Grand Illusions

TODD GITLIN EXAMINES TWO NEW BOOKS ABOUT THE ’60S

The Round World Made Flat

JACKSON LEARS TAKES STOCK OF JARED DIAMOND’S THEORIES OF THE HUMAN PAST

Lipstick Traces

RACHEL KUSHNER ASSESSES NEW TRANSLATIONS OF LITERARY ICON CLARICE LISPECTOR

CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN on Kingsley Amis’s drunken comedies

MELANIE REHAK on the joy of holiday gift baskets

KERRY HOWLEY on how the Osama bin Laden mission is ready for its close-up

CHOIRE SICHA on the hidden virtues of the envious life

ZACH BARON: George Saunders’s Tenth of December

EDMUND GORDON: James Meek’s The Heart Broke In

RUTH FRANKLIN: Leonard S. Marcus’s Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices

ED PARK: P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters

CLANCY MARTIN: Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home

ALBERT MOBILIO: Christine Schutt’s Prosperous Friends

MICHAEL DIRDA: Georges Minois’s The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed

JOHANNA FATEMAN: VALIE EXPORT’s Archiv

ERIC BANKS: Matthew Guerrieri’s The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination

LOUIS BAYARD: David Thomson’s The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies

JOHANNA BURTON: Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin’s Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art

JENNY DAVIDSON: Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations

ALBERT MOBILIO: Gerhard Richter’s Patterns: Divided, Mirrored, Repeated

RICHARD BYRNE: Lawrence M. Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy

COLBY CHAMBERLAIN: Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork

DAN KENNEDY: Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald

ROCHELLE GURSTEIN: Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman

RICK PERLSTEIN: Landon R. Y. Storrs’s The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

CHRIS WILSON: Nate Silver‘s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t