Saturday Links, the scholarly edition
Nov. 29th, 2008 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for Lévi-Strauss
By STEVEN ERLANGER, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
PARIS — Claude Lévi-Strauss, who altered the way Westerners look at other civilizations, turned 100 on Friday, and France celebrated with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired, the Musée du Quai Branly.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss is cherished in France, and is an additional reminder of the nation’s cultural significance in the year when another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a specially French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques” had it been fiction.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss, a Brussels-born and Paris-bred Jew, fled France after its capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. He spent the next eight years based in the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and was influenced by noted anthropologists like Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia.
On Friday, the culmination of several days of celebration, there were no false notes. At the Quai Branly, 100 scholars and writers read from or lectured on the work of Mr. Lévi-Strauss, while documentaries about him were screened, and guided visits were provided to the collections, which include some of his own favorite artifacts.
Stéphane Martin, the president of the museum, said in an interview that Mr. Lévi-Strauss was himself a major collector, and as he first toured the new museum, in 2006, “he remembered various pieces and complained that he had to sell them to pay for a divorce.”
Mr. Martin, along with the French culture minister, Christine Albanel, and the minister of higher education and research, Valérie Pécresse, presided over the unveiling of a plaque outside the museum’s theater, which is already named for Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who did not attend the festivities. Ms. Pécresse announced a new annual 100,000 euro prize (about $127,000) in his name for a researcher in “human sciences” working in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Mr. Lévi-Strauss on Friday evening at his home.
Roger-Pol Droit, a philosopher who read from “Tristes Tropiques,” said that he “would have loved a text from Lévi-Strauss today saying, ‘I hate birthdays and commemorations,’ just as he began ‘Tristes Tropiques’ saying, ‘I hate traveling and explorers.’ “
“This is all about the effort of making him into a myth,” Mr. Droit continued, “because that is what we do in our time.”
The museum was the grand project of former president Jacques Chirac, who loved anthropology and embraced the idea of a colloquy of civilizations, as opposed to the academic quality of the old Musée de l’Homme, which Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, described as “an empty shell — full of artifacts but dead to themselves.”
The new museum, which has 1.3 million visitors a year, was a sort of homage to Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who “blessed it from the beginning,” Mr. Descola said, and was an important voice of support for a much criticized and politicized idea.
In 1996, when asked his opinion of the project, Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in a handwritten letter to Mr. Chirac: “It takes into account the evolution of the world since the Musée de l’Homme was created. An ethnographic museum can no longer, as at that time, offer an authentic vision of life in these societies so different from ours. With perhaps a few exceptions that will not last, these societies are progressively integrated into world politics and economy. When I see the objects that I collected in the field between 1935 and 1938 again — and it’s also true of others — I know that their relevance has become either documentary or, mostly, aesthetic.”
The building is striking and controversial, imposing the ideas of the star architect Jean Nouvel on the organization of the spaces. But Mr. Martin says it is working well for the museum, whose marvelous objects — “fragile flowers of difference,” as Mr. Lévi-Strauss once called them — can be seen on varying levels of aesthetics and serious study. They are presented as artifacts of great beauty but also with defining context, telling visitors not only what they are, but also what they were meant to be when they were created.
On Thursday, from noon to midnight, ARTE, a French-German cultural television channel, showed nothing but Lévi-Strauss, with documentaries, films and interviews with him and with those inspired or influenced by his work, including the novelist Michel Tournier.
The French Academy, which governs the French language and elected Mr. Lévi-Strauss in 1973, honored him in what its permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, called “a huge event and perhaps above all ‘a family celebration.’ “
On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”
Mr. Levi-Strauss took difference as the basis for his study, not the search for commonality, which defined 19th-century anthropology, Mr. Descola said. In other words, he took cultures on their own terms rather than try to relate everything to the West.
Mr. Descola, 59, said he was 17 when he read “Tristes Tropiques,” and “it left a lasting mark.”
