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What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
Getting Better All the Time?
A review by David E. Nye
Whether it's intended to be so or not, the title of Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants is a provocation to most historians of technology, who would reply almost unanimously that technology has no wants or desires. Each tool or machine has latent uses, but each is only an inert object until human beings decide whether and how to use it. In contrast, Kelly talks about technology as a composite whole that emerged before human beings existed and that facilitated their rapid domination of the planet. For him, technology has intentions, and it is radically accelerating evolution. Kelly has been ...
The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Motley Crue
Those filthy boys
A review by Georgie Lewis
The Dirt is a book that is easy to dip into. Getting out is another matter. I was unable to put down this 420-page autobiography of Mötley Crüe, the "World's Most Notorious Rock Band," until I had read it cover to cover. I began by flipping it open here and there in the hope of finding a little voyeuristic titillation. But I would then become engrossed in the middle of some chapter and have to flip back and read from the beginning. The hairsprayed, drug-addled, womanizing exploits of the four inspire as much fascination as they do repugnance. It's hard not to find Nikki, Tommy, Vince, and ...
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler
The Good Old Bad Days
A review by Anna Godbersen
Perhaps because New York figures so prominently in the public imagination, the real New York (whatever that means) always seems to be somewhere in the past; in the '20s, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or, more likely, in the '70s, in some very downtown loft. For anyone who has ever felt this way, here comes Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning, a book as lively and wry as its Howard Cossell-inspired title. Mahler recreates the city as it was in 1977, giving only what background information is necessary and sparing us an over-lengthy analysis of anything after that ...
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Harry Potter for adults
A review by Ron Charles
The prospect of having to read an 800-page novel billed as "Harry Potter for adults" was enough to make this weary book critic pine for an invisibility cloak. But for those of you who, like me, can't endure another charmless opening at the Dursleys', take heart: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is no Harry Potter knockoff. It's altogether original -- far closer to Dickens than Rowling. In fact, I'm so in love with Susanna Clarke's debut novel that I must have been beaned on the head with a golden snitch. Its appearance on the Booker longlist last week adds a nice flourish to the launch.
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Indiscretion by Jude Morgan
Austen Powers
A review by Ron Charles
Halfway through Jude Morgan's Indiscretion comes a litmus test for your sensitivity to Jane Austenism: A young woman in an exquisitely appointed manor in the English countryside complains, "There is nothing very grand, or exciting, or even terrible, to be met with in a district like this: it is all just narrow provincial dullness." If that line inspires an ironic little grin, you have the good sense and sensibility to keep reading. But if, instead, you think, "She's absolutely right," you will already have dropped off into a deep sleep hundreds of pages earlier. This is, after all, a...
Pompeii by Robert Harris
The day it rained fire
A review by Ron Charles
One cataclysmic disaster can ruin your whole day, but at least it has the advantage of surprise. That's more than can usually be said for stories about cataclysmic disasters, which lumber toward their climax like some bore telling a multipart joke you've already heard. Who honestly didn't feel the urge to push a few heads under water to speed up James Cameron's interminable Titanic? We endure documentaries about German aerodynamics because we want to see the Hindenburg in flames. "Oh, the banality!" Robert Harris confronts this very problem in his new novel about the explosion of Vesuvius, ...
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