Book and Arts Reviews
The Recovery from Wounded Knee
Jan 29, 2019 The Economist
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. By David Treuer
According to a convenient myth dating back to the 19th century, Native Americans were doomed to vanish, except for a few hold-outs on remote and poverty-striccken reservations. A corrective is urgently required, argues David Treuer in his new survey of "Indian Country." Read more
Mapping the Making of America
Nov. 22, 2018 The Economist
A History of America in 100 Maps. By Susan Schulten.
When General William Sherman was ordered to strike at the heart of the Confederacy during America's Civil War, he first asked for a map of Georgia and Alabama. Read more
"Shatila Stories" is one novel, penned by nine refugees
June 26, 2018 Economist online
Out of a difficult, heart-rending situation, a new kind of literature has emerged. Read more
Stranger and Stranger
May 30, 2015 The Economist
The Merusault Investigation by Kamel Douad.
When Albert Camus published his best-known work, "L'Etranger," in 1942, Algeria was still a colony of France, and the "Arab" killed by the book's anti-hero, Meursault, had no name. Read more
Crime and Punishment
October 9, 2015
For nearly a century and a half, Scotland Yard has kept secret a chilling gallery known colloquially as the "Black Museum". This collection of some 2,000 weapons and other bits of evidence used in Britain's more notorious crimes was created as a training ground for detectives from London and around the world. But since its inception, this hidden, presumably grisly trove has tantalised the public. Read more
New fiction: See Naples and die
October 5, 2013
The Story of a New Name. By Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein
Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of. The Italian author has written six lavishly praised novels. But she writes under a pseudonym and will not offer
herself for public consumption. Full review
Blood Sport
Aug. 10, 2013 The Economist
The Son. By Philipp Meyer.
PHILIPP MEYER was justly acclaimed for his first novel, “American Rust”, about the decline of the country’s industrial heartland. For his new book he has turned to an earlier rise and fall: the blood-soaked history of the American West. In this retelling of the story of the American frontier, the settlers are not heroes and the natives are not victims. Both sides are equally violent, and anyone weak enough to object is swiftly destroyed. Full Article
Not Ticking
Aug 4, 2013 The Economist Online
THE shadow of a giant second hand sweeps in silent arcs around a sundial’s shaft, patterning the floor. It lengthens, then reverses, crossing tracks with shorter stripes that represent the minute and the hour. In the industrial vault of London’s Roundhouse theatre, an artificial sun illuminates this enormous clock, a metal spider with three rotating light-tipped arms. Conrad Shawcross, a young British sculptor, calls this light installation "Timepiece", yet it thwarts anyone who hopes to use it to tell the time. Full article
Divided Soul
Jul. 13, 2013 The Economist
They Divided the Sky. By Christa Wolf. Translated by Luise von Flotow.
City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr Freud. By Christa Wolf. Translated by Damion Searls.
IN HER last years Wolf, who died in 2011, was branded an opportunist who not only failed to blow the whistle on a corrupt dictatorship, but enjoyed all the privileges doled out to a “state poet”. Now a brace of new translations—of her first novel, and her last—offer English speakers a more generous reading of her literature and life. Full Article
Real Time Magic
Jun. 21, 2013 The Economist Online
A PAIR of teen lovers flees a father’s death threat. A jealous husband drugs his wife to force her to have sex with an animal. Expect the hashtags to erupt across the internet: such wanton stories are the stuff of instantaneous reaction on all online platforms. With this slight difference: our lovers here are called Hermia and Lysander, the feuding couple Oberon and his fairy Queen Titania, who is made to love an ass. Full article
A Fresh Way of Looking
May 14, 2013 The Economist Online
IN 2000 Tate Britain scandalised the art world by rearranging its unrivalled collection of British art. Instead of grouping works by schools and movements, the London museum chose to display the art by theme (eg, "war" or "city life"). Now it has decided to upend convention once again by rehanging its permanent collection chronologically. The happy result of this unorthodox approach is an electrifying ramble through 500 years of British art. Full article
Modern Art From The Middle East
Apr. 24, 2013 The Economist Online
IN 2010, when curators from the Tate Modern in London stepped into the Beirut home of Saloua Raouda Choucair, a Lebanese artist, they were amazed. The house and studio of the woman they would come to call “a pioneer of modernism in the Middle East” was crammed with so many sculptures that some pieces doubled as furniture. Yet hardly any of the hundreds of abstract works, in stone, wood, metal and fiberglass, along with early paintings, had ever been seen in public. Full Article
Writing to Survive
Apr. 6, 2013, The Economist
The Book of My Lives. By Aleksandar Hemon. Essays on Exile.
IN LATE 1991 Aleksandar Hemon was at his family’s mountain cabin above Sarajevo, immersed in literature, when the Bosnian Serb nationalist and eventual war criminal Radovan Karadzic appeared on television. When Mr Karadzic prophesied the “annihilation” of Bosnia’s Muslims, Mr Hemon writes in a new book of essays, it surpassed anything his then 27-year-old “humanist imagination” could conceive. Full article
Dancing Around Duchamp
Feb. 15, 2013 The Economist online
MARCEL DUCHAMP, a French artist credited with inventing conceptual art, was in his late 50s when he met John Cage, a composer, and Merce Cunningham, a choreographer, in New York. Duchamp had fled the war in France and turned to playing chess; Cage and Cunningham were a generation younger, partners in love and work, experimentation and movement. Still, the impact of the elder artist on the pair—and then on their painter friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—was profound. Full article
Slightly Off
Jan. 26, 2013 The Economist
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. By Yoko Ogawa. A haunting introduction to the work of an important Japanese author.
AN ELDERLY man who curates a museum of torture. A landlady who grows carrots shaped like hands. A woman who buys a birthday cake for her dead son. The odd stories of Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese author, irrupt into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave. Full article
The Self Stripped
Jan. 19, 2013, The Economist
THE confessional tale of depravity redeemed goes back at least to St Augustine. Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer, plays with this legacy in “How Should a Person Be?” out now in Britain following a rapturous reception in America. A novel masquerading as memoir, it is a sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be 20-something now. Full article
The Hobbit: An unexpected disappointment
Dec. 11, 2012 The Economist online
In the hands of the director of the wildly successful Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Tolkien’s shorter, picaresque tale takes on the bloated dimensions of a mountain troll. Full article
Same as it ever was
Rediscovering music with Talking Heads’ front man
October 6, 2012, The Economist
How Music Works. By David Byrne. McSweeney’s
DAVID BYRNE is the rock star who vanished. The mesmerising front man of Talking Heads, a cult American band of the 1970s and 1980s, he disappeared into the jungles and deserts of world music after the band dissolved acrimoniously in 1991. But Mr Byrne, a Scottish-born New Yorker, never stopped making music, or sense. Full article
More than just a pretty swatch
September 22, 2012, The Economist
The textiles of William Morris were one of the first global brands. His densely patterned floral papers and chintzes have graced bourgeois interiors since the 1860s; they remain instantly recognisable signs of taste and wealth today. Full article
Stories from elsewhere
July 2, 2012, The Economist online
At a recent literary event aboard a barge on the River Thames in London, Pia Juul, one of Denmark's leading poets and writers, conversed with Ali Smith, a British novelist. Ms Juul's voice was nearly drowned out by nearby diners and music playing upstairs. The symbolism was apt. Full article
The city beckons
June 30, 2012, The Economist
What Winston Churchill called “the vast mass of London” can be overwhelming. Help is at hand, in a new digital wonder-box released in time for the Olympics. “London: A City Through Time” is neither coffee-table book nor guide nor map, but a nearly endless fusion of all three in an app. Full article
Gold in white and black
June 16, 2012, The Economist
Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire. By Andrea Stuart. When next you visit one of England's Tate museums, think about the slaves on whose backs the Tate & Lyle sugar empire originally rose. The British empire itself owed its existence, and much of its wealth, to a scatter of Caribbean islands dedicated to the exploitation of “white” and “black” gold. Full article
England, my England
May 13, 2012, The Economist online
“Writing Britain”, the summer exhibit at the British Library, is something of a gift to foreign visitors arriving for the Olympic Games. It is an attempt by curators to take us by the hand and lead us back into these hallowed places, seeing them once more through the eyes of those who wrote about them first. Full article
Just "a humble Negro printer"
March 20, 2012, The Economist online
Amos Paul Kennedy, junior was a successful computer programmer for AT&T when he saw a printing press at colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, and stopped in his tracks. At age 40, he decided that his corporate life was over. Full article
Fast Forward
June 24, 2010, The Economist
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. By Nicholas Carr. A blogger and card-carrying member of the “digerati”, Nicholas Carr is worried enough about the internet to raise the alarm about its dangers to human thought and creativity. Full article
Magnificent Maps
May 13, 2010, More Intelligent Life
The hundred or so maps on view at the British Library reveal the perennial human obsession with finding one's place in the world, writes Alix Christie ... Full article