It’s an image most Westerners recognize immediately: A lone man standing in the middle of a five-lane street, blocking a line of tanks. Single-handedly, “Tank Man” prevented the tanks from advancing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Tank Man was one of more than a million Chinese students from universities across the country’s capital who converged on the square in April of 1989, demanding democratic reform. The resulting stand-off between students and the government lasted a month and a half and, eventually, led to a military crackdown. As many as 3,600 students died and more than twice that number sustained injuries.

The picture of “Tank Man”—taken by photographer Jeff Widener of the Associated Press—was one of the most famous stories captured during the confrontation. Now, issued to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, comes another compelling story: Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang. Full Story »

It sits at the core of the American Dream: the idea that, through pluck and hard work, anyone can succeed. Horatio Alger called that kind of person the “self-made man.”

And according to Malcom Gladwell, it’s all a bunch of malarkey. 

In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell explodes the myth of the self-made person. “No one makes it alone,” he says.

“We tell rags to riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds,” Gladwell says. While inspiring, such stories are deeply flawed because a person’s success has less to do with what they’re like than with where they’re from.

“The values of the world we inhabit, and the people we surround ourselves with, has a profound effect on who we are,” he says. Full Story »

Do you have what it takes?

That’s the basic question that drives Ben Sherwood’s book The Survivors Club. In a crisis, what determines whether a person survives? “Why do some people live and others die?” Sherwood wondered. “How do certain people make it through the most difficult trials while others don’t?”

The reasons, of course, vary—but they’re also quite surprising.

In The Survivors Club, Sherwood, a best-selling author and award-winning journalist, delves into the science of survival. He talks to survival experts, doctors, psychologists, training instructors, rescuers, and researchers in an attempt to find out just exactly what “it” is for a clearer sense of what it takes to survive. Full Story »

Sam Smith:

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting.

Brian Angliss:

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

I’m not done with this book, but it’s been an interesting read thus far. Harris chronicles a long list of atrocities committed in the name of faith, with an understandable focus on the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While it took me a long time to put aside my own biases (I’m an animist neo-pagan) and actually be able to read the book at all, I’ve found it an illuminating if occasionally frustrating read. Full Story »

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. Full Story »

Dirk Wittenborn’s exploration of the drug culture—not the flashy counter-culture of the 1960s but the mainstream medicate-every-problem culture that arose in the 1980s—is at once a biting indictment of social values and a touching portrait of an unfulfilled family.

Wittenborn’s Pharmakon manages to do all this and more.

The story begins at the crossroads where pharmacology first meets psychology amidst the crisp idealism of Eisenhower-era America. The nation, reveling in postwar peace and prosperity, promises potentiality—a potentiality that whitewashes the individual melancholy of the Friedrich family. Yale psychology professor William Friedrich, nagged by the fact that his personal potential hasn’t yet blossomed, suddenly, he finds himself fast-tracked toward success when he and his research partner discover a drug that can make everybody happy. Full Story »

I love plants; in fact, i prefer the company of plants to that of people and i consider our green companions the higher life form.  So when i saw Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (Oliver Morton) staring at me from a shelf in the bookstore, i caved.  I didn’t even need the jacket blurbs making statements like, “A book that may reorder the way you think about the world…” (The Economist).  I was after the advertised “…complete biography of the earth through the lens of this mundane and most important of processes [photosynthesis].”  My expectations were high.  Mr. Morton exceeded them with massive amounts of historical and scientific information rendered in rich prose.

Full Story »

Orcs by Stan Nicholls is too much of a good thing. Perhaps because the book is a promotional tool as much as a literary experience.

Orcs contains three of Nicholls’ novels, Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder, and Warriors of the Tempest, packaged together into a handsome bundle that’s currently being pushed at the major book chains in advance of the 2009 release of Nicholls’ next round of Orc books. Orcs also contains a short story that serves as a prequel to the novels, plus a lengthy author interview.

My plan was to read one of the three novels in the omnibus, go on to something else, then come back to the other pieces at some undetermined point in the future.

The Orcs had other ideas.

Full Story »

Ask Baby Boomers where they were when they heard President Kennedy had been assassinated. Ask Gen-Xers where they were when they heard about the Challenger explosion. Ask Americans where they were when they heard about 9/11.

Every generation has one: an event so monumental that it, in part, defines that generation—an event so big everyone stops to watch and listen and sometimes cry. Pearl Harbor…Hiroshima…the moon landing….

Joe Garner’s modern classic We Interrupt This Broadcast captures these moments and more—and now, reissued in a Tenth Anniversary Edition, there’s literally an entire CD more. Full Story »

Mike Sheehan:

I’m reading Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy (Disinformation, 2008). Beckerman, who proudly boasts that Hunter Thompson called him a “morbid little bastard,” is an engaging, sharp, equal-opportunity ballbuster who revels in taking to task extremists of the “loony left” and ”rabid right” infecting American sociopolitics. Armed with factoids, anecdotes and amusing personal experiences (such as his brief encounter with Rev. Jerry Falwell), he gleefully skewers self-righteous ignoramuses on both sides from his perch in the middle.  While his distracting sexual braggadocio and gratuitous profanities betray his age (he’s in his mid-20’s), he’s clearly on his way to becoming a top satirist.  One to watch.  His official site: Marty Beckerman. Full Story »

It takes him ninety-one pages, but Larry McMurty finally articulates the problem that plagues his newest memoir, Books.

“Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader,” he writes, “and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy? How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop?”

McMurtry’s rhetorical question seems to lift a millstone from around his neck, because the memoir gets more readable as the book goes on. But to enjoy the lightened load, a reader has to make it to page ninety-one in the first place—which looks deceptively easy given the cavalcade of short chapters. (Page ninety-one is, indeed, the first page of chapter thirty-four.) Books with such short chapters typically fly by. Full Story »

I am a sucker for a snappy book cover, and the cover for Paul Auster’s new novella, Man in the Dark, is about as snappy as I’ve seen in a long time.

But, as you may recall, there’s a well-worn adage about books and covers.

Man in the Dark, a thin volume only eight-and-a-half inches tall and not quite six inches wide, caught my eye with its leafy, mulchy , concretey artwork, beautifully embossed and glossed and splashed with just the right dash of stars-and-stripes color.

It’s hard to capture an impression. But the book made one. The text on the inside flap drew me in even more. This cover had me, book, first line, and sinker.

I should really, really know better by now.

Man in the Dark hardly delivers on anything its cover promises.

That said, the novella is a quiet, elegant exploration of the loneliness that comes from physical and emotional isolation. It’s a beautiful little book (its cover notwithstanding). Full Story »

“War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin’,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest once said.

While that might seem like a statement of the obvious in the context of the American Civil War, the topic of death and the war has largely gone unexplored. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust is the first in-depth examination of the nation’s most intimate experience with death.

And although the subject is grim, the book is fascinating—not only for what it tells us about mid-nineteenth century America but also because of the light it sheds on us today.

Full Story »

Once known as “The Dark Continent,” Africa boasted a romantic reputation to Westerners as an unknown place of mystery and intrigue. The moniker still holds true today, although for a different reason: Most Americans know so little about current affairs on the continent that news from African countries might as well be struggling to escape a black hole.

Fortunately, Immaculée Ilibagiza’s memoir, Left To Tell, serves as a light in the darkness—even if the darkness it illuminates is among the darkest in modern history. Full Story »

For a guy who’s been dead for nearly four hundred years, it’s pretty amazing that Shakespeare is still cranking out the hits.

And I’m not talking about great productions of his classic plays. I’m not talking about recently discovered “lost manuscripts.” I’m talking brand-spanking-new plays.

That’s what John Reed has cooked up in All the World’s a Grave, a new tragedy by William Shakespeare.

With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare’s own words and characters into an entirely new play.

Full Story »

If you are what you read, it is indeed evident that our cast of characters is composed of both scholars and rogues. . .

Chris Mackowski:

All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare by John Reed (Plume, 2008). Take all the best plot ingredients from Shakespeare’s greatest plays, cut and paste the Bard’s own language, keep all the insights into human behavior, and mix creatively — the result is Reed’s invigorating re-envisioning of Shakespeare, written by Shakespeare himself. Full Story »

Grab a walking stick, sling on a backpack, grab a notebook, and don your pith helmet. Keri Smith and her inventive new book want you to go exploring in an effort to free your creativity.

How to be an Explorer of the World: Portable Art Life Museum challenges readers to look at the world around them with fresh eyes. “Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles,” Smith writes.

In that vein, Smith’s book reads like a primer on how to capture everyday wonder. Full Story »

When David Foster Wallace climbed aboard John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” media caravan in the early days of the 2000 presidential primary season, he hoped to understand why McCain generated so much excitement, so much attention, so much hope. In fact, Wallace was amazed by “the enormous hopes and enthusiasm [McCain’s] generating in press and voters alike.”

Much has changed in the past eight years. McCain, the maverick “anticandidate” who peddled change and hope, who raged against the Washington establishment, now is the Washington establishment. As the 2008 republican nominees, his current campaign lacks the spontaneity and access of his first bid for the White House, and “Straight Talk” has been replaced by on-message scripts written by political marketers. The hope is gone.

And Wallace is dead, victim of an apparent suicide earlier this month. Full Story »

Running and writing may be polar opposite activities.

Writing requires long sedentary hours of deep thought; running, by its very nature, typifies motion, yet most runners don’t spend their time thinking about much of anything in particular as they run.

Both activities require solitude, although a runner may race with hundreds of other entrants and a writer requires an audience.

So perhaps running and writing seem like odd bedfellows for a book, but then again, Haruki Murakami has made his reputation by stretching boundaries and asking readers to look at the world in different ways.

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, takes a different approach than his usual fiction. Running is a memoir about the two things in Murakami’s life that best define him. Murakami tries to get inside his own head to explain the appeal, and the importance, of running and how that impacts his work as a writer. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor,” Murakami explains. Full Story »

The Battle of Gettysburg certainly ranks as one of America’s great stories—but how it became such a great story is a story unto itself.

That’s the focus of Thomas Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory.

Does the world need one more book about the battle of Gettysburg? (Well, there will always be a market for one, so maybe that’s a moot question….) In the case of These Honored Dead, published in 2003, the answer was—and is—yes. Desjardin’s book is a must-have for anyone who seriously considers him/herself a Civil War buff. But perhaps more important, it’s an indispensable case-study for anyone interested in understanding the forces that shape public opinion as it evolves into historical record.

And with everything that’s gone on in the last eight or so years, that kind of insight could be particularly useful. Full Story »