2 of 4
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, by Michael Lewis (Norton). As readers of Moneyball know well, no one writes more entertainingly and informatively on sports than Michael Lewis, who is the heir to Tom Wolfe in his flair for mastering a subject and describing it with pungent wit and an uncanny eye for trends that seem obvious once he's pointed them out. His new book will delight football fans; it's also a slice of life (young African American is adopted by affluent evangelicals and finds unexpected success on the gridiron) that might seem to spring from a novelist's imagination, so neatly does it manage to gather in one narrative a cluster of contemporary conundrums.
Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, by Robert Irwin (Viking). This book by a British Arabist will rightly be hailed as the definitive rebuttal to Edward Said's Orientalism, but it is not primarily concerned with polemics; rather, Irwin sets out to recount the history of scholarship devoted to the Middle East, which Said had characterized in such a tendentious fashion. Irwin "is a superb writer: lucid, witty, fair-minded, with a wicked sense of irony," or so I say in my review of his book in the January issue of Christianity Today. A sequel is promised, to be entitled The Arts of Orientalism.
The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Like all of Powers' novels, this latest—which won the National Book Award—is a muscular wrestling with big questions, here centering on (but not limited to) what the far reaches of neuroscience might have to tell us about who we are, how we construct and maintain a sense of our identity. (One key character in the novel is based to some degree on Oliver Sacks.) All this is fleshed out in a story set in motion when a young man rolls his truck on a freezing February night in Nebraska. The sandhill cranes have alighted en masse for their annual visit, and with no forcing Powers weaves questions about their fate into the story. Finally the book is a kind of wrestling with God, not exactly the God of the Bible (and there are glimpses of fundamentalists, one very angry, others rather befuddled, to drive home that point) yet akin.
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, by Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton (New Directions). Transtromer is Swedish, which usually means a dearth of translations, but not in his case. Robert Bly is only one of a number of poets who have been attracted over the years by the challenge of bringing Transtromer into English. Robin Fulton is another—he's been at it for decades—and this is his latest effort. Transtromer's output has always been spare, and a severe stroke a few years ago made him even more laconic. This collection translates all the published poems, including some we haven't seen before, and a brief memoir of childhood. The volume takes its title from Transtromer's very slim 2004 collection, which concludes with a striking sequence of haiku. Here is one of them: "Something has happened. / The moon filled the room with light. / God knew about it."
share this page
RSS Feed
