Word: knopf
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...must cope with ironies and layers of deconstruction (one strategy is to distance the reader from the hero and keep him a mystery, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did in The Great Gatsby). So pity Mona Simpson, a talented young novelist (Anywhere but Here) whose new book, A Regular Guy (Knopf; 372 pages; $25), begins with this sentence: "He was a man too busy to flush toilets." Does any superman survive that? It's not that this is a scatological work or a racy read about a rich scientist-businessman. Instead, it is an earnest attempt by a talented writer...
When it was all over and she was back in London, says Armstrong, she was so stimulated by the Genesis stories that she wrote a book. In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (Knopf) is a brief survey of the tales through the prism of Armstrong's strongly held views about God's ultimate unknowability and the folly of some current denominations in second-guessing him. It joins the works of other Moyers panelists that collectively illustrate the rabbinic adage "Turn it, turn it, everything is in it." Two are new translations: Alter's (Norton) and a more selective...
During his more than 30 years of turning out literate, suspenseful, best-selling novels, John le Carre has played just about every imaginable variation on the themes of espionage and betrayal. But The Tailor of Panama (Knopf; 333 pages; $25) shows that he knows a few more tricks than he has so far revealed. How about, for example, a story of some eager beavers in British intelligence hot on the trail of a conspiracy that does not actually exist...
Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (Knopf; 427 pages; $30) portrays the chief operating officer of the Vietnam buildup as a "tragically split man." Central to this view are McNamara's unsatisfactory answers to questions that have dogged him since he left the Pentagon on Feb. 19, 1968: Why did he choose to remain in office more than two years after he was telling colleagues the war was futile? And why did he continue to rationalize publicly a conflict he privately did not believe...
Louis Begley's About Schmidt (Knopf; 274 pages; $23) peels back a layer or two of this weekend world, where the old gentry and gregarious newcomers have little in common except tax brackets. Begley is himself a New York City lawyer turned writer who has fictionalized delicate matters of class and ethnicity before. For instance, his earlier novel The Man Who Was Late (1992) is about a New York City lawyer who, as a Jew, always feels somewhat on the outside in his white-shoe firm...