• review • July 11, 2012

    ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science by Barri J. Gold

    Lizzie Wade

    While it is widely accepted that science influences literature, it is a much dicier proposition to suggest that literature influences the sciences. Even physicists, who frequently declare their equations as beautiful as poetry, are rarely willing to cop to being culture-bound. According to English professor Barri J. Gold, however, physics—and nineteenth-century physics in particular—is heavily indebted to literature, and vice versa. In ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, Gold argues that some of the universal truths that eventually ended up codified as “the laws of

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  • review • July 10, 2012

    Welcome to Florida

    Jennie Erin Smith

    The Florida Everglades is now home to an expanding population of introduced Burmese pythons. Nowhere else in the world has a species of python established a large breeding population outside its native range. The snakes, native to Southeast Asia and a common pet-trade import in the 1990s, are not the only invasive reptiles in southern Florida: three species of frogs, four of turtles, forty-three of lizards and four other kinds of snake have become established, half of them traceable to the pet trade by way of accidental escapes or deliberate releases. But Burmese pythons are the most imposing

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  • review • July 06, 2012

    Spoiled Rotten

    Elizabeth Kolbert

    With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past

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  • review • July 05, 2012

    The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen

    Rachel Nolan

    The year was 1911 and Sam Zemurray, a penniless Russian immigrant, was on his way to becoming an American business mogul. Zemurray had gained a modest foothold in the fruit business by selling "ripes"—bananas that arrived in the US too bruised and brown for the United Fruit Company to sell. Investing his profits, he bought a slice of land along the Cuyamel River in Honduras where he planned to grow and export his own fruit. After bribing his way to tax-free exports and exemption from import duties on equipment, Zemurray was poised to strike it rich, but he had a problem: the Honduran government

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  • review • July 04, 2012

    “I Only Want a Little Authenticity!”

    Uzodinma Iweala

    When I was in college, after a discussion of Chinua Achebe at the tail end of a survey course in English literature, I got into an argument with a classmate who suggested that plenty of African literature was good but could never be great because it was so political. Leaving aside the obviously problematic use of “African” as a catch-all classification for literature from 1 billion people in 52 countries (and a decidedly Eurocentric bias), my classmate’s musings did identify a tension at the very root of the Western world’s interaction with so-called African literature. Can literature be both

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  • review • July 03, 2012

    Mengele's Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman

    Jeremy Kessler

    Clyde Snow, a cigar-sucking Texan anthropologist, once remarked that “bones make good witnesses . . . they never lie and they never forget.” Snow rose to something like prominence in the mid-1980s when two South American exhumations linked the morbid skills of forensic anthropology to the increasing prestige of international human rights. In the wake of Argentina’s 1982 defeat in the Falklands War, human rights activists opened the graves of several desaparecidos—men and women “disappeared” by the military governments that had ruled the country from 1973 to 1983. A year later, Brazilian

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  • review • June 29, 2012

    Getting Away with It

    Paul Krugman and Robin Wells

    In the spring of 2012 the Obama campaign decided to go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital, a private-equity firm that had specialized in taking over companies and extracting money for its investors—sometimes by promoting growth, but often at workers’ expense instead. Indeed, there were several cases in which Bain managed to profit even as it drove its takeover targets into bankruptcy.

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  • review • June 28, 2012

    The Loom of Ruin by Sam McPheeters

    Sam Biederman

    Why do Los Angeles's storytellers keep dreaming of the apocalypse?

    Whether in fiction or film, from The Day of the Locust to Crash to last year's Barbarian Nurseries, narratives seeking to capture the spirit of that sprawling city always seem to fall into the same pattern. Like an LAPD surveillance helicopter's spotlight, these stories zoom from the Valley to Long Beach, lighting occasionally on select characters in different folds of the social fabric. And the moment the light hits one of these poor souls, you know they'll meet a bad end: scene by scene, act by act, these fantasies of Los

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  • excerpt • June 27, 2012

    Tucker Max's Book Memes for the Digital Age

    Alec Hanley Bemis

    I have a bad habit. (No it’s not that I read Tucker Max’s books for pleasure.) My bad habit is that I often begin books by taking a peek at the ending. The best test of a book is not the seduction of a well-planned first sentence; it is how well the book satisfies expectations at the bitter end. By this measure, Tucker Max’s third book, Hilarity Ensues, is a great read. The epilogue begins, “When I got to the literary world, it was like a great big pussy, just waiting to get fucked—and I stepped up and fucked the ever loving shit out of it.”

    I was sold—not on the book’s literary value, per

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  • review • June 25, 2012

    Don't Look Now

    Alix Ohlin

    A married couple laugh together in a restaurant. They’re playing a game, making up stories about the strangers around them. Because they take the game so very seriously, we come to understand how little fun they are otherwise having. If only I can keep this going, the husband thinks, if only, if only… He can’t. This is “Don’t Look Now,” the story that made me fall in love with Daphne Du Maurier’s work, and it is lovely and wistful and unsettling. Though she’s best known as a novelist, Du Maurier’s strange, often beautiful stories deserve to be more widely read than they are. Like her novels,

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  • review • June 22, 2012

    Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate by Ginger Strand

    Margaret Eby

    It’s no coincidence that the title of Killer on the Road, Ginger Strand’s analysis of the interstate system and the violence intertwined within it, sounds familiar. That phrase echoes throughout the past sixty years of American pop culture, from Jim Morrison’s breathy warnings in “Riders on the Storm” to James Ellroy’s pulpy noir of the same name about a Manson-obsessed schizophrenic. “If a song or book title contains the word Interstate or Freeway, expect mayhem,” Strand warns. And the book demonstrates why this is the case. Killer is a titillating, clever volume that mixes the sweeping

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  • review • June 21, 2012

    A Hologram for the King

    Carolyn Kellogg

    More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields — he's the founder of McSweeney's, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. He's the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store. For his work, he's been awarded the TED Prize, the Heinz Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Yet inside all of that is Eggers the writer, who's

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