Damian Da Costa

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.  read more »

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
By Mohammed Hanif
Alfred A. Knopf, 323 pages, $24  read more »

THE HAKAWATI
By Rabih Alameddine
Alfred A. Knopf, 513 pages, $25.95

The Hakawati, Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine’s third novel, is a late entry to a field that includes movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and novels like The Tin Drum—stories that process situations of extreme sadness and moral complexity through the viewpoint of a child. It’s a device with great potential for showing up the childish side of adult politics, and—always the set piece of this genre—how everyday life continues in spite of it all.  read more »

With as many musical genres competing for your attention as there are iPods currently plugged into ears, there’s a huge demand today for aurally inclined curators. What regular person has time to sort through everything?  read more »

THE KONKANS
By Tony D’Souza
Harcourt, 308 pages, $25

In the early 16th century, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama came ashore on the western coast of India, claiming the land for Portugal and the local people for Christ. The Indians converted by da Gama developed a culture distinct from that of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. The Konkans eat pork and beef, speak a language derived from Portuguese called Konakani and, in the 500 years since da Gama’s arrival, have evolved a reputation as merchants. Yet their customs retain traditional Hindu elements—Konkan weddings, for example, include Hindu dances.

How do proud Catholics like the Konkans reconcile their devotion to the One True God with India’s dizzying religious and cultural diversity? Same way everyone copes with difference: through a combination of denial and amused contempt. “Hindus, surprisingly, are rather admired by the Konkans,” explains Francisco, the half-Konkan, half-white narrator of Tony D’Souza’s promising second novel.  read more »

ALFRED KAZIN: A BIOGRAPHY
By Richard M. Cook
Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35

With the death of Alfred Kazin in 1998 at the age of 83, the kind of high-end literary journalism that he’d devoted his life to in over a thousand book reviews, an epochal 1942 history of realism in American literature and three memoirs of life among the New York intellectuals, came at last to an end. Kazin’s legacy, like that of his idol Edmund Wilson, consisted almost entirely of occasional pieces on incidental topics aimed at an educated general public, and in brooding memoirs that mixed score-settling and book-chat in even measure.

A freelancer to the last, Kazin never quit hustling for the next book review or fellowship or visiting professor appointment. “Between October 1997 and his death on June 5, 1998,” writes Richard M. Cook in his exhaustively researched biography, “Kazin published five essays in the New York Review of Books, three essays and reviews in The New York Times, and two essays and a poem in The New Republic.”  read more »

Zugzwang falls short of the standard Ronan Bennett set with The Catastrophist, but only if you assume he’s aiming beyond entertainment.  read more »

Has classical music become hip? From the looks of this fall, some of the city’s most traditional venues will be competing with clubs for the downtown crow.  read more »

“Vienna,” the first of the two narrative essays that make up Marc Edmundson’s meditation on the late life and thought of Sigmund Freud, is a tale worthy of a libretto.  read more »

INNER WORKINGS: LITERARY ESSAYS 2000-2005
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 304 pages, $25.95

Each of the 21 essays included in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 is named for the author whose works it examines, making the collection’s table of contents read like a syllabus. In the first half of the course, J.M. Coetzee lectures on European literature of the first half of the 20th century, in translation from Italian, German, Hungarian and Polish. It’s an honor roll of anomie: the Swiss writer Robert Walser, for example, whose works went largely neglected during his lifetime, the last years of which he spent institutionalized; or the Austrian Robert Musil, whose The Man Without Qualities (1930) chronicled the breakdown of Enlightenment liberalism that prefigured the rise of fascism in Europe.  read more »