Book Reviews

That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong with America? And How it Can Come Back Who’s it by? Thomas L Friedman (Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum (Professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University). What’s it about? How America lost its superpower status and what it can do to get it back.  Friedman and Mandelbaum distil America’s crisis into four main problem areas: Lack of focus since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11. Chronic failure to address problems in education (49% of American adults do not know how long it takes the Earth to revolve

At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris.  However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic advancement which, ironically enough, was to prove feminine in nothing but name.   While some women at this time were busy playing Calliope to Europe ’s artists and musicians, swathes of other down-and-outs were falling prey to the disease of the moment, Hysteria. Interred in the notorious L’Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris – a century later

The BBC’s World at One recently asked five leading figures in the literary world for their thoughts on the ‘future of the book’. Here is what they had to say: 1.) Notorious literary agent, Andrew Wylie – aka ‘the Jackal’ – worried that the industry is at a crisis point. He argued the book industry is in danger of mirroring the fortunes of the music industry by giving too much power to distributors like Amazon. ‘Publishers have been trying to reconcile themselves with the demands of the digital distributors,‘ he said. ‘I think if they allow the digital distributors to set the music then the dance will become fatal…The music business ended

As a new series of Desert Island Discs gets underway, we investigate the least talked about but most fascinating aspect of the show: the castaway’s book choice… This March, in the most momentous archival unveiling since Glasnost, the entire back catalogue of the world’s longest-running factual radio programme, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, went online. Searchable and sortable, it’s a dangerously addictive resource, especially if you’re the sort of weirdo who’s been carrying around a mental list of eight songs, a book and a luxury since childhood. Helpfully, the BBC has compiled a list of castaways’ top tunes: Ode to Joy, Land of Hope and Glory, and other drearily

One of the literary excitements of this week, The Fear Index by Robert Harris, showed that the journalist and novelist continues to mine both the ancient and modern world for inspiration.  His latest thriller revolves around a mad scientist who’s created a beast he can’t control. So far, so Shelley, but this monster is unmistakably of the moment: a computer program designed to monitor fear in money markets for a hugely profitable hedge fund. His tale tips into gothic when the soulless monster switches and starts to track fear in the mind of its master. Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times (£) raved about the up-dating of a timeless classic: ‘Robert