“Money doesn’t make us happy.” We’ve all heard it from parents who drive Mercedes, innovative musicians who sell out to big labels, and Yale grads in their third year at Goldman Sachs. The mass consumerism that drives our economy — encouraging you to buy that new cell phone with the built in PDA and GPS and that pink argyle sweater from J. Crew — is harming...
“Beginner’s Greek,” the debut novel from journalist James Collins, has been compared — both in its jacket copy and in early press coverage — to the novels of Jane Austen. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Mr. Collins, you are no Jane Austen. At first glance, “Beginner’s Greek” seems like perfect Valentine’s weekend reading, whether or not you had a date last...
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan chose this mantra to begin his new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” For good measure, he slapped it on the cover, too. It seems simple enough at first reading — isn’t everything we eat food? But Pollan distinguishes between yogurt and Go-gurt, between foods our grandmothers would...
Readers may be most familiar with Geraldine Brooks for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 novel “March,” which imagined the Civil War experience of Mr. March from “Little Women.” In her latest novel, “People of the Book,” Brooks tackles much less familiar territory, imagining the history of the (real) Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest existing Jewish prayer...
To fully appreciate Tom Perrotta’s ’83 latest novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” it helps to imagine that it is October 2004 again, in the final weeks of the presidential election. George W. Bush is headed for re-election, thanks in large part to the overwhelming support of the religious right and the machinations of Karl Rove. Constitutional amendments banning gay...
Amid the “filleting” and “sawing” apart of arms, legs and pelvises going on all over during her first year of medical school, Pauline Chen — author of the memoir “Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality” and a former Yale-New Haven Hospital resident — begins to understand that she must “learn to separate [her] emotional self from [her]...
On the night of Oct. 19, the Yale Bookstore played? host to the final act of a drama that has played itself out for nearly 40 years. Warren Kimbro — convicted murderer, ex-felon and, according to a new book by Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, a changed man — offered a final apology. “Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a...
On the night of Oct. 19, the Yale Bookstore played? host to the final act of a drama that has played itself out for nearly 40 years. Warren Kimbro — convicted murderer, ex-felon and, according to a new book by Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, a changed man — offered a final apology. “Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a...
Under a hot, tropical night sky, Jose Antonio Maria Vaz stands on a desolate rooftop, with his clothing in tatters, waiting for the world to end. He is the vagrant apostle known as the "Chronicler of the Winds." Henning Mankell opens his novel with this textual cinematic shot that entices and fully engages the reader's imagination: A prophet of the apocalypse...
I've always thought short stories were just something novelists did to pass the time. They express a creative urge, certainly, but nothing epic -- if the writer just eats a cookie, I imagine the urge will subside. To put it simply, when reading "The New Yorker," I skim the short stories and scavenge for the cartoons. It took Deborah Eisenberg's new collection...
