We all know we’re supposed to draw a line between the artist and the art. The veteran English essayist Geoff Dyer himself once had cause to remind me, mid-enthusiastic gabble, that his book on D.H. Lawrence was, in fact, “a conceit.” But as a reader often more interested in the lives of writers than their works, I must confess the idea of a full-blown memoir – finally! – from Dyer had me excited. I was not disappointed.
Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems. For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo. They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds.
Fifty-five years after they broke up, what is there left to say about the Beatles? There have been so many books written about the group and so many obsessively detailed websites devoted to exploring every song, every public utterance, every twist and turn in their history, that the average rational man or woman might think they know all there is to be known about them. Craig Brown’s magisterial 2020 volume 150 Glimpses of the Beatles was a pop-cultural dive into their peerless influence and standing; Ian MacDonald’s still legendary Revolution in the Head dives into the 241 songs that they recorded (although, of course, it should be 242, thanks to the emergence of “Now And Then” in 2023) and does so with grace, intelligence and slightly frightening attention to detail.
In Notes to John, Joan Didion’s ostensibly private record of three years’ therapy under psychiatrist Dr. Roger MacKinnon – one memory troubles her a great deal. When her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne was about seven, they watched the (wholly unsuitable) Night of the Living Dead, before Didion insisted Quintana accompany her to the kitchen at midnight. She pretended to be afraid for herself, but really she worried the glass doors of the living room made Quintana vulnerable to intruders. Reading this book sometimes feels like being the imagined predator lurking in the dark: we catch only a slice of the illuminated interior, and Didion behaves as if she isn’t being seen. By the end of 1999, Quintana, who was 33, had reached a new crisis point in her struggle with alcoholism.
The music critic Ian Penman has structured his new book about the great French composer and rascally agent provocateur Erik Satie in three parts, in the manner of classic Satie compositions such as Trois Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes and Trois morceaux en forme de poire. A hundred years after his death, aged 59, in 1925, Satie remains one of the great enigmas of 20th-century composition. A frequent visitor of Parisian cabarets, immersed in the city’s chanson tradition, his work could also be bafflingly conceptual. He was connected to the world of classical composition through his friendships with Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, but remained determinately his own person. His music is regularly held up as a precursor to John Cage and to ambient electronica alike.
In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve center for transmitting information, gossip and rumors.
What more can be said of the American conservative commentator, novelist, musician, sailor, talk-show host and tireless public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), that he or his previous biographers haven’t already said or written? After all, this is an individual who in 1983 wrote a 90,000-word book, called Overdrive, covering the events of a single week of his life. Plenty more, it turns out, as Sam Tanenhaus proves in his thousand-page biography Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Buckley was blessed with a voice that sounded like he let it marinate in a cask of port between appearances Buckley was 58 when he wrote Overdrive, and kept to a schedule that would have taxed the energy of a man half his age.
I first learned about anti-Semitism at the age of eight, when my father explained to me that his closest business friend could not live near us because he was Jewish. This was 1961, hardly three miles from Mount Vernon, Virginia, in a new-build neighborhood that was racially segregated, as was my elementary school. Black children descended from George Washington’s slaves lived in a nearby rural ghetto called Gum Springs and were not welcome east of Fort Hunt Road. Somehow that memory – like John F. Kennedy’s assassination two years later and the view of his funeral procession from my father’s office window – is one of my earliest and starkest recollections.
Ocean Vuong’s writing is heavily influenced by his own experiences. The protagonist of his first coming-of-age novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a carbon-copy of the author. Vuong was born in Vietnam in 1988. While serving with the US Navy, his American grandfather fell in love with “an illiterate girl from the rice paddies” who gave him three children. When one of them, Vuong’s mother, was identified as mixed-race by a policeman, the family was displaced to a refugee camp in the Philippines and finally made it to Hartford, Connecticut, where Vuong was raised by his mother, aunt and grandmother. His family story merits a book of its own.
