Book Reviews

A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice. Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an 11th-12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, was a renowned scholastic who defended the faith by intellectual argument rather than by reference to scripture and other authorities. Broderick’s Anselm does much the same in his contemporary investigations, guided by moral reasoning and intuition rather than dogma. He is helped by the fact that, before becoming a monk,

More jobs Americans won’t do: write their own novels. Mind you, I wrote this post, so I’m in no position to carp or quibble. Still, this is ingenious: Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don’t know why–the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the Kwik Trip, the Food Network after ten p.m. In 100 words or less, please answer the question, “What makes you so unhappy?” in the comments field below. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos’s new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009

Reviewing Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, last week, Michael Lind wrote: But “The Wrecking Crew” is a polemic, not a dissertation. With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives — from Juvenal and Alexander Pope to H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke — have been the best satirists. In Thomas Frank, the American left has found its own Juvenal. Consider his update of a 1945 civics primer, “We Are the Government,” which followed the cheerful wanderings of a dime that paid for a variety of enlightened New Deal regulations. In Frank’s contemporary version, the dime travels from a private government contractor to

We’ve just uploaded Lloyd Evans’s Web Exclusive report on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event – Howard Jacobsen discussing his novel ‘The Act of Love’ with Peter Florence.  You can read it here.

Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head: Many years later,

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators,’ reported the geologist William Whewell. ‘But these days are past.’ The meeting was chaired by Coleridge, who vetoed the use of ‘philosopher’; ‘savants’ was instantly rejected as too French. But ‘some ingenious gentlemen’ (including Whewell himself) proposed ‘that, by analogy with “artist”, they might form “scientist” ’. Natural philosophers did not,

We’ve just posted up Lloyd Evans’s review of Thomas Friedman’s talk at Intelligence Squared last night on his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future. It is well worth reading.

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’ David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs. There’s the