2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Farrar Straus and Giroux,
898 pages, $30

Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five different novellas in a sprawling story spanning decades, continents and styles. Mysterious and full of dread, 2666 is cluttered with hundreds of characters introduced by name—hungry writers, hapless detectives, hustlers and hookers, journalists and pugilists. It conveys, with literal heft, what’s glorious about art and what’s terrifying about death. There’s much to explore and revisit, to ruminate on and be haunted by.  read more »

Lives of the Artists
By Calvin Tomkins
Henry Holt and Company,
272 pages, $26

Calvin Tomkins’ new book, Lives of the Artists, is pure entertainment. Never mind the bland and even ugly jacket (a shame, since the Oxford edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, from which this book takes its name, features Vasari’s own Saint Luke Painting the Madonna, a lush and relevant choice of illustration)—Mr. Tomkins’ essays, all profiles from The New Yorker, are across the board engaging and smooth and welcoming in the magazine’s signature style. Although one could go down a very long and winding path with the sexual significance of Jeff Koons’ gigantic stainless steel casts of balloon animals, or into the psychology of Cindy Sherman’s decades of playing dress up, Mr.  read more »

Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 309 pages, $27.99

Of all the writers in the world—the number continues to multiply in terror-inducing increments—Malcolm Gladwell may be the only one who doesn’t need the extra credit from God you get for being published in The New Yorker.

His status there as star staffer certainly wins him no extra love from the management-consultant types who stuff his best-selling books into their briefcases before striding purposefully through airports, en route to their next carpeted conference suite. Mr. Gladwell has other, far more relatable gigs: Eponymous Web site maintainer; curiously youthful-seeming Romeo (like public-radio heartthrob Ira Glass, he’s well into his 40s); orator who fills theaters the size of the Colosseum with his plummy-voiced presentations, his hands flitting in front of him like birds as the capacity crowd murmurs its approval.  read more »

Lyrics: 1964-2008
By Paul Simon
Simon & Schuster, 408 pages, $35

"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”

These are the opening lines, the breathtaking opening image, of Graceland, Paul Simon’s biggest-selling solo album. Listening to them stream effortlessly against the song’s insistent bop, it’s easy to lose sight of the bloody, terrorized scene they depict. But read it on the page, in silence, as Lyrics: 1964-2008 permits you to do, and the extent of Mr.  read more »

Call Me Ted
By Ted Turner
Grand Central, 433 pages, $30

I didn’t set out to be a billionaire,” Ted Turner writes in his long awaited autobiography, Call Me Ted. “I wanted to be a success.”

Of course, he’s much more than a “success.” Part mogul, part visionary, he revolutionized television around the world in the 1980s by creating CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network; in the next decades, his improbable media empire grew to embrace Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network.

Along the way, he captained his boat Courageous to victory in the America’s Cup (and made headlines for his outrageous antics—he’s always been controversial).  read more »

Traitor to His Class:
The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt
By H. W. Brands
Doubleday, 888 pages, $35

Talk about smart timing. As Americans choose a new president to rescue the United States from economic despair, H. W. Brands’ biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt hits the bookshelves.

Roosevelt took office in the midst of the Great Depression precisely at the moment the banking system was collapsing. He quickly explained to Americans what was happening and what they should expect from the government. In his first presidential radio address (or “fireside chat” as they came to be called), he began by saying, “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done and what the next steps are going to be.  read more »

Danger’s Hour: The Story of
the USS Bunker Hill and the
Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her
By Maxwell Taylor Kennedy
Simon & Schuster, 515 pages, $30

If you happened to search Amazon the other day for “World War II,” you would have been instantly bombarded with 200,093 titles. So any writer—and especially a first-time book writer—who hopes to be heard above the boisterous rat-a-tat analysis of that monumental struggle would be well served to light on an idea that hasn’t yet been handled by a multitude of would-be Brokaws. And good luck with that.

Fortunately, lawyer, environmentalist and historian (and, yes, Robert F. Kennedy’s son) Maxwell Taylor Kennedy has exhaustively examined just such fresh—or, at least, newly interesting—material in his book on Japanese kamikaze pilots.  read more »

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
The Penguin Press, 432 pages, $29.95

On June 18, 1815, 190,000 men assembled outside Brussels, three patchwork armies poised to do battle over the future of Europe: troops from Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau under the command of the Duke of Wellington; his Prussian allies to the northwest under Gebhard von Blücher; and, against them to the south, the French. The reconstituted Armée du Nord, 123,000 strong, was led by an unlikely Corsican commander of Italian stock, for whom French was a second language and a second nationality, and whose battlefield brilliance had made him not just Emperor of France but the most powerful and terrifying man in Europe—twice now.  read more »

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books
By Alex Beam
PublicAffairs, 320 pages, $24.95

In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, hundreds of New York City’s poorest pulled up seats at free seminars every week to discuss Descartes and Shakespeare. At these gatherings, one of their teachers, Clifton Fadiman, reported, “the truck driver grew less arrogant, the immigrant less humble.” One time the discussion was, according to the philosopher Mortimer Adler, “as good as my Columbia groups.”

This was the dawn of the Great Books movement, a 20th-century phenomenon based on the earnest discussion of Western classics.  read more »

A Mercy
By Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf, 167 pages, $23.95

We are a nation of orphans. It’s our New World inheritance. White, black, red, we’re fatherless, motherless. The whites orphaned themselves, leaving behind the Old World, its comforts and strictures, for a trackless wilderness. The blacks were stolen from their homes, packed into slave ships and sold into orphanhood. As for the natives, the “savages,” their way of life was gutted by the European invasion—some tribes were decimated on contact, others suffered a gradual, inexorable dispossession: They were orphaned bit by bit. One way or another, our ancestors were foundlings—do we feel it still, a trace memory of thrilling, terrifying isolation? And is that primal loneliness a condition, weirdly, of our freedom?

Toni Morrison’s powerful new novel, A Mercy, takes us back to the moment of our collective unmoored infancy, to a farm scratched out of the deep forest in the American colonies at the very end of the 17th century.  read more »