Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008
Fiction | Biography | Current Events | History | Society & Culture

Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong (Prestel Publishing)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("California Cool," March 2008)

"The first book to connect the various artistic forms that modernism took in the region is the unusually intelligent and lavishly illustrated Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong, with essays by six prominent art critics (the eponymous art exhibition is currently touring the country). More important, the book provocatively suggests that a common sensibility animated all those forms. It thereby illuminates the substance of style—that is, how an aesthetic both shapes and is shaped by viewpoint and temperament, proclivities and prejudices."

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The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art, by Tim Blanning (Harvard)
(to Cover," December 2008)

"Despite its deadening title, this is a provocative and amusing book. Blanning describes not the triumph of good music but the development of Western music generally, from an aristocratic court frill to a powerful social force."

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Boxing: A Cultural History, by Kasia Boddy (Reaktion)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"Boddy, a British academic, intelligently takes up—via art, literature, film, and the media—the many issues that have historically veined the sport: 'nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity,' plus dialectics like 'brawn versus brains, boastfulness versus modesty, youth versus experience.'"

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Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, by Thomas P. Campbell (ed.) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, by Thomas P. Campbell (ed.) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Reviewed by Jed Perl ("The Man Who Remade the Met," October 2008)

"Seeing Tapestry in the Renaissance convinced me that the vast hunt scenes designed by Bernaert van Orley around 1530 and realized by the weavers of Brussels are among the masterworks of European art, panoramas of a richness and intricacy and poetic loveliness rivaling those of Brueghel. In these two catalogs, Campbell, assisted by contributions from many of the best scholars in the field, helps us understand why such astonishing works could be so undervalued."

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Byzantium: Faith and Power, by Helen C. Evans et al. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Reviewed by Jed Perl ("The Man Who Remade the Met," October 2008)

"Helen Evans’s immense catalog for Byzantium: Faith and Power is as gloriously overstuffed as was the exhibition it accompanied. The sections devoted to stone sculpture, metalwork, icon painting, mosaics, and textiles could stand as substantial books in themselves."

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Punctuated Equilibrium, by Stephen Jay Gould (Harvard Belknap)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"This latest posthumous volume, which was the central chapter of his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, argues that Darwin’s theory of a steady continuum of evolutionary progress was incorrect. Rather, Gould posits, most species have originated during punctuated geologic moments, and persisted through the periods of stasis that followed."

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Get to Work…And Get a Life, Before It’s Too Late, by Linda Hirshman (Penguin)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("I Choose My Choice," July/August 2008)

"Not afraid, in her own big-nosed, razor-tongued way, to alienate everyone (or at least half of everyone), Hirshman considers all stay-at-home mothers fish in her barrel (think fish pedaling tiny aquatic bicycles)."

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Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West, by Erin Hogan (Chicago)
("Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Casually scrutinizing the artistic works Sun Tunnels, Double Negative, Roden Crater, and Lightening Field while gamely playing up her fish-out-of-water status, Hogan delivers an ingenuously engaging travelogue-cum-art history."

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A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life, by Neil Gilbert (Yale)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("I Choose My Choice," July/August 2008)

"The triumph of feminism, Gilbert reminds us (echoing those socially conservative men of the left, George Orwell and Christopher Lasch), has served the culture of capitalism."

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Patty’s Got a Gun, by William Graebner (University of Chicago)
Reviewed by Caitlin Flanigan ("Girl, Interrupted," September 2008)

"Graebner’s book is surprisingly slender, given the scope of its subject: it barely reprises the facts of the case, but rather considers at length the various cultural meanings he finds within it."

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Stuff White People Like, by Christian Lander (Random House)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("Intolerant Chic," October 2008)

"Leaving aside the delightfully off-kilter photographs and the too-cute flowcharts and quizzes, this all-but-instant work (book deal in March, publication in July) is an assemblage of Lander’s blog essays—including those available on the site when the book went to the printer plus 75 new ones, about the same length as the originals."

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Why Women Should Rule the World, by Dee Dee Myers (Harper)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?," November 2008)

"Myers carefully—and probably admirably?—refrains from directly putting men down. No, the tone throughout is as friendly and measured—with just a little flash of heel—as a quarterly report. The lessons Myers ultimately derives from her experience are supported with bold pronouncements, research, and statistics."

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Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence, by Styliane Philippou (Yale)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("A Vision in Concrete," July/August 2008)

"The book is a marvel of presentation. Philippou fluidly explicates her narrative and arguments with detailed site diagrams and maps; drawings, plans, and elevations; photographic comparisons of buildings historically linked to Niemeyer’s; and her own lavish, precise photography of Niemeyer’s work, including both general views and details."

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Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Carlos A Picón et al. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Reviewed by Jed Perl ("The Man Who Remade the Met," October 2008)

"In the historical photographs that Picón has gathered and in his account of 125 years of collecting is the story of the Metropolitan’s heroic efforts to establish in the New World a remarkable record of the achievements of the Old—a record now housed in one of the most delightful, coolly elegant spaces in Manhattan."

