This week, a biography of Gabriel García Márquez two decades in the making, an A-Rod tell-all juiced into early release, and Colm Tóibín’s masterful new novel, Brooklyn.
The Geopolitics of Emotionby Dominique Moisi
Today’s international conflicts can be explained through a clash of bad feelings.
Forget the clash of civilizations, today’s international conflicts can be explained through a clash of emotions. Dominique Moisi, an international-affairs expert who is a visiting professor at Harvard University this year, argues that potent feelings of national identity have dissipated and instead, conflict and tension between countries is being driven by feelings of fear, humiliation, and hope. The West is fearful of foreign cultures as American and Western cultures feel their national identities slipping away. The Middle East is feeling humiliated by years of falling behind in the global economy and bitter regional conflicts. And finally, Moisi argues, Asia is feeling very hopeful as it rapidly grows and looks into the future. Move over Sam Huntington.
Brooklynby Colm Tóibín
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic are praising Tóibín’s masterful new novel.
Don’t be fooled by the title—this novel is not about the hip Brooklyn of today, a refuge for writers fleeing high prices in Manhattan. Nor is it about a borough inhabited by new waves of Arab or Southeast Asian immigrants. It is a flashback to the days when the Irish were a major immigrant group in the borough. A young woman in the 1950s breaks free from the small town in Ireland where she was raised and moves to Brooklyn with hopes of new opportunities. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have been raving about this novel, which is award-winning author Colm Tóibín’s sixth. While reviewers at The Times Literary Supplement and the L.A. Times said the book was full of intense emotion, grief and loss, the people at O Magazine saw it differently. “There are no antagonists in this novel, no psychodramas, no angst. There is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself.” All agree on Tóibín’s masterful craft though. “Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect,” wrote Ruth Scurr, of The TLS.
The Red Squadby E.M. Broner
An octogenarian feminist channels her youth in this deft mystery.
This fast-paced new novel feels like the work of a young author brimming with energy, but is in fact written by an 82-year-old veteran feminist. Esther M. Broner flashes back and forth between “Now” and “Then” as she tells the tale of her protagonist, Anka. The flashbacks begin after the main character, Anka, a professor, receives a Freedom of Information file about her political activities, and motley crew of associates, in her heyday. Broner herself is an award-winning playwright and is considered a pioneer in women’s studies. In a brief review, Publishers Weekly writes, “Broner captures the mannerisms, witticisms and transparent insecurities of her young idealists, and the who-was-the-rat mystery will keep readers involved through the too-tidy conclusion.”
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
by Gerald Martin
One Hundred Years (almost) of Gabo.
An ode to “Gabo.” Gerald Martin spent nearly 20 years researching, interviewing and writing this massive biography on the Nobel Prize-winning “magical realist.” In fact, the list of people he interviews fills almost four pages in the acknowledgements. Martin starts in the small Colombian town where Márquez was born and ends with the writer now, an ailing octogenarian. One reviewer for The Guardian wrote, “If García Márquez is apt to play fast and loose with chronology, his admiring biographer, by contrast, has the scrapbook-filling exhaustiveness of the stage mother.” Indeed, there is something ominous, and almost morbid, about the work finally being released now. When Márquez was asked about his past in a 2006 interview, he replied, “’You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing, only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.”
A-Rodby Selena Roberts
The life of the complicated Yankee superstar goes deeper than steroids.
Selena Roberts’ juicy book about baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez hit the shelves a week early after her allegations that “A-Roid” used performance-enhancing drugs as a teenager leaked. But while everyone is focused on the scandal, the more persistent theme seems to be A-Rod’s intense need for attention. The book begins with a description of Rodriguez in September 2008. “August had been dreadful yet exhilarating for Alex. He was reveling in his summer-long status as the Tabloid Prince of New York.” Roberts’ conclusion? “Only one thing scared Alex more than being called a cheater—being ignored.” Suppose he’s happy now.
