Positive thinking should never be the same after Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided. But as Ehrenreich herself shows in a sketch of the movement’s history, its theorists, hucksters, and practitioners have thumbed their noses at reason ever since Mary Baker Eddy popularized New Thought with the mind-over-matter healing doctrine of Christian Science. Led by preacher Joel Osteen, motivational guru Tony Robbins, and academic psychologist Martin Seligman, among many others, the national cult of uplift abounding has lately generated subprime mortgages, megachurches, and a “pink-ribbon culture” that promotes a mind-cure-style approach to treating breast cancer: Maintaining a positive outlook, Ehrenreich learned firsthand, is

In 1913, the French writer Charles Péguy observed that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirty years.” Kate Cambor’s new study, Gilded Youth, tracks the changes of that era through the figures of Léon Daudet, son of the beloved French writer Alphonse; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the groundbreaking neurologist Jean-Martin; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor. These childhood friends, all born in the late 1860s, were caught between two epochs, between the “pessimism and pensiveness” of the nineteenth century and the “energy and activity” of the twentieth. Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola,

Inspired by a low-key dadaism, California artist William T. Wiley has been making densely allusive, humorously inflected paintings, sculptures, and films for fifty years. The vividly cartoonish, Rube Goldberg–like imagery in Wiley’s creations serves a very literary sensibility—his paintings, prints, and watercolors tell stories and employ wordplay. A series of drawings and watercolors from the early ’80s addresses environmental topics like acid rain and Three Mile Island, as well as overtly political themes such as nuclear proliferation, apartheid, and capital punishment. The tension between hectic composition, intensified by a carnival-colored palette, and socially alert content is a seductive one: We

Current economic and social conditions—growing income disparity, battles over immigration, corporate titans’ sway over political affairs—have led many contemporary critics to point out correspondences between the United States of the past two decades and the nation of the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age. For optimists pursuing a similar analogy, the recent election of a community organizer as president, his push for health-care reform, and this summer’s minimum-wage hike recall the Progressive response to Gilded Age industrial capitalism. Cecelia Tichi trenchantly summarizes such comparisons at the beginning and end of Civic Passions. In between, her brisk profiles of seven lesser-known reformers

Middle of the night and your head teems with half-formed thoughts: Did I pay the car insurance? Where did I park the car? Is my best dress shirt at the dry cleaners? What time’s the wedding on Saturday? Need a map of Vermont to get there. I should frame my vintage maps one of these days. Maybe start with that bird’s-eye view of New Amsterdam, or the blue-tinted mariner’s chart . . .

John Irving always starts his stories at the end, which is why it has taken him nearly twenty years to write his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River (Random House, $28). “The ending just eluded me,” he said in late September, when he spoke to me by phone from his Vermont home. “I knew only that there was a cook and his son, in a rough kind of place, and something happens to make them fugitives.” The protagonists in this exquisitely crafted, elliptically structured novel—a gripping story that spans five decades and extends across northern New England and Ontario—are

Tintinology is a neglected field of study in the United States, but something approaching a cottage industry in the rest of the world. More than seventy books have been written about the great Belgian Georges Remi, who died in 1983 and was better known by his pseudonym, Hergé. Yet despite this torrent of analysis about the creator of the strangely coiffed boy reporter Tintin; his little dog, Snowy; and Captain Haddock, the drunken sailor with a Tourette’s-like compulsion to shout insults, we still know surprisingly little about the cartoonist, who was famously reticent, granting only a handful of major interviews

Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War is an important book—though it’s not for everyone. If you want a painstaking critique of Noam Chomsky or of protestors who chanted “Imperialism!” when America attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan, it offers no end of material and thoughtful argument. But general readers will find its last third off-putting. Following the author’s own penchant for witty turns of phrases, allow me this slogan: “Part of the way with Bérubé!”