New York Times Book Reviews
Book Review - The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - By Selina Hastings
Selina Hastings’s biography sees the origins of Somerset Maugham’s habit of cruelty in his cruel childhood.
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Book Review - A Great Unrecorded History - A New Life of E. M. Forster - By Wendy Moffat
Wendy Moffat’s perceptive biography does not make E. M. Forster’s sexuality explain everything, though of course it explains a great deal.
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Book Review - The Great Silence - By Juliet Nicolson
A history of the aftermath of World War I, when Britain strove to suppress its grief with willed gaiety.
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Book Review - The Eitingons - By Mary-Kay Wilmers
This biography of an influential Russian clan encompasses the Soviet secret police and Sigmund Freud’s inner circle.
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Posing as Fitness
Two books on how yoga was packaged and promoted in different ways in America, depending on the audience and the era.
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Letter From India: Somerset Maugham’s Swami
Long before Elizabeth Gilbert, Somerset Maugham turned the ashram experience into a monster best seller, “The Razor’s Edge.”
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Book Review - Father of the Rain - By Lily King
Lily King’s novel delves into the relationship between a charismatic but troubled man and his devoted daughter.
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Book Review - What Is Left the Daughter - By Howard Norman
Howard Norman’s crisp epistolary novel explores the illogic of love and the violent chaos left in its wake.
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Book Review - The Cookbook Collector - By Allegra Goodman
Amid clear echoes of “Sense and Sensibility,” two sisters of emotionally opposite persuasions navigate a world on the brink of 9/11 in Allegra Goodman’s new novel.
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Book Review - Revolutionaries - A New History of the Invention of America - By Jack Rakove
Jack Rakove argues that the struggle for American independence molded the founders as much as they molded it.
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Book Review - Being Wrong - Adventures in the Margin of Error - By Kathryn Schulz
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Book Review - Through the History of the Cold War - The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs
A collection of letters between George F. Kennan and the historian John Lukacs sheds light on the intellectual underpinnings of Kennan’s notion of “containing” the Soviets.
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Book Review - Dreyfus - By Ruth Harris
A patient, fair-minded exploration of the human ideals, hatreds and delusions that were on display in the Dreyfus Affair, “the most famous cause célèbre in French history.”
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Up Front: Miranda Seymour
Miranda Seymour is deep into the research for her next book, a social study of the friendship and the royal and cultural links between England and Germany before World War I.
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Archive: Book Review Podcast
Featuring Allegra Goodman on her novel “The Cookbook Collector”; and Stefanie Syman on her history of yoga in America, “The Subtle Body.”
Categories: Book Reviews