Book Review

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 »

The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians
Text By Dorothy Gallager
Pantheon, $15.95

“The thing about a mural in a restaurant,” swooping-haired Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter writes in the introduction to The Mural at the Waverly Inn, “is that, in a way, it tells the story of the customers back to them.” Mr. Carter, who co-owns that haute-bohemian Bank Street bastion and commissioned its art from Edward Sorel, really means that a good restaurant mural tells the story that its customers want to hear while they’re forking down $55 plates of mac-and-cheese with truffles.  read more »

Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans
Talk About Change in the Church
and the Quest for Meaning
By Kerry Kennedy
Crown, 247 pages, $24.95

Kerry Kennedy’s book may be called Being Catholic Now, but her opening is pure chutzpah. Given an audience with Pope Benedict a few years back, she asked him, “In view of the tragedy unfolding in Africa, for the sake of the sanctity of life, would you consider changing the Church’s position on the use of condoms?” It’s a great, inescapable moment, one of those times the powerful are called on their own hypocrisy and given the chance to rise above it. At Ms.  read more »

Buyology: The Truth and Lies
About Why We Buy
By Martin Lindstrom
Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95

Danish marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology is about why, neurologically speaking, we buy some things and not others, leading some brands to fail while others conquer the known universe. Mr. Lindstrom reminds us throughout that he’s advised international corporations on the selling of everything from feminine hygiene products to sore-throat lozenges, so it’s perhaps to be expected that he expends considerable ink selling his book, too, even as he writes it. His is “the largest, most revolutionary neuromarketing experiment in history,” he boasts—a project he hopes will “sculpt the future of advertising” and “revolutionize the way all of us think and behave as consumers.  read more »

On Architecture: Collected
Reflections on a Century
of Chang
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Walker & Co., 496 pages, $35

The question of the day is about public taste, and whether there can any longer be such a thing. When I asked a few of my friends who are young architects what they thought of Ada Louise Huxtable, venerable critic most recently for The Wall Street Journal and for whom The New York Times invented the job of newspaper architecture critic, the response ranged from blank to neutral. One told me her parents had mailed to her clippings of Ms. Huxtable’s Journal pieces when she was studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the way parents do when trying earnestly to relate to kids launched far into the realms of professional sophistication.  read more »

The Widows of Eastwick
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, 308 pages, $24.95

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. —Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The return of The Witches of Eastwick?

If only. John Updike’s weird sisters, returned now as widows, aren’t so much wicked as weary, and wearying.

And yet Updike adepts will find much to admire in this late novel. If you’re happy to ignore certain elements (plot, for instance), you’ll find yourself in descriptive prose heaven. But if you prefer to fall blessedly into a book the way Alice fell down the rabbit hole—that is, if you still read naïvely—you’ll hate The Widows of Eastwick.  read more »

A Fortunate Life
By Robert Vaughn
St. Martin’s, 322 pages, $25.95

In 1972, Robert Vaughn wrote a book about the blacklist era called Only Victims. It’s basically his Ph.D. thesis—well structured, even-handed, a bit pedantic, but still invaluable, and I’ve always recommended it to people interested in that period.

It’s taken Mr. Vaughn 36 years to write another book—and it’s a memoir, A Fortunate Life.

Barring particularly interesting off-screen activities, show business autobiography invariably provokes a referendum on the career in question. So here goes: Robert Vaughn was carving out a nice niche as an all-purpose character actor with leading man looks—that Fearless Fosdick jaw!—in everything from episodic television to Roger Corman’s Teenage Cave Man (1958), when he got lucky with three parts: a preppy turned howling drunk in a Warner Bros.  read more »

Sea of Poppies
By Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
515 pages, $26

The West has a pernicious dependence on China, and Western business barons are bent on a war that will allegedly liberate a foreign people, as well as secure less lofty things, like the free flow of commodities and profit. While this might sound like a critique of present-day U.S. economic policy and the invasion of Iraq, it’s actually a description of the mid-19th-century world vividly conjured up by veteran Indian author Amitav Ghosh in Sea of Poppies. (The first in his Ibis Trilogy, the book was short-listed for the Booker prize but lost to Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger.  read more »

George, Being George
Edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.
Random House, 423 pages, $30

Even the prologue of this quite extraordinary book about the legendary George Plimpton suggests a sad but wondrous tale: George had a “yearning for ecstatic experience … you saw it most sensationally in his love of fireworks,” a friend tells us. It started when he was in his late 20s and in Madrid about to interview Hemingway, and he and Piedy Lumet saw some homemade fireworks erupt onto a square and he was hooked.

