Founding Faith
by Steven Waldman (Random House, $26)
Steven Waldman’s valuable new book might overturn some misconceptions about how America’s Founders viewed faith, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Though Waldman’s colloquial prose style can be distracting, he “takes pains” to underscore the First Amendment’s ambiguities and reminds us that clashes among Puritans, Baptists, Catholics, and Quakers were much on the minds of the Founders when they separated church and state.
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Daydream Believers
by Fred Kaplan (Wiley, $26)
Any dissection of the Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders is bound to feel “terribly familiar” in its details, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. What sets Fred Kaplan’s book apart is that the Slate.com columnist grounds his argument in a fresh idea. Team Bush, he says, mistakenly assumed that U.S. power had expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union when, in fact, the end of the Cold War only weakened America’s alliances.
Windy City
by Scott Simon (Random House, $25)
Scott Simon’s new novel rates as a must-read for “city-politics fiends,” said Don Oldenburg in USA Today. When a Chicago mayor is found dead in his office, an appealing Indian-born stand-in works valiantly to quiet the “delectable political chaos” that ensues. Though Simon’s descriptions of his native city can become “too much of a good thing,” the NPR host consistently finds some clever new turn to draw you back in.
Superclass
by David Rothkopf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
David Rothkopf’s portrait of today’s global power elite could have been a hit if the former U.S. undersecretary of commerce had listed the 6,000 people that he says he has identified as the world’s most influential wheeler-dealers, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. While it’s mildly interesting to instead learn how this tightknit group thinks, a reader begins to suspect that the chief purpose of Superclass is attracting superclass clients to Rothkopf’s consulting business.
Worlds at War
by Anthony Pagden (Random House, $35)
This “troubling” book from UCLA professor Anthony Pagden hardly deserves to be called history, said Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun. To Pagden, the Western world has for 25 centuries been “fighting for justice against an unjust and unreasonable East.” Instead of re-examining the myths that encrust the major collisions between the two cultures, “he seems to want to revive the power of those myths.”
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Who owns Gaza? Israel's occupation plansThe Explainer Egypt, Israel and Britain have ruled the beleaguered territory
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Savages: a tragi-comedy set in a 'quirky handcrafted world'The Week Recommends This new animated film by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Claude Barras is undeniably political, but it has a hopeful message
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Why 'faceless bots' are interviewing job huntersIn The Spotlight Artificial intelligence is taking over a crucial part of recruitment
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”