Books

When asked what they knew about Joan Didion, a not insignificant number of people might mention her famous essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." It is the eponymous essay of Didion’s 1968 collection, the first non-fiction collection of her career. The essay ends with the oft-repeated description of Susan, a five-year-old in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. She wants a bicycle for Christmas, likes ice cream, Coca-Cola, and the beach — and gets high on acid. Didion describes the domestic setup, and her own discomfort: she "falter[s] at the key words" when asking her if she has other friends on drugs. Didion immortalized the scene of Sixties freedom gone wrong; there is no utopia here. Other Didion fans might be drawn to her essay "Goodbye to All That.

Barack Obama exited the presidency far blacker than he entered it. That’s a central theme of historian Claude A. Clegg III’s splendid and wide-ranging “interpretive history” of how Obama’s White House years “were witnessed, experienced, and interpreted by African-Americans.” That framing reflects a book that is self-consciously aimed at black readers, but it also illuminates an important truth about Obama, one that this reviewer realized after spending more than eight hours talking with him during three “off-the-record” visits to the Oval Office during the last nine months of his presidency. Clegg is too good a historian to be an uncritical fanboy like the many journalists who forfeited their professionalism during the Obama years.

Today marks ten years since the death of the writer Christopher Hitchens, one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth and early twenty-first century journalism. He probably would have been amused by the way virtually every sector of political and social thought has subsequently claimed him as their own in his posthumous form. Whether you’re a right-wing demagogue, a left-wing woke activist or a hand-writing neocon, you can surely find the perfect Hitchens quote to suit your purposes. Hitchens died far too young at 62, but then he had already lived the kind of full-throated bacchanal existence that his peers could only look upon in envy. He wrote over thirty books, which alternated between the profound and the provocative, and millions of words of journalism.

If you have a graduate degree in English, I’ll bet you my neglected copy of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, you’ve read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. It’s long been a favorite of critics because we don’t really know what happens in the end — everyone loves a puzzle — but the postmodern critics love it big time. You can superimpose any half-baked theory with impunity because no one will call you on it. In 1995, Wayne Booth wrote that he found more than 500 books or articles on the novella before he got tired of adding them up. It’s easily double that now. That’s not to say it’s a bad story. Quite the opposite. I think it’s one of James’s best. It is also a good example of how James has been misunderstood.

Godine at Fifty: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher, by David R. Godine, David R. Godine, 2021 In The Truth about Publishing, Sir Stanley Unwin writes: “It is easy to become a publisher, but difficult to remain one.” David R. Godine has accomplished the difficult task of remaining one for fifty years, and in the beautifully designed and set Godine at Fifty — would we expect any less from a Godine book? — he tells the story of the company’s beginning and survival and of each book he has published over the years, chock-full of reproductions of the company’s covers, woodcuts, and illustrations. This is a book about books for book lovers. Raised in Boston, David R.

Matt Labash I read a lot of books. Probably well over sixty in the last year. I’m not saying that in some little-kid braggadocious way. After all, I’m fifty-one years old. Though some have said I read on a fifty-two-year-old level. In addition to the couple of books I have open at any time, a good deal of my book consumption comes via audio: I have an audiobook going in my car or on my MP3 player at all times. And at my advanced age, if I don’t dog-ear and underline a book, it’s lost down the memory hole forever, no matter how much I liked it. But one I do remember liking so much that it bears mentioning, is John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet (Penguin, $28).

Stacey Johnson-Batiste’s account of her friendship with Vice-President Kamala Harris comes at an awkward time. Over the past eighteen months, Harris has seen her approval ratings fall to record lows — even worse than Dick Cheney's and Mike Pence's — and has been the subject of regular rumors from Team Biden that she’ll be removed from the VP ticket and shunted off to the Supreme Court. A well-sourced, and damning, CNN story suggests that, in the increasingly likely event of Biden not standing for a second term, she would face an opposed candidacy, rather than the coronation that many, no doubt including Harris herself, might have expected.

You’re sick of cancel culture, and you’re not alone. Just last week, the fashion designer Tom Ford complained that cancel culture “‘inhibits design’ because ‘everything is now considered appropriation’ and designers can no longer ‘celebrate other cultures’.” The actress Dakota Johnson, famous until recently for being the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, told The Hollywood Reporter she finds the whole thing — and I do mean the whole thing — sad. “I feel sad for the loss of great artists. I feel sad for people needing help and perhaps not getting it in time. I feel sad for anyone who was harmed or hurt. It’s just really sad.

When Democratic strategists look back on how woke theology cost them key races in 2021 — never mind the coming flood of the midterms — they will discover the #MSWL. Hidden away on Twitter, it's one of the actual headwaters of all things blindly woke, the way the mighty Mississippi begins as a shallow stream. It’s part of the reason we have drag queens reading to our kids in public libraries and Virginia doesn’t have Terry McAuliffe as governor. #MSWL is a hashtag meaning "manuscript wish list." For anyone interested in publishing fiction, the road to a book deal is complex. Publishers aren't interested in reading manuscripts sent directly to them because most are truly horrible. They will only consider reading those submitted by literary agents on behalf of authors.

There is a spot, about a twenty-minute drive from the New England town in which I grew up, where the devil is said to appear to hikers. It isn't known why he does this or if he's ever decent enough to bring a six-pack with him. But the legend is such that a high school friend of mine once refused to go there, presumably out of fear that she'd come back with a hex. That's New England for you, where growing up you assume that every town has its eerie old house and every county its howling boarded-up insane asylum. That diabolical trail is just one of countless spooky yarns native to the region, catalogued in collections of ghost stories you can buy in bookstores and airports.

We are traveling through a shower of Greek anniversaries, triumphant and calamitous. Last year marked the 25th centenary of the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, when 300 Greek warships defeated a Persian armada four times larger and ended the Persian empire’s expansion into Europe. This year marks the bicentenary of the beginning of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire in 1821, which resulted in the first European nation-state to be founded on the Enlightenment values of the American Constitution. Next year will mark the centenary of Greece’s defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, which ended the modern Greek state’s aspirations to absorb all the lands where Greeks lived and had lived since antiquity, an event still referred to as ‘the catastrophe’.

Alexander the Great famously wept when he saw the breadth of his domains, for there were no more worlds left to conquer. Had he been alive today, he would simply have signed a Netflix deal and reaped hitherto unimaginable rewards. Netflix's announcement that they have paid an undisclosed but presumably staggering amount of money for the complete works of Roald Dahl, to add to the licensing agreement that they already had with the Roald Dahl Story Company, seems set to flood the streaming service with unlimited Dahl adaptations over the coming years. Already, we are promised a new film of the musical of Matilda and a television series based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but these are merely the tip of a very large, very lucrative and wholly fantastical iceberg.

Thirty-two years ago, the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage in dugout canoes and boarding a Quito-bound steam train through the Andes, run by the estimable Empresa de Ferrocariles Ecuatorianos. Their journey had its moments: at one stage both parties were to be found at 13,000 feet, crusted with ice and huddled overnight from the gales inside a pair of plastic trash bags; they then got themselves lost for a while among a wilderness of huge and very active volcanoes.

Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and World War Two? What is there left to say? To gain attention, any new study has to have a thesis: some fresh angle that previous writers have overlooked or played down. For Frank McDonough it is the insane impossibility that Germany could ever have won the struggle it launched against the combined powers of the US, USSR and the British Empire that was the Führer’s fatal flaw. McDonough is an academic specializing in Nazi Germany, and he writes clearly and readably, with just enough detail, on the huge canvas that he covers.