Jonathan Liu

ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
By Ted Widmer
Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $25

Ted Widmer has carved out the kind of heroically peripatetic career in entertainment, politics and scholarship that gives young men hope and older men heartburn. Widmer? If the name doesn’t yet ring a bell, that could be because he’s had more than the average 44-year-old’s share of names.

Connoisseurs of high-concept mid-’90s glam metal know him as Lord Rockingham, dandy guitarist of the Upper Crust, a Boston band known for performing AC/DC-style anthems in powdered wigs and associated ancien régime regalia. (Their tongue-in-jowl celebrations of aristocracy include "Let them Eat Rock" and "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class.  read more »

BREACH OF PEACE: POTRAITS OF THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
By Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co., 239 pages, $45

The slog was slow and messy, but the Democratic primary season at least left us with a handy object lesson in the principles and perils of proportional response. One suspects that for the Clinton and Obama shock troops alike, the defining episode will be the May 31 meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, one of the few chapters of late capitalist civic life deserving of the old 20th-century catch-all epithet "Kafkaesque."

There, stammering and shaking on the dais, was Harold Ickes—veteran of 1964’s Freedom Summer and namesake of F.  read more »

THE AMERICAN RESTING PLACE: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY THROUGH OUR CEMETERIES AND BURIAL GROUNDS
By Marilyn Yalom
Houghton Mifflin, 297 pages, $30

IT'S A GOOD TIME to be alive if you’re interested in the American way of death.  read more »

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria. W. W. Norton, 292 pages, $25.95.

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is one of those peculiar volumes public thinkers of a certain disposition, upon reaching a certain popular standing, seem compelled to write: an omnibus summation of the recent trajectory of their thinking—and, by extension, the state of the world.  read more »

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc modifications and additions, so that by 1972, the same basic car had become a 3,300-pound, 375-horsepower V-8 behemoth.  read more »

THE COMPLEX: HOW THE MILITARY INVADES OUR EVERYDAY LIVES
By Nick Turse
Metropolitan, 271 pages, $23

Give Nick Turse credit: It’s not every would-be polemicist who has enough faith in the message to irrevocably—and hilariously—undermine himself two pages into his first book. Yet there they are, in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph of the introduction to The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, three words embalmed parenthetically in a text that (the reader will soon discover) rather persistently confuses parentheses for exclamation points.  read more »

ON EMPIRE: AMERICA, WAR, AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY
By Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 97 pages, $19.95

What a difference a decade makes in the course (and discourse) of empire!

In the year 303, the emperor Diocletian issued the Edict Against the Christians, which ushered in the great persecution that still bears his name. Across the Roman Empire, it was martyrs, martyrs everywhere; churches were razed and imperial offices purged—it was the harshest crackdown in Roman history.  read more »

FANON
By John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin,
229 pages, $24

Is it high tribute or snarky takedown to say that a novelist’s prose reads like verse? The “poetry of imagination,” scolded Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, precedes the “prose of thought.” Does that notion console the reader of John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as he struggles through five-page thickets of rather disconnected words, praying for the arrival of a period, an inner copy editor demanding the liberal placement of ¶’s in the margins.

“As he turns back,” begins one of Mr. Wideman’s verse-worthy performances, “he widens his eyes and nods, his gaze brushing hers, letting her share if she chooses the information his eyes carry about how rapidly the crowd’s growing for this matinee performance in dismal weather and somewhere in there between glances and glances away he says hi or hello, an English greeting in France, and she responds with the same English word and he repeats it, the echoing maybe a bit too cute, more playful than cute he hopes, aren’t adults allowed to be playful, though there’s a chance someone standing in this line or in the crowd streaming by on the boulevard would, if given the opportunity, torture you, chop off your head. …”  read more »

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 356 pages, $26

A few hundred pages into The Division of Labor in Society, a 1893 tract notable for its eyeball-bleeding tedium and the insouciant unfalsifiability of its categorizations, Emile Durkheim finally addresses a matter the modern reader might care to hear about: namely, “the division of intellectual labor.”

“Science,” Durkheim writes, “carved up into a host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole. … The division of labor cannot therefore be pushed too far without being a source of disintegration.” Durkheim, of course, spent the rest of his life establishing sociology as its own special, separate science.  read more »

AGAINST HAPPINESS: IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY
By Eric G. Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 151 pages, $20

If all productive misery reads like this, give me idle joy.

Americans are plump and satisfied, complains Eric G. Wilson, and the tragedy is that their rose-colored glasses and SSRI’s prevent them from channeling the creative inner torment of noted melancholics such as Coleridge, Keats, Beethoven and Lennon. And, oh yes, Eric G. Wilson.

As he strenuously insists on page after violet page of Against Happiness—the prose is roughly the color of a Grade 3 ankle sprain—Mr. Wilson is just as much a sad sack as the great men of history, and thus much closer to Truth than the so-called “happy types.” (Manic depression is the closest he ever gets to defining his own vaunted “melancholy.”)  read more »

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER’S MANIFESTO
By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 244 pages, $21.95

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto? A churlish title, perhaps—but these days it’s hard not to agree with Michael Pollan that all eating is a political act.  read more »

In Turning Back the Clock, a collection of charming, bite-size missives from the millennial trenches of “Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi,” the good-faith give-and-take of the conscientious translator becomes “the very base of cultural life.”  read more »

"Stephen Colbert" has become one of the most richly textured characters on television. Sadly, none of that makes I Am America (And So Can You!) worth reading.  read more »

The Fall takes a look back in order to move pop music forward.  read more »

In Vanilla Bright Like Eminem, Michel Faber crafts opening sentences like an Edwardian newsman-fop transported to today’s metro section.  read more »

In 1993, three months after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the Ms. Foundation sponsored the first national Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Not that 90’s feminism was particularly feminist—soon enough, American corporations found it worthwhile to let boys know that they too could aspire to work outside the home.  read more »

Five nice New York boys make fun summer anthems.  read more »

On Volta, signature wails collide with Timbaland beats Iceland’s coolest: Björk at Coachella.  read more »