Books

At around 1 o'clock Thursday morning, Morgan Entrekin decided it was time to extract himself from the dance floor at Socialista and head home. "I'm having an excellent time!" he said, half empty beer in hand. "I wish I were 20 years younger! I could dance all night."

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.  read more »

2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Farrar Straus and Giroux,
898 pages, $30

Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five different novellas in a sprawling story spanning decades, continents and styles. Mysterious and full of dread, 2666 is cluttered with hundreds of characters introduced by name—hungry writers, hapless detectives, hustlers and hookers, journalists and pugilists. It conveys, with literal heft, what’s glorious about art and what’s terrifying about death. There’s much to explore and revisit, to ruminate on and be haunted by.  read more »

Lives of the Artists
By Calvin Tomkins
Henry Holt and Company,
272 pages, $26

Calvin Tomkins’ new book, Lives of the Artists, is pure entertainment. Never mind the bland and even ugly jacket (a shame, since the Oxford edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, from which this book takes its name, features Vasari’s own Saint Luke Painting the Madonna, a lush and relevant choice of illustration)—Mr. Tomkins’ essays, all profiles from The New Yorker, are across the board engaging and smooth and welcoming in the magazine’s signature style. Although one could go down a very long and winding path with the sexual significance of Jeff Koons’ gigantic stainless steel casts of balloon animals, or into the psychology of Cindy Sherman’s decades of playing dress up, Mr.  read more »

"What do you think? Let me know. Meanwhile...see you about a million times this week, I suppose." That's how the Vintage book publicist and essayist Sloane Crosley closed a pitch letter she sent to this reporter on Monday afternoon. Really, what is it with this week? The National Book Awards suddenly make everyone want to go out? Or is it maybe just this whole autumn? That Bolano book launch should have been a red flag: Something, who knows what, is making publishing people want to party their brains out right about now.

Monday night, mere hours after Ms. Crosley sent that email, something like three things started happening practically simultaneously: at the National Arts Club, a  read more »

Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 309 pages, $27.99

Of all the writers in the world—the number continues to multiply in terror-inducing increments—Malcolm Gladwell may be the only one who doesn’t need the extra credit from God you get for being published in The New Yorker.

His status there as star staffer certainly wins him no extra love from the management-consultant types who stuff his best-selling books into their briefcases before striding purposefully through airports, en route to their next carpeted conference suite. Mr. Gladwell has other, far more relatable gigs: Eponymous Web site maintainer; curiously youthful-seeming Romeo (like public-radio heartthrob Ira Glass, he’s well into his 40s); orator who fills theaters the size of the Colosseum with his plummy-voiced presentations, his hands flitting in front of him like birds as the capacity crowd murmurs its approval.  read more »

If things had gone the other way in the presidential election, who’d be buying a book urging us to take pride in our country? Luckily, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey had the good sense to bet on Obama and a boom in patriotism among bookish folk. Their apple pie anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco, $29.95), feels just right: Matching 50 writers (most of them young and hip) with 50 states (yes, even the reddest of them) in an attempt to get at the multiplicity of the nation in all its rich peculiarity suddenly seems not only clever but good—a sign of progress, a ray of hope.  read more »

Lyrics: 1964-2008
By Paul Simon
Simon & Schuster, 408 pages, $35

"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”

These are the opening lines, the breathtaking opening image, of Graceland, Paul Simon’s biggest-selling solo album. Listening to them stream effortlessly against the song’s insistent bop, it’s easy to lose sight of the bloody, terrorized scene they depict. But read it on the page, in silence, as Lyrics: 1964-2008 permits you to do, and the extent of Mr.  read more »

Call Me Ted
By Ted Turner
Grand Central, 433 pages, $30

I didn’t set out to be a billionaire,” Ted Turner writes in his long awaited autobiography, Call Me Ted. “I wanted to be a success.”

Of course, he’s much more than a “success.” Part mogul, part visionary, he revolutionized television around the world in the 1980s by creating CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network; in the next decades, his improbable media empire grew to embrace Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network.

Along the way, he captained his boat Courageous to victory in the America’s Cup (and made headlines for his outrageous antics—he’s always been controversial).  read more »

Traitor to His Class:
The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt
By H. W. Brands
Doubleday, 888 pages, $35

Talk about smart timing. As Americans choose a new president to rescue the United States from economic despair, H. W. Brands’ biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt hits the bookshelves.

Roosevelt took office in the midst of the Great Depression precisely at the moment the banking system was collapsing. He quickly explained to Americans what was happening and what they should expect from the government. In his first presidential radio address (or “fireside chat” as they came to be called), he began by saying, “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done and what the next steps are going to be.  read more »

Danger’s Hour: The Story of
the USS Bunker Hill and the
Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her
By Maxwell Taylor Kennedy
Simon & Schuster, 515 pages, $30

If you happened to search Amazon the other day for “World War II,” you would have been instantly bombarded with 200,093 titles. So any writer—and especially a first-time book writer—who hopes to be heard above the boisterous rat-a-tat analysis of that monumental struggle would be well served to light on an idea that hasn’t yet been handled by a multitude of would-be Brokaws. And good luck with that.

Fortunately, lawyer, environmentalist and historian (and, yes, Robert F. Kennedy’s son) Maxwell Taylor Kennedy has exhaustively examined just such fresh—or, at least, newly interesting—material in his book on Japanese kamikaze pilots.  read more »