Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D.Vance (Harper Collins, New York, 2016) $27.99 “Hillbilly Elegy” achieved its undeserved fame during a time when the topic of White Rage was hot. Its jacket blurbs announce an “instant classic” and the…
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture by William Leach (Pantheon Books, New York, 1993) The original American culture was an idealized blend of Republican virtue, Christian piety and community values overlaid against a backdrop of slavery, gambling, genocide…
Second Look Books: Killing Custer by James Welch with Paul Stekler (Alfred A. Knopf, $25) James Welch is the author of two splendidly bleak novels of American Indian experience. “The Death of Jim Loney” and “Winter in the Blood” together constitute a considerably eloquent body…
Theroux, Paul. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2011 (285pp. $25) Before too much of the 19th century had exhausted itself in revolution and bloody war, travel, which had once been the province of solitary wayfarers,…
Second Look Books: The Informers by Brett Easton Ellis (Alfred A. Knopf, $22) Brett Easton Ellis is justly famous for his book, “American Psycho” which caused a moral firestorm when it was first published. I consider Ellis a fine American novelist who is responding to…
Second Look Books: Julip by Jim Harrison (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95) Originally published on July 10, 1994. Jim Harrison died last year. His passing is a great loss for American letters. Jim Harrison is one of our very best American writers. He is the author…
Why Write? A Master Class on the Art of Writing and Why it Matters by Mark Edmundson (Bloomsbury, New York 2016) Mark Edmundson is a professor at the University of Virginia with books to his credit like Why Teach? and Why Read? Why Write? un-limbers…
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter (Penguin Press, New York 2017) Nobody in their right minds would now be anything but concerned about the rise of addictive behaviors, especially as they relate to digital electronic…
What Kind of Creatures are We? by Noam Chomsky, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016 (Chapter 3: What is the common good?) Now that the fragile version of American democracy is imperiled through inattention, demagoguery and oligarchy, Noam Chomsky’s new book about human life presents…
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel (Scribner, New York, 2017, $22) This terrible novel is endorsed by the famous George Saunders, and the almost-as-famous Mary Karr, “ever generous” (no kidding) teachers of Mr. Magariel at Syracuse University, where the author took his MFA….