Editorial Reviews “Arrival City brilliantly captures the breakneck pace of this ‘great migration,’ as the peasants of the poor world relocate to their own megacities—and ours. And it brings profoundly good news from the mean streets . . . Bottom of Form Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist skilled in both colourful reportage and sustaining a [...]
S.T. Joshi profiles 14 notable agnostics and atheists from the 19th and 20th centuries. He is up front about the fact that he’s not trying to be encyclopedic and has chosen his subjects based on whether he “shares an intellectual sympathy with them.” They are, by and large, a fascinating bunch, including Thomas Huxley, who [...]
Michael Krasny, an English professor at San Francisco State University and the host of the “ Forum ” public radio talk show, decries the polarized state of affairs between religious fundamentalists and militant atheists in Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest (New World, $22.95). Krasny, who was raised by Jewish parents, quotes novelist Julian Barnes: “I don’t believe [...]
Saul Frampton’s “When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?” takes its Zen-like title from another of Montaigne’s most famous observations. Compared with “How to Live,” Frampton’s is a much tighter and more elegant work, a series of historical and critical essays rather than a [...]
The fiftieth-anniversary edition of the classic account of Hollywood’s inner workings–voted one of the century’s top 100 journalistic works and called by Hemingway “much better than most novels.” In the spring of 1950, when New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross heard that John Huston was planning to make a film of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of [...]
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. [...]
If ventriloquism is a lost art, Mr. Shepard has found it. In these 13 short stories he shows he can move the lips of anyone: a special-effects designer on a Japanese film, a 15th-century French accomplice to dozens of murders, a retired American soldier reeling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Then there’s Mr. Shepard’s realistic staging, [...]
Guaranteed a place in the pantheon of feminist writers, Roiphe has written memoirs about her childhood, marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, yet she has always glided over her twenties. Now we understand why. Roiphe’s fiercely candid account of her struggles during the cold-war era is propulsive and abrading in its exposure of unquestioned sexism and the [...]
Books and films almost beyond number have been inspired by the ‘Cambridge Spies,’ five well-bred, brilliant English university students recruited to spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Their efforts helped Stalin defeat the Nazis, press the Cold War, and even brought down the government of Harold Macmillan in 1963. They also created a [...]
New Yorker librarian Michaud’s first novel displays significant but uneven talent. Its emotional insight and character development are first rate, but its lack of structure and pacing diminish their power. Clara Lugo, a Dominican immigrant who grew up in a troubled home in the upper reaches of Manhattan, has escaped that world for comfort and [...]
