Book Reviews

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century. He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is,

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944. LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show

In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a serious novel, full of living human beings’ – has gone by different names in English: House of Liars or, in this new edition published by Penguin Classics and NYRB Books, Lies and Sorcery. Narrated by the semi-autobiographical ‘Elisa’ (a ‘nun-like recluse’

Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received a series of anonymous letters taunting him about his coquettish wife’s affair with George-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, a French officer and the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Pushkin, imagining the ambassador himself had written them, fired off a furious letter of accusation. He and d’Anthès-Heeckeren duelled the next day, and Pushkin was fatally shot. Aged just

‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic. The ancient Semitic tongue of Ethiopia served as that nation’s official language long before English came to rule at court, and in courts. Girma was both a journalist and a novelist, educated in the US and an editor of English-language magazines in Addis Ababa. He evidently relished the various genres adroitly mined in Oromay. They