his men. It also inspired them.

Washington’s story benefits from a vigorous telling. The powdered wig, the silly pants, the poker face staring out from crumpled dollar bills: All serve to separate us from our founding father. Rhodehamel’s urgency of prose restores the connection. He also showcases his experience as the former archivist of Mount Vernon by bringing manuscript sources directly to the reader. A fine detail is Washington’s distinctive penmanship. “He learned to write in an imposing hand that is still lovely to see. His lines lay perfectly straight across the paper. He liked elegant capital letters.”

Rhodehamel contends that a tension between ambition and reluctance to serve produced Washington’s greatness. He eagerly sought out commands early in his career, but he hesitated to assume the presidency and could not wait to be free of it. In office, he used his tremendous prestige to consolidate American nationhood at an uncertain moment. Washington was not perfect: He freed his slaves in his will but had been a lifelong slaveholder; and while he decried partisanship, he himself became a fierce Federalist. Yet even flawed, Washington was both the projection and embodiment of the citizenry’s deepest aspirations.

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Published on April 27, 2017 18:28

New Spanish Language Imprint Launches at Quarto Group

This content was originally published by on 27 April 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Quarto Iberoamericana will be overseen with Quarto Group's longtime partner, the Argentina-based Catapulta Editores. It will publish 20 books a year, starting in fall 2017.

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Published on April 27, 2017 17:26

Home Alone With the Ghost of Emily Dickinson

This content was originally published by SARAH LYALL on 27 April 2017 | 10:21 pm.
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“I wanted to see what it would be like to spend some time in that room,” said Lanette Ward, 70, a retired English teacher from Atlanta who admires Dickinson so much she named her daughter Emily. She wrote there for two hours late one afternoon, as day turned to evening and a replica of one of Dickinson’s famous white dresses, displayed in the room, began to take on special significance.

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The poet’s bed.

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Greg Miller for The New York Times

“Oh, yes, I felt closer to her,” Ms. Ward said by phone later. “It felt magical to me, like being in an Emily Dickinson high holy place.” She hadn’t planned to write anything in particular, but what emerged, she said, were the beginnings of “a story of magical realism, very Southern Gothic, something about the dress being animated and beginning to move.”

Maria Arenas, a 20-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visited the room on Dec. 2 as a surprise birthday present from her family. Her father drove up to town to collect her.

“He was very mysterious about it,” Ms. Arenas said. “He didn’t say where he was taking me, and then he handed me a little bag when we got to the center of Amherst with this notebook and a pack of pencils.”

Installed in her spot, she let her mind wander and found Dickinson invading her thoughts. “I started writing whatever came out,” she said. “I ended up writing a short story about a fish. It was very interesting.”

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A reproduction of Dickinson’s desk, where she wrote her poems and letters.

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Greg Miller for The New York Times

To prepare myself for the experience, I wandered through the house, which is being restored to the way it looked, more or less, when Dickinson lived there until her death in 1886. The bedroom is back to its old state, though several pieces of furniture, like the bureau and the tiny writing desk that was so important to Dickinson’s work, are reproductions. (The originals are owned by Harvard.) For some reason, Dickinson’s single bed, made of a lovely dark wood, seemed particularly poignant and evocative.

Snippets from Dickinson’s poems are scattered throughout the house, and I read a few — “A chilly Peace infests the Grass” and “I dwell in Possibility” — to get into the mood.

Pretty much everyone else had left the house, and I was alone on the second floor. The sound of people rustling downstairs began to recede along with the noises from outside, as what passes for rush hour in Amherst came and went. The light was changing, and already I was feeling different.

Even if you’re lucky enough to have a room of your own, as Virginia Woolf put it in her elegant manifesto, and this applies as much to male as to female writers, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to suppress the cacophony in your head. It’s hard to find a calm spot for clear thinking. I’d arrived with an unquiet mind — there was a tricky project at work, and an even trickier personal situation. Having left my bags with their comforting electronic devices in another room, all I had at my disposal were some pencils I’d borrowed from the museum office, a couple of Dickinson poems and my notebook.

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Exterior view of the Emily Dickinson Museum with Dickinson’s bedroom visible on the second floor.

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Greg Miller for The New York Times

Barbara Dana, an actress and Emily Dickinson scholar who toured the country for four and a half years in the one-woman play “The Belle of Amherst,” spent two hours in the room in September, working on a memoir about a difficult time in her life. She said it helped cement a closeness she had long felt for the poet. What she hadn’t been prepared for, though, was how moved she would feel.

“This is going to sound weird,” said Ms. Dana, who is 76. “I felt her very strongly there. I started working. I told her, this memoir is hard for me to do. I said it out loud, very quietly, ‘I need your help.’ And as I was writing I felt her support, and I thought, we’re both writers. I had never allowed myself to think that before.”

I arrived knowing far less about Dickinson than Ms. Dana does. I planned to absorb the atmosphere and maybe meditate a little, to try to imagine the room in the 19th century. My notebook was meant merely to record my observations.

I read a Dickinson poem aloud, in a murmur, trying to fall into its cadences and absorb its meaning. I closed my eyes. I was so tired.

What happened next is also going to sound weird.

A calm came over me, and I was overtaken by a sharp distilled focus that expressed itself, bizarrely, in a compulsion to write. I did something I hadn’t done since elementary school, and never of my own accord: I began to compose a poem. What came out wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t terrible, and that wasn’t really the point anyway. The point was that it just poured out of me, this surge of emotion and language. I was expressing myself in a whole new way.

The thoughts spilled out in order and did not step over each other. I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop writing until Ms. Steinhauser came in an hour later and told me it was time to go. It felt thrilling. It felt uncanny. It felt as if no time had passed at all.

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