Adelle Waldman

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE: A ONE-NIGHT STAND, MY UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD, AND LOVING THE BEST MISTAKE I EVER MADE
By Mary F. Pols
Ecco, 272 pages, $24.95

A few years ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children sparked a media firestorm by arguing that many women end up husband-less and childless—and by extension miserable—because they’re too focused on their careers during their 20s; they put off husband-finding and baby-bearing until it’s too late.

I was 26 when that book came out, and what didn’t sound right to me was the implication that women in their 20s were too caught up in their careers to think much about dating or relationships. For better or for worse, it seemed to me that most women I knew, myself included, were very interested in dating. The women I’m talking about, fellow journalists for the most part, were by no means boy-crazy slackers. We worked long hours; many of us moved to faraway cities to advance our careers. Yet when my cell phone flashed with the number of one of my girlfriends late at night, not once did I think the caller was wracked with worry over an article she was writing. No, it was bound to be about relationship trouble or its inverse, loneliness, which might as well be called lack-of-relationship trouble.  read more »

KYRA
By Carol Gilligan
Random House, 241 pages, $25

Carol Gilligan is one of the most influential feminist social theorists of her time. She’s also one of the least rigorous. Now she’s written a novel. It makes perfect sense: Why bother with real people whose experience may not conform to your theories when you can just make up characters who fit precisely? (Well, perhaps because it doesn’t make for good art—but that’s a secondary concern to someone who feels she’s unearthed the essential truth of the human condition and is on a mission to disseminate it.)  read more »

But new book argues it’s not all bad—coffee giant helps the little guy!  read more »

You know those little turquoise boxes from Tiffany’s, the ones with a big white bow? Apparently, they are among the great icons of the world—up there, I suppose, with the pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the Eiffel Tower. At least, that’s what Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff said at Wednesday's grand opening of the new Tiffany & Co. store on Wall Street.

“So many of us have enjoyed Tiffany products in our lives,” Mr. Doctoroff gushed.

I’m not sure his words registered with the coffee-cart vendors whom Tiffany’s had contracted to display turquoise umbrellas and give out free coffee (in turquoise paper cups) and cookies, but Mr. Doctoroff was probably right about most of the hundred or so well-heeled tourists and Wall Street types who came to watch the ribbon-cutting and partake of free breakfast and gift bags.  read more »

In New York, the culture wars aren’t over abortion and gay marriage—we are far too sophisticated to disagree about those sorts of issues!—but over 46-story condo-hotels in SoHo.

Specifically, the one that was officially unveiled to reporters Wednesday at a heavily guarded and extremely lavish press conference (picture red carpets; chandeliers large enough for any room at Versailles; gold-plated utensils; and a peculiarly lissome black-clad catering staff at a construction site), while a crowd of earnest, sandal-wearing demonstrators across the street waved hand-lettered signs bearing such slogans as, “Value of Land: Millions. Defending our Neighborhoods: Priceless” and “Zoning Laws Trump Trump.”

The Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium, slated for completion in the spring of 2009, would be the tallest building between the financial district and the Empire State Building. Part condo, part luxury hotel, the glassy tower with panoramic city views will undoubtedly be opulent—some might even say garishly so (with cause: the top floor will house a members-only club called “SoHi”).

It’s no surprise that the building has detractors among the NPR crowd, people for whom a genuine concern for historic preservation coalesces with an equally genuine distaste for unabashed materialism (a.k.a., the cornerstone of our capitalist economy). What was particularly impressive about the 50 or so protesters who showed up yesterday was their diversity—that is, their chronological, not ethnic or racial, diversity. Twenty-somethings in nerd glasses—the This American Life crowd—waved their placards next to gray-haired devotees of Isaiah Sheffer.  read more »

Is a house a metaphor? Robert and Lee Dalzell would say so. In The House The Rockefellers Built, they argue that Kykuit, the mansion that John Rockefeller Jr. (“Junior”) began building for his father in 1906, is laden with meaning.  read more »

Yet another memoir of a privileged young woman’s search for love in the big city.  read more »

It’s chicken soup for the New York home hunter in former Post editor Alison Rogers’ new book.  read more »

Rick Moody’s fiction has always had a strong topical streak: He’s as concerned with particular aspects of contemporary American society—the barrenness of mass consumerism, say, or the tragically limited economic and aesthetic scope of the lower middle-class, or the dangers of nuclear power—as he is with the inner lives of his characters.  read more »

New book tells the subterranean, gilded-age catacombs back story of the modern-era eyesore.  read more »