The Greatest Story Every Sold : the Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina
Starred Review. This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George Bush?calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"?and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" […]
The City of Falling Angels
Library Journal Review: Starred Review. More than ten years after the publication of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt returns with another nonfiction thriller, this one set in Venice. The victim here is the Fenice, Venice's spectacular opera house, which burned under mysterious circumstances three days before Berendt's arrival in early 1996. […]
On Beauty
Publisher Weekly Review: Starred Review. Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century?style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative […]
Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966-2004
Hertzberg collects 121 of his published essays on the American political scene, nearly half drawn from his “Comment” pieces for the New Yorker. Styling himself a social democrat of the European variety, as well as a liberal Democrat of the American breed, he comments on a broad range of political events, figures, and processes, including […]
Freddy and Fredericka
Library Journal Review: Helprin’s expansive, kitchen-sink fiction (Memoir from Antproof Case, A Soldier of the Great War) is often marked by the occasional madcap flight of fancy, but his latest is a full-out farce and a fable of epic proportions. Freddy, the Prince of Wales, is a stiff intellectual, while his beautiful wife, Princess Fredericka, […]