Harvey Weinstein has a memorable walk-on role in Keith McNally’s memoir I Regret Almost Everything. Taking a break from being New York’s most celebrated restaurateur, McNally wrote and directed a film called End of the Night that was screened at Cannes in 1990. Its auteur hoped that Weinstein, who distributed the previous year’s Palme D’Or-winning picture Sex, Lies, and Videotape, would warm to it. He was blunt: “I didn’t like your film and I’m not going to buy it.” As McNally swallows the shot, there’s a chaser. “But I’d still like to come to the after-party.” McNally admires Weinstein’s honesty, if little else. So I’m going to be straight, too. I didn’t enjoy I Regret Almost Everything. This is a shame, because the ingredients are promising.
The question at the heart of Amanda Knox’s latest memoir Free: My Search For Meaning is a simple one: what are the life prospects for an exoneree? It follows 2013’s Waiting to be Heard, which detailed the Seattle student’s imprisonment in Italy before and after a wrongful murder conviction, and her fight for justice. For anyone who was asleep under a boulder at the time, Knox is the gauche American student who became the target of a media firestorm following the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. She was convicted of the crime alongside her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in 2009 and freed on appeal in 2011. (Kercher’s actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a fast-track trial in 2008, and released in 2021.
What connects pistachios, hay, and Mr. Krook in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House? Asked this question on a recent episode of the British TV quiz show Only Connect, the contestants noted all three are prone to spontaneous combustion, although, as one player exclaimed, “I can’t imagine that happening in a novel, but things were different back then.” Novels contain novel imaginings, but people back then were equally skeptical. Dickens eventually had to defend the death of Krook, the sozzled owner of a rag-and-bottle shop, by listing the historical precedents. He knew a thing or two about a rapid reaction between fuel and oxygen that emits a fiery blaze of energy. By night he walked and walked, to still his beating mind.
In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book, The Apple, shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).
Caroline Calloway — “It” girl, Instagram phenomenon, scammer, grifter — wants to give you some advice. Except, like most things in Calloway’s world, it’s not that simple. What she actually wants is for Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation (1994), to give you some advice. But there’s just one problem: Wurtzel is dead. No matter: Calloway is stepping in, updating Wurtzel’s unpublished advice guide with some of her own insights and social-media savvy. If this unbidden collaboration from beyond the grave sounds farfetched, that’s because it is. Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life is about as mad as you would expect from the self-published author of Scammers and no less extraordinary for it. Of collaboration, Calloway knows a fair bit.
Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent burst into the world in 1987, zinging out of bookstores into bestseller-dom like nobody’s business. It concerned Rusty Sabich, a lawyer who became a suspect in the case he was prosecuting. There were enough twists and turns to satisfy the most Daedalian of labyrinth-makers, and its longevity was demonstrated by its being adapted into a new, Jake Gyllenhaal-starring show last year on Apple TV+. Presumed Guilty’s title plays nicely on its predecessor’s, and also points toward this new book’s consideration of racism within the American justice system. Sabich is now an old man, nearing his eighties. But boy, is he active. We know this because he likes to canoe while stripped to the waist. He chops wood in the outdoors!
The gilt fell off Saturday Night Live’s reputational gingerbread almost from the moment of its inception. Long before the arrival of Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984) — its antihero dead at the age of thirty-three — whatever luster the show had possessed had been well-nigh obliterated by a tide of scuttlebutt. The girls were (apparently) all bulimics and anorexics. The guys were coke fiends and egomaniacs. Misogyny (exemplified by Belushi’s dislike of sketches written by women) and back-stabbing were endemic; drug dealers sat in on the writing sessions.
Russia’s war on Ukraine presages a dire future for all of Europe unless Vladimir Putin’s military is decisively defeated. That is the powerful and persuasive argument advanced in Keir Giles’s new book. To appreciate fully the importance of his contentions, you must acknowledge not only Giles’s own status as a supremely well-connected senior fellow at the famed Chatham House think tank in London but even more so the all-star cast of international military luminaries who have publicly endorsed his analysis: the now-retired US generals John Allen and Ben Hodges, UK general David Richards, Australian general Mick Ryan, plus former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Giles’s assertions thus should be taken with the utmost seriousness.
Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident — poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humor (Max notes his "strong urge to file a complaint" about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events.
What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic. In 1944, the increasingly paranoid German occupation decided that Roberto’s whole family was Jewish and inextricably linked to the world-famous Nobel prizewinning scientist Albert Einstein, now in America and high on the Nazi death list. There were connections, of course. Roberto and Albert were first cousins — their fathers were brothers — and were both committed atheists.
In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.” Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence.