NONFICTION
Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (Knopf). Annie Cohen-Solal "inventories the artists who at some point showed there [alla galleria di Leo Castelli] beginning in 1957, when Castelli, at the age of 49, converted his daughter's bedroom into a gallery. There were Rauschenberg and Johns, of course, and Lichtenstein and Warhol, but also Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Christo, Robert Morris, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Schnabel, David Salle. The list, a virtual syllabus of American art after the '50s. slate. (Nella foto Leo Castelli e Jasper Johns nel 1966.)


Tre libri sul silenzio, sul nytbr.
DA LEGGERE
I ricchi sono ritornati, e spendono come matti. Daniel Gross, slate.

Chi era Charles Dickens? Robert Gottlieb, nyrb.

Columbia University Press ha annunciato che il prossimo anno pubblicherà un testo inedito di David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. Si tratta della tesi scritta da Wallace in filosofia ad Amherst College, curata da Steven M. Cahn e Maureen Eckert. cup.

NOTIZIE
La recensione del 9 maggio scorso di Trials of the Diaspora. A History of Anti-Semitism in England (OUP), di Anthony Julius da parte di Harold Bloom (nytbr) ha suscitato molte lettere critiche da parte dei lettori, tra cui anche James Wood. Il nytbr della scorsa domenica ne pubblica alcune. Le critiche più frequenti riguardano l'equiparazione da parte di Bloom di anti-sionismo e anti-semitismo e la sua discussione di personaggi anti-semiti in Shakespeare, Dickens, Fitzgerald e Hemingway.


Oxford University Press ha lanciato O.B.O., una nuova bibliografia online, compilata da esperti in modo selettivo, non comprensivo. Ars Technica e Chronicle of Higher Education l'hanno definita l'"anti-Google" (e si potrebbe dire anche l'anti-Wiki).

DA LEGGERE
Eric Hobsbawm, "My Days as a Jazz Critic". "I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman. He arranged a meeting with the editor, Kingsley Martin, then at the peak of his glory, who said 'Why not?', explained that he conceived his typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties, and passed me on to the commander of the (cultural) back half of the mag, the formidable Janet Adam Smith. Her interests ranged from mountaineering to poetry, but did not include jazz. As 'Francis Newton' (named after a Communist jazz trumpeter who played on Billie Holiday’s 'Strange Fruit'), I wrote a column every month or so for the New Statesman for about ten years." LRB.

INTERVISTE
Ad Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Q: In your new book, Nomad: From Islam to America, you urge American Christians to try to talk to American Muslims about the limitations of their faith. A: We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community. Q: That could be dangerous for the proselytizers. A: It may be, but in the United States we have a police force and the rule of law; we can’t just say something is dangerous and abstain from competing in the marketplace of ideas. nytmag.

DA LEGGERE E AMMIRARE
Stewart Pollens, Stradivari (Cambridge UP). Highly illustrated, the book contains over 100 black and white photographs of Stradivari’s workshop materials, and colour photographs of 16 important Stradivari instruments • Includes fascinating biographical and historical information, and a step-by-step account of how Stradivari made his violins, making it appealing to enthusiasts as well as academics • Chapters are divided by instrument types, making it easy for the reader to locate information. cup.

INTERVISTE
Ad Aharon Appelfeld, uno scrittore che amo molto. "Q: Have you ever felt that you have exhausted this subject or period -- the period of the Holocaust -- or that you might want to write about another period of your life? A: I write about ideas. It's not memoir, it's not history, it's not psychology, it's about the human being in the world, all of the good and the bad that a person encounters in life. This is what I have written 40 books about. I have written books that take place in Israel, and I have written about other periods, not just about the period of the war. Also about other times in Jewish history. I don't write history, or memoirs of the Holocaust. Of course, in the Holocaust, many horrible things happened. So many "interesting" things. Take the case of a boy living with a prostitute. This doesn't happen every day. And if I myself hadn't lived with a prostitute, I couldn't have written the book. Things like this couldn't have happened in regular times." haaretz.

NONFICTION
Bernd Heinrich, The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy (Harvard UP). Il sesso tra gli uccelli. Da leggere la bella intervista all'autore: "So are birds more biologically inclined to have sex with multiple partners than to be monogamous? Well, you have to talk about individual species. With most birds, the couples break up after the breeding cycle and often re-pair at the next breeding cycle. But that may only be a consequence of them coming back to the same nest site. If somebody else shows up, they'll mate with them instead. And some birds are not at all polyamorous. Ravens, for example, stay in pairs year round. That's unusual."salon.

DA LEGGERE. NEW YORK, NOW AND THEN
Una serie di articoli sulla trasformazione di New York: "Gentrification and Its Discontents. Manhattan never was what we think it was", di Benjamin Schwarz, theatlantic. "Life in New York, Then and Now", di John Podhoretz, commentary, che parla soprattutto dell'Upper West Side diventato "the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen. One doesn’t walk a block without seeing a yarmulke; the three conservative synagogues are alive and buzzing with congregants; the neighborhood’s gans, day schools, and yeshivas are educating some 4,000 children; a dozen kosher restaurants and two kosher supermarkets profitably serve an increasingly observant community. This is genuine urban renewal, which rose from once-rank soil after the soil was, finally, properly tended and tilled and brought once again to life." E infine l'editoriale di oggi di David Brooks, "Children of the '70s", nyt.

PAROLE
Quants: the quants are the experts in mathematics, physics and computer science who brought sophisticated quantitative approaches to the world of Wall Street. Ne parla diffusamente Scott Patterson, nel suo libro The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (Crown). nytmag.