“I can’t say I decided on the spot to become an anthropologist,” he said, “but rather to become a man like that.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Quai Branly is its landscaping, designed by Gilles Clément to reflect the questing spirit of Mr. Lévi-Strauss. Mr. Clément tried to create a “non-Western garden,” he said in an interview, “with more the spirit of the savannah,” where most of the animist civilizations live whose artifacts fill the museum itself.
He tried to think through the symbols of the cosmology of these civilizations, their systems of gods and beliefs, which also animate their agriculture and their gardens. The garden here uses the symbol of the tortoise, not reflected literally, “but in an oval form that recurs,” Mr. Clément said.
“We find the tortoise everywhere,” he continued. “It’s an animal that lives a long time, so it represents a sort of reassurance, or the eternal, perhaps.”
Mr. Lévi-Strauss “is very important to me,” Mr. Clément said, adding: “He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future.”
Basil Katz contributed reporting.
Holiday Gift Guide: Michiko Kakutani’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
APPLES & ORANGES by Marie Brenner. In this deeply affecting memoir, a journalist uses the prism of her love and grief for her dead brother — and her bewilderment over the twists and turns of his eccentric life — to create a haunting portrait of him and their uncommon family.
AMERICA AND THE WORLD: CONVERSATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft; moderated by David Ignatius. Two former national security advisers, a Democrat and a Republican, offer astute assessments of the daunting challenges — terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a globalized economy, for starters — that will face Barack Obama when he becomes president.
THE BIN LADENS: AN ARABIAN FAMILY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY by Steve Coll. This riveting book not only provides a psychologically detailed portrait of Osama bin Laden, but in recounting the story of his extended family it also underscores the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal House of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions and his technical expertise.
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES by Louise Erdrich. Arguably the author’s most ambitious book, this novel examines the fallout that the vigilante hanging of several innocents will have on three generations of people who live on the margins of a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
LINCOLN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER by Fred Kaplan. This resonant biography looks at the role that Lincoln’s avid reading of the Bible, Shakespeare and other works played in shaping his gifts as a writer, and how his literary skills in turn helped him articulate — and promote — his vision of a new America rising from the ashes of the Civil War.
A MERCY by Toni Morrison. Set in 17th-century America, this small jewel of a story is at once a kind of prelude to the author’s masterwork, “Beloved,” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery.
NETHERLAND by Joseph O’Neill. Filled with echoes of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” this stunning novel about a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and a Dutch-born banker explores the American Dream as its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York.
ALEX & ME: HOW A SCIENTIST AND A PARROT UNCOVERED A HIDDEN WORLD OF ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE — AND FORMED A DEEP BOND IN THE PROCESS by Irene M. Pepperberg. A charming portrait of Alex the gray parrot — whose linguistic and cognitive skills impressed the world, before his death in 2007 — by the scientist who worked with him for three decades.
LUSH LIFE by Richard Price. Offering the reader a wide-screen, 3-D Imax portrait of a corner of New York, this police procedural brilliantly transcends its genre thanks to its author’s pitch-perfect dialogue, his journalistic eye for detail and his understanding of how people navigate the social and cultural mazes of a big city.
MILLENNIAL MAKEOVER: MYSPACE, YOUTUBE, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais. In what turns out to have been a highly prescient book, the two authors predicted that 2008 would be a “change” election, informed by new technology and by the outlook of a new generation of millennial voters, who tend to be more inclusive, optimistic and tech-savvy than their elders.
Holiday Gift Guide: Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
By JANET MASLIN, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? by Kate Atkinson. Another smart, tricky expansion on the mystery format from an author whose doppelgängers, parallel plots and beguiling characters keep her on a winning streak.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño. A maddening, alluring, wild and woolly five-part magnum opus from a Chilean-born literary superstar who wrote as if his life depended on it — and then died, in 2003. Posthumous English-language versions of his work have made him a legitimate sensation.
CHARLATAN: AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HUCKSTER, THE MAN WHO PURSUED HIM, AND THE AGE OF FLIMFLAM by Pope Brock. Medical quackery at its most heavenly, thanks to the wryly hilarious tone with which the true story of the virility expert Dr. John R. Brinkley is told. A “can you top this?” wealth of outlandish stories (in 1930 Brinkley began running for governor of Kansas three days after being stripped of his medical license) makes this a delight.
PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD by Mark Harris. With unusual overarching wisdom, this film book captures the cultural volatility of 1967 by tracking five very different contenders — including “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Bonnie and Clyde” — for the best picture Oscar.
THE GIVEN DAY by Dennis Lehane. Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser color this fierce, sweeping historical drama, set in 1919 and told by the bard of Irish Boston. Mr. Lehane, the author of “Mystic River,” outdoes himself with something even bigger than a great detective tale.
SERENA by Ron Rash. A stunningly effective novel that is stark, fierce, dramatic and gripping from its unforgettable opening paragraph. A woman of frighteningly indomitable ambition wreaks havoc on her husband’s Appalachian business empire. Equal parts myth, poetry and folklore.
THE SNOWBALL: WARREN BUFFETT AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE by Alice Schroeder. The self-made über-investor turns out to be as interestingly eccentric as he is rich. And he was savvy enough to have owned a tenant farm while he was in high school. Find out how.
FINAL SALUTE: A STORY OF UNFINISHED LIVES by Jim Sheeler. Why do we know so little about what happens when fallen American troops come home? One of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war is told with heartbreaking pride and acuity.
AUDITION: A MEMOIR by Barbara Walters. She’s been there, done that, met everyone and seen everything in the course of a 50-year television career. Despite its dignified tone, this is the year’s dishiest memoir.
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE by David Wroblewski. A boy and his dogs — as well as a mother, father and uncle who are surprisingly like Hamlet’s — are presented with utter, seamless naturalism and grace by Mr. Wroblewski, an author who became (I’d say) 2008’s happiest surprise.
And if you need more ideas:
100 Notable Books of 2008 from the New York Times
And then once you realize you have too many books...
Essay: The Well-Tended Bookshelf
By LAURA MILLER, The New York Times, November 30, 2008
In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. Despite what I like to think of as a rigorous “one book in, one book out” policy, it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull.
I am not a collector or a pack rat, unlike a colleague of mine who once expressed the fear that he might perish someday under a toppled pile of books and papers, like a woman whose obituary he once read. I was baffled the first time a friend explained to me that the book in my hand was his “reading copy,” while the “collection copy” resided upstairs, in some impenetrable sanctum. Having reviewed hundreds of books over the past 20-some years, I no longer subscribe to the notion that I have a vague journalistic responsibility to keep a copy of every title I have ever written about. I am not sentimental.
Nevertheless, things had gotten out of hand. The renovations forced me to pull every copy off every shelf and ask: Do I really want this? I filled four or five cartons with volumes destined for libraries, used-book stores and the recycling bin, and as I did so, certain criteria emerged.
There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients. Silverberg cherishes the copy of Céline given to him when he was 19 by William Burroughs, while “people I’ve stopped talking to go out immediately. There are people whose books I refuse to live with.”
The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. “I like to keep something on my shelf for every mood that might strike,” said Marisa Bowe, a nonprofit consultant and an editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.” At its most pragmatic, and with the aid of technology, this attitude can be breathtakingly ruthless. Lisa Palac, a freelance writer, and Andrew Rice, a public relations executive, ultimately chose their beloved but snug house in Venice, Calif., over their library. “We’d been lugging these books around for years, and why?” Palac wrote in an e-mail message. Her husband said, “Do we really need to keep that copy of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ from college on hand? I can order up another copy online and have it tomorrow if I need it.” They kept only one carton of books apiece, donating the rest to a fund-raising bazaar for their son’s school.
Older people, curiously enough, seem to favor the less nostalgic approach. When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important. Most of them express no regrets, although Nicholson Baker, who wrote an entire book protesting the “weeding” of books and periodicals from American libraries, still mourns the collection of science fiction paperbacks he discarded in his youth. “I’m not good at it,” Baker wrote in an e-mail message when asked about his own culling. “When I’m doing research, I buy lots of used, out-of-print books, preferably with underlining and torn covers. I like watching them pile up on the stairs.”
