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Books of The Times: ‘You Know That Chicken Is Chicken, Right?’

When you sit down to eat sushi or grilled sea bass, do you stop and think about Nemo the cartoon fish and his chatty little friends? When you order Chicken McNuggets at McDonald’s, do you picture Chicken Little fretting that the sky might fall? When ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  19 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Michael Pollan,  Jonathan Safran Foer,  Peter Singer,  Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Cesar Chavez

Books of The Times: Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy, its ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  14 Nov 2009

Related Topics: John McCain,  Sarah Palin,  Barack Obama,  U.S. Republican Party,  U.S. Democratic Party

Books of The Times: In a Sketchy Hall of Mirrors, Nabokov Jousts With Death and Reality

Given the shape of Vladimir Nabokov’s own life, it’s hardly surprising that death and its cousin loss permeated his fiction like a potent but noxious perfume. Nabokov’s wealthy, aristocratic family was forced to flee Russia in the wake of the ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  9 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Vladimir Nabokov,  Alfred A. Knopf,  Ernest Hemingway

Books of The Times: ‘Amaze Me,’ Mother Said, So That’s What She Did

In “Lit,” her searing new memoir, Mary Karr recalls that she and her impossible mother used to play a game, when they were driving or her mother was bored or sprawled on her bed with a hangover: “Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me my ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  5 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Whitbread

The Obama the Campaign Knew

One year after Barack Obama was voted into the White House, does the public want to relive the marathon 21-month campaign that began long before the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire and churned on through the seemingly endless calendar of primaries and ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  2 Nov 2009

Related Topics: Barack Obama,  David Plouffe,  George W. Bush,  White House,  Hendrik Hertzberg

Books of The Times: From John Irving, Father and Son Swimming in a Vortex of Chaos

“Last Night in Twisted River” showcases all of John Irving’s biggest liabilities as a writer: a tricked-up, gimmicky plot; cartoony characters; absurd contrivances; cheesy sentimentality; and a thoroughly preposterous ending. And yet, at the same time, ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  26 Oct 2009

Related Topics: John Irving

Books of The Times: Two Storytellers, Singing the Blues

Before he emerged in the 1980s as one of Britain’s most talented and acclaimed young novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro was an aspiring singer-songwriter, an admirer of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who played in British folk clubs and the Paris Métro. His ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  22 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Kazuo Ishiguro,  Bob Dylan,  Leonard Cohen,  O. Henry

Review: 'The Good Soldiers' vividly captures the blood, violence and moments of humanity experienced by a battalion in the Iraq surge

names like Route Pluto, Dead Girl Road and Route Predators, the last of which "was constantly being seeded with hidden bombs." The Iraq war in David Finkel's heart-stopping new book is not the Bush administration's misguided exercise in hubris, ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES, The San Jose Mercury News,  21 Oct 2009

Related Topics: George W. Bush,  David Finkel,  The Pentagon,  Saddam Hussein

Books of The Times: Boy to Man: Amazing Adventures

In one of the funniest and most resonant essays in this collection, Michael Chabon writes about the evolution or devolution of Lego. How the basic Lego colors he remembers from his youth red, white, blue, yellow, green and black have given way, in his ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  18 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Michael Chabon,  Harry Potter,  Allen Iverson,  Ferrari,  Philip Roth

Books of The Times: They’ll Take Manhattan, Isle of Whimsy and Virtual Reality

In one of the many marijuana-fueled conversations in this tedious, overstuffed novel, the hero Perkus Tooth asserts that it’s “common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares.” And another character named Oona replies ...

From MICHIKO KAKUTANI, The New York Times,  12 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Jonathan Lethem,  Zadie Smith,  Marlon Brando,  eBay Inc.

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