The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America
Jacob Riis, an ambitious carpenter from a rural town in Denmark who became famous for his photojournalistic expos� of the squalor of Manhattan�s tenements, abandoned his homeland after being spurned by a local beauty, and spent several years as a tramp and itinerant worker in Buffalo and western Pennsylvania. This biography vividly captures that time, during which Riis was constantly on the verge of exhaustion and destitution. His experience of poverty shaped his later attempts to humanize it, in the stark images and text of his seminal book �How the Other Half Lives.� Buk-Swienty esteems his subject without idolizing him, noting that Riis sought to improve the living conditions of the poor in part to stave off anarchy and a Communist revolution.Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND ASIN:0316057584 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: FromThe New YorkerREVIEW: The seventeenth and final novel in Rankin�s Inspector Rebus series is set during the Edinburgh detective�s final week at work. (He is nearing the mandatory retirement age of sixty.) The novel begins with a dissident Russian poet beaten to death, and expands to take in small-time drug dealers, cloak-wearing women who act in walking mystery tours of the city, international oligarchs, and Scottish bank executives. A contemporary artist who makes sound installations may be in league with politicians agitating for Scotland�s independence. Rebus is as gruffly mischievous as ever, and the novel ends in a cliffhanger scene with his arch-enemy that will have readers gasping into the blank space that follows. Rankin�s work is crime fiction at its most consuming, cerebral best.Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND ASIN:1416572104 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: FromThe New YorkerREVIEW: Kureishi�s latest novel returns to the subject of immigrant life in London�a theme that brought him early success, with the screenplay for �My Beautiful Laundrette� and the novel �The Buddha of Suburbia��but adds to it the jaundiced outlook of middle age. Jamal, an outwardly respectable psychoanalyst, harbors dark secrets, which generate the novel�s thrillerlike plot, and darker desires. Kureishi fulsomely depicts the sexual frustrations and adventures of a middle-aged man: �the underbelly�or potbelly, more like�of British suburban sexuality,� as one of Jamal�s many disaffected ex-girlfriends puts it. And therapy, an experience that a patient compares to �being stirred inside by a huge spoon,� provides Kureishi with fertile ground for caricature. At heart, however, this is a novel about guilt and retribution, as Jamal comes to terms with his past and realizes the terrible truth that �to conceal is to reveal.�Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND ASIN:0810972980 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: FromThe New YorkerREVIEW: Because Vanity Fair ran from 1913 to 1936, ceased publication, and then resumed in 1983, this dazzling panoply of twentieth-century fame has some striking absences: no Elvis, no Marilyn, no Beatles. The two resulting eras are presented not chronologically but mostly as a series of then-and-now diptychs: Clark Gable opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Fred and Adele Astaire opposite the Olsen twins, H. G. Wells opposite Tom Wolfe. (It�s presumably happenstance that Richard Perle is opposite Goebbels.) Comparing the two eras is hard. The later one is more excessive, but it often undercuts its own grandiosity with humor or menace, making earlier celebrity seem more innocent. If Edward Steichen�s Isadora Duncan against the Parthenon is the epochal image of the first run, Annie Leibovitz�s multi-person tableaux, as static and riddling as allegorical paintings, typify the current style. Occasionally, a subject (Salvador Dali) or a photographer (Horst P. Horst) had the longevity to figure in both periods.Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND