After the genocide An unflinching exploration of a nation’s violent past and enduring generational scars. By Lucy Popescu he shadow of the 1994 geno- cide against the Tutsi peo- ple hangs over Gaél Faye's second novel, Jacaranda, published in French in 2024 and awarded the Prix Renaudot. It opens in a psychiatric hospital in Rwanda where 21-year-old Stella, born after the atrocities, has been inte…
A Season Of Sibling Memory Make Nice By Ryan Effgen Knopf, 336 pages, $30 IT WAS THE wish of their recently deceased mother that the three Pickford children get together with their father on the Michigan island where, years ear- lier, the family had owned a beloved if ramshackle summer home. The title of Ryan Effgen’s appealing debut novel, “Make Nice,” alludes to the pet exhorta- tion of dear old…
A Club From Concord The Emerson Circle By Bruce Nichols Avid Reader, 368 pages, $32 By ALEX BEAM O BORROW Walt Whit- man’s line, Ralph Waldo Emerson contained mul- titudes. He was, as Bruce Nichols convincingly argues in “The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World,” the pre-eminent public intel- lectual of his time. His works, such as his lecture “The American Scholar” (1837…
From a Marxist Perspective The Age of Hobsbawm By Emile Chabal Belknap, 480 pages, $35 By DoMINIC GREEN HE PRIVILEGES of the English eccentric resem- ble those of the fool in the medieval court. Iri- tating but never truly dangerous, his antagonism is a safety valve for the class system and a flatter- ing diversion for its proprietors. The socially acceptable options for 20th- century English ecce…
وليد جنبلاط : رصاصة ورث صداهاء ووصيةٌ تركها لتيمور د. فاروق غائنم خداج(.) مذ الصفحات الأولى من كتاب وليد جتبلاط «قدرٌ في هذا المشرق: من الحرب الأهلية إلى السلام المستحيل»؛ شعرت أن ما بين يدي ليس مذكرات رجل يريد أن يقتْعنا بآنه كان على صواب, يقدر ما هي وثبقة تسليم. فالرجل الذي ورث زعامته تحت وطأة الرصاص عام 177 حين اغتيل والده كمال جنبلاط فى ١١ آذار, هو نفسه الذي sis منة رئاسة الحزب التقدمي اشت…
Good aliens, bad aliens, and an ET called Allen By James Lovegrove am A Miller's Still Lost: Tales from the Year 2080 (Del Rey £20/Penguin $19) comprises eight stories set after the arrival of a race of benevolent, technologically advanced aliens who have solved pretty much all of the world’s ills, from bringing about nuclear disarmament to fixing the climate crisis. The concept is ripe with poten…
For, against and both at the same time The people of Russia speak for themselves in an extraordinary on-the-ground account of how it really feels to live in Putin's world of contradiction and doublethink. By Matthew Janney Never Say War: Life Inside Russia by Asne Seierstad, translated by Sisin Mackie Virago £30, 512 pages he best soldier is one nobody will miss.” Linger on that sentence for a mom…
Hockney's poolside muse A biography captures the hedonism, sunshine and high-flying social circles that inspired the artist in 1960s California. By Christian House hen David Hockney died earlier this year, tributes praised the Bradford-born painter for achieving that rare art-world hat-trick: he was admired by critics, his works sold for millions and the public adored him. Hockney’s life and work …
books Eh ear an Ia NE Meet Hockney''s real housewife of Beverly Hills - Book of the week Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool, the art historian James Cahill offers both an attentively close reading television one evening, Hockney saw an advert for Lady Clairol hair dye. “Blondes have more fun. Doors open for in the converted garage of a run-down house in a particularly seedy part of Los…
How Film Became History By Thomas Doherty Columbia, 280 pages, $28 By PETER TONGUETTE N A VISIT to Berlin, in Febru- ary 1933, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. wrote about his impressions for Script magazine. “Germany today is a fortress... . Every- where are troops.” Despite his family’s immense wealth, Vanderbilt aspired to be a journalist. But he did more than write. “While mid-Europeaning,” he later r…