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The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap, by Susan Pinker (Scribner)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?," November 2008)

"Using the latest neurological and biological findings of brain-imaging and sex-hormone assays, Pinker adds scientific ballast to the anecdotal truisms that women are more consensus-minded and team-oriented, and are better at reading human visual cues, interpreting feelings, and maintaining relationships and relationship networks than men."

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Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (ed.) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Reviewed by Jed Perl ("The Man Who Remade the Met," October 2008)

"This catalog, which also contains five essays by as many art historians, becomes a conversation about the many ways to approach a great artist and his relationship with the natural world—a relationship that for Poussin was by turns terrifying and inspiriting, humbling and ennobling."

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Smack: Heroin and the American City, by Eric C. Schneider (Pennsylvania)
(to Cover," December 2008)

"As one might expect, he fares best when humanizing and personifying the scourge and its chronologically shifting discontents, worst when permitting trend-tracking and stat-mongering to seep to the fore."

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Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, by Susan Sessions Rugh (Kansas)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young (whose style blessedly stints on academese), treats this period of post–World War II innocence—or Cold War escapism, depending on one’s point of view—with a healthy revisionism minus any smudge of sepia sentimentality. Smart and sensitive, well researched and no-nonsense, Rugh’s ride is well worth taking."

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The Edible Series: Hamburger: A Global History, by Andrew F. Smith (Chicago)

Pizza: A Global History, by Carol Helstosky (Chicago)

Pancake: A Global History, by Ken Albala (Chicago)
("Cover to Cover," October 2008)

"Smith’s lively tone is the most appetizing, Helstosky’s lukewarm but palatable, Albala’s overcooked and hard to swallow. While each title is fairly bursting with facts, figures, and recipes, the casual reader would do well to consider his or her particular appetite—and to perhaps peer into the kitchen—before coming to the table."

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Have You Seen …?, by David Thomson (Knopf)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("The Reel Thing," November 2008)

"Have You Seen …?—a by turns astringent and gushy appraisal of 1,000 movies made from 1895 to 2007—is, for better and worse, something of a muddle. This work discriminates in what it includes and what it doesn’t—but does so using several different and somewhat contradictory criteria."

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The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity, by Richard Todd (Riverhead)
(to Cover," December 2008)

"Richard Todd is a longtime cultural critic with Montaigne-like tendencies toward gently acerbic discursion. Owing certain stylistic, spiritual, and topical allegiances to Joseph Epstein’s bravura snobbery, Todd takes ruminative stock of his life and the paradoxes inherent in various external matters: celebrity, antiquity, politics, travel, brand names, spare parts, modern art."

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Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, by Marilyn Waring (Harper San Francisco)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?," November 2008)

"As Waring hammers home with example after absurd example, policies that spring from building national GDPs can be destructive to the planet as well as to humans."

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Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, edited by Michael Watts; photographs by Ed Kashi (PowerHouse)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"With text by noted activists (including the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka) and indelible images from the award-winning photojournalist Kashi, this graphic work trains an engaged lens on the paradoxical plights of the Niger Delta. More than an unflinching look at how one country’s promise of prosperity was fouled by oil’s crude stain, this is a nuanced consideration of “the resource curse” with few clear antecedents."

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Museum Inc.: Inside the Global Art World, by Paul Werner (Prickly Paradigm Press)
Reviewed by Jed Perl ("The Man Who Remade the Met," October 2008)

"Werner has a good eye for the smoke-and-mirrors of the marketing people and what it often serves to hide, which is a synergy between art museums and corporate ambition that has little to do with art itself."

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The Golden Age of Couture, by Claire Wilcox (ed., Victoria and Albert Museum)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("Couture Clash," January/February 2008)

"This poignant and brilliant flowering was probed in a highly touted exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum this fall and in the text-heavy, exceptionally pretty, intelligent, and well-written companion volume, The Golden Age of Couture. Although the book occasionally looks askance at the excesses and legacy of Dior, it insists that he was the era’s defining force."

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America Eats!, by Pat Willard (Bloomsbury)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"One unifying New Deal program, more or less forgotten until this book, was the WPA/Federal Writers’ Project survey of how America was managing to eat socially in that thin time. The recipes are nothing to write home about, but the spirit of camaraderie, and the determination to not let penury rob everyday existence of the companionable joys of food, are moving and instructive 70 years on."

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Ted Muehling: A Portrait, by Susan Yelavich (Rizzoli)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("A Bit of Punctuation," September 2008)

"In the juxtaposition of photos of the scavenged natural objects littering Muehling’s studio—antlers, fossils, shells, stones, pinecones, tree trunks, feathers, coral, branches, bird’s nests—with those of his highly refined, flawlessly proportioned creations, readers can apprehend how Muehling, who was trained as an industrial designer at Pratt, pares down and streamlines natural forms to create jewelry that’s at once delicate and austere, organic and abstract."

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