From then on his life seemed punctuated by fireworks. His fireworks. He’d set them off in places like Wainscott, mammoth fireworks erupting over the potato fields behind his house.  read more »

He Is … I Say:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond
By David Wild
Da Capo Press, 203 pages, $25

I tried so hard to like Rolling Stone editor David Wild’s He Is … I Say that at first I pretended to not see sentences like “See, I’m a Believer that Neil Diamond didn’t just go on American Idol this year—he is an American idol, year after year” or “Forty years later, ‘Brooklyn Roads’ remains a song that I’ve seen reduce grown men to tears, including a few times when I was looking in the mirror.”

Mr. Wild’s new book on Neil Diamond is so shmaltzy—and not the irresistible shmaltz of Diamond hits like “Sweet Caroline” or “I’m a Believer”—that it takes tolerance to make it through to page 203.  read more »

Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
By Russell Shorto
Doubleday, 320 pages, $26

Given the difficulty philosophers have explaining themselves, the prospect of a journalist doing it for them usually doesn’t bode well. Few journalists have both the nimbleness of mind and the lucidity of prose required to explain abstract ideas; fewer still can tell a really good story. One sterling exception is Russell Shorto, whose last book, The Island at the Center of the World, a best-seller in 2004, was widely praised for weaving an ambitious argument—the Dutch, not British, gave Americans some of their most cherished democratic values—around a lively narrative about Manhattan’s early settlers.  read more »

Fred Astaire
By Joseph Epstein
Yale University Press, 198 pages, $22

You know you’re in trouble when the author of a book on a popular artist drags in lofty literary references to justify what he clearly regards as his own intellectual slumming. In this case, Joseph Epstein, the author of Snobbery (2002) and the former editor of The American Scholar, invokes Proust to compare Fred Astaire’s habitual pursuit of Ginger Rogers to Swann’s pursuit of Odette.

For the rest of this mediocre brief biography, Mr. Epstein sensibly cites Arlene Croce, John Mueller and Astaire’s largely unhelpful autobiography. This restraint is a good idea, because when Mr.  read more »

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
By Rose George
Metropolitan Books, 288 pages, $26

Let’s not be clever. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, Rose George’s perfectly disquieting new book, is very good.

How do I know? Because as I sat reading it in a small park in my Manhattan neighborhood, I became acutely aware that the soaring condos surrounding me were only possible because they served as chutes for the disposal of human excrement: All around me thousands of gallons of human waste and wastewater plummeted to the earth to be swallowed by New York City’s perennially overtaxed sewer system.  read more »

The City’s End: Two Centuries
of Fantasies, Fears, and
Premonitions of New York’s
Destruction
By Max Page
Yale University Press, 271 pages, $37.50

It took something like 48 hours to seal over Pompeii and all those Pompeians with pumice and lava and ash; and fewer than 48 seconds to flatten and fry Nagasaki, to begin cancers, to burn kimono patterns into skin like decals ironed onto blue jeans. Those were exceptions, though. Most cities we’ve lost to history were simply used up and abandoned like overgrazed pastures. But tragedies of the commons make for less spectacular and more hectoring entertainments than Pompeii- or Nagasaki-like cataclysms, which is why Max Page has plenty of material for The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.  read more »

To Love What Is
By Alix Kates Shulman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 180 pages, $22

The most remarkable and memorable part of the story Alix Kates Shulman tells in her latest memoir, To Love What Is, comes early on, before the main event. The book is mostly about what happened after Ms. Shulman’s 75-year-old husband had a terrible fall from a sleeping loft in her rural Maine retreat: He suffered significant and lasting brain damage, and she refused to institutionalize him, even though he must be supervised every waking hour. To Love What Is is a chronicle of the organization and sacrifice involved in keeping her husband at home with her in New York City—a maze of traps and dangers to a disoriented, brain-injured person.  read more »

Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ
By Richard Dooling
Harmony, 272 pages, $25

