Wednesday, March 19,2008

Crescent City Blues

The roots of New Orleans

By David Luhrssen

New Orleans has been in the news often in the past three years, and most of the headlines have not been good. Despite gradual reconstruction, much of it undertaken by private groups in the face of governments stymied on all levels, portions of the city remain in ruins and its population scattered. New Orleans has become a symbol of relentless nature overwhelming under-funded public programs, a catastrophe of poor planning, a failure of the national imagination. As Ned Sublette implies in his latest book, New Orleans could never have been conceived by the American imagination in the first place. The Crescent City was a Caribbean port swallowed whole and only gradually digested by Manifest Destiny.

Wednesday, March 19,2008

Renewing the Countryside-Wisconsin

(University of Wisconsin Press), edited by Jerry Hembd, Jody Pad

By Michael Popke

The next time you wish you lived anywhere but here, pick up Renewing the Countryside-Wisconsin, read a few pages and change your mind in a hurry. These 39 short pieces, written by several different authors and complemented by stunning fullcolor photography, profile hardworking individuals, organizations and businesses in the state that are blazing trails in sustainable and organic agriculture, environmentally responsible business practices and homegrown . . .

Wednesday, March 19,2008

Death and Dessert

Book Preview

By Aisha Motlani

When Marie Antoinette was reputed (however erroneously) to have waived off the plight of France’s starving masses with the words “Let them eat cake” she was clearly unaware of the dire repercussions. The same might be said of the characters in Joanne Fluke’s best-selling Hannah Swensen mysteries. Dead bodies keep turning up in a small Minnesotan town, bearing evidence of having indulged in Swensen’s sweet delights prior to their demise.

Wednesday, March 12,2008

Deep Consciousness

Finding the goddess within

By David Luhrssen

For many of us, the world feels increasingly off balance. Life seems out of joint. Many of the apparent causes are in the human environment, whether it’s mindless movies, marketing campaigns to stimulate desire for useless things, political doublespeak or the endless supply of spam.

Wednesday, March 12,2008

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

(Random House), by Truman Capote

By Tom Wilmeth

Similar to viewing scarce footage of John Coltrane or hearing an unknown concert recording by Woody Guthrie, this new collection of Truman Capote’s previously uncollected essays encourages a re-evaluation of his canon. Because each of these essays had been published separately during the author’s life, this compilation doesn’t possess the same scholarly fascination as 2005’s release of Summer Crossing, Capote’s lost first novel. Still, Portraits and Observations should spark renewed and deserved interest in this unique American voice.

Wednesday, March 12,2008

Burying the Past

Book Preview

By Aisha Motlani

Moe Prager is no stranger to cold cases. You might even say the former NYPD officer and protagonist of Reed Farrel Coleman’s award-winning P.I. series relishes the challenges they pose. He lives by Faulkner’s words, “The past is never dead,” the truth of which becomes unequivocally clear in Coleman’s fifth novel of the series, Empty Ever After.

Wednesday, March 5,2008

Putting America to Work

How FDR continues to outrage the right

By Roger K. Miller

By and large, historians have credited President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal for getting the United States out of the Great Depression. From time to time salvos are lobbed from conservative bunkers, such as Amity Shlaes’ anti-New Deal tome of last year, The Forgotten Man. But like so many other books of its kind, it failed to land a lethal hit, and meanwhile the ranks of New Deal defenders continue to be replenished.

Wednesday, March 5,2008

Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture

(University of Wisconsin), edited by Marcus C. Levitt and Tatyan

By David Luhrssen

Violence has been inseparable from the human condition, so why pick on Russia? The editors of this collection of scholarly essays fail to make their case, but that doesn’t mean that many of the book’s articles aren’t worth reading. Violence is a broad theme and the contributors to Times of Trouble explore the subject along many avenues. Among the most interesting topics are women writers who survived the Gulag, psychological violence in Dostoyevsky, the curmudgeonly and skeptical late-Soviet novelist Viktor Astaf’ev and an astute psychological examination of Stalinism whose conclusion is that Stalin and his henchmen feared the Russian people as much as the people feared them.

Wednesday, March 5,2008

Death and Rebirth

Book Preview

By Aisha Motlani

School shootings, date rape, kidnapping, modern-day witch hunts for alleged sexual predators: These are just a few of the thorny issues Jodi Picoult has dealt with in the numerous novels she’s written to date. And in each of them she offers readers a vantage point from which hasty moral judgments are impossible. In her new book, Change of Heart, she tackles capital punishment, using it as a vehicle to examine religious dogma and the crippling loss of a loved one, as well as the fallacy of sentencing a man to death without fully understanding his crime.

Wednesday, February 27,2008

Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Pictures

Book Review

By David Luhrssen

Herbert von Karajan was one of classical music’s towering figures in the 20th century. The Austrian conductor’s career began under the Nazis (even though Hitler considered him “un- German”) and continued after World War II, when he rapidly attained star status. The text to A Life in Pictures summarizes his life and career, but, as the title suggests, the photographs are the focus of this coffee-table book. The best are black-and-white, artful compositions in light and shadow. Their subjects cover Karajan at work and play—he loved zooming around in sports cars and speedboats when he wasn’t conducting meticulous and powerful interpretations of great symphonies.

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Elections 2008

Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.

Sources: Pentagon to stop forced tour extension (AP)

AP - The Army will substantially reduce use of the unpopular practice of holding troops beyond their enlistment dates and will pay $500 to those still forced to stay in the service, defense and congressional officials said Wednesday.

AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them (AP)

AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.

Analysis: White House, Dems backpedaling on AIG (AP)

AP - For the first time since last fall's election, Democrats and the Obama administration are backpedaling furiously on an issue easily understood by financially strapped taxpayers: $165 million in bonuses paid out at bailed-out AIG.

Pence: Return AIG donations (Politico)

Politico - House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence is urging politicians from both parties to strongly consider returning campaign contributions from AIG.

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Going Out on a Pier to Buy A Home

Late last week, New York City went out on a limb, or a pier to be exact, to help a group of people in Queens. For almost 100 years the 17 houses on Beach 84th Street Pier were owned by the state or