Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Hugh Thomas’s The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America.
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More Likely Benumbed Than Spellbound
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, history, hugh thomas, jonathan yardley, nonfiction, spain, washington post
Antipoetic Phenomena
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Benjamin Taylor’s volume of Saul Bellow’s letters.
In the march of what we like to believe is progress, we win some and we lose some. We now enjoy the convenience and ease of instantaneous electronic communication, which on the whole is good, but we no longer write letters, which is not. This by now is a commonplace, so there is no point in laboring it, but “Saul Bellow: Letters” is close to, if not exactly, the last of its kind. The long history of published collections of correspondence, from Lord Chesterfield to Abraham Lincoln to Virginia Woolf to Flannery O’Connor, is coming to an end. The loss, as Bellow’s letters remind us, is very much our own.
Posted in Reading
Tagged benjamin taylor, book review, correspondence, jonathan yardley, saul bellow, usa
Impersonal Immensity
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Olga Grushin’s The Line.
Her depiction of the Soviet state is as withering in “The Line” as it was in “The Dream Life of Sukhanov,” and the stultifying atmosphere is the same, but there are important differences. The central character in the first novel is a talented artist who sacrifices his principles for the easy life of an apparatchik, while the artist in “The Line” is Sergei, now in his late 40s, a musician whose ambitions to play the violin were crushed when, as a boy, he was forced by the state to take up the tuba and spend his days and nights playing official music “of a crude, simple nature — brass exclamations punctuating anthems and marches, not worth his time, not worth his breath, not worth the very air he sent vibrating.” Sukhanov’s capitulation to the system is voluntary and cynical, while Sergei’s is coerced yet does not quite kill his boyish idealism.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, jonathan yardley, olga grushin, russia, usa, washington post
Cowardice and Valor
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers.
It is a novel about many things, all of them interesting and explored by Vásquez with acute moral sensitivity, but at its core is one of the greatest of all literary themes: betrayal.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, colombia, jonathan yardley, juan gabriel vasquez, washington post
History of Abuse
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games.
When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. It is easy to find in the past justifications or excuses for doing what one wants. It is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient they may seem.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, history, jonathan yardley, margaret macmillan, politics, usa, washington post
Lost Capital
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, jonathan yardley, politics, usa, ward just, washington dc, washington post
A Tricky Hand
Having recently re-read Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” I am struck by the parallels and affinities between it and “Closing Time.” As boys both Wright and Queenan were poor, often to the point of having little or nothing to eat; both had bad relationships with their father; both were driven to read at a very early age, read everything they could, and set their hearts on the writing life. It is possible to rise up from poverty, but it takes a rare soul to do so, and a force of will that those of us who are more fortunate are ill-equipped to understand.
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Joe Queenan’s Closing Time.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, joe queenan, jonathan yardley, memoir, usa, washington post
Depths of Dementia
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Richard Mason’s Natural Elements.
Posted in Reading
Tagged book review, jonathan yardley, richard mason, uk, washington post