Current Events | Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008

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

Rivals, by Bill Emmott (Harcourt)
"Cover to Cover" October 2008)

"In a chatty but serious study, Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, details the growing competition among China, India, and Japan. For all the talk of these nations’ power potential, the book makes them out to be squabbling, if dangerous, children in need of a firm parental hand from Washington to keep them in line."

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The Road to Serfdom – Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, by F.A. Hayek, edited by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago)
"Cover to Cover" June 2008)

"First published in 1944, a year in which a planned economy was the norm in democracies as well as in collectivist states, Hayek’s denunciation of state control over the means of production was breathtakingly audacious."

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Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, by Leszek Kolakowski (Basic)
"Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Kolakowski offers an answer to the title question that is anything but glib. Instead, he offers a discrete, dialectical wonder, a highbrow, low-key little volume that’s strangely synchronous: backward-looking, forward-thinking, and—best of all—wholly free of both condescension and commonplaceness."

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Letters to a Young Teacher, by Jonathan Kozol (Crown)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Tales Out of School," March 2008)

"Instead of exploring the chaotic and the new, Kozol seems more comfortable retelling the familiar territory of his ’60s civil-rights jeremiads inhabited by only two cartoonish, archetypical kinds of parents. If he were a parent and had to navigate our hardscrabble world, both the problems and the solutions might appear different to him."

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The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power, by James Moore and Wayne Slater (Three Rivers Press)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?" November 2008)

"My gloom deepened as I read about Rove’s vast, conspiratorial, conservative stealth fog, a fog microdirected by Rove not during official meetings in the White House but during rendezvous on rainy Washington side streets (called to order by Rove’s quietly tapping on a car window)."

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Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, by Peter Moskos (Princeton)
"Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Moskos, now an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, deftly intermingles cops-and-robbers verisimilitude and progressive social science, yet keeps his reportage clear-eyed, his conclusions pathos-free. What results is a thoughtful, measured critique—of the failed drug war, its discontents, and the self-defeating criminal justice system looming just beyond."

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Dawn, Dusk, or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy, by Yasmina Reza (Knopf)
Reviewed by Cristina Nehring ("Un Homme in Full," June 2008)

"In many ways, her narrative reads like a long-running tale of foreplay. Reza is pulsingly alive to Sarkozy’s moods, his foibles, his ambiguities. It makes for a memoir that is unfair. For Reza ends up slightly bitter about her resistant subject."

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Untied Kingdom, by Ian Robinson (Brynmill Press)
Reviewed by B.R. Myers ("Keeping a Civil Tongue," April 2008)

"Robinson casts his nets a little too widely. There is indeed a great English tradition of literary scholars—“prophets” as Robinson calls them—passing general comment on cluture, but it is more difficult to do this now than it was in Matthew Arnold’s day. Criticizing pop and rock music, for example, requires a little more research than Robinson seems able to stomach."

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All Too Human: A Political Education, by George Stephanopoulos (Back Bay Books)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?" November 2008)

"Stephanopoulos’s book is a Victorian bodice ripper. He describes his rapturous beginnings as an altar boy, the thrill of being behind the curtain, of staying calm in the face of power, of anticipating a powerful man’s needs."

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Looking For a Few Good Moms: How One Mother Rallied a Million Others Against the Gun Lobby, by Donna Dees-Thomases, with Alison Hendrie (Rodale)
Reviewed by Sandra Tsing Loh ("Should Women Rule?" November 2008)

"Donna Dees-Thomases’s Million Mom March on Washington in 2000, an event she chronicles in her astonishing (and also hard to find!) book, Looking for a Few Good Moms—a volume that contains the most dauntingly titled appendix I’ve ever seen: 'How to Organize a Bus.'"