From Smithsonian, Hemingway's Cuba, Cuba's Hemingway: His last personal secretary returns to Havana and discovers that the novelist's mythic presence looms larger than ever; and Before the Revolution: Socialites and celebrities flocked to Cuba in the 1950s. Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel On the Road became the blueprint for the Beat generation and shaped America's youth culture for decades. It influenced scores of artists, musicians and film-makers, but how does it resonate with young people today? Discovered: Kerouac "cuts": The original, 120-ft typewritten roll of the beat generation literary classic is being republished, complete with material too hot to handle in 1957. Ray Bradbury, Norman Lloyd and Norman Corwin: Aging with grace, these 3 men of letters snap fingers in the face of time. For her devoted fan base, Doris Lessing is unquestionably the greatest living writer never to win a Nobel Prize (and a review of The Cleft).
From The Age, a review of Primo Levi's A Tranquil Star, a review of Gunter Grass' Peeling the Onion; and exactly what constitutes Jewishness has been much debated, but most people would be surprised at the Semitic self-identification of a group of more than 80 New Zealand Maori (a Polynesian race). Raul Hilberg, the "dean of Holocaust studies," is dead. Terry Eagleton finds that politics is glossed over in AN Wilson's fictional take on Hitler and the Wagners, Winnie and Wolf. A review of From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths by Heather O'Donoghue.
A review of Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of her Subject by Meryle Secrest. A review of Walking Broad: Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love by Bruce Buschel. A review of American Tornado: The Terrifying True Story of the 1974 Outbreak- And The People Whose Lives Were Torn Apart by Mark Levine. A review of The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink by Robert D. Morris. The lion's sneeze: Stefano Zuffi's The Cat in Art looks at how depicting the feline has engrossed artists for millennia. Poetry in the plumage: A review of Crow Country: A Meditation on Birds, Landscape and Nature by Mark Cocker (and more). A review of Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature by Tim Flannery. A review of The Most Important Fish in the Sea by H. Bruce Franklin.