You know the Evolution of Man chart? The drawing in biology textbooks illustrating our progress from knuckle-dragging monkey to upright, intelligent marvel? (Well, at least a few men turned out that way.) One of the most popular spoofs of the much-spoofed drawing includes a final picture of a man hunched over a computer, looking just as simple-minded as the furry fellow at the back of the line. Recently, I’ve been seeing this chart over and over again in daydreams and nightmares, only in this version, the geeky modern guy shrinks and gets swallowed by a MacBook, which morphs into a human-size robot, then some kind of nightmarish version of the Terminator, pointing a huge laser gun right at me.  read more »

Desire: Where Sex Meets
Addiction
By Susan Cheever
Simon & Schuster, 174 pages, $23

Every so often in this thin book about “sex addiction,” the sea of psychotherapeutic gobbledygook parts and John Cheever, the author’s famous father, peeks through. He appears literally, mixing the young and heartsick Susan Cheever a gin and tonic as he nurses one of multiple daily Scotches (or later, in his belated sobriety, wanting to know how to operate a dishwasher, with a child’s enthusiasm). And he appears literarily, in brief but lyrical passages from Ms. Cheever about ice floes nudging one another on the East River, or the stubborn, sickly-sweet smell of the tacky 1970s cologne Canoe clinging to her sheets after one of her many one-night stands.  read more »

The Partnership: The Making
of Goldman Sachs
By Charles D. Ellis
The Penguin Press, 729 pages, $37.95

Around 1990, I read somewhere that over half the graduating class at Yale had signed up to be interviewed by Goldman Sachs. I found the thralldom to Mammon that this bespoke by turns amazing, discouraging and in its way disgusting, and I said so in the column I was writing at the time for this paper.

At that point, this once-great Republic had not yet turned—twice—to 55 Broad Street for its secretary of the Treasury: under Clinton, Robert E. Rubin, and now, even more significantly, Henry W. Paulson Jr., who in the eyes of many is really running this nation in distress, both out front and behind the scenes.  read more »

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
By Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño
Alfred A. Knopf, 260 pages, $24.95

I’m proud to say that I’ve never been thrown out of Shopsin’s General Store. This is due primarily to the fact that I’ve never visited it, neither in its two hallowed West Village nooks nor in its current, humbler digs amid the multiethnic scrum of the Essex Street Market. But on a more hypothetical level, I have a gut feeling that Kenny Shopsin—founder, owner, chef and foul-mouthed philosopher—would take a shine to me.

At least, I hope to God he would. The list of those who have crossed Mr. Shopsin and suffered the consequences is long and illustrious; a request for corn chowder, hold the bacon, for instance, will not be granted, but may well get you your soda poured over your head, followed by summary ejection and lifetime banishment.

“From the beginning, I was different from your average grocer,” Mr. Shopsin considerably understates near the beginning of Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin, his brilliant, hilarious and infuriating sociocultural manifesto masquerading as cookbook.

Mr. Shopsin does, technically, run a restaurant, in the sense that he makes food for people to eat on the premises, and in exchange they give him money. But Shopsin’s has always seemed to be a personal proclamation more than anything else.

Together with his wife, Eve (who died a few years ago and to whom the book is solely and charmingly dedicated in top-of-the-eye-chart type), Mr. Shopsin started his small shop in the early 1970s, selling everything you’d expect a general store would. The difference was that he didn’t believe in the American retail edict that the customer is always right; to the contrary, “until they show me that they are worth cultivating as customers, I’m not even sure I want their patronage.” The feeling has not infrequently been mutual. “A lot of people get out of here real fast,” Mr. Shopsin notes with pride.

THE BOOK, LIKE THE store, is an elegy to a dying New York, one where a shop owner can bathe his kids in the sink while he’s making tuna salad, and tell the Health Department to fuck off when they point to the turkey sitting out on the counter all afternoon.

Which sorts of actions should not be confused with an aversion to rules. Mr. Shopsin has established lots of rules over the years, including: no copycat orders (“I don’t like people who can’t think for themselves”); no parties larger than four (“they don’t interact with other customers”); and absolutely no substitutions (this being, perhaps, understandable in light of a menu that has contained as many as 300 soups at a time). But what if you’re deathly allergic to, say, peanuts? See ya! “Go eat at a hospital,” Mr. Shopsin adds helpfully.

Survive all the hazing, however, and you’ll learn that Mr. Shopsin genuinely loves running his restaurant, and he welcomes people who understand the world he’s trying to cultivate. That world is defined by the quality of its relationships—both among customers and between customers and staff. (This may not seem too different from small, locally owned shops all over the country, but you can’t do anything quietly in New York.)

