Review by New York Times Review
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. (Penguin, $18.) MacLean sketches out the six-decade push to protect the wealthy elite from the will of the majority. The architect of this plan was James McGill Buchanan, a political economist who, starting in the mid-1900s, devoted his career to paving the way for a right-wing social movement. BLACK MAD WHEEL, by Josh Malerman. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) A rock 'n' roll band, the Danes, is approached by a top military official to help identify a mysterious, but potent, noise: The sound seems able to neutralize any kind of weapon, and even make people disappear. As the story goes to the African desert and beyond, the novel "takes flight in some head-splitting metaphysical directions," Terrence Rafferty wrote here. THE WORLD BROKE IN TWO: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature, by Bill Goldstein. (Picador, $18.) The year 1922 was pivotal for these modernists. Goldstein makes good use of their correspondence and published material to outline each writer's development and creative blocks, and how their work fit into a broader postwar movement. MOVING KINGS, by Joshua Cohen. (Random House, $17.) David King is a heavyweight in the moving industry in New York, the patriotic, Republican and wealthy owner of a well-known storage company. In a moment of nostalgia, he invites his distant cousin Yoav, fresh from service in Israel's military, to work for him, carrying out the business's ugly side - evicting delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. The novel and its tensions promise some thematic heft, touching on race, occupation, gentrification and who deserves the right to a home. THE LONG HAUL: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, by Finn Murphy. (Norton, $16.95.) Murphy has logged hundreds of thousands of miles and decades on the road, but may be an unlikely representative: He falls asleep reading Jane Austen in motels and nurtures a crush on Terry Gross, "probably because I've spent more time with her than anyone else in my life." SUNBURN, by Laura Lippman. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) In a sleepy Delaware town, two newcomers - a waitress running from her past and a short-order cook - fall in love, though the two are not what they claim to be. Set in 1995, this novel has an undertow of 1940s noir, but with more heart than you might expect. As our reviewer, Harriet Lane, wrote: "You see the huge red sun sinking into the cornfields; you feel the dew underfoot."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Four radical writers battled illness, depression, domestic stress, heartbreak, and artistic paralysis as the year 1922 delivered two literary explosions: James Joyce's Ulysses and the first English translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. These novels would serve as goads and polestars for T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In an extensively researched, extraordinarily fine-grained and lucid literary history rich in biographical discoveries, Goldstein traces the synergy among this quartet and reveals both their anguish and esprit de corps. He extracts wisdom, wit, cattiness, and sympathy from diaries and letters as he charts the fitful creation of The Waste Land, A Passage to India, Kangaroo, and Mrs. Dalloway concurrent with Eliot's breakdowns and rest cures, Forster's unrequited love for men, Lawrence's fractious sojourn in Taos with Mabel Dodge Sterne, and Woolf's defiance of doctor's orders. Here, too, are publishing skirmishes and censorship cases. Goldstein's ardently detailed, many-faceted story of a pivotal literary year illuminates all that these tormented visionaries had to overcome to make the modern happen. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times books website, offers an extensively annotated account of how four major authors invented modernism in 1922. Already a literary landmark for the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and the first appearance of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in English, 1922 is staked out by Goldstein as a "crucial year of change and outstanding creative renaissance" for his principals. Lawrence's Women in Love survived an obscenity lawsuit, Forster revived his career with A Passage to India, Eliot published The Waste Land to wide acclaim, and Woolf invented Mrs. Dalloway's inner world. For context, Goldstein dwells at length, and with frequent repetition, on his writers' challenges, disappointments, and jealousies. Lawrence whirls like a dervish over countries and continents, happy nowhere; Forster broods with loneliness and grief; Eliot waffles over his great poem in between rest cures; and Woolf battles illness and her own inclination toward elegant spite. Goldstein's plentiful digressions threaten to disjoint an already fragile narrative thread. Nonetheless, the intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This scholarly study examines the lives of four major English writers in 1922 when, Willa Cather suggested, the literary world "broke in two" with the dawn of modernism, beginning with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Goldstein (founding editor, New York Times book website) maintains that these writers were interested in creating "the language of the future," but each began the year with an impediment to moving forward. Virginia Woolf suffered from recurring influenza, T.S. Eliot was recovering from a nervous breakdown, E.M. Forster was lonely, and D.H. -Lawrence was -continually moving from place to place in search of utopia. Goldstein traces his subjects' activities during the year to show how they reached breakthroughs that got their careers back on track, including the publication of Eliot's landmark poem, The Waste Land. Hovering over the four were the shades of not only Ulysses but also Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the lasting effects of World War I, which left England a different country from what it had been previously. VERDICT Recommended for all readers interested in the development of early 20th-century English literature.-Denise J. Stankovics, Vernon, CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A group biography of four writers who are held as standard-bearers for a new movement in 20th-century literature.Historical periods rarely break into neat divisions, but Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times book website and current critic for NBC's Weekend Today in New York, makes a solid case for 1922 as the climacteric in which the modern era beganmodern, that is to say, in the sense of literary and artistic modernism. His four cases in pointVirginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrenceproduced significant, even definitive work that year. Perhaps most significantly, Eliot published The Waste Land, forever altering the poetic landscape by showing that nightmare and saga could be brought to bear on the neurasthenic postwar present. Not that Eliot was the nicest of guys, and perhaps a certain meanness of spirit defines modernism as much as any literary trope. As Goldstein writes, "Eliot often dealt in very narrow, very selective truth. Many of those who knew Eliot welldid not trust him." Though 1922 was also the year in which the much-admired Marcel Proust died, Woolf took her cues from James Joyce and took as a challenge the need to "confront and pin down on paper the texture and vitality of a new landscape of the mind." Interestingly, Goldstein traces her evolution as having been sparked by a kind of imagined writer's block that led her to yield to what she called the "common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudice," and began to produce inventive, experimental books in a challenge that she trusted those readers to accept. Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars; though Lawrence is barely read these days, the others still hold up, and he brings fresh eyes to all of them. An engaging, lightly worn literary study, of a piece with Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (1971) in divining the origins of the modern. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
