Previously Reviewed by National Book Critics Circle
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A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Jo by Christopher Benfey
Christopher Benfey, a scholar of Emily Dickinson and Gilded Age America, would not have his book A Summer of Hummingbirds had Dickinson not responded to a small floral painting sent to her in 1882 by writing an eight-line poem in return, which spoke of "A Route of Evanescence" in describing the...

Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron
In the months before he fell into his final, fatal illness in the fall of 2006, William Styron compiled a number of essays, lectures and occasional pieces that he had written over the previous 20 years of his life. Havanas in Camelot is the result of that foraging process, and while it's a minor...

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
More than four decades have passed since readers made the acquaintance of a figure who has assumed an almost mythological role in the stories that are sometimes told about the way we live now. This was the bricoleur, introduced into the cultural conversation by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the opening...

Draining the Sea by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
It's unsurprising that Micheline Aharonian Marcom, whose first two novels, Three Apples Fell From Heaven and The Daydreaming Boy, explore the massacre of Armenians nearly a century ago, has turned her attention to Guatemala.
She is among a growing number of contemporary novelists writing about...

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" has remained lodged in mine for many years, not just because he kills a literary critic in it (with the puckish implication that what goes around comes around), but because it exhibits so cleanly what the best stories do: range outward from the...

Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict by Sandra Mackey
At the end of Mirror of the Arab World, Sandra Mackey acknowledges her publisher's editor in chief, Starling Lawrence, "who has so wisely recognized the value of books on the Middle East for the nonspecialist reader." Lawrence is right to want to publish popular books about the Middle East. And...

The Konkans by Tony D'Souza
Storytelling doesn't mean what it used to mean. Our cultural memories reside increasingly in visual information, and less in the stories told of our ancestors or by our parents. Even literary novels don't mean what they used to mean - despite Jonathan Franzen's screed in Harper's a few years ago...

Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman
Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the...

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Gilpin Faust grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, visiting the cairns and killing fields of the Civil War. She is 60 now, the president of Harvard University, and still makes time to go to the graves of individual soldiers who died for the Union and Confederate causes.
A respected ...

Zeroville by Steve Erickson
"The last time he was in the United States," begins a sentence in Steve
Erickson's 1993 Arc d'X, "driving aimlessly through Wyoming and
the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the
Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car
radio." The nub of...

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