Five myths about cutting the deficit By William G. Gale
Sunday, November 28, 2010;
Suddenly, debt commissions --and commissioners, and reports, and even draft reports -- are everywhere. The president's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is due to vote on its final recommendations by Dec. 1 (its co-chairs having put forward a draft plan earlier this month). And earlier this month, another commission -- the Bipartisan Policy Center's Debt Reduction Task Force led by economist Alice Rivlin and former senator Pete Domenici -- reported its own plan.
Budgets may be boring, but the stakes before us are exceedingly high. As we go about reducing the deficit, who will pay which taxes? How will we defend our country? And how will we treat our elderly? Unfortunately, questionable thinking and outright distortions by critics from across the political spectrum are getting in the way of these and other difficult decisions.
1. The United States is on the verge of a fiscal crisis.
Not really. Greece faced a fiscal crisis earlier this year when it had to slash its deficit immediately or risk capital flight and economic collapse. Ireland is in the same straits now, and Portugal may soon be headed that way. The United States faces a very different situation. Long-term interest rates on government debt are low. Investors are not fleeing U.S. capital markets; instead, America continues to be a magnet for capital from around the world.
Of course, the lack of an imminent crisis hardly means there is no problem. If our current policies continue, by 2020 net interest payments on the national debt will exceed $1 trillion, 20 percent of federal revenues, annually - enough for rating agencies to downgrade the quality of U.S. debt, which in turn would raise borrowing costs and increase the deficit further.
Even in the absence of a crisis or a downgrade, the effects of persistent deficits are substantial. For example, the International Monetary Fund has found that for every 10 percentage-point increase in the national debt relative to the size of the overall economy, economic growth in an industrialized country will fall by 0.15 percentage points.
That may not sound like much, but the United States is on a path for its debt-to-GDP ratio to rise from about 40 percent in 2008 to about 90 percent in 2020. That means that our annual growth rate could fall by more than 0.75 percentage points - with major negative consequences for employment and standards of living.
Just because there is no crisis right now, however, doesn't mean we can afford to wait. If we address our fiscal challenges sooner, we can make gradual - if difficult - changes. If we wait too long, we really will be facing a crisis, and the necessary adjustments will be far more severe and sudden.
2. The deficit commissions should propose reforms that are politically viable.
No solution to this problem is going to be politically popular. But even if Congress disregards the current proposals, dismissing them as politically unfeasible, that will not mean the commissions' efforts will have failed.
By publicly proposing deficit solutions, these commissions already have fulfilled their main function: to start a serious national conversation. While the combination of spending cuts and tax reforms recently suggested by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission - may not even win the support of all the panel's members, they might induce the commission's anti-tax and pro-spending forces to release their own proposals. This would allow voters and policymakers to compare plan against plan - and that is exactly the discussion the country needs to have.
Any eventual solution to the deficit problem will involve measures currently considered politically impossible. For example, anti-tax advocates have objected that the co-chairs' plan would constitute a tax increase - even though Congress would raise more revenue by doing nothing for the next 10 years than it would by enacting the plan. Social Security supporters, meanwhile, have heaped criticism on Bowles and Simpson for their proposal to raise the early and normal retirement ages by one year per generation for the next two generations - even though the average lifespan will probably increase even faster, so retirement periods would still grow.
Objecting to these proposals without proposing alternatives is not productive.
3. Social Security has a surplus, so it shouldn't be cut.
Supporters of Social Security argue that the program's 2010 surplus, combined with its projected 27-year solvency, should exempt it from the budget axe.
But ruling out cuts is a bad idea. First, Social Security faces a long-term deficit. And even if the program were running a long-term surplus, the simple arithmetic of the overall fiscal situation dictates that everything - everything - should be on the table.
Simply reducing earmarks; limiting waste, fraud and abuse; or cutting back on government workers won't come close to solving the problem. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and net interest payments typically account for 70 percent of federal spending and are on course to account for 80 percent by 2020. Any serious effort on the spending side needs to address each of these items.
Medicaid and Medicare pose the biggest challenges to long-term fiscal conditions, of course, but defense cuts are also critical. (While we're on the topic of defense, it's worth noting that officials such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, have said that the deficit itself poses a threat to national security.)
Finally, keeping Social Security reform on the table isn't just good fiscal policy, it's good politics. It underscores the importance of shared sacrifice. If we are to find a solution that is politically sustainable, we cannot exempt large segments of society from pitching in.
4. We can balance the budget without raising taxes.
Although it is mathematically possible to balance the budget without raising taxes, it is impossible in a political sense.
Budget discipline works only when it is imposed on both sides of the ledger. In 1990 and 1993, the last time we faced a serious fiscal crunch, Congress did just that, slashing spending and raising taxes. In contrast, in 1981 and 2001, massive tax cuts did not lead to reduced spending, despite the hopes of those who espouse the "starve the beast" theory of fiscal reform.
Instead, the tax cuts were accompanied by big increases in spending, thus boosting the deficit from both sides. The logic is clear: If some politicians reward their constituents through tax cuts, other politicians will see no reason that they can't reward their own constituents through more spending. It is only when fiscal discipline is comprehensive and coordinated that it works and endures.
Moreover, we shouldn't balance the budget without tax increases - they are the only way to ensure that high-income households pay a fair share of the deficit burden. Without higher taxes as part of the fiscal reform package, middle- and low-income households - which tend to feel spending cuts most acutely - will end up bearing almost all of the burden.
The nation rapidly raised tax revenues and rates during World War II; for a long time, those rates persisted, and the economy performed well. Well-designed tax increases could help the economy and the budget now, too. We should cut the mortgage interest deduction, which is expensive and regressive and helped deepen the housing crisis. We should impose taxes on greenhouse gases, for revenue and for the environment. And we need to tax consumption, to reduce our propensity to overspend.
5. A new short-term stimulus would be fiscally irresponsible.
The Rivlin-Domenici plan proposes higher near-term deficits as a means of economic stimulus, to be followed by cuts down the line. Some may see this as Washington-style "business as usual" - always putting off cuts until tomorrow - but it makes sense economically. With the recovery stalling, spending more and taxing less now to get the economy going is perfectly consistent with the need for medium- and long-term fiscal discipline. A strong economy can do the budget a lot of good by boosting tax revenues and reducing spending on unemployment benefits and other need-based programs.
As always, there is a balancing act between immediate and longer-term concerns. Fiscal responsibility requires that we spend stimulus funds wisely on projects with the biggest bang for the buck. According to the Congressional Budget Office, these would include infrastructure spending, aid to the states, higher unemployment benefits, hiring credits and a payroll tax holiday.
