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Big Squeeze: Tough Times for American Work (08 Edition) by Steven Greenhouse
Time for a New Deal
A review by Jeff Madrick
Only recently has the situation outlined by Steven Greenhouse in his new book,The Big Squeeze, been getting serious attention from politicians. Average wages for American workers have been largely stagnating for a generation. Some six million more Americans have no health insurance today than did seven years ago. The distribution of income in the United States is as unequal as it was in the Roaring Twenties. With the country facing a possibly deep and painful recession, unemployment rising, and mortgage defaults at record levels, the poor state of the economy is finally high on the list of...
In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau by Lawrence Peter Haeg
A locked-up life
A review by Olivia Cole
Born in St Paul, Minnesota, Charles Macomb Flandrau might have had a career as spectacular as the city's most famous writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald; this, at least, is the suggestion of Larry Haeg in his biography of this almost forgotten literary figure. Whereas Fitzgerald had to fund his serious writing with sales of short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Flandrau was comfortably well off, and had to be persuaded to contribute. He was something of a celebrity at twenty-six for his Harvard Episodes, a series of vignettes which exposed the high jinks of privileged students; after that...
Yellowstone Command: Colonel Nelson A. Miles and the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877 by Jerome A. Greene
Indian Wars
A review by Benjamin Schwarz
On June 25, 1876, at the Little Bighorn, 2,000 Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors won the most stunning victory in the history of the American Indians' struggle with whites. But by the following spring, the U.S. Army had broken the Sioux and Cheyenne, and the twenty-six-year contest for the northern plains had ended, as thousands of Indians streamed into the reservations and surrendered. Although this outcome was foreordained, few had anticipated the rapidity or totality of the Indian defeat. More than anyone else, General Nelson A. Miles was responsible for crushing the tribes. A hero...
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Knockemstiff Signed Edition by Donald Ray Pollock
Last Exit to Ohio
A review by Gerry Donaghy
Donald Ray Pollock's debut collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, opens with the line "My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old," setting the stage for the intense, gritty prose styling that fills these 200-plus pages. If the thought of reading how this lesson in pugilism goes down makes you a little uncomfortable, don't even bother to pick up this book. The stories in Knockemstiff depict some of the most heartbreakingly original characters and situations of recent memory: the father who juices his son with Mexican...
Who's Who in Hell by Robert Chalmers
A review by Elizabeth Judd
What if the obituaries became a vehicle for unapologetic heckling? That's the extended joke at the heart of Robert Chalmers's energetic debut novel chronicling the travails of Daniel Linnell, an obituarist at a prestigious London paper where death notices are packaged as popular entertainment. Daniel's days consist of perusing news articles for "the fatal hint" — anything from an actual illness to "a report that a star had been partying too vigorously." Gravitating toward famous subjects with lurid pasts, he takes a stash of unpublishably nasty obits and begins writing a compendium of the...
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
The Possessed
A review by Benjamin Moser
If you're perusing this magazine, chances are you went through a "Russian phase": that period when a curious, intellectually ambitious young reader, primed to enter literary adulthood, finally takes up Crime and Punishment or War and Peace. In The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman recalls her own adolescent encounter with Tolstoy. "Anna Karenina was a perfect book, with an otherworldly perfection: unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a super-charged gray zone between nature and culture. How had any human being ever managed to write something...
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