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Benjamin Disraeli (Jewish Encounters) by Adam Kirsch
What Disraeli Can Teach Us
A review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
1. In one of his best essays, Isaiah Berlin compared two astonishing contemporaries, both of them "famous, influential, exceptionally gifted." Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) were men of letters who hoped to become men of action, both addressed the great question of class conflict but from totally different angles, and both did so by way of identifying with classes to which they did not belong. They were both Jews. Of the two stories, Disraeli's is plainly the more extraordinary for what he accomplished during his lifetime: Marx did not die "triumphant and full ...
A Wedding in December: A Novel by Anita Shreve
Do We Ever really leave high school?
A review by Matt Rusling
Seven high school friends meet 27 years after graduation for a long weekend. Such is the Big Chill setup of Anita Shreve's new novel A Wedding in December. As the title indicates, it's a wedding rather than a funeral that's sparked this particular reunion, but one member is missing. Stephen Otis, the most charismatic and athletic of the friends, drowned the spring of their senior year. The happy couple is Bill and Bridget, former high school sweethearts who broke up in college. Two years ago, Bill divorced his wife and daughter to be with Bridget, a single mom who's battling cancer...
Fast-Talking Dames by Maria Dibattista
Voices Carry
A review by David Thomson
The men and women in American colleges these days sometimes reckon that the movies began with Jaws and Star Wars, and then congratulate themselves on a sufficient sense of history to accommodate films made before they were born. A few weeks ago, on an Ivy League campus, I was told by a film professor that students shown East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause had felt that James Dean was whiny. Well, such a case can be made: Dean was never short on self-pity, and that gloomy mood was over-indulged by the Actors Studio confusion with words. Yet these students went further: they identified...
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America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark A Noll
God Without Thunder
A review by Eugene D. Genovese
Those who today most vehemently protest religious display in public life usually refer to America's plurality of faiths. It is certainly true that many religions have flourished here, but these impassioned protests obscure the long-undisputed centrality of Protestant Christianity to America's society and politics. In late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America, Mark A. Noll writes, "Republican and Protestant convictions merged as they did nowhere else in the world." This contention grounds Noll's magisterial book, in which the merger's impact on theology figures as "a central theme."...
Collapse : How Civilizations Choose To Fail Or Succeed (05 - Old Edition) by Jared Diamond
Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down
A review by Douglas Brown
Most people who have seen pictures of Easter Island's massive stone figures have wondered at how the stone was moved on a treeless island where you couldn't make rollers. Seeing pictures of the Anasazi ruins nestled into canyon walls in the American Southwest likewise triggers wonderment at where the people went, as does seeing Mayan ruins in Central America. In Collapse, Jared Diamond covers these "failed" societies, along with several others. Like Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse is a sprawling epic encompassing centuries of history while spanning the globe. ...
The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz
Under Fire
A review by Andrew Carroll
The timing is hardly ideal for yet another Iraq book. Americans are burned out on the war not just politically but aesthetically. After a wave of books, articles, news reports, documentaries and blogs, Iraq has become a tired, repetitive story with no happy ending in sight. So why hand over $24.95 for one more war story? Because, as it turns out, Martha Raddatz's The Long Road Home is a masterpiece of literary nonfiction that rivals any war-related classic that has preceded it. The chief White House correspondent for ABC News, Raddatz was in Baghdad when she learned about a platoon of 1st...
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