For the most part, I’ve been pragmatic in my purging, and for years reference books were the most likely survivors. I needed them for work, for those occasions when I suddenly had to know at what age Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom” (39) or the name of the Greek muse of lyric poetry (Euterpe). Now the Internet can tell me all that. Apart from the rare reference that’s worth reading in its own right, like David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, these titles have been drifting away as the trust I’m willing to put in Wikipedia gradually equalizes with the faith I’ve invested in, say, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. (It doesn’t help that reference books tend to be shelf hogs.)
Nevertheless, most of the nonfiction I’ve kept consists of books I’ve already read and know I’m likely to refer to in my own writing. Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge has come in handy for more than one project, as has Carol J. Clover’s study of slasher films, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” In fiction, on the other hand, apart from a few choice favorites, the list is weighted toward classics I optimistically plan to get around to someday. Like John Irving, I hold one substantial unread Dickens novel (“Barnaby Rudge”) in reserve, for emergencies. This method has its pitfalls. The novelist Jonathan Franzen used to limit the unread books on his shelves to no more than 50 percent of the total. “The weight of those books seemed to represent a standing reproach to me of how little I was reading,” he said in a phone interview. “I want to be surrounded by books I love, although now sometimes I worry that it’s too familiar, what I see when I look around me, that it’s become a sort of narcissistic mirror.”
When it comes to novels, I’m probably too sanguine about what my future can accommodate. “Eventually the truth hits home,” Brian Drolet, a television producer in New York, told me. “As the actuarial tables advance, the number of books you’ve got time to read diminishes.” Dr. Johnson once said of second marriages that they represent the triumph of hope over experience. So, too, do my bookshelves. I have turned out to be less rational about this than I thought, and have made my library into a charm against mortality. As long as I have a few unread books beckoning to me from across the room, I tell myself I can always find a little more time.
Laura Miller is a staff writer for Salon and the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” which has just been published.
By STEVEN ERLANGER, The New York Times, November 29, 2008
PARIS — Claude Lévi-Strauss, who altered the way Westerners look at other civilizations, turned 100 on Friday, and France celebrated with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired, the Musée du Quai Branly.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss is cherished in France, and is an additional reminder of the nation’s cultural significance in the year when another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a specially French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques” had it been fiction.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss, a Brussels-born and Paris-bred Jew, fled France after its capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. He spent the next eight years based in the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and was influenced by noted anthropologists like Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia.
On Friday, the culmination of several days of celebration, there were no false notes. At the Quai Branly, 100 scholars and writers read from or lectured on the work of Mr. Lévi-Strauss, while documentaries about him were screened, and guided visits were provided to the collections, which include some of his own favorite artifacts.
Stéphane Martin, the president of the museum, said in an interview that Mr. Lévi-Strauss was himself a major collector, and as he first toured the new museum, in 2006, “he remembered various pieces and complained that he had to sell them to pay for a divorce.”
Mr. Martin, along with the French culture minister, Christine Albanel, and the minister of higher education and research, Valérie Pécresse, presided over the unveiling of a plaque outside the museum’s theater, which is already named for Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who did not attend the festivities. Ms. Pécresse announced a new annual 100,000 euro prize (about $127,000) in his name for a researcher in “human sciences” working in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Mr. Lévi-Strauss on Friday evening at his home.
Roger-Pol Droit, a philosopher who read from “Tristes Tropiques,” said that he “would have loved a text from Lévi-Strauss today saying, ‘I hate birthdays and commemorations,’ just as he began ‘Tristes Tropiques’ saying, ‘I hate traveling and explorers.’ “
“This is all about the effort of making him into a myth,” Mr. Droit continued, “because that is what we do in our time.”
The museum was the grand project of former president Jacques Chirac, who loved anthropology and embraced the idea of a colloquy of civilizations, as opposed to the academic quality of the old Musée de l’Homme, which Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, described as “an empty shell — full of artifacts but dead to themselves.”
The new museum, which has 1.3 million visitors a year, was a sort of homage to Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who “blessed it from the beginning,” Mr. Descola said, and was an important voice of support for a much criticized and politicized idea.
In 1996, when asked his opinion of the project, Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in a handwritten letter to Mr. Chirac: “It takes into account the evolution of the world since the Musée de l’Homme was created. An ethnographic museum can no longer, as at that time, offer an authentic vision of life in these societies so different from ours. With perhaps a few exceptions that will not last, these societies are progressively integrated into world politics and economy. When I see the objects that I collected in the field between 1935 and 1938 again — and it’s also true of others — I know that their relevance has become either documentary or, mostly, aesthetic.”
The building is striking and controversial, imposing the ideas of the star architect Jean Nouvel on the organization of the spaces. But Mr. Martin says it is working well for the museum, whose marvelous objects — “fragile flowers of difference,” as Mr. Lévi-Strauss once called them — can be seen on varying levels of aesthetics and serious study. They are presented as artifacts of great beauty but also with defining context, telling visitors not only what they are, but also what they were meant to be when they were created.
On Thursday, from noon to midnight, ARTE, a French-German cultural television channel, showed nothing but Lévi-Strauss, with documentaries, films and interviews with him and with those inspired or influenced by his work, including the novelist Michel Tournier.
The French Academy, which governs the French language and elected Mr. Lévi-Strauss in 1973, honored him in what its permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, called “a huge event and perhaps above all ‘a family celebration.’ “
On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”
Mr. Levi-Strauss took difference as the basis for his study, not the search for commonality, which defined 19th-century anthropology, Mr. Descola said. In other words, he took cultures on their own terms rather than try to relate everything to the West.
Mr. Descola, 59, said he was 17 when he read “Tristes Tropiques,” and “it left a lasting mark.”
“I can’t say I decided on the spot to become an anthropologist,” he said, “but rather to become a man like that.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Quai Branly is its landscaping, designed by Gilles Clément to reflect the questing spirit of Mr. Lévi-Strauss. Mr. Clément tried to create a “non-Western garden,” he said in an interview, “with more the spirit of the savannah,” where most of the animist civilizations live whose artifacts fill the museum itself.
He tried to think through the symbols of the cosmology of these civilizations, their systems of gods and beliefs, which also animate their agriculture and their gardens. The garden here uses the symbol of the tortoise, not reflected literally, “but in an oval form that recurs,” Mr. Clément said.
“We find the tortoise everywhere,” he continued. “It’s an animal that lives a long time, so it represents a sort of reassurance, or the eternal, perhaps.”
Mr. Lévi-Strauss “is very important to me,” Mr. Clément said, adding: “He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future.”
Basil Katz contributed reporting.
Holiday Gift Guide: Michiko Kakutani’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
APPLES & ORANGES by Marie Brenner. In this deeply affecting memoir, a journalist uses the prism of her love and grief for her dead brother — and her bewilderment over the twists and turns of his eccentric life — to create a haunting portrait of him and their uncommon family.
AMERICA AND THE WORLD: CONVERSATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft; moderated by David Ignatius. Two former national security advisers, a Democrat and a Republican, offer astute assessments of the daunting challenges — terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a globalized economy, for starters — that will face Barack Obama when he becomes president.
THE BIN LADENS: AN ARABIAN FAMILY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY by Steve Coll. This riveting book not only provides a psychologically detailed portrait of Osama bin Laden, but in recounting the story of his extended family it also underscores the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal House of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions and his technical expertise.
THE PLAGUE OF DOVES by Louise Erdrich. Arguably the author’s most ambitious book, this novel examines the fallout that the vigilante hanging of several innocents will have on three generations of people who live on the margins of a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
LINCOLN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER by Fred Kaplan. This resonant biography looks at the role that Lincoln’s avid reading of the Bible, Shakespeare and other works played in shaping his gifts as a writer, and how his literary skills in turn helped him articulate — and promote — his vision of a new America rising from the ashes of the Civil War.
A MERCY by Toni Morrison. Set in 17th-century America, this small jewel of a story is at once a kind of prelude to the author’s masterwork, “Beloved,” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery.
NETHERLAND by Joseph O’Neill. Filled with echoes of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” this stunning novel about a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and a Dutch-born banker explores the American Dream as its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York.
ALEX & ME: HOW A SCIENTIST AND A PARROT UNCOVERED A HIDDEN WORLD OF ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE — AND FORMED A DEEP BOND IN THE PROCESS by Irene M. Pepperberg. A charming portrait of Alex the gray parrot — whose linguistic and cognitive skills impressed the world, before his death in 2007 — by the scientist who worked with him for three decades.
LUSH LIFE by Richard Price. Offering the reader a wide-screen, 3-D Imax portrait of a corner of New York, this police procedural brilliantly transcends its genre thanks to its author’s pitch-perfect dialogue, his journalistic eye for detail and his understanding of how people navigate the social and cultural mazes of a big city.
MILLENNIAL MAKEOVER: MYSPACE, YOUTUBE, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais. In what turns out to have been a highly prescient book, the two authors predicted that 2008 would be a “change” election, informed by new technology and by the outlook of a new generation of millennial voters, who tend to be more inclusive, optimistic and tech-savvy than their elders.
Holiday Gift Guide: Janet Maslin’s 10 Favorite Books of 2008
By JANET MASLIN, The New York Times, November 28, 2008
WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? by Kate Atkinson. Another smart, tricky expansion on the mystery format from an author whose doppelgängers, parallel plots and beguiling characters keep her on a winning streak.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño. A maddening, alluring, wild and woolly five-part magnum opus from a Chilean-born literary superstar who wrote as if his life depended on it — and then died, in 2003. Posthumous English-language versions of his work have made him a legitimate sensation.
CHARLATAN: AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HUCKSTER, THE MAN WHO PURSUED HIM, AND THE AGE OF FLIMFLAM by Pope Brock. Medical quackery at its most heavenly, thanks to the wryly hilarious tone with which the true story of the virility expert Dr. John R. Brinkley is told. A “can you top this?” wealth of outlandish stories (in 1930 Brinkley began running for governor of Kansas three days after being stripped of his medical license) makes this a delight.
PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD by Mark Harris. With unusual overarching wisdom, this film book captures the cultural volatility of 1967 by tracking five very different contenders — including “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Bonnie and Clyde” — for the best picture Oscar.
THE GIVEN DAY by Dennis Lehane. Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser color this fierce, sweeping historical drama, set in 1919 and told by the bard of Irish Boston. Mr. Lehane, the author of “Mystic River,” outdoes himself with something even bigger than a great detective tale.
SERENA by Ron Rash. A stunningly effective novel that is stark, fierce, dramatic and gripping from its unforgettable opening paragraph. A woman of frighteningly indomitable ambition wreaks havoc on her husband’s Appalachian business empire. Equal parts myth, poetry and folklore.
THE SNOWBALL: WARREN BUFFETT AND THE BUSINESS OF LIFE by Alice Schroeder. The self-made über-investor turns out to be as interestingly eccentric as he is rich. And he was savvy enough to have owned a tenant farm while he was in high school. Find out how.
FINAL SALUTE: A STORY OF UNFINISHED LIVES by Jim Sheeler. Why do we know so little about what happens when fallen American troops come home? One of the great underreported stories of the Iraq war is told with heartbreaking pride and acuity.
AUDITION: A MEMOIR by Barbara Walters. She’s been there, done that, met everyone and seen everything in the course of a 50-year television career. Despite its dignified tone, this is the year’s dishiest memoir.
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE by David Wroblewski. A boy and his dogs — as well as a mother, father and uncle who are surprisingly like Hamlet’s — are presented with utter, seamless naturalism and grace by Mr. Wroblewski, an author who became (I’d say) 2008’s happiest surprise.
And if you need more ideas:
100 Notable Books of 2008 from the New York Times
And then once you realize you have too many books...
Essay: The Well-Tended Bookshelf
By LAURA MILLER, The New York Times, November 30, 2008
In order to have the walls of my diminutive apartment scraped and repainted, I recently had to heap all of my possessions in the center of the room. The biggest obstacle was my library. Despite what I like to think of as a rigorous “one book in, one book out” policy, it had begun to metastasize quietly in corners, with volumes squeezed on top of the taller cabinets and in the horizontal crannies left above the spines of books that had been properly shelved. It was time to cull.
I am not a collector or a pack rat, unlike a colleague of mine who once expressed the fear that he might perish someday under a toppled pile of books and papers, like a woman whose obituary he once read. I was baffled the first time a friend explained to me that the book in my hand was his “reading copy,” while the “collection copy” resided upstairs, in some impenetrable sanctum. Having reviewed hundreds of books over the past 20-some years, I no longer subscribe to the notion that I have a vague journalistic responsibility to keep a copy of every title I have ever written about. I am not sentimental.
Nevertheless, things had gotten out of hand. The renovations forced me to pull every copy off every shelf and ask: Do I really want this? I filled four or five cartons with volumes destined for libraries, used-book stores and the recycling bin, and as I did so, certain criteria emerged.
There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients. Silverberg cherishes the copy of Céline given to him when he was 19 by William Burroughs, while “people I’ve stopped talking to go out immediately. There are people whose books I refuse to live with.”
The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. “I like to keep something on my shelf for every mood that might strike,” said Marisa Bowe, a nonprofit consultant and an editor of “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.” At its most pragmatic, and with the aid of technology, this attitude can be breathtakingly ruthless. Lisa Palac, a freelance writer, and Andrew Rice, a public relations executive, ultimately chose their beloved but snug house in Venice, Calif., over their library. “We’d been lugging these books around for years, and why?” Palac wrote in an e-mail message. Her husband said, “Do we really need to keep that copy of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ from college on hand? I can order up another copy online and have it tomorrow if I need it.” They kept only one carton of books apiece, donating the rest to a fund-raising bazaar for their son’s school.
Older people, curiously enough, seem to favor the less nostalgic approach. When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important. Most of them express no regrets, although Nicholson Baker, who wrote an entire book protesting the “weeding” of books and periodicals from American libraries, still mourns the collection of science fiction paperbacks he discarded in his youth. “I’m not good at it,” Baker wrote in an e-mail message when asked about his own culling. “When I’m doing research, I buy lots of used, out-of-print books, preferably with underlining and torn covers. I like watching them pile up on the stairs.”
For the most part, I’ve been pragmatic in my purging, and for years reference books were the most likely survivors. I needed them for work, for those occasions when I suddenly had to know at what age Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom” (39) or the name of the Greek muse of lyric poetry (Euterpe). Now the Internet can tell me all that. Apart from the rare reference that’s worth reading in its own right, like David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, these titles have been drifting away as the trust I’m willing to put in Wikipedia gradually equalizes with the faith I’ve invested in, say, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. (It doesn’t help that reference books tend to be shelf hogs.)
Nevertheless, most of the nonfiction I’ve kept consists of books I’ve already read and know I’m likely to refer to in my own writing. Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge has come in handy for more than one project, as has Carol J. Clover’s study of slasher films, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” In fiction, on the other hand, apart from a few choice favorites, the list is weighted toward classics I optimistically plan to get around to someday. Like John Irving, I hold one substantial unread Dickens novel (“Barnaby Rudge”) in reserve, for emergencies. This method has its pitfalls. The novelist Jonathan Franzen used to limit the unread books on his shelves to no more than 50 percent of the total. “The weight of those books seemed to represent a standing reproach to me of how little I was reading,” he said in a phone interview. “I want to be surrounded by books I love, although now sometimes I worry that it’s too familiar, what I see when I look around me, that it’s become a sort of narcissistic mirror.”
When it comes to novels, I’m probably too sanguine about what my future can accommodate. “Eventually the truth hits home,” Brian Drolet, a television producer in New York, told me. “As the actuarial tables advance, the number of books you’ve got time to read diminishes.” Dr. Johnson once said of second marriages that they represent the triumph of hope over experience. So, too, do my bookshelves. I have turned out to be less rational about this than I thought, and have made my library into a charm against mortality. As long as I have a few unread books beckoning to me from across the room, I tell myself I can always find a little more time.
Laura Miller is a staff writer for Salon and the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” which has just been published.
