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To Be Frank

Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 400pp “In 1954, I was a fairly normal fourteen-year-old, enjoying sports, unhealthy food, and loud music,” writes Barney Frank at the start of his zippy, witty memoir. “But even then I realized that there were two ways in which I was different from the other guys: I was attracted to the idea of serving in government and I was attracted to the other guys.” These two tendencies — towards public service, towards men — are the organizing principles of Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, which traces the activist Congressman’s career from his childhood in New Jersey through his thirty-two-year career representing Massachusetts in the House of Representatives. Along the way, we witness Frank’s efforts on behalf of the LGBT community during the AIDS crisis, we hear the true story of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and we see the financial crisis from the perspective of the man who lent his name to the biggest finance reform act in living memory. The yardstick for Frank’s half-century of service is the contrast between the America of his youth and the […]

Plato at the Googleplex: Review

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Knopf Doubleday / Vintage, 2014; 480pp “Just accept the one preposterous premise that Plato could turn up in twenty-first-century America, an author on a book tour, and everything else, I hope, makes sense.” That’s the preposterous but brilliant premise of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein‘s latest book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, a witty and stimulating tour of Ancient Greece interspersed with “out of time” Platonic dialogues with a right-wing talk-show host, an agony aunt, the 92nd Street Y, and staff at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Remember that bit in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Socrates, Beethoven, Joan of Arc et al go wild in a shopping mall? It’s sort of like that, only with a much more rigorous approach to textuality. It’s also a fierce defence of the practice of philosophy today, at a time when many scientists and other “philosophy-jeerers” would have you believe that philosophy is just a stop-gap, a method of generating questions that will later be answered by science, and has no inherent value in itself. Goldstein intersperses these witty imaginings with historical context for the thinking that her Plato puts […]

Review: Gabriel – A Poem, by Edward Hirsch

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch Knopf Doubleday, 2014; 96pp A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; 736pp How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; 368pp “Many of the very greatest poems seem as if they were written in blood,” Edward Hirsch once wrote. So it is with his magnificent, harrowing Gabriel (2014), a book-length poem that anatomizes Hirsch’s grief over the death in 2011, at the age of twenty-two, of his son. Gabriel is an elegy, a confession, a howl. It’s a poem steeped in literary history but also fluent in contemporary idiom and reference (the poem’s epigraph comes from a Blink-182 song). Reviewing it feels intrusive — like reviewing a eulogy. Yet I also imagine that Hirsch, always a passionate advocate for “a participatory poetics”, understood that in publishing such a personal work, each new reader would, in a sense, encounter Gabriel alive once more; the creative act of reading would have a resurrective aspect. In How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry (1999), he wrote that “The lyric poem seeks to mesmerize time. It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming […]

Fail Better

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis Simon & Schuster, 2014; 272pp In 2010, Sandra Bullock was briefly my favorite person in the world. In the same weekend, she won and accepted the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress (for All About Steve) and, for her role in The Blind Side, the Oscar for Best Actress. It was an astonishing act of humility; I doubt many in Hollywood would acknowledge so freely the unpredictability of artistic achievement. Bullock became, in that moment, a beacon of hope for all who see in their perceived failures the seeds of their future successes. Yes, she seemed to be saying, I did make All About Steve. But from the same well of emotion and experience that I drew on for that role came The Blind Side. If you try and fail, try again. Or, put another way: failure is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. This is the message of Sarah Lewis’s inspiring book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, which recasts failure as a useful and perhaps even essential step on the path to success, innovation, […]

Steven Pinker On Style

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker Viking, 2014; 368pp Is it better to err unwittingly or to be all crouching pedant, hidden snoot? This is perhaps a question more of lifestyle than writing style, but one I nevertheless contemplated throughout the happy week I spent surfing the pages of Steven Pinker‘s new writing guide, The Sense of Style. He offers no easy answers — sometimes it’s definitely better to put your foot down; sometimes you’ll end up with egg on your face — but, having read it, I go back out into the world with a renewed sense of purpose and a better-calibrated sonar for the faux pas. Like Pinker, I’ve been known to dip into style manuals for pleasure. I pride myself on being pretty good at spelling, punctuation, and grammar (although I’ve stopped putting that on my dating profile — it turns me off, let alone potential candidates). But with great power comes great responsibility. You can crush someone with a correction, however subtly administered. To point out an error in grammar or punctuation is, to me, no better than to tell someone they look rough today, or to ask them if they […]