The other key to a responsible stimulus package is timing. Short-term stimulus cannot become long-term policy. Congress should explicitly legislate an end date for any new stimulus and couple it with a medium-term deficit-reduction package. Together, these policies would do more to spur the economy and curb the deficit than either would alone.
William G. Gale is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
100 Notable Books of 2010 FICTION & POETRY
November 24, 2010
100 Notable Books of 2010 FICTION & POETRY
AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE. By David Goodwillie. (Scribner, $25.) A bombing unites a blogger and a beautiful eco-terrorist in this literary thriller, an exploration of what motivates radicalism in an age of disillusion.
ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings.
THE ASK. By Sam Lipsyte. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job is the protagonist of this darkly humorous satire, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.
BOUND. By Antonya Nelson. (Bloomsbury, $25.) For Nelson’s complacent heroine, the death of an estranged friend elicits memories of their reckless youth.
COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY. By Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Set in Nazi-occupied Europe, this novel, appearing only now in English, is a mid-century masterpiece by the centenarian Keilson, who served in the Dutch resistance.
DOUBLE HAPPINESS: Stories. By Mary-Beth Hughes. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Hughes likes to juxtapose her characters’ relative passivity with the knife edge of evil within or, more often, outside them.
FOREIGN BODIES. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) This nimble, entertaining homage to Henry James’s late work “The Ambassadors,” in which an American heads to Paris to retrieve a wayward son, brilliantly upends the theme, meaning and stylistic manner of its revered precursor.
FREEDOM. By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.
FUN WITH PROBLEMS: Stories. By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Stone’s collection.
GIRL BY THE ROAD AT NIGHT: A Novel of Vietnam. By David Rabe. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) In this tale of war and eros, two young people from opposite ends of the earth are caught up in events far beyond their control.
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST. By Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.
GREAT HOUSE. By Nicole Krauss. (Norton, $24.95.) In this tragic vision of a novel, Nadia, a writer in New York, faces a wrenching parting when a girl shows up to claim an enormous desk that has been in her safekeeping for decades.
HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE. By Charles Yu. (Pantheon, $24.) Yu wraps his lonely story of a time machine repairman in layers of gorgeous meta-science-fiction.
HOW TO READ THE AIR. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $25.95.) Mengestu’s own origins inform this tale of an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his parents.
I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME. By Per Petterson. Translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson. (Graywolf, $23.) This novel’s lonely Scandinavian protagonist grapples with divorce, death and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
ILUSTRADO. By Miguel Syjuco. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A murder mystery punctuated with serious philosophical musings, this novel traces 150 years of Filipino history, posing questions about identity and art, exile and duty.
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE. By Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $26.95.) Orringer’s protagonist is a Jewish architecture student in late-1930s Paris forced to return home to Hungary ahead of the Nazi invasion there.
LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP. By Lisa Robertson. (Coach House, paper, $14.95.) In these intellectual poems, the experimental curtains suddenly part to reveal clear, durable truth.
THE LIVING FIRE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010. By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $27.) Hirsch’s “living fire” is an irrational counterforce with which he balances his dignified quotidian.
THE LONG SONG. By Andrea Levy. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Levy’s high-spirited, ambitious heroine works on a plantation in the final days of slavery in Jamaica.
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.
THE LOTUS EATERS. By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The photojournalist heroine of Soli’s Vietnam War novel ponders whether those who represent war merely replicate its violence.
MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War. By Karl Marlantes. (El León Literary Arts/Atlantic Monthly, $24.95.) In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.
MEMORY WALL: Stories. By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?
MR. PEANUT. By Adam Ross. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.
THE NEAREST EXIT. By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) The C.I.A. spy in this thriller is sick of his trade’s duplicity, amorality and rootlessness.
THE NEW YORKER STORIES. By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $30.) This collection of tales dating back to 1974 lets readers imagine their way into a New Yorker fiction editor’s moment of discovery.
ONE DAY. By David Nicholls. (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls’s nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the halting romance of two children of the ’80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff.
THE PRIVILEGES. By Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $25.) In this contemporary morality tale, a family stumbles along, rich and dysfunctional, without ethical or moral responsibility.
ROOM. By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.
THE SAME RIVER TWICE. By Ted Mooney. (Knopf, $26.95.) In this nuanced literary thriller, a deal to acquire Soviet-era cultural artifacts puts a Parisian clothing designer and her filmmaker husband in peril.
SELECTED STORIES. By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) These stories, gathered from Trevor’s last four collections, are frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.
SHADOW TAG. By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.
SOLAR. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan’s funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist’s plans against global warming.
SOMETHING RED. By Jennifer Gilmore. (Scribner, $25.) Gilmore’s contemplative second novel explores the lost ideals and lingering illusions of a family once politically committed to bettering the world.
SOURLAND: Stories. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Oates explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way.
THE SPOT: Stories. By David Means. (Faber & Faber, $23.) Like Beckett, Means reveals a God-like inclination to see his characters as forsaken case studies.
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY. By Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $26.) Exhilarating prose illuminates the horrors of a future America in this satire.
THE SURRENDERED. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET. By David Mitchell. (Random House, $26.) Mitchell’s historical novel about a young Dutchman in Edo-era Japan is an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of an adventurous rescue tale.
THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT. By Cathleen Schine. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Two Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.
TO THE END OF THE LAND. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two friends are deeply involved with the same woman in this somber, haunting novel of love and loyalty in time of conflict, set in Israel between 1967 and 2000.
VIDA. By Patricia Engel. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Engel’s understated stories are told from the perspective of a daughter of Colombian immigrants.
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. By Jennifer Egan. (Knopf, $25.95.) In her centrifugal, unclassifiably elaborate narrative, Egan creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them.
WHAT BECOMES: Stories. By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Though the characters in her harrowing fourth collection buckle under the weight of misfortune, Kennedy can go from darkness to humor in a heartbeat.
WHITE EGRETS: Poems. By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection is intensely personal, an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth.
WILD CHILD: Stories. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) In these tales, Boyle continues his career-long interest in man’s vexed tussles with nature.
NONFICTION
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/Penguin, $32.95.) More than offering a backward look, this account of the disaster of 2008 helps explain today’s troubling headlines and might help predict tomorrow’s.
APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet. By Jennifer Homans. (Random House, $35.) The question of classical ballet’s very survival lies at the heart of this eloquent, truly definitive history, which traces dance across four centuries of wars and revolutions, both artistic and political.
BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women. By Rebecca Traister. (Free Press, $26.) A colorful, emotional argument that 2008 gave feminism a thrilling “new life.”
THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.) A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.
