BREAK
di fine vacanze. Gli aggiornamenti saranno ripresi mercoledì 2 settembre.

DA LEGGERE
"In my few interviews with him, I had the following experiences: I would ask him about some grand political idea or theme. His answers were O.K. but unimpressive. Then I would ask him about a detail from a piece of legislation many years back. Suddenly he could talk with incredible knowledge about subsection C of paragraph 6 in article 13.
He was the best at handling negotiations, crafting compromises, putting together the details, understanding the various constituencies at play, divining a legislative path through committee and onto the floor. This is not the stuff of poetry but prose. It’s the sort of human capital that is in short supply in Congress right now, where relatively few people know how to craft complicated legislation." David Brooks su Ted Kennedy. NYT.

FICTION
Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (Ballantine). Crisi d'identità nell'era Internet. Tre persone si reinventano una vita. WP.

FICTION
William Trevor, Love and Summer (Viking). Una storia d'amore complicata, ma descritta con grande gioia. "His new work is all about life, and if there are dampers and de-accelerants on that life, it is nevertheless a fabulously benign book - almost, I might say, a work of sympathetic magic..." Sebastian Barry su G/O.

Josh Neufeld, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon). Graphic novel su sette persone di New Orleans dopo Katrina. LAT.

Le ultime graphic novels. G/O.

NONFICTION
Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness (FSG). "Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers." But Phillips and Taylor show that kindness -- "the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself" -- is essential to our humanity. Michael Dirda sul WP.

Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses. How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House). Il rapporto tra Robert Moses, il più grande costruttore di NY negli anni Sessanta e Settanta e Jane Jacobs. WP.

Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking). Il male non viene solo per nuocere... SFC.

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys. Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, a cura di David Henry Sterry e R. J. Martin Jr. (Soft Skull Press). Raccolta di scritti - brutalmente onesti - di lavoratori del sesso sulle loro esperienze. NYTBR.

Elizabeth Edwards, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities (Broadway). Autobiografia della moglie del candidato alle presidenziali John Edwards. Christopher Hitchens su Atlantic.

INTERVISTE
Ad Amit Chaudhuri di cui è appena uscito il romanzo The Immortals (Knopf). BG.

DA LEGGERE
La recensione di Daniel Mendelsohn all'ultimo film di Tarantino, Inglorious Basterds. "Tarantino, the master of the obsessively paced revenge flick, invites his audiences to applaud this odd inversion—to take, as his films often invite them to take, a deep, emotional satisfaction in turning the tables on the bad guys. ("The Germans will be sickened by us," Raine tells his corps of Jewish savages early on.) But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino's new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that "again" will happen." Newsweek.

INTERVISTE
A Frank Bruni, ex - quasi - critico culinario del Times, di cui è appena uscito un libro di memorie, Born Round. The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater (Penguin Press). bookbench.

FICTION
M. J. Hyland, This Is How (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic). Un signore inglese in crisi cerca una nuova vita. NYTBR.

Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Che cosa succede quando il riscaldamento globale minaccia la nostra esistenza? NYTBR.

NONFICTION
RIPPED
Greg Kot, How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner). La battaglia tra case discografiche e ragazzini muniti di computer. NYTBR.

Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War (Heinemann). Sulle differenze tra Occidente e mondo islamico. G/O.

FICTION
Penelope Lively, Family Album (Fig Tree). Una villa edwardiana e le riunioni di una grande famiglia. G/O.

Anita Brookner, Strangers (Random House). La storia di un uomo solo che si prepara a morire tra estranei. SFC.

Nuovi visual books su autori classici. NYTBR.

NONFICTION
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby. What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Che gli adulti abbiano molto da imparare dai bambini non è un'ovvietà. NYTBR.

Martha Cooper e Henry Chalfant, SUBWAY ART (Chronicle). Viene ristampato in un'elegante edizione il libro sui graffiti delle metropolitane uscito nel 1984. BG.

Due nuovi libri su Woodstock: Pete Fornatale, Back to the Garden. The Story of Woodstock (Simon & Schuster), e Michael Lang con Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (HarperCollins). NYTBR.

DA LEGGERE
Il racconto di Sherman Alexie, "War Dances", sul nyer. A ottobre uscirà presso Grove Press una raccolta di racconti di Alexie dallo stesso titolo.

PAROLE
Sexting (a portmanteau of sex and texting) is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photos electronically, primarily between cell phones. herald.ie. E se si vuole un sexting decoder: washingtoncitypaper.

INTERVISTE
A Ian McEwan sul suo prossimo libro che avrà per argomento il "climate change". Ecco come gli è venuta l'idea: “It took me a long time to find a way into this subject - I've been thinking about it for a number of years. And then I spent some time in the Arctic, with a group of artists and scientists; we were living on a boat that was frozen in a fjord. One of the things that struck me about that was there was a sort of boot room, and one of the iron rules of this boat was we had to take off all our outer clothing - boots, goggles, balaclava, skidoo suits - and over the week, the chaos of this boot room grew more and more intense.” edp24.

NOTIZIE
Il nuovo romanzo di Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, si può scaricare gratuitamente da Oprah.com, ma solo oggi!

Bubbles, lo scimpanzè di Michael Jackson, sta scrivendo le sue memorie. thebookseller.

FICTION
Ward Just, Exiles in the Garden (Houghton Mifflin). Alec Malone, fotoreporter a Washington, preferisce i sogni al successo. NYTBR.

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House). Il protagonista del romanzo è un acrobata che scorrazza su dei cavi tra un grattacielo e l'altro di NY. NYTBR.

NONFICTION
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking). Monumentale studio della regione di confine tra California e Messico. NYTBR.

David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Faber). La star dei Talking Heads parla delle città visitate in bicicletta. G/O.

Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (Allen Lane). Gli umori dell'Inghilterra tra le due guerre mondiali. "In any case, such emotions – the extremely widespread dislike of Jews in the West, for instance – were obviously not felt or acted on in the same way by, say, Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf. Emotions in history are neither chronologically stable nor socially homogeneous, even in the moments when they are universally felt, as in London under the German air-raids, and their intellectual representations even less so. How can they be compared or contrasted? In short, what are historians to make of the new field?" Eric Hobsbawm su LRB.

Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). G/O.

DA LEGGERE
Michael Massing sul giornalismo e Internet. NYRB.

"The case for the imaginative greening of derelict industrial sites was tremendously advanced with the recent opening of the first segment of New York City's High Line, a linear park superimposed on a long-defunct cargo railroad trestle that wends through nearly a mile and a half of Manhattan's West Side from midtown to Greenwich Village." Martin Filler su NYRB.