Books, Arts and Culture

My Life By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00 Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually […]

A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa By Howard W. French • Knopf • 280 pages • $25.00 The appointments of Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as the president’s national-security adviser raised hopes in some quarters that the United States would begin to take more serious interest […]

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead By David Callahan • Harcourt • 353 pages • $26.00 Few decisions caused George Washington more agony than whether or not to accept some canal-company shares that the Virginia General Assembly offered him in 1784. The gift was perfectly legal, […]

There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling’s, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone’s […]

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge • Penguin • 464 pages • $25.95 The recent history of American politics can be told as the story of two alliances — one made and unmade by the Democrats, one made and kept by the Republicans. The […]

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, Free Press, 383 pages, $26.00 Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life By Daphne de Marneffe, Little, Brown, 401 pages, $25.95 The natives are restless again. For the past […]

Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment By James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 299 pages, $24.00 More than 30 years ago, in 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the world on notice, warning that the rapidly expanding human enterprise was jeopardizing the stability […]

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity By Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press, 345 pages, $24.95 In the mid-1990s, Alex Alben pioneered a new Hollywood genre: a DVD retrospective on an actor’s career, structured around contemporary interviews with the actor but including clips […]

Plan of Attack By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 480 pages, $28.00 Future historians will point to two interrelated foreign-policy disasters that could make George W. Bush a one-term president, if the voters pay attention. The first is the well-documented failure of the Bush administration to take al-Qaeda seriously enough, both before and […]

Anti-Americanism By Jean-François Revel, translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell, Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95 On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense By David Brooks, Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $25.00 Jean-François-Revel, author of the best-selling Without Marx or Jesus, wrote Anti-Americanism to […]