Mark Oppenheimer
By Mark Oppenheimer
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Culture Scant Dishing From a Print Pooh-bah
Lives and Letters By Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $30 There is something poignant in reading a collection like this, one that comprises mainly long, discursive reviews of long, intelligent books about long-dead people. Our author is a notable man of letters, the former editor in chief of both Simon & Schuster…
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Culture And On The Seventh Day She Rested
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time By Judith Shulevitz Random House, 217 pages, $28 ‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography….
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Culture Sunny Side Down
Sunnyside By Glen David Gold Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95. Perhaps you’ll know where I am going with this review if I begin by saying that Glen David Gold’s last book was splendid. So many fiction writers begin small, writing about what they know, etching a fine portrait of a particular and familiar time and place,…
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Culture There’s Something in the Air
Atmospheric Disturbances By Rivka Galchen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $24. Having just finished “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Rivka Galchen’s first novel, I find myself strangely unable to stop thinking about “Bandits,” the last Elmore Leonard novel I read. This is not because the two novels are similar, but because they are so radically dissimilar. Reading…
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Culture Brownsville Boy
Alfred Kazin: A Biography By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 464 pages, $35. Of Alfred Kazin’s serried and august friends and enemies, people still know a lot: Irving Howe and Richard Hofstadter, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt — they all wrote grand books that will long outlive them, or…
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Culture Scrapbook Inquiry
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25. Given her belief in the instability of knowledge, Janet Malcolm is, on principle, always at a loss for clear answers. Instead, she has mastered the finely honed question. In “The Silent Woman,” what interested Malcolm — and the happily implicated reader…
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Culture Susan Sontag: Juggler of the Moral and the Aesthetic
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches By Susan Sontag, Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. In his foreword to “At the Same Time,” the new collection of essays and speeches by his mother, the late Susan Sontag, David Rieff writes: “It is sometimes said of my…
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Culture Channeling Kafka in Buenos Aires
The Ministry of Special Cases By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $25. Nathan Englander’s new novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” begins on a dark night in a dangerous time: Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on one another’s space. The headstones were packed tight, the bodies underneath elbow…
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