The book will still be around in the morning. That's the best advice I can give anyone appalled by the mere existence of director Baz Luhrman's 3-D, darn near transcendently tasteless screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby—or Da Gr8 Gatsbee, as I've grown fond of calling Luhrman's version.

For once, I find myself almost envying people who've never read Fitzgerald's novel. Free of literacy's inner censure, untroubled by invidious comparisons, they can just let the whole whooshing, clamorous debauch run them over like a fire truck tearing after a burning Christmas tree, emerging dazed but sated. Then again, ex-English major or no, that was pretty much my own reaction.

Newly out from University of Massachusetts Press, Devon Powers's Writing The Record: The Village Voice and The Birth of Rock Criticism—which'll cost you a whopping $80 for its 160 pages in hardcover, making the paperback's $22.95 price tag seem almost reasonable—is the first work of intellectual history I know of whose heroes are a couple of guys I used to see around the office during my own tenderfoot days at the paper in question. Don't blame me for both being uncommonly interested and feeling time's icy fingers do the Charleston on the nape of my neck. Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland was weird enough; that Perlstein was too young to have any first-hand memories of the Nixon era demanded a certain, how you say, adjustment. Still, it's not as if I used to run into Tricky Dick at the soda machine.

So let's get my personal acquaintance with Powers's two protagonists out of the way. Richard Goldstein, author of the Voice's seminal "Pop Eye" column from 1966 to 1969, is someone I never exchanged more than a few pleasantries with during my later stints at the paper. On the other hand, Robert Christgau, the Voice's rock-crit colossus for almost 40 years until he got the boot in 2006, not only gave me my start as a reviewer but remains a valued friend, albeit one I'm lucky to see once a year. Fortunately, Powers's time frame—mid-'60s to early '70s, with considerable and shrewd preliminary sussing of the Village's history as a bohemian lodestar and the Voice's Ike-era origins—cuts off well before the punk-crazed batch of Voice contributors I belonged to came into the picture.

In 1956, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School, her class of more than 500 students included nine women and one black man. Erwin Griswold, the school’s dean, summoned the nine women and asked each to answer a question: How could she justify taking a place that would otherwise have gone to a man?

Our lives rarely turn out the way we plan. Perhaps it’s to counter this pervasive sense of uncertainty that so many people feel compelled to write memoirs of perseverance, reframing the shifts their lives have taken into a sure-footed narrative arc. But confusion is the reigning feeling in James Lasdun’s new memoir Give Me Everything You Have (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A highly regarded, New York-based British novelist, essayist, and poet, Lasdun writes about being stalked for more than six years, unable to do a thing about it. “I’m not so sure of anything anymore,” Lasdun tells us early on in the book.

Like all mammals, human beings can be cruel. As we create hierarchies, we use social or physical power to hurt, manipulate, and get what we want. But unlike other mammals, we periodically reconceptualize our cruelties, declaring behaviors that were once acceptable to be crimes against God and humankind. Campaigners transformed slavery, once seen as biblically endorsed, into the sin of sins. Wife-beating and marital rape, once judicious uses of husbandly authority, are now illegal domestic violence. These behaviors continue, of course—we’re still mammals—but they’ve switched categories, from acceptable to punishable.

The Tea Party’s name was one of its organizers’ most brilliant choices. Furor at George W. Bush’s bank bailouts and Barack Obama’s electoral victory might have taken any number of forms less charged with history. It could have grown into a movement to Stop Paying Your Neighbor’s Mortgage, as CNBC’s Rick Santelli urged in the on-air rant that galvanized rank-and-file conservatives in early 2009. It could have harked back to the property-tax revolts of the late Carter years or to any of the loosely organized right-wing splinter groups from which so many Tea Party organizers were drawn. Some early organizers proposed to call this the Porkulus movement, with pigs’ heads and free government “pork” as its icons rather than the 1775 “Don’t Tread on Me” flags that soon dotted the protest rallies.