Review: The Marauders, by Tom Cooper

The Marauders by Tom Cooper Crown, 2015; 320pp “Of course he knew that searching for an island of marijuana was crazy. But he also knew that every so often fools stumbled upon fortune, whether by fate or fluke.” This is Cosgrove, one of the gallery of scofflaws and no-hopers that fill out Tom Cooper‘s cracking debut novel, The Marauders. A thriller set in Jeanette, La., in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, The Marauders channel-hops between twin drug dealers, a one-armed shrimper, a teenage boy and his bitter father, a drifter and his criminal buddy, and a BP middleman sent to settle claims to the oil company’s advantage. All the while, its helter-skelter plot unfolds. The teeming swamps of Barataria Bay are a constant mysterious presence, and it’s here that Cosgrove and Hanson, who met on a community-service program, go hunting for the Toup brothers’ legendary marijuana island. It’s also where Lindquist, who pops painkillers from a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, roves with his metal detector, hoping to turn up pirate gold, or, failing that, jewelry lost in the floods of Katrina. Cooper’s sense of place is masterful, reflecting both the stoicism of the Barataria’s inhabitants and the precariousness of their way […]

Life on the Farm: A Dark, Disturbing Thriller

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith Grand Central Publishing, 2014; 400pp You’re walking home. You get a phone call from your father. He’s upset. Your mother has been committed to an asylum. “The symptoms started gradually,” he tells you; “anxiety and odd comments, we can all suffer from that. Then came the allegations. She claims she has proof, she talks about evidence and suspects, but it’s nonsense and lies.” Before you know it, you’re meeting your mother at the airport. She looks crumpled, distressed; she’s lost weight. She’s carrying with her a bag which she says contains “evidence that I’m not mad. Evidence of crimes being covered up.” What do you do, and who do you believe? This is the intriguing premise of Tom Rob Smith‘s new thriller, The Farm. It also actually happened, pretty much, to Smith. Like his protagonist, Daniel, he’s half-Swedish on his mother’s side, his parents retired to a farm in a remote community in Sweden, and he was disturbed one day on his way home by a call from his father telling him his mother had been committed. Like Tilde in The Farm, she also managed to discharge herself, fly to England, and attempt to convince her son that his […]

The Life and Death of the Hollywood Actress

Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn Harper Perennial, 2015; 128pp “It’s not easy to write about your dead peers,” said Amber Tamblyn in an interview with Rachel Simon at Bustle published this week. “I was giving myself a lot of permissions that I normally wouldn’t… and telling myself that’s how I am going to get closer to the story, that’s how I’m going to become one with them. But I can’t write like that. It just made it even darker.” Tamblyn’s third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler, is indeed a rhapsody in black, a threnody for the victims of Hollywood. Some of these women (they’re all women) you might know: Brittany Murphy, Sharon Tate, Marilyn Monroe. Others you probably don’t. As poet Diane di Prima writes in a foreword to the book, “At some point you will begin to get curious… At that point, go to the library or search the Internet for information about any girl/woman you find yourself thinking about. Look up Peg Entwistle, Bridgette Andersen, Samantha Smith.” This, it seems, is pretty much what Tamblyn did. In eight black pages in the epilogue (the book is fabulously designed), we see what appears to be her (re)search history for the book, including (out of sequence; […]

The Argument From Design

The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak Viking, 2014; 432pp In a world of inter-religious conflict, plague, and natural disasters, the most elegant teleology may be found in architecture. This is Elif Shafak‘s proposition in her ambitious new novel, The Architect’s Apprentice. Shafak is the mostly widely read female writer in Turkey, has 1.7 million Twitter followers, and in 2010 she was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She writes regularly for the Guardian on feminism, human rights, and the state of democracy in Turkey. Although The Architect’s Apprentice is a historical novel, set mostly in the sixteenth century in Istanbul, its author’s very contemporary concerns flow through it. Inspired by an image in Gulru Necipoglu’s The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, Shafak sets out to imagine the world and the people outside the frame of official history. As she describes it in her author’s note: it was a painting of Sultan Suleiman, tall and sleek in his kaftan. But it was the figures in the background that intrigued me. There was an elephant and a mahout [elephant tamer] in front of the Suleimaniye Mosque; they were hovering on the edge of the picture, as if ready to run away, unsure as […]

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