As with many highly principled people, there’s a whiff of protesting too much in Mr. Shopsin’s worldview. It’s not about “us” and “them,” he insists, but of course it’s all about that—he says he can tell whether a new patron is going to “work out” the moment he or she enters the store.

OH, YES: THERE ARE recipes, too. A lot of them, all straightforward and without pretense. Some, like mac ’n’ cheese pancakes, look really good. Instructions are along the lines of what you might expect. (“If you like your eggs more cooked, cook them more.”) But Eat Me isn’t about the recipes, which are just a conduit to get you from one Shopsin treatise to the next.

Those treatises are wonderfully written, though in that regard they’re jarring. Carolyn Carreño, who receives a co-author credit, presumably took Mr. Shopsin’s words from interviews and his own writings and then knitted it all together. While the result is highly readable, it’s at odds with Mr. Shopsin’s righteous bombast. It feels too clean and reasonable, as though someone had stuffed Mr. Shopsin into a nice new suit and combed his hair. There’s something disconcerting about calm, measured sentences from a guy who describes looking up the skirts of the “young girls” leaning over to scoop ice cream, or who says things such as “Bacon pancakes and bacon french toast both remind me of pussy.” You feel as though the book should arrive already spattered in grease and guacamole.

Mr. Shopsin says that the process of putting his book together was similar to raising children, which he says “allows you to go through your life a second time.” It’s a touching observation, and it’s clear that despite the financial difficulties that have plagued Mr. Shopsin and his store from the beginning (hence the multiple moves), his children are all devoted to him, to the shop and to the philosophy that guides it all. He writes without bitterness, “Shopsin’s has never been about making money. It is our lives.”

As for the book, Eat Me is probably the safest way to understand and appreciate Kenny Shopsin: At least he can’t kick you out in the middle.

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Alfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $24.95

My review copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is covered with statistics about its success in Europe—it sold nearly one copy for every three Swedes; the books in the trilogy beat Harry Potter on the French charts—and the plans, likewise, for its success over here—a first printing of 150,000 copies; “outreach” to 25 Swedish consulates all over the United States.

One’s reaction to information of this kind—at least my reaction—is to think, It’s probably terrible, but there must be something to it. And in this case, that reaction is correct: The book is terrible, but there’s certainly something to it.

The story—of a crusading financial journalist drawn into the sinister secrets of a wealthy industrialist family while simultaneously seeking revenge on a different industrialist who has sued him for libel; getting involved with a beautiful, damaged young goth hacker; and carrying on a long-term, easygoing adulterous affair with the co-publisher of his little magazine, Millennium—is ridiculous. The incidents are preposterous.

Larsson tells us what kind of open-faced sandwiches his characters make—what kind of toppings, what kind of bread—and, once, the square footage of a room, but not what things look like or how people feel. There’s a gratuitously gory scene of hideous revenge on a character who’s barely appeared, and the dark secret at the center of everything seems completely arbitrary. To call the dialogue wooden would be an insult to longbows and violins.

AND YET, I HAD no trouble finishing the book—on the contrary, I raced through it, even while I disliked it, and myself for reading it. So what was it that compelled me? Maybe the story possesses an organic coherence, so that it doesn’t matter if the incidents are absurd; or maybe the very fantastical nature of those absurdities creates a mesmerizing dreaminess. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the dialogue is wooden, so long as each wooden remark points inexorably to the next; or maybe reading about fully realized human characters takes too much energy, and Larsson’s sketchy figures get the job done just as well. Maybe the quality of a story matters less than the teller’s conviction; or maybe this book appealed to a part of me, but just not a part I like. Maybe I’m a snobbish spoilsport for even posing these questions; or maybe there’s no reason that a thriller can’t be well written, too, nothing to exempt a thriller from the full weight of literary judgment—no reason to choose between judging a book “gripping” and judging it “terrible.”

Because it is indeed gripping, but it’s gripping not regardless of but in spite of its failings—its failings make it much less satisfying.

But The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first book of a trilogy—maybe, when they release book three, it will all make sense.

Will Heinrich is the author of The King’s Evil (Scribner). He can be reached at wheinrich@observer.com.

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists
Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship
By Ken Silverstein
Random House, 195 pages, $24

Two years ago, when I was a press officer for the United Nations in Iran, government agents tried to sting us. In an effort to discredit the U.N., every week I was visited by two fat, profoundly bearded and poorly dressed “TV producers”; they offered us unprecedented access to large national audiences on the condition that we weave criticism of the regime into our work. Of course, we turned them away and thus preserved our organization’s ability to remain in the country as a neutral aid rather than a propagandist for regime change.

