Book Reviews

The view from the top of life’s hill can be expansive yet daunting. While we can see where we came from, we also see the other side of the slope and it’s all downhill from here.

Dani Shapiro stands at the top of the hill with a lot on her mind. Has she been a good enough wife, daughter and mother? Is she Jewish enough? Has she practiced enough yoga? She is less interested in “Why are we here?” than in “What does it all mean for me?”

These aren’t the small questions, obviously, but they’re questions that we all face whether we confront them openly or hide from them. Shapiro decides to face them head-on as she adjusts to the view from the “afternoon” of her life in her memoir Devotion: A Memoir .

There is “Tudor frenzy” everywhere you look. From the 2009 Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall (a historical novel about Henry VIII’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell) to the hit Showtime series The Tudors starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Henry VIII is once again back in style. Books, movies, TV – the notorious king is everywhere, and not far behind is his infamous second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Julie Powell is not Tiger Woods but one can’t be blamed if the golf star’s colossal implosion comes to mind while reading her new work. How juicy was that first bite about the golfer’s late night-early morning car crash and reports of another woman... then another woman … then another woman. But that tasty moment of gossip eventually gave way to a sense that we’ve seen too much -- the crying child and collapsed mother-in-law on the 911 call sealed it. If we must read on, it should be with real compassion for the wrecked lives involved.

Hampshire College was founded in 1970 as the ne plus ultra progressive institution. The elite liberal arts college in Massachusetts has not grades, no distribution requirements, flexible independent majors and, according to lore, lots of drugs and Frisbee.

What was it like to go to Hampshire in its early days, in the conservative eighties, or today? Have the ideals held up in an increasingly standards-driven educational landscape? What do Hampshire graduates go on to achieve, and how do they look back upon their unusually, though elite, education? Has this experiment worked?

After securing her place as novelist of substance, as opposed to the other kind of novelist that haunts the best seller lists, Zadie Smith ( White Teeth: A Novel , On Beauty ) began writing essays in publications whose editors were eager to work with her: The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the trendy Believer. She wrote on expected serious topics (E.M. Forster, George Eliot) and then surprisingly frivolous topics (the Oscars), and tried to branch out from the lonely perch of literary fiction to try her hand in the overcrowded field of pop culture commentator. Such maneuvers have been successfully attempted before by Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, etc.

Judith Matloff’s idea of a normal life probably isn’t what you’d call normal. As a foreign correspondent, Matloff spent the first 20 years of her career covering tragedies from Zaire to Chechnya, but decided to trade it in for a life somewhere more peaceful, more practical. …Somewhere like a dilapidated crack house in West Harlem during its drug trafficking heyday.

I am a carnivore. So, the irony wasn't lost on me when I was asked to review Jonathan Safran Foer's new book “Eating Animals,” a non-fiction account of his exploration into the horrors of factory farming in the United States. 

I had fully expected to be shocked by Safran Foer's descriptions of how chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows are treated inhumanely in our heartland's conglomerate-owned plants, where not only is there no care given to animals' well-being while alive, but absolutley no care given to their slaughter. The book didn't disappoint on this front. In fact, it exceeded expectations.

Religion poisons everything… God is a delusion… the end of faith... these are phrases lately found among the burgeoning supply of books by "new atheists" who take arms against a sea of holy rollers and jihadis.  In an age of faith-based politics, resurgent creationism, and religious terrorism, aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have become bestselling authors.