Feature

William McGowan

William McGowan is the author of Coloring the News and Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka. His book about The New York Times, Gray Lady Down, will be published this fall.

Captain Sir by Edgar Rice (DaCapo Press, $21). This compulsively readable biography describes the life and times of scholar-adventurer and tantric adept Sir Richard Burton. Rice credits Burton’s anthropological and literary investigations of Hindu and Muslim cultures—including a translation of the Kama Sutra—with having laid the base for much 19th- and 20th-century scholarship and exploration.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon, $10). This slim novel is like its teenage anti-heroine: It’s thin, beautiful, and breathes with the rhythms of budding female sexuality. Both narrator and reader watch helplessly as, against a backdrop of colonial decadence and Indochinese allure, passion merges with rank prejudice to doom an affair still able to haunt decades later.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Vintage, $14). Think early-’80s yuppies and their godhead, David Letterman, represent the roots of today’s seemingly ubiquitous Irony Culture? You’ll think again when you read Richard Yates’ 1961 novel, one of the earliest explorations in American letters of the “ironic pretender” and the corrosive power of the smirky “so bad it’s good” mentality.

An Historical Relation of Ceylon by John Knox (out of print). Knox was a 17th-century sailor who was shipwrecked on the Ceylonese coast and held for nearly 20 years in the upcountry stronghold of the Buddhist king of Kandy. Knox’s account, one of Britain’s first best-sellers, describes a kingdom that considered itself the “protector” of Buddhism but regularly executed enemies by letting royal elephants stomp them to death.

Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (Touchstone, $14). Cool hipsters, bug-eyed religious fanatics, and other edge freaks mingle with amazing narrative precision in millennial Jerusalem. The novel makes the Arab-Israeli conflict understandable in a profoundly psychological and political fashion, even as it shows how the struggle’s complexities undermine easy, binary thinking.

Holy Land

Recommended

Blaze kills 39 at migrant detention center in Mexico
 Rescuers work to take the injured and the corpses of the victims out of the premises after a fire at an immigration detention center in Northern Mexico
tragedy at the border

Blaze kills 39 at migrant detention center in Mexico

U.S. to crack down on guns going south, Mexico works to stop fentanyl heading north
A CBP agent at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro, California.
Stopping the Flow

U.S. to crack down on guns going south, Mexico works to stop fentanyl heading north

Lebanon to reverse daylight savings decision
Clock tower in Lebanon.
really, what time is it?

Lebanon to reverse daylight savings decision

The extreme weather events of 2023
An illustration of a tornado and wind-swept palm trees
In depth

The extreme weather events of 2023

Most Popular

How to watch 5 planets align in the night sky on Tuesday
Moon, Jupiter, Venus.
skyline

How to watch 5 planets align in the night sky on Tuesday

5 toons about Trump's possible indictment
Political Cartoon
Feature

5 toons about Trump's possible indictment

Florida principal forced to resign over Michelangelo's David display
The statue of 'David' by Michelangelo.
Controversy Over David

Florida principal forced to resign over Michelangelo's David display