Ken Silverstein, Washington editor for Harper’s, tells in Turkmeniscam of another sting, one that he concocted to snare four of the capital’s major lobbying firms. He induced these firms to vie for a fake but hefty contract to publicize the “strengths” of the Stalinist dictator of the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. Two of the firms, APCO Worldwide and Cassidy & Associates, tripped over themselves in their eagerness to champion one of the world’s most repressive regimes. In so doing, they became would-be accomplices of a demented, plundering despot.

Some of the lobbyists came from careers as high-ranking government insiders from both parties. In earlier life, they might have been Wilsonian idealists, but now, as deceptive denizens of K Street, they’re deeply into realpolitik, hustling for a fat paycheck by trying to make a tyrant palatable to U.S. policy makers.

AFTER CONSIDERING VARIOUS possible “clients,” Mr. Silverstein settled on a corrupt country with a “bloodcurdling” record on political rights and civil liberties—and an interest in rapprochement with the West. Then, with a cover story, business cards, a bogus Web site (that linked to nothing), vague allusions to Middle Eastern players and a sharp new suit from Hugo Boss, he wormed his way into the confidence of top lobbyists. He had the help of a seemingly knowledgeable and elegant-looking sidekick who, in his one verbal contribution to negotiations, blathered on nonsensically. Mr. Silverstein feared the jig was up, but the conferees reacted with sage nods of approval along with offers to build a useful coalition among politicians and the chattering classes.

From these interactions, Mr. Silverstein secretly recorded the particular tactics and inducements that lobbyists deploy to handle advocacy, policy change, damage control, reputation management and investment promotion. One of the prospective lobbyists tempered his pitch with a caveat—“Anyone who tells you they can get a congressman to do what you want ought not to be believed, but we can get in the door and make the case”—and yet, in the absence of rounded information and against a backdrop of longtime interactions, many legislators and other policy actors accept the case as made.

If Mr. Silverstein’s sting came easily, so did the lobbyists’ blandishments—they know how to win earmarks, to craft perceptions and to turn negative images into positive ones. Mr. Silverstein doesn’t make the argument that lobbyists are engaged in something of a carefully orchestrated sting themselves, but their handiwork smacks of swindle. That is, legislators, diplomats and the media are goaded into buying into a varnished depiction of the horrific situation in the “client” country.

GROWING OUT OF AN article last year in Harper’s, Turkmeniscam is a nimble contribution to the literature on the maneuvers of high-priced and impactful wheelers and dealers in the nation’s capital. As such it viably offers a supplement to this year’s important investigation by The Washington Post into Gerald Cassidy of Cassidy & Associates, a kingpin of domestic lobbyists.

With windbags and shills dominating the cast of characters, Mr. Silverstein’s clever exposé has some of the fun of an Elmore Leonard novel. He has an eye for the shady gesture, the persuasive detail and the big picture. The reader may wish that his sting could have been somehow prolonged so that we could see what documents and activities APCO Worldwide and Cassidy & Associates would have hatched for Turkmenistan. But Mr. Silverstein’s budget was small and his timeline short.

And his methods proved controversial: When his article first appeared in Harper’s, other inside-the-Beltway reporters joined lobbyists in criticizing the “unethical” tactics of his master-of-disguise investigative journalism. In rebuttal, Mr. Silverstein points to his field’s long but now largely dormant tradition of undercover reporting. He also is eloquent in criticizing the expectation that reporters merely “repeat the spin from both sides. … ‘Balance’ is not fair. It’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting … and [of] shirking our responsibility to inform readers.”

Stings are sometimes necessary if you want to get the whole story. The Iranians found them useful in ferreting out our non-subversive intentions; when we didn’t go for the easy critique they tried to plant, they came to quasi-trust us. By the same token, Mr. Silverstein’s trick is most useful and necessary for showing how lobbyists’ gloss can trump context and integrity.

Dorn Townsend is a freelance reporter based in New York City. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism
By Bernard-Henri Lévy
Random House, 233 pages, $25

Yes, he’s a celebrity who wears expensive suits. But he’s a real-deal philosopher, too, so let’s put on our thinking caps and review the principles of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s political thought as presented in Left in Dark Times, a manifesto with a subtitle suitable for the barricades, A Stand Against the New Barbarism.

