Books of The Times

A Young Soldier Pauses on Dallas Cowboys Turf

‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ by Ben Fountain

By JANET MASLIN

Published: May 6, 2012

Ever since Fox News showed them fighting a fierce battle in Iraq, the Bravos have been wildly famous. They are just completing a two-week Victory Tour of the homeland.

Nobody wants to mention that they are hours away from being sent back to war. And nobody wants to think too hard about what kind of American heroes they really are.

Mr. Fountain, whose only previous book was the short-story collection “Brief Encounters With Che Guevara,” sets up this Thanksgiving game as an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war. Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience. Although Beyoncé’s girl group is on red-hot display during halftime, this book leaves no doubt that Billy is the real destiny’s child in the story.

Review of Sacre Bleu, by Christopher Moore

Reviewed by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans

The Philadelphia Inquirer

In July 1890 in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, tormented by mental instability, shot himself “for the good of all.”

Or did he?

So begins another exceedingly bizarre, often raucous, and consistently delightful journey into the sweetly demented mind of novelist Christopher Moore.

A few globs of horror, a dollop of humor, a tincture of the supernatural, and a robust measure of Chaucerian bawdiness flavor his newest work, a “Comedy d’art” set in Paris at the end of the 19th century.

Books of The Times

The Tracks of an Author’s, and a Reader’s, Tears

‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed, a Walkabout of Reinvention

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: March 27, 2012

....

To mention all this does Ms. Strayed a bit of a disservice, because there’s nothing cloying about “Wild.” It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound. 

Books of The Times

From ’60s Patchouli and Free Love to Darker Days a Half-Century Later

‘Arcadia,’ a Novel by Lauren Groff

By JANET MASLIN

Published: March 18, 2012

The raw beauty of Ms. Groff’s prose is one of the best things about “Arcadia.” But it is by no means this book’s only kind of splendor. Ms. Groff draws her readers into the mind of Bit, the first kid born into the midst of Arcadia’s affectations. His real first name is Ridley, but he earned his nickname by being very small. “Bit” is supposed to mean “Little Bit of a Hippie.” But it also describes the bit-by-bit way this book coalesces as Bit, its main character, begins to understand his surroundings. 

“Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies” by Mikey Walsh

By Marcela Valdes, Published: March 2

Washington Post Book Review

Fighting and manhood. From “The Iliad,” with its tale of ancient Greeks who prove themselves on the battlefield, to “Fight Club,” with its contemporary fantasy of office workers who regain their dignity by battling one another bloody in basements, the two ideas are often entwined. According to Mikey Walsh’s harrowing memoir Gypsy Boy, nowhere is this more true than among England’s Romany Gypsies, whose passion for bare-knuckle fighting infuses their culture.

'Anne Frank': Short Stories Fumbling for Perfection

Falling In Love With 'Norumbega Park'

New York Times "Book of the Times

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

January 12, 2012

In the course of “The Orphan Master’s Son,” Jun Do travels with a delegation to America (which results in some ridiculously funny scenes set at a Texas ranch), is sent to a prison camp and later assumes the identity of Sun Moon’s husband, a national hero named Commander Ga, whom he may or may not have killed. His real evolution, however, is more significant: By the book’s end he has grown from a sort of generic Everyman — a faceless representative of the indignities a citizen in North Korea might be subject to — into a full-fledged individual for whom the reader roots and grieves. 

Books of The Times

In an England of Certainties, Even in Its Undercurrents

By EMMA BROCKES Published: December 11, 2011

New York Times

November 10. 2011

By Errol Morris

It all adds up to one of the best time-travel stories since H. G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful. Could it be the bottomlessness of reality? The closer you get to history, the more mysterious it becomes. He has written a deeply romantic and pessimistic book. It’s romantic about the real possibility of love, and pessimistic about everything else.

In King’s earlier, more overtly supernatural novels, the quotidian is interrupted by some unspeakable horror. In “11/22/63,” the quotidian contains the horror, something real and familiar. It’s indifferent to human lives, and it is inescapable. It is time.

The New York Times

By Liesl Schillinger

October 14, 2011

Once, on holiday, a friend and I descended a narrow iron ladder into a floodlit cavern and followed a guide into a small boat. As he rowed us through eerily motionless waters under a low, stalactite-fanged ceiling, the overhead lights went out, and only his flashlight pierced the darkness. In its beam we could see the play of the variegated colors across the crystal-crusted walls, and the slow-moving flickers of eyeless fish, our vision completely dependent on his single beam. Reading Michael Ondaatje’s mesmerizing new novel, “The Cat’s Table,” is like being guided, just as surely and just as magically, through the author’s lustrous visions.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

October 8th, 2011

By John Brumfield

While Barry maintains his own confident style, sly echoes of James Joyce are heard here and there. It must be an occupational hazard for Irish writers, but in this case it's done with a very light touch. There's a two-page description by Lilly of a roller-coaster ride and her second-by-second reactions to it that might have been set down by Molly Bloom herself were she not rhapsodizing in her soliloquy about another sort of roller-coaster ride. I must admit, though, that I had to put the book down for a minute while letting the image of Joyce, too, on a roller-coaster play out. In any case, it's hard to imagine even the great Jimmy topping this delightful romp through the excited psyche of a careworn immigrant unexpectedly allowed a brief moment of unfettered pleasure.

NPR Books

October 3, 2011

No two countries are experiencing the global financial crisis in the same way. And according to author Michael Lewis, you can tell a lot about each country by looking at its problems — and how they're being dealt with... As he tells NPR's Lynn Neary, Lewis found a fatal flaw deeply ingrained in each country's culture — which he says helps to explain how they lost their economic way when they were offered cheap credit.

NPR Books

By Rachel Syme

September 12, 2011

Morgenstern is both a writer and a visual artist, and the world of The Night Circus is elaborately designed, fantastically imagined and instantly intoxicating — as if the reader had downed a glass of absinthe and leapt into a hallucination. Like Rowling, Morgenstern conjures a setting so intricate and complete that imposing a plot on it feels almost worthy of extra credit. But that's where the comparison ends. The Harry Potter saga, played out through the hijinks of its young wizards, was propelled by an epic battle between good and evil; The Night Circus uses romance, not morality, for fuel.

New York Times
By Kathryn Schulz
September 1, 2011

“Believing Is Seeing,” though perceptive about photography, is fundamentally concerned with something very different: epistemology. Morris is chiefly interested in the nature of knowledge, in figuring out where the truth — in both senses — lies. As that suggests, Morris believes in objective truth, and believes that people can grasp it — “even though,” as he has written elsewhere, “the world is unutterably insane.”

The Washington Post
By Jonathan Yardley
August 25, 2011

NPR Books

'Player One': A Winning, Geeked-Out Page-Turner

By Michael Schaub

August 22, 2011

There's no doubt that Cline had a very specific audience in mind, but don't let the 1980s-intensive subject matter put you off. Ready Player One is ridiculously fun and large-hearted, and you don't have to remember the Reagan administration to love it. (Though depending on your age, you might want to keep Wikipedia open so you can decipher the references to Oingo Boingo, Real Genius and Max Headroom.)