THE BRIDGE: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick. (Knopf, $29.95.) This study of Obama before he became president, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”
CHANGING MY MIND: Occasional Essays. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The quirky pleasures here are due in part to Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History. By Yunte Huang. (Norton, $26.95.) The urbane presentation of Earl Derr Biggers’s fictional Chinese sleuth, in print and in film, ran counter to the racism of his era.
CHRISTIANITY: The First Three Thousand Years. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. (Viking, $45.) MacCulloch traces the faith’s history through classical philosophy and Jewish tradition, fantastical visions and cold calculations, loving sacrifices and imperial ambitions.
CLEOPATRA: A Life. By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence.
COLONEL ROOSEVELT. By Edmund Morris. (Random House, $35.) The final volume of Morris’s monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt vividly covers the eventful nine years after he left office.
COMMON AS AIR: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. By Lewis Hyde. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hyde draws on the American founders for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.
CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Shapiro is particularly interested in what “the authorship question” says about successive generations of readers.
COUNTRY DRIVING: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Hessler chronicles the effects of an expanding road network on the rapidly changing lives of individual Chinese.
THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.
EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. By S. C. Gwynne. (Scribner, $27.50.) The story of the last and greatest chief of the tribe that once ruled the Great Plains.
ENCOUNTER. By Milan Kundera. Translated by Linda Asher. (Harper/HarperCollins, $23.99.) Illuminating essays on the arts in the context of a “post art” era.
THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (Norton, $29.95.) Foner tackles what would seem an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and sheds new light on it.
FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim. (Knopf, $39.95.) Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful.
FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food. By Paul Greenberg. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Even as Greenberg lays out the grim and complicated facts about the ravaging of our seas, he manages to sound some hopeful notes about the ultimate fate of fish.
HITCH-22: A Memoir. By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.
THE HONOR CODE: How Moral Revolutions Happen. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS. By Rebecca Skloot. (Crown, $26.) Skloot untangles the ethical issues in the case of a woman who unknowingly donated cancer cells that have been the basis for a vast amount of research.
INSECTOPEDIA. By Hugh Raffles. (Pantheon, $29.95.) In this beautifully written, slyly humorous encyclopedia, Raffles seeks to redress the speciesism that has cast insects as creatures to be regarded with distrust and disgust.
KOESTLER: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. By Michael Scammell. (Random House, $35.) Scammell wants to put the complex intelligence of Koestler (“Darkness at Noon”) back on display and to explain his shifting preoccupations.
THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. By Jane Leavy. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Many biographies of Mantle have been written, but Leavy connects the dots in new and disturbing ways.
LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.
THE LAST HERO: A Life of Henry Aaron. By Howard Bryant. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Amid all the racism, Aaron approached his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record more as grim chore than joyous mission.
THE LAST STAND: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $30.) The author of “Mayflower” gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others who fought that day, but Custer steals the show.
LIFE. By Keith Richards with James Fox. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Reading Richards’s autobiography is like getting to corner him in a room to ask everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones.
LONG FOR THIS WORLD: The Strange Science of Immortality. By Jonathan Weiner. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a proselytizer for radical life extension, is the main figure in this engaging study.
THE MIND’S EYE. By Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $26.95.) In these graceful essays, the neurologist explores how his patients compensate for the abilities they have lost, and confronts his own ocular cancer.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.99.) An entertaining spy tale about the British ruse that employed a corpse to cover up the invasion of Sicily.
ORIGINS: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. By Annie Murphy Paul. (Free Press, $26.) Paul’s balanced, common-sense inquiry into the emerging field of fetal origins research is structured around her own pregnancy.
PARISIANS: An Adventure History of Paris. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $28.95.) This series of character studies — some of familiar figures, some not — is arranged to give meaning to a volatile, complicated city.
PEARL BUCK IN CHINA: Journey to “The Good Earth.” By Hilary Spurling. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The vast historical backdrop of this biography informs but never overwhelms its remarkable, elusive subject.
POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong. By Terry Teachout. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This biography maintains that discomfort with Armstrong’s public persona has led detractors to minimize his enormous contributions to music and to civilization.
THE POSSESSED: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15.) An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a graduate student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.
THE PRICE OF ALTRUISM: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. (Norton, $27.95.) Harman surveys 150 years of scientific history to examine the theoretical problem at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why do organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?
THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One. By Jonathan Alter. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) This appraisal by a Newsweek columnist is mercifully free of the sensationalistic tone of other recent campaign books.
THE PUBLISHER: Henry Luce and His American Century. By Alan Brinkley. (Knopf, $35.) The creator of Time and Life used his magazines to advance political favorites, paint an uplifting portrait of the middle class and promote American intervention in the world.
RATIFICATION: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. By Pauline Maier. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Maier’s history lays out the major issues, the arguments, the local context, the major and minor players, and lots of political rough stuff.
THE SABBATH WORLD: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. By Judith Shulevitz. (Random House, $26.) This wide-ranging meditation is part spiritual memoir, part religious history, part literary exegesis.
SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices. By Noah Feldman. (Twelve, $30.) A group portrait of Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.
SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. By Justin Spring. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50.) A sad, dangerous, astonishingly eccentric 20th-century life, recounted in absorbing detail.
SUPREME POWER: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court. By Jeff Shesol. (Norton, $27.95.) Contention over Roosevelt’s proposal to transform the court nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and severely damaged fragile Democratic unity.
THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. By Joan Schenkar. (St. Martin’s, $40.) A witty biography of the manipulative, secretive and obsessive creator of Tom Ripley, a character who was a version of Highsmith herself.
THE TENTH PARALLEL: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. By Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A journey along a latitude line where two religions meet and often clash.
TRAVELS IN SIBERIA. By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Dubious meals, vehicle malfunctions and relics of the Gulag fill Frazier’s uproarious, sometimes dark account of his wanderings.
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson. (Random House, $30.) This consummate account of the exodus of blacks from the South between 1915 and 1970 explores parallels with earlier European immigration.
WASHINGTON: A Life. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow brings his considerable literary talent to bear on the continued hunger of many Americans for more tales of the first president’s exploits.
THE WAVE: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. By Susan Casey. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Brainy scientists, extreme surfers and mountains of water mix it up in Casey’s vivid, kinetic narrative.
WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend. By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.
100 Notable Books of 2010 FICTION & POETRY
AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE. By David Goodwillie. (Scribner, $25.) A bombing unites a blogger and a beautiful eco-terrorist in this literary thriller, an exploration of what motivates radicalism in an age of disillusion.
ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings.
THE ASK. By Sam Lipsyte. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job is the protagonist of this darkly humorous satire, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.