Beware the four pillars of totalitarianism—the Absolute, History, the Dialectic and Disease. The Absolute, Mr. Lévy explains, is the dream of a utopian society emptied of politics and conflict; History is the one-way path to utopian salvation; the Dialectic is the final arbiter of the meaning of events and experience in the light of History’s goal; and the idea of Disease is what, in totalitarian regimes, substitutes for the idea of Evil, replacing that old, religiously rooted notion with a clinical, materialistic image of noxious bacteria or a virus that must be purged from an infected body.

Mr. Lévy’s principles translate into support for Israel (like all nations imperfect, but that’s the nature of politics sans messianism); engaged solidarity with political causes of the oppressed around the world (“there is no economy of pity,” Mr. Lévy declares); and a righteous brief against censorship for the sake of appeasing Islamic theocrats (because using the doctrine of “tolerance” to justify the curtailment of free speech reneges on the republican promise of a political sphere absolutely separate from the realm of faith—and the messianism that never trails far behind).

THOSE PRINCIPLES LED Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who was at the time still running for office, to wonder aloud why his friend Bernard-Henri Lévy refused to endorse his candidacy. Mr. Sarkozy was, after all, the first “post-ideological” French politician, cut more from the cloth of the centrist American politics that Mr. Lévy prefers.

It’s a good question, and Left in Dark Times is Mr. Lévy’s alternately ponderous, angry and impassioned answer—an attempt to hold tight to the left, a left Mr. Lévy considers himself bound to “almost genetically.” It’s no wonder, then, that he writes with such urgency about the need for his “family” to reconsider its ideals and orthodoxies in the light of shifting global politics and the frequent intramural clashes between committed leftists. Take, for example, the question of humanitarian intervention: Mr. Lévy is staunchly in favor, rejecting the notion that “foreign” cultures are inviolable, “unknowable,” deserving of respect simply for their otherness.

Indeed, Mr. Lévy is withering toward the bien-pensant notion that societies are ecosystems whose balance the West disturbs at its own peril. “The idea that cultures are as inevitable as climates or soils,” he writes “… is no less hateful when it warns us against the devastating effects that the abolition of the burqa or the outlawing of the genital mutilation of young girls might have on the local culture than when it’s telling us that human rights expire once they are removed from the places that bred them.” As evidence, he points to the abolition of capital punishment in France in 1981, under the presidency of François Mitterrand—it was the end of the guillotine’s 200-year reign, but “[n]either the West, nor philosophy, nor France, fell to pieces when the ‘keystone’ was shattered.”

To those who counter that France legislated the change for itself, Mr. Lévy deals his trump card: “Are we more worried about the destabilizing effects of an overly brutal infusion of human rights—or about the effects, destructive in another way, of the massive, high-dosage infusions of pure fascism that are the Arab, Hindu, Khmer, and other fundamentalisms?” The liberal piety of respect for the other, Mr. Lévy argues, is based on a false premise: The drive toward “purity” in Islamic culture grows from the same ideological root as the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini; it is, in fact, not “other” at all.

FOR THE GENERATION OF Americans who associate French philosophy with Jacques Derrida’s clever evasions, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s decisiveness risks seeming almost gratuitously un-French. But in fact he emerges from a strain of French thought that’s had far less play in college classrooms, one that includes the philosopher (and, like Mr. Lévy, prolific journalist) Raymond Aron, who insisted that any political philosophy worth its salt had to address the practical question “What should the minister do?”; and Julien Benda, who wrote in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927) that in the decades leading up to World War I, Europe’s thinkers and writers, “who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences, have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul,’ ‘the immutability of their German consciousness,’ for the ‘fervor of their Italian hearts.’” Mr. Lévy sees in the progressivism that emphasizes the inviolable nature of indigenous cultures and identities the same inversion of intellectual values Benda saw in Nietzsche, deceptively updated in the form of liberal “tolerance for difference.”

This puts Mr. Lévy squarely at odds with radical left critics of imperialism such as Noam Chomsky. And it leaves him lonely, too. Mr. Sarkozy’s personal charm and moderate politics make him an agreeable conversation partner, but his attitude toward the two things Mr. Lévy holds most dear—the importance of ideas, of straight thinking about the global situation, and a corollary sense of France’s continuing responsibility toward its own past (“not dwelling on the crime,” Mr. Lévy writes, “but creating a constructed, well-informed, organized memory of it”)—is a deal-breaker. “Our first memory-free president,” Mr. Lévy teases. “The first of our presidents to wish all ideas well, because he really is indifferent to them.”

Mr. Lévy counterposes his own fever dream of 20th-century French history, delivered in the rhetorical mode of prophecy. But neatly ordered prophecy: Mr. Lévy (a Frenchman after all) prefers his idea-trees to follow evenly numbered, rationally divisible paths. He highlights four historical events, each linked to a facet of the leftism Mr. Lévy wants to separate, once and for all, from what he believes to be the soft-headed liberalism of “tolerance” on one side, and from the proto-fascist, incipiently anti-Semitic radicalism of thinkers like Slavoj Žižek on the other: The May ’68 uprising of workers and students against Gaullist social conservatism, which teaches anti-authoritarianism; the atrocities committed by France in Algeria, which teach anti-colonialism; the depredations of Vichy collaboration, which teach anti-fascism; and finally, at the bottom of it all, the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair, the false conviction of the French army lieutenant Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The subsequent outcry and his eventual exoneration split French society cleanly in two: clerical, anti-Semitic, statist vs. secular, universalist, individualist. “And France, a century later, returns there,” Mr. Lévy writes, “every time one side starts to prefer injustice to disorder; every time the other side stands up against the injustice—no matter how minor, or apparently harmless, or costly to repair.”

These memories interlace with reflections on his long career of political activism (most recently in Darfur) and are studded with passionately held positions on every issue current on the world stage. Whether or not you agree with him on Mr. Sarkozy’s neoliberalism, or the Palestinians, or the nature of terrorism, you will be convinced of this: Ideas matter to him, even more than a sharp suit.

Damian Da Costa is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com.

Supreme Courtship
By Christopher Buckley
Twelve, 285 pages, $24.99

In Supreme Courtship, Christopher Buckley’s most recent portrait of Washington through the looking glass, a massively unpopular president, clicking through the cable channels late at night at Camp David, comes across a rerun of a prime-time reality television show called Courtroom Six. By morning he’s made up his mind: He’s going to nominate “judge” Pepper Cartwright to the Supreme Court.

Charming, brash, Texan, Pepper Cartwright is not observably intelligent, yet prone to dishing out zingers in response to male plaintiffs on Courtroom Six. She packs a pistol, and “shimmies” into her jeans—and we know what it means for a woman to shimmy.  read more »

Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize
Everything We Know
By Randall Stross
Free Press, 275 pages, $26

First I must confess: I am a Google junkie. Like most info-hungry New Yorkers, I spend an unreasonable amount of time searching for things on the Internet, from breaking news to videos of hugging lions. Using any other search engine would seem absurd. But while reading Randall Stross’ book Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, I became uncomfortable with how much Google knew about me and how much I had been relying on it. A self-imposed rehab seemed to be the only solution.  read more »

One Fifth Avenue
By Candace Bushnell
Hyperion, 433 pages, $25.95

When Candace Bushnell started writing her “Sex and the City” column in this newspaper in 1994, Rudy Giuliani was mayor, the average price of a Manhattan apartment was $450,000 and very few people had Internet access at home. To judge by her latest novel, One Fifth Avenue, it seems likely that Ms. Bushnell is nostalgic for at least two out of the three.

In real life, One Fifth Avenue is an imposing co-op building just north of Washington Square Park; its ground floor houses the Mario Batali restaurant Otto. By using the venerable address as the setting of this book, Ms.  read more »

It’s time to make room for Raymond Tallis, the playful polymath whose wonderful new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head (Yale, $28), will make you see yourself not just in a new light, but from a dozen new angles. If that sounds like more self-scrutiny than you can bear, think of it as an exercise in philosophical anatomy—or if that’s still too scary, take Mr. Tallis’ suggestion and think of it as tourism: a guided trip around a body part that happens to house the sense of self.

A bonus, for those of us who care about how sentences are made: Reading The Kingdom of Infinite Space is an aesthetically pleasing experience.  read more »

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark:
The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
By Don Thompson
Palgrave MacMillan, 256 pages, $24.95

On Sept. 15 and 16, Sotheby’s auctioned off 223 new works by British artist-provocateur Damien Hirst, who raked in $200.7 million (having already, over the course of his relatively brief career, amassed a purported billion—billion—dollar fortune). I know: Your eyes are glazing over at news of yet another record-setting auction of outrageous contemporary art. But that’s because you’ve misplaced the emphasis—it’s not that it’s Damien Hirst or that it’s contemporary, it’s that the works are new, as in produced within the last two years. Mr. Hirst is the first major artist to take his art directly to auction, bypassing the dealers whose function, traditionally, is to introduce artists’ work to the marketplace.  read more »

New York Stories:
Landmark Writing from Four Decades of
New York Magazine
Edited by Steve Fishman, John Homans, and Adam Moss
Random House, 573 pages, $17

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, cultural and economic vitality were oozing, often gushing, away from American cities into suburbia. A 1967 Time cover story, “Our Embattled Cities,” featured Daniel Patrick Moynihan, calling him an “urbanologist,” and extending the title to other thoughtful academics and city planners, including Edward J. Logue, whose New York State Urban Development Corporation would build Roosevelt Island.

In that time, another innovative “urbanologist” emerged from the galley proofs, green eyeshades, and ink-stained disrepute of American journalism.  read more »

The Forever War
By Dexter Filkins
Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $25

Dexter Filkins is a runner. During his three and a half years in Iraq, he’d regularly lace up his shoes, don his short shorts and stride along the Tigris River even in unbearable, 100-degree-plus heat. At first it was a simple, there-and-back, five-mile course, past waving children and friendly folks, past a field of green the Americans had laid by the riverbank as part of a park project. Then his path was truncated by a checkpoint, then by another, until finally his run was a short sprint distance that he’d repeat enough times to make his mileage.  read more »

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
By Muriel Barbery
Europa Editions, 336 pages, $15

A cross between Sophie’s World and a modernized Parisian Cinderella—and filled with philosophical and rhetorical questions most Americans would never think to ask themselves—The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the second novel of Muriel Barbery, a philosophy professor at the University of Saint-Lô, in Normandy. A surprise best seller, it has sold more than 1.2 million copies in France since 2006.

The novel alternates seamlessly between the musings of Renée, the 54-year-old concierge of an apartment building in the affluent seventh arrondissement, and the pensées profondes of Paloma Josse, a 12-year-old resident.

Renée tells us that for 27 years she has been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, “a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments, all of which are inhabited, all of which are immense.  read more »

Antoine’s Alphabet:
Watteau and His World
By Jed Perl
Alfred A. Knopf, 210 pages, $25

Where will Barnes and Noble shelve Jed Perl’s Antoine’s Alphabet? It’s an art book illustrated with gorgeous etchings based on the paintings of Antoine Watteau; it’s a short biography of the painter in the style of the Penguin Lives series, drawing vivid scenes of the artist’s life in 18th-century Paris; it’s a coded memoir of the critic himself, who interrupts musings on his subject with sketches of conversations with “a writer friend” of fierce intelligence (and irritating self-importance). And it’s also, unassumingly, what its title says—a child’s Alphabet: A is for actors (one of Watteau’s pictorial obsessions), B is for backs (whose expressive potential Watteau recognized long in advance of Rodin), and on down the line, mimicking in spirit the quality Mr.  read more »

Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
By Annie Proulx
Scribner, 221 pages, $25

Annie Proulx’s fiction tends to sneak up on you. Her characters, like her writing, start off deceptively slow and deliberate, but then before you know it, you’re weeping over a singular detail—a bloodstained shirt hung on a nail in a trailer, with another shirt placed inside of it, as in her 1997 story “Brokeback Mountain.” Ms. Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her novel The Shipping News, but there’s something about the constraints of short fiction that allow her to really pack a wallop. And so it is with her latest collection of stories, Fine Just the Way It Is, which revisits the dusty prairie terrain of Wyoming and the flinty, hardened and somewhat desperate sorts who live there.  read more »

Indignation
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 233 pages, $26

First, an apology: Like many of his fans, I expect a masterpiece every time a new Philip Roth novel is announced, and when it falls short, I carp and quibble and point invidiously to past Roth triumphs. Sorry.

Indignation is flawed, but I promise to ignore the problem as long as I can (it’s a case of ill-considered narrative strategy) and celebrate instead a magnificent display of writerly talent: a lean, powerful novel with bold characters who command attention; scenes of impressive dramatic intensity and comic vitality; language that blasts the reader’s cozy complacency (it’s not called Indignation for nothing); and a theme that swells imperceptibly from a murmur to a satisfying roar.  read more »

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musica