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.
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.
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.
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.
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Richard Mason’s Natural Elements.
Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man.
The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author’s opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition.
The reader knows at the outset that Poland and France soon will fall and that millions will die, including many of those whom we meet in these pages, and Furst means us to feel frustration and anger as the prevailing idée fixe opens the way to Hitler’s acts of aggression.
Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw.
Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History.
Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Antonio Skarmeta’s The Dancer and the Thief. On The Diane Rehm Show guest host Susan Page interviews the Chilean author.
Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post reviews Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.
The enthusiasm with which the venerable firm of HarperCollins is promoting this massive deadweight of a novel, and the money that it’s putting where its mouth is, leaves one to ponder once again the eternally mysterious ways of the book-publishing industry.