BOUND. By Antonya Nelson. (Bloomsbury, $25.) For Nelson’s complacent heroine, the death of an estranged friend elicits memories of their reckless youth.
COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY. By Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Set in Nazi-occupied Europe, this novel, appearing only now in English, is a mid-century masterpiece by the centenarian Keilson, who served in the Dutch resistance.
DOUBLE HAPPINESS: Stories. By Mary-Beth Hughes. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Hughes likes to juxtapose her characters’ relative passivity with the knife edge of evil within or, more often, outside them.
FOREIGN BODIES. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) This nimble, entertaining homage to Henry James’s late work “The Ambassadors,” in which an American heads to Paris to retrieve a wayward son, brilliantly upends the theme, meaning and stylistic manner of its revered precursor.
FREEDOM. By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.
FUN WITH PROBLEMS: Stories. By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Stone’s collection.
GIRL BY THE ROAD AT NIGHT: A Novel of Vietnam. By David Rabe. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) In this tale of war and eros, two young people from opposite ends of the earth are caught up in events far beyond their control.
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST. By Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.
GREAT HOUSE. By Nicole Krauss. (Norton, $24.95.) In this tragic vision of a novel, Nadia, a writer in New York, faces a wrenching parting when a girl shows up to claim an enormous desk that has been in her safekeeping for decades.
HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE. By Charles Yu. (Pantheon, $24.) Yu wraps his lonely story of a time machine repairman in layers of gorgeous meta-science-fiction.
HOW TO READ THE AIR. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $25.95.) Mengestu’s own origins inform this tale of an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his parents.
I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME. By Per Petterson. Translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson. (Graywolf, $23.) This novel’s lonely Scandinavian protagonist grapples with divorce, death and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
ILUSTRADO. By Miguel Syjuco. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A murder mystery punctuated with serious philosophical musings, this novel traces 150 years of Filipino history, posing questions about identity and art, exile and duty.
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE. By Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $26.95.) Orringer’s protagonist is a Jewish architecture student in late-1930s Paris forced to return home to Hungary ahead of the Nazi invasion there.
LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP. By Lisa Robertson. (Coach House, paper, $14.95.) In these intellectual poems, the experimental curtains suddenly part to reveal clear, durable truth.
THE LIVING FIRE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010. By Edward Hirsch. (Knopf, $27.) Hirsch’s “living fire” is an irrational counterforce with which he balances his dignified quotidian.
THE LONG SONG. By Andrea Levy. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Levy’s high-spirited, ambitious heroine works on a plantation in the final days of slavery in Jamaica.
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.
THE LOTUS EATERS. By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The photojournalist heroine of Soli’s Vietnam War novel ponders whether those who represent war merely replicate its violence.
MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War. By Karl Marlantes. (El León Literary Arts/Atlantic Monthly, $24.95.) In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.
MEMORY WALL: Stories. By Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $24.) These strange, beautiful stories all ask: What, if anything, will be spared time’s depredations?
MR. PEANUT. By Adam Ross. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.
THE NEAREST EXIT. By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) The C.I.A. spy in this thriller is sick of his trade’s duplicity, amorality and rootlessness.
THE NEW YORKER STORIES. By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $30.) This collection of tales dating back to 1974 lets readers imagine their way into a New Yorker fiction editor’s moment of discovery.
ONE DAY. By David Nicholls. (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls’s nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the halting romance of two children of the ’80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff.
THE PRIVILEGES. By Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $25.) In this contemporary morality tale, a family stumbles along, rich and dysfunctional, without ethical or moral responsibility.
ROOM. By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.
THE SAME RIVER TWICE. By Ted Mooney. (Knopf, $26.95.) In this nuanced literary thriller, a deal to acquire Soviet-era cultural artifacts puts a Parisian clothing designer and her filmmaker husband in peril.
SELECTED STORIES. By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) These stories, gathered from Trevor’s last four collections, are frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.
SHADOW TAG. By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.
SOLAR. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan’s funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist’s plans against global warming.
SOMETHING RED. By Jennifer Gilmore. (Scribner, $25.) Gilmore’s contemplative second novel explores the lost ideals and lingering illusions of a family once politically committed to bettering the world.
SOURLAND: Stories. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Oates explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way.
THE SPOT: Stories. By David Means. (Faber & Faber, $23.) Like Beckett, Means reveals a God-like inclination to see his characters as forsaken case studies.
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY. By Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $26.) Exhilarating prose illuminates the horrors of a future America in this satire.
THE SURRENDERED. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET. By David Mitchell. (Random House, $26.) Mitchell’s historical novel about a young Dutchman in Edo-era Japan is an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of an adventurous rescue tale.
THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT. By Cathleen Schine. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Two Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.
TO THE END OF THE LAND. By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two friends are deeply involved with the same woman in this somber, haunting novel of love and loyalty in time of conflict, set in Israel between 1967 and 2000.
VIDA. By Patricia Engel. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) Engel’s understated stories are told from the perspective of a daughter of Colombian immigrants.
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. By Jennifer Egan. (Knopf, $25.95.) In her centrifugal, unclassifiably elaborate narrative, Egan creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them.
WHAT BECOMES: Stories. By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Though the characters in her harrowing fourth collection buckle under the weight of misfortune, Kennedy can go from darkness to humor in a heartbeat.
WHITE EGRETS: Poems. By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The Nobel Prize winner’s latest collection is intensely personal, an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth.
WILD CHILD: Stories. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) In these tales, Boyle continues his career-long interest in man’s vexed tussles with nature.
NONFICTION
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (Portfolio/Penguin, $32.95.) More than offering a backward look, this account of the disaster of 2008 helps explain today’s troubling headlines and might help predict tomorrow’s.
APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet. By Jennifer Homans. (Random House, $35.) The question of classical ballet’s very survival lies at the heart of this eloquent, truly definitive history, which traces dance across four centuries of wars and revolutions, both artistic and political.
BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women. By Rebecca Traister. (Free Press, $26.) A colorful, emotional argument that 2008 gave feminism a thrilling “new life.”
THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.) A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.
THE BRIDGE: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick. (Knopf, $29.95.) This study of Obama before he became president, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”
CHANGING MY MIND: Occasional Essays. By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The quirky pleasures here are due in part to Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
CHARLIE CHAN: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History. By Yunte Huang. (Norton, $26.95.) The urbane presentation of Earl Derr Biggers’s fictional Chinese sleuth, in print and in film, ran counter to the racism of his era.
