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The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophecy of Environmentalism Really Meantby Robert Sullivan
Was Henry David Thoreau a hermit or a party animal?
Upon the publication of his last book, Rats, The New York Times hailed Robert Sullivan as an “urban Thoreau.” In his latest book, Sullivan has proudly claimed the mantel, injecting some fresh insight into his namesake’s life. The Thoreau You Don’t Know attempts to recast Thoureau as a garrulous man about town, not the eccentric ascetic he is often portrayed to be. “I suppose I have an ax to grind,” Sullivan writes. “The Thoreau you know bothers me too, in light of the one I think I've seen.” Publishers Weekly praises Sullivan as “a fine companion on yet another pilgrimage to Walden.”
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in Americaby Julia Angwin
From upstart to a jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s corporate crown.
Old media, meet new media: Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin’s new book, Stealing MySpace, covers the online social network from its founding, to its defeat of rival Friendster, to its eventual takeover by NewsCorp. It features media personalities such as Sumner Redstone (who battled Murdoch for the company), Bill O’Reilly, and Tila Tequila, who was one of the first celebrities to use the site to launch a career. Other highlights include Eliot Spitzer’s spyware lawsuit against the company, the investigation into its lack of protection of minors, and MySpace’s ongoing (and some would say losing) feud with Facebook.
Wonderful World: A Novelby Javier Calvo
A psychedelic trip involving the mafia, comic books, antiques, women’s coats, and Stephen King.
How do you summarize Wonderful World, Spanish writer Javier Calvo’s first novel to appear in English? It is, according to Publishers Weekly, “a frenetic and magnificent mashup of family drama, mob revenge story, and surreal mystery featuring a gigantic enforcer obsessed with comic books, a 12-year-old girl fixated on Stephen King, a ‘namby-pamby’ antiques dealer on a mad quest and a crime lord with a penchant for women's coats.” Hmm. Plugging the book, GQ writes, “Javier Calvo claims to have channeled the ghost of Charles Dickens to write this postmodern thriller, and the young Spanish author tells his tale with enough brio—the cartoonish cast includes Pink Floyd-obsessed gangsters and plastic-surgery-maimed matriarchs—that you'll excuse the presumption.”
The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyrannyby Wendell Steavenson
Why did Iraqis go along with Saddam Hussein’s crimes?
Ever since the Holocaust, the question of how ordinary citizens permit and participate in their governments’ crimes has obsessed historians. In The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson asks the question of Iraqis and Saddam Hussein. Her story is built around Kamel Sachet, an Iraqi general who at first supported Hussein and later turned against him. Reviewing the book for London’s Observer, Peter Beaumont writes, “So many of the depictions of life inside Saddam's regime have been two dimensional and unreliable, written for political effect in the run-up to the invasion. Her account, pieced together in the aftermath of the Iraqi war, is ambiguous and recognizably human, written with an eye for the small, compelling detail. When killings and torture do take place, they seem all the more shocking.”
The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolutionby Naftali Bendavid
Recounting the rise of Rahm.
Besides President Obama, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel may just be the new administration’s most household name. How’d he get here? Newt Gingrich recently praised Naftali Bendavid’s The Thumpin’ from 2007, which recounts Rahm’s rise with a particular focus on his engineering the Democrats’ congressional victory in 2006. Reviewing the book for Salon, Edward McClelland writes, “Emanuel was just the kind of shameless asshole the Democrats needed to win back power. … Emanuel comes off as one of the most colorful, driven and profane Washington characters since Lyndon Johnson. ‘The Jewish LBJ,’ political scientist Larry Sabato calls him, not only for his ambition but also for his reputation as an amoral political animal focused only on power
