A columnist for The Nation, Eric Alterman is most recently the author of It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (Back Bay Books, $14).
Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (Viking Press, $14). The best book ever about the contemporary mores of elite American journalism was written in the mid-19th century by a Frenchman. The more things change…
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The Counterlife by Phillip Roth (Vintage Books, $14). Roth hit his stride as never before with a book—presented as a kind of postmodern afterthought to the famed Zuckerman trilogy—that looks deep into the hearts and minds of men and finds just more penises. Brilliant, funny, deep, and dirty. A perfect book, really.
Rabbit, Run by John Updike (Ballantine Books, $14). Is it possible to write the great American novel anymore? No, the country is too diverse and its culture too self-contradictory. But John Updike gets an A for effort for spending nearly 40 years trying—as well as for leaving in the dirty (racist, sexist, imperialist) parts.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, $13). Not everything in life that’s great has to be high-minded. I almost picked Flaubert’s Sentimental Education here, which is undoubtedly a “better” book, but nowhere near as much fun. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I laughed, I cried, I wished it would never end.
The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume I by Robert Caro (Knopf, $35). This is volume one of a proposed history that will likely run up to more than 4,000 pages. Yet each page is meticulously researched, beautifully written, and frequently both astounding and moving at the same time. A perfect marriage of writer to subject and an archetypal work of historical reconstruction, and written by a nonhistorian. It edges out Caro’s other masterpiece, The Power Broker, only because of its wayyy larger-than-life subject.
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