CHRISTIANITY: The First Three Thousand Years. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. (Viking, $45.) MacCulloch traces the faith’s history through classical philosophy and Jewish tradition, fantastical visions and cold calculations, loving sacrifices and imperial ambitions.
CLEOPATRA: A Life. By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence.
COLONEL ROOSEVELT. By Edmund Morris. (Random House, $35.) The final volume of Morris’s monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt vividly covers the eventful nine years after he left office.
COMMON AS AIR: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. By Lewis Hyde. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Hyde draws on the American founders for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.
CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Shapiro is particularly interested in what “the authorship question” says about successive generations of readers.
COUNTRY DRIVING: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory. By Peter Hessler. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Hessler chronicles the effects of an expanding road network on the rapidly changing lives of individual Chinese.
THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.
EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. By S. C. Gwynne. (Scribner, $27.50.) The story of the last and greatest chief of the tribe that once ruled the Great Plains.
ENCOUNTER. By Milan Kundera. Translated by Linda Asher. (Harper/HarperCollins, $23.99.) Illuminating essays on the arts in the context of a “post art” era.
THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (Norton, $29.95.) Foner tackles what would seem an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and sheds new light on it.
FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. By Stephen Sondheim. (Knopf, $39.95.) Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful.
FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food. By Paul Greenberg. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Even as Greenberg lays out the grim and complicated facts about the ravaging of our seas, he manages to sound some hopeful notes about the ultimate fate of fish.
HITCH-22: A Memoir. By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.
THE HONOR CODE: How Moral Revolutions Happen. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS. By Rebecca Skloot. (Crown, $26.) Skloot untangles the ethical issues in the case of a woman who unknowingly donated cancer cells that have been the basis for a vast amount of research.
INSECTOPEDIA. By Hugh Raffles. (Pantheon, $29.95.) In this beautifully written, slyly humorous encyclopedia, Raffles seeks to redress the speciesism that has cast insects as creatures to be regarded with distrust and disgust.
KOESTLER: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. By Michael Scammell. (Random House, $35.) Scammell wants to put the complex intelligence of Koestler (“Darkness at Noon”) back on display and to explain his shifting preoccupations.
THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. By Jane Leavy. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Many biographies of Mantle have been written, but Leavy connects the dots in new and disturbing ways.
LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.
THE LAST HERO: A Life of Henry Aaron. By Howard Bryant. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Amid all the racism, Aaron approached his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record more as grim chore than joyous mission.
THE LAST STAND: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $30.) The author of “Mayflower” gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others who fought that day, but Custer steals the show.
LIFE. By Keith Richards with James Fox. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Reading Richards’s autobiography is like getting to corner him in a room to ask everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones.
LONG FOR THIS WORLD: The Strange Science of Immortality. By Jonathan Weiner. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a proselytizer for radical life extension, is the main figure in this engaging study.
THE MIND’S EYE. By Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $26.95.) In these graceful essays, the neurologist explores how his patients compensate for the abilities they have lost, and confronts his own ocular cancer.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.99.) An entertaining spy tale about the British ruse that employed a corpse to cover up the invasion of Sicily.
ORIGINS: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. By Annie Murphy Paul. (Free Press, $26.) Paul’s balanced, common-sense inquiry into the emerging field of fetal origins research is structured around her own pregnancy.
PARISIANS: An Adventure History of Paris. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $28.95.) This series of character studies — some of familiar figures, some not — is arranged to give meaning to a volatile, complicated city.
PEARL BUCK IN CHINA: Journey to “The Good Earth.” By Hilary Spurling. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The vast historical backdrop of this biography informs but never overwhelms its remarkable, elusive subject.
POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong. By Terry Teachout. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This biography maintains that discomfort with Armstrong’s public persona has led detractors to minimize his enormous contributions to music and to civilization.
THE POSSESSED: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15.) An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a graduate student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.
THE PRICE OF ALTRUISM: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. (Norton, $27.95.) Harman surveys 150 years of scientific history to examine the theoretical problem at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why do organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?
THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One. By Jonathan Alter. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) This appraisal by a Newsweek columnist is mercifully free of the sensationalistic tone of other recent campaign books.
THE PUBLISHER: Henry Luce and His American Century. By Alan Brinkley. (Knopf, $35.) The creator of Time and Life used his magazines to advance political favorites, paint an uplifting portrait of the middle class and promote American intervention in the world.
RATIFICATION: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. By Pauline Maier. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Maier’s history lays out the major issues, the arguments, the local context, the major and minor players, and lots of political rough stuff.
THE SABBATH WORLD: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. By Judith Shulevitz. (Random House, $26.) This wide-ranging meditation is part spiritual memoir, part religious history, part literary exegesis.
SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices. By Noah Feldman. (Twelve, $30.) A group portrait of Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas.
SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. By Justin Spring. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50.) A sad, dangerous, astonishingly eccentric 20th-century life, recounted in absorbing detail.
SUPREME POWER: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court. By Jeff Shesol. (Norton, $27.95.) Contention over Roosevelt’s proposal to transform the court nearly paralyzed his administration for over a year and severely damaged fragile Democratic unity.
THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. By Joan Schenkar. (St. Martin’s, $40.) A witty biography of the manipulative, secretive and obsessive creator of Tom Ripley, a character who was a version of Highsmith herself.
THE TENTH PARALLEL: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. By Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A journey along a latitude line where two religions meet and often clash.
TRAVELS IN SIBERIA. By Ian Frazier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Dubious meals, vehicle malfunctions and relics of the Gulag fill Frazier’s uproarious, sometimes dark account of his wanderings.
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. By Isabel Wilkerson. (Random House, $30.) This consummate account of the exodus of blacks from the South between 1915 and 1970 explores parallels with earlier European immigration.
WASHINGTON: A Life. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow brings his considerable literary talent to bear on the continued hunger of many Americans for more tales of the first president’s exploits.
THE WAVE: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. By Susan Casey. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Brainy scientists, extreme surfers and mountains of water mix it up in Casey’s vivid, kinetic narrative.
WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend. By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By DWIGHT GARNER
November 23, 2010
Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By DWIGHT GARNER
THE BEST OF IT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Kay Ryan. Kay Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost make them Twitter messages. They are also, as it happens, riddled with heartbreak and loss, and possess an essential gawkiness that, despite their wit, draws you close. Ms. Ryan’s poems are, in 2010, about as good as American poetry gets. (Grove, $24)
HITCH-22: A MEMOIR by Christopher Hitchens. Mr. Hitchens’s memoir traces his coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man, and it’s both electric and electrifying. Mr. Hitchens embraces the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards. His book is also a lovely paean to the dearness of one’s friends. (Twelve, $26.99)
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. This thorny and provocative first book — it’s about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty — floods over you like a narrative dam break. It’s one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like a book Rebecca Skloot was born to write. (Crown, $26)
SIMON WIESENTHAL: THE LIFE AND LEGENDS by Tom Segev. A meticulous and forceful biography of the legendary Nazi hunter, a man who led one of the 20th century’s most interesting lives. Tom Segev’s book begins in medias res — with the hunt for Adolf Eichmann — and rarely slows to catch its breath. This biography captures a character, and is cleareyed about its subject’s many character flaws. (Doubleday, $35)
MOURNING DIARY by Roland Barthes. On Oct. 26, 1977, the day after his mother’s death, the French theorist and literary critic Roland Barthes began keeping a diary of his suffering. Now, 30 years after his own death, it has been published. This book’s unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power. Barthes’s ironic intellect is here wrapped around his nakedly beating heart. (Hill and Wang, $25)
THE LAST HERO: A LIFE OF HENRY AARON by Howard Bryant. This confident and brawny book is, incredibly, the first full-dress biography of the man who, in 1974, broke Babe Ruth’s home run record and did so as a black man playing for Major League Baseball’s first franchise in the Deep South. It’s also a striking and elegiac assessment of race relations in America in the mid-20th century, and a rich portrait of a complex, introverted man. (Pantheon, $29.95)
I.O.U.: WHY EVERYONE OWES EVERYONE AND NO ONE CAN PAY by John Lanchester. Mr. Lanchester, who is British, isn’t an economist or a business journalist. He’s a novelist (and a talented one) who happened to become obsessed with the global banking crisis, and who has written a shrewd, bleakly funny book about it. He explains complicated things like credit default swaps with rigor, but he is also guided by perception and instinct. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman. Ms. Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book is ostensibly about her favorite Russian authors but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs and how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. It asks this plaintive question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: HOW A DEAD MAN AND A BIZARRE PLAN FOOLED THE NAZIS AND ASSURED AN ALLIED VICTORY by Ben Macintyre. What makes “Operation Mincemeat” — a book about a corpse with false papers that Allied spies set afloat off the coast of Spain during World War II — so winning, beyond the author’s research, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that’s been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. (Harmony Books, $25.99)
PARISIANS: AN ADVENTURE HISTORY OF PARIS by Graham Robb. Mr. Robb’s ebullient book is a defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history. Mr. Robb smuggles into his text a tremendous amount of real feeling and playfulness, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page. (W. W. Norton & Company, 28.95)
Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By DWIGHT GARNER
THE BEST OF IT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Kay Ryan. Kay Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost make them Twitter messages. They are also, as it happens, riddled with heartbreak and loss, and possess an essential gawkiness that, despite their wit, draws you close. Ms. Ryan’s poems are, in 2010, about as good as American poetry gets. (Grove, $24)
HITCH-22: A MEMOIR by Christopher Hitchens. Mr. Hitchens’s memoir traces his coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man, and it’s both electric and electrifying. Mr. Hitchens embraces the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards. His book is also a lovely paean to the dearness of one’s friends. (Twelve, $26.99)
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. This thorny and provocative first book — it’s about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty — floods over you like a narrative dam break. It’s one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like a book Rebecca Skloot was born to write. (Crown, $26)
SIMON WIESENTHAL: THE LIFE AND LEGENDS by Tom Segev. A meticulous and forceful biography of the legendary Nazi hunter, a man who led one of the 20th century’s most interesting lives. Tom Segev’s book begins in medias res — with the hunt for Adolf Eichmann — and rarely slows to catch its breath. This biography captures a character, and is cleareyed about its subject’s many character flaws. (Doubleday, $35)
MOURNING DIARY by Roland Barthes. On Oct. 26, 1977, the day after his mother’s death, the French theorist and literary critic Roland Barthes began keeping a diary of his suffering. Now, 30 years after his own death, it has been published. This book’s unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power. Barthes’s ironic intellect is here wrapped around his nakedly beating heart. (Hill and Wang, $25)
THE LAST HERO: A LIFE OF HENRY AARON by Howard Bryant. This confident and brawny book is, incredibly, the first full-dress biography of the man who, in 1974, broke Babe Ruth’s home run record and did so as a black man playing for Major League Baseball’s first franchise in the Deep South. It’s also a striking and elegiac assessment of race relations in America in the mid-20th century, and a rich portrait of a complex, introverted man. (Pantheon, $29.95)
I.O.U.: WHY EVERYONE OWES EVERYONE AND NO ONE CAN PAY by John Lanchester. Mr. Lanchester, who is British, isn’t an economist or a business journalist. He’s a novelist (and a talented one) who happened to become obsessed with the global banking crisis, and who has written a shrewd, bleakly funny book about it. He explains complicated things like credit default swaps with rigor, but he is also guided by perception and instinct. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman. Ms. Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book is ostensibly about her favorite Russian authors but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs and how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. It asks this plaintive question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: HOW A DEAD MAN AND A BIZARRE PLAN FOOLED THE NAZIS AND ASSURED AN ALLIED VICTORY by Ben Macintyre. What makes “Operation Mincemeat” — a book about a corpse with false papers that Allied spies set afloat off the coast of Spain during World War II — so winning, beyond the author’s research, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that’s been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. (Harmony Books, $25.99)
PARISIANS: AN ADVENTURE HISTORY OF PARIS by Graham Robb. Mr. Robb’s ebullient book is a defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history. Mr. Robb smuggles into his text a tremendous amount of real feeling and playfulness, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page. (W. W. Norton & Company, 28.95)
Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By JANET MASLIN
November 23, 2010
Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By JANET MASLIN
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman. This debut novel by a former journalist is a splendid original, the hilarious yet wrenching half-century story of a newspaper’s rise and fall. But this book is bigger than the life cycle of any one profession. Mr. Rachman structures his story so wittily and unpredictably that figuring out where it’s headed is half the fun. (Dial Press, $25)
SAVAGES by Don Winslow. Mr. Winslow wrote 12 previous crime novels before “Savages,” the one that jolts him into a different league. Boisterously stylish, outrageously brazen, this is a ferocious, wisecracking, high-wire act about a Southern California drug deal gone wrong. A snow-white opening page with a two-word obscenity establishes Mr. Winslow’s indelible, no-prisoners narrative style. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
