Review by New York Times Review
WIT'S end By James Geary. (Norton, $23.95.) Geary takes an unusual - , approach to writing about wit. The chapter on verbal repartee is written as a dramatic dialogue. For the neuroscience of wit, he delivers a scientific paper. A quirky approach for a quirky topic, freak kingdom By Timothy Denevi. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Beyond the drugs and gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson was a fierce opponent of corruption and the authoritarian tendencies of political leaders. This is what most motivated his writing, Denevi argues in a new biography of the bombastic writer, the new order By Karen Bender. (Counterpoint, $26.) A finalist for the National Book Award, lauded for her short stories, Bender returns with a collection that reflects America's new reality. One story takes place after a school shooting, another centers on a woman grappling with unemployment, muck By Dror Burstein, translated by Gabriel Levin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Burstein is one of the most experimental and exciting Israeli novelists writing today. His new book is a reworking of the Book of Jeremiah tinged with much surreality - there are talking dogs and cunneiform tattoos. heirs of the founders By H. W. Brands. (Doubleday, $30.) Brands, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, has turned to the generation of American political leaders who arrived in the wake of the founding fathers and dominated the first half of the 19th century. The intertwined lives of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John Calhoun are examined for all the ways they helped shape the young nation. "One of the odd effects of this exhausting and endless news cycle, for me anyway, is that I am always looking for something else to read. I'm not looking to be distracted so much as absorbed in bold, ambitious books (fiction, typically) filled with big ideas and imaginative characters. You can't get much bigger or bolder than John Irving's a prayer for owen meany, starting with its tiny, eponymous hero - barely 5 feet tall, fully grown - whose high-pitched utterings Irving renders solely in all-caps. 'THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COINCIDENCE,' Owen declares, matterof-factly, staking out his position on one of the existential questions at the heart of the book, set in small-town New Hampshire in the 1950s and '60s: Are our lives governed by fate or by chance? T am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice,' the novel's narrator - and Owen's best friend - says in the book's opening sentence. Months after finishing A Prayer for Owen Meany,' I find myself suffering a similar fate." - JONATHAN MAHLER, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, ON WHAT HE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Upon entering a restaurant and seeing a former spouse, Groucho Marx quipped, Marx spots the ex. In Groucho's spontaneous inversion of a trite phrase, Geary discerns a manifestation of wit as a mental power that breaks through sterile habits of thought, so opening up new imaginative horizons. Though readers might expect wit in a comedian, Geary recognizes wit as an intellectual force that does far more than amuse. As the capacity to fruitfully fuse radically different ideas, wit guides visual artists, scientists, philosophers, dramatists, and priests. Geary indeed underscores the versatility of wit by casting his chapters in various genres one, for instance, in the heroic couplets of neoclassical poetry; another in the sober reflections of a sermon; another in the scintillating dialogue of a satiric play; yet another in the rigorous logic of a scientific article. Readers roaring with laughter at outrageous puns one moment find themselves carefully assessing psychological studies the next, only to then spin into the wild linguistic creativity of jive. Geary's own puckish style mischievous and unpredictable itself sparkles with wit as it provides the thread stringing together these variegated beads, all strikingly different, yet all remarkably similar in illuminating how wit exposes hidden truths, awakens dormant capacities. An exhilarating romp, entertaining and enlightening.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A playful book that celebrates all forms of wit.In his latest, Geary (Deputy Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism/Harvard Univ.; I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, 2011, etc.) discusses many of the forms wit can take. To add to the fun, he writes each chapter in a style that mimics the topic under discussion. A chapter that compares wit to fencing is a "dramatic dialogue" between philosopher Denis Diderot and literary theorist Madame de Stal, who says that, to be witty, one must have what is known in fencing as a riposte, "a quick, robust return thrust." Another chapter, written as a scientific paper, examines "how wit might work in the brain" and includes footnotes, figures, tables, and diagrams. Geary has great fun with the many different styles: an essay written in the manner of 17th-century English playwright Joseph Addison's Spectator essays on "the nature of wit"; a section written in jive; a poem in the form of a rap song; an art history lecture that states that "seeing is an interpretive act," such as when one detects a human face in a rock outcropping; even a sermon. The use of different styles for each chapter is sometimes too clever for its own good, but one is likely to come away from the book convinced of many of the author's arguments, as when he demonstrates that "puns are not wit's lowest form but its highest expression." Many of the anecdotes are hilarious, as when Geary notes that, after a Columbia University philosopher stated in a lecture that no language exists in which two positives make a negative, another professor muttered from the back of the hall, "Yeah, yeah.""To see clearly, look askance," Geary advises. He heeds his own advice to entertaining effect. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