JUST KIDS by Patti Smith. The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print. Ms. Smith’s time with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe in “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone” — the Chelsea Hotel — is summoned with both nostalgic innocence and sharp perspicacity, as are the period’s showy luminaries. As she writes exactingly of Andy Warhol, “I hated the soup and felt little for the can.” (Ecco, $27)
FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French. Ms. French’s third novel is an Irish mystery story and a richly enveloping family story too. She draws a piercingly astute portrait of the Mackeys, a Dublin clan riven by old secrets, grievances and sibling squabbles. The unsolved disappearance of a neighborhood girl, Rosie Daly, once broke the heart of Frank Mackey, her abandoned sweetheart. But it sets off sparks now that Frank is a middle-aged undercover detective — and there’s a suddenly a chance that Rosie may be found. (Viking, $25.95)
A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY: A NEW LIFE OF E. M. FORSTER by Wendy Moffat. This new look at what Ms. Moffat calls Forster’s “strange broken-backed career” casts fascinating light on why, after publishing classic works including “A Room With a View” and “Howards End,” this towering novelist kept the last two-thirds of his life under wraps. His biographer traces a long, heretofore mostly hidden life and makes it clear why the homosexual Forster, in his last years, looked back so angrily at the world that had forced him to hide his true nature. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50)
FIFTH AVENUE, 5. A.M.: AUDREY HEPBURN, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN WOMAN by Sam Wasson. A bonbon of a book about the making of the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” filled with all the delightful anecdotes and none of the dull ones. Its knowledgeable author looks fondly and incisively at the arsenal of tricks that turned Truman Capote’s risqué heroine into the bewitching Audrey Hepburn of Blake Edwards’s frothy classic. A book as well tailored as the little black dress the movie made famous. (Harper Studio, $19.99)
61 HOURS by Lee Child. The craftiest and most highly evolved thriller in Mr. Child’s smashing Jack Reacher series, even if 2010 also brought the too-smashing, more head-busting follow-up, “Worth Dying For.” In the interests of pure gamesmanship, not to mention knuckle-whitening suspense, Mr. Child threw aside his own conventions and did everything differently this time. Thigh-high snowdrifts, precise logistics and a mania for detail made this the robust, he-man version of a closed-town Agatha Christie story. (Delacorte, $28)
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabel Wilkerson. In a book that is, quite amazingly, her first, Ms. Wilkerson pulls off an all-but-impossible feat: she documents the migration of black Americans across their own country on a grand, panoramic scale but also a very intimate one. This work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who leave their hometowns to emigrate to big cities during the days of Jim Crow. For anyone who has never imagined what it was like for a black man to drive from Louisiana to California without being free to pull off the road and sleep, Ms. Wilkerson puts many such stories on the page. (Random House, $30)
THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: CLINTON VS. STARR by Ken Gormley. Another work of living history that’s full of real voices, including the remarkable ones of former President Bill Clinton and the former special prosecutor Ken Starr. With an exhaustive list of interviewees who attest to Mr. Gormley’s impartiality, including some who could not speak freely while under fire, this law professor coaxes forth the dizzyingly convoluted legal mess that plagued the Clinton presidency and led to impeachment hearings. He has pieced together a book that’s no cinch to read but is certain to age well thanks to its comprehensiveness. The title leaves no doubt as to how much bipartisan damage Mr. Gormley thinks was done, and the price he thinks we all paid. (Crown, $35)
MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson. Funny, barbed, winsome storytelling from a first-time novelist shaping an odd-couple romance. When the rigidly correct British widower of the title meets the dignified, elegant, conveniently widowed Mrs. Ali, he scandalizes his provincial neighbors and sets off a slew of screwball consequences. A bit formulaic and pat, perhaps, but noncopycat mainstream fiction was in oddly short supply this year. With a nod to the genteel flair of Alexander McCall Smith, Ms. Simonson delivers an old-school charmer. (Random House, $25)
Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By JANET MASLIN
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman. This debut novel by a former journalist is a splendid original, the hilarious yet wrenching half-century story of a newspaper’s rise and fall. But this book is bigger than the life cycle of any one profession. Mr. Rachman structures his story so wittily and unpredictably that figuring out where it’s headed is half the fun. (Dial Press, $25)
SAVAGES by Don Winslow. Mr. Winslow wrote 12 previous crime novels before “Savages,” the one that jolts him into a different league. Boisterously stylish, outrageously brazen, this is a ferocious, wisecracking, high-wire act about a Southern California drug deal gone wrong. A snow-white opening page with a two-word obscenity establishes Mr. Winslow’s indelible, no-prisoners narrative style. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
JUST KIDS by Patti Smith. The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print. Ms. Smith’s time with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe in “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone” — the Chelsea Hotel — is summoned with both nostalgic innocence and sharp perspicacity, as are the period’s showy luminaries. As she writes exactingly of Andy Warhol, “I hated the soup and felt little for the can.” (Ecco, $27)
FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French. Ms. French’s third novel is an Irish mystery story and a richly enveloping family story too. She draws a piercingly astute portrait of the Mackeys, a Dublin clan riven by old secrets, grievances and sibling squabbles. The unsolved disappearance of a neighborhood girl, Rosie Daly, once broke the heart of Frank Mackey, her abandoned sweetheart. But it sets off sparks now that Frank is a middle-aged undercover detective — and there’s a suddenly a chance that Rosie may be found. (Viking, $25.95)
A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY: A NEW LIFE OF E. M. FORSTER by Wendy Moffat. This new look at what Ms. Moffat calls Forster’s “strange broken-backed career” casts fascinating light on why, after publishing classic works including “A Room With a View” and “Howards End,” this towering novelist kept the last two-thirds of his life under wraps. His biographer traces a long, heretofore mostly hidden life and makes it clear why the homosexual Forster, in his last years, looked back so angrily at the world that had forced him to hide his true nature. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50)
FIFTH AVENUE, 5. A.M.: AUDREY HEPBURN, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN WOMAN by Sam Wasson. A bonbon of a book about the making of the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” filled with all the delightful anecdotes and none of the dull ones. Its knowledgeable author looks fondly and incisively at the arsenal of tricks that turned Truman Capote’s risqué heroine into the bewitching Audrey Hepburn of Blake Edwards’s frothy classic. A book as well tailored as the little black dress the movie made famous. (Harper Studio, $19.99)
61 HOURS by Lee Child. The craftiest and most highly evolved thriller in Mr. Child’s smashing Jack Reacher series, even if 2010 also brought the too-smashing, more head-busting follow-up, “Worth Dying For.” In the interests of pure gamesmanship, not to mention knuckle-whitening suspense, Mr. Child threw aside his own conventions and did everything differently this time. Thigh-high snowdrifts, precise logistics and a mania for detail made this the robust, he-man version of a closed-town Agatha Christie story. (Delacorte, $28)
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA’S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabel Wilkerson. In a book that is, quite amazingly, her first, Ms. Wilkerson pulls off an all-but-impossible feat: she documents the migration of black Americans across their own country on a grand, panoramic scale but also a very intimate one. This work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who leave their hometowns to emigrate to big cities during the days of Jim Crow. For anyone who has never imagined what it was like for a black man to drive from Louisiana to California without being free to pull off the road and sleep, Ms. Wilkerson puts many such stories on the page. (Random House, $30)
THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: CLINTON VS. STARR by Ken Gormley. Another work of living history that’s full of real voices, including the remarkable ones of former President Bill Clinton and the former special prosecutor Ken Starr. With an exhaustive list of interviewees who attest to Mr. Gormley’s impartiality, including some who could not speak freely while under fire, this law professor coaxes forth the dizzyingly convoluted legal mess that plagued the Clinton presidency and led to impeachment hearings. He has pieced together a book that’s no cinch to read but is certain to age well thanks to its comprehensiveness. The title leaves no doubt as to how much bipartisan damage Mr. Gormley thinks was done, and the price he thinks we all paid. (Crown, $35)
MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson. Funny, barbed, winsome storytelling from a first-time novelist shaping an odd-couple romance. When the rigidly correct British widower of the title meets the dignified, elegant, conveniently widowed Mrs. Ali, he scandalizes his provincial neighbors and sets off a slew of screwball consequences. A bit formulaic and pat, perhaps, but noncopycat mainstream fiction was in oddly short supply this year. With a nod to the genteel flair of Alexander McCall Smith, Ms. Simonson delivers an old-school charmer. (Random House, $25)
Michiko Kakutani’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
November 23, 2010
Michiko Kakutani’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
LIFE by Keith Richards with James Fox. Written with uncommon candor, eloquence and humor, this electrifying memoir channels its author’s love of music, even as it creates an indelible portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age. It’s a book that does a high-def, high-velocity job of conjuring the past, be it the author’s small-town childhood or the madness that was life on the road with the Rolling Stones — a book in which Mr. Richards has magically translated the fierce emotion of his guitar playing to the page. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
CLEOPATRA: A LIFE by Stacy Schiff. In her captivating new biography Ms. Schiff adroitly strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In place of history’s sex kitten Cleopatra stands revealed as a charismatic and capable politician — a historical figure way more complex and compelling than any fictional creation. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
LETTERS by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. By turns cranky and charming, ruminative and cocky, Saul Bellow was a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer. And this absorbing collection of his correspondence creates a sharp-edged self-portrait of the artist as a close spiritual relative of his heroes: a seeker and searcher, vacillating between the emotional poles of exuberance and depression; a self-made writer, adept at spinning his philosophical ideas and romantic ups and downs into fiction. (Viking, $35)
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart. This super-sad, super-funny novel not only showcases its author’s super-caffeinated comic gifts, but also uncovers his abilities to write movingly about love and heartbreak. Set in the near future in a toxic New York City, this is a novel that manages to mash up an apocalyptic satire with a tragic romance and make the whole thing wondrously work. (Random House, $26)
FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen. The author’s most deeply felt novel yet, “Freedom” is both a gripping portrait of a dysfunctional family and a telling, wide-angled snapshot of our troubled times. The book showcases its author’s impressive literary tool kit — all the essential storytelling skills, along with lots of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean window on American middle-class life.(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
FRANK: THE VOICE by James Kaplan. This is a biography that reads like a novel, a portrait of Frank Sinatra that captures his gifts and contradictions: the tough guy known for his tender love songs; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty heartthrob who turned his own heartache over Ava Gardner into classic torch songs. Mr. Kaplan does a nimble, brightly evocative job of tracing the development of Sinatra’s art, and his remarkable rise and fall and rise again before the age of 40. (Doubleday, $35)
CRISIS ECONOMICS: A CRASH COURSE IN THE FUTURE OF FINANCE by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. Although Mr. Roubini’s pessimistic forecasts once earned him the sobriquet Dr. Doom, his predictions of fiscal disaster came frighteningly true in 2008, when the global financial system teetered on the edge of the abyss. In “Crisis Economics,” he uses his gifts as a teacher to give the lay reader a lucid and engrossing account of the causes and consequences of that great meltdown.(Penguin Press, $27.95)
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason. This ingenious debut novel performs a series of jazzy, postmodernist variations on “The Odyssey,” imagining alternate fates for Homer’s characters and reinventing his hero’s relationships with his wife, his mistress and his comrades in arms. The book addresses Homer’s original themes — the dangers of pride, the protean nature of identity — while at the same time raising new questions about art and originality and the nature of storytelling. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO by Jaron Lanier. A pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, Mr. Lanier is a digital-world insider concerned with the effect that online collectivism and the current enshrinement of “the wisdom of the crowd” is having on artists, intellectual property rights and the larger social and cultural landscape. In taking on such issues, he’s written an illuminating book that is as provocative as it is impassioned. (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95)
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell. Best known in the past for his experimental, puzzlelike fiction, Mr. Mitchell has turned his hand, this time, to creating a historical novel set in Edo-era Japan. His suspenseful and meticulously observed story of forbidden love — between a young Dutchman and a Japanese midwife, who is abducted by a mysterious group of monks — unfurls, musically, to become a meditation on East and West, superstition and science, tradition and change. (Random House, $26)
Michiko Kakutani’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
LIFE by Keith Richards with James Fox. Written with uncommon candor, eloquence and humor, this electrifying memoir channels its author’s love of music, even as it creates an indelible portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age. It’s a book that does a high-def, high-velocity job of conjuring the past, be it the author’s small-town childhood or the madness that was life on the road with the Rolling Stones — a book in which Mr. Richards has magically translated the fierce emotion of his guitar playing to the page. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
CLEOPATRA: A LIFE by Stacy Schiff. In her captivating new biography Ms. Schiff adroitly strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In place of history’s sex kitten Cleopatra stands revealed as a charismatic and capable politician — a historical figure way more complex and compelling than any fictional creation. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
LETTERS by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. By turns cranky and charming, ruminative and cocky, Saul Bellow was a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer. And this absorbing collection of his correspondence creates a sharp-edged self-portrait of the artist as a close spiritual relative of his heroes: a seeker and searcher, vacillating between the emotional poles of exuberance and depression; a self-made writer, adept at spinning his philosophical ideas and romantic ups and downs into fiction. (Viking, $35)
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart. This super-sad, super-funny novel not only showcases its author’s super-caffeinated comic gifts, but also uncovers his abilities to write movingly about love and heartbreak. Set in the near future in a toxic New York City, this is a novel that manages to mash up an apocalyptic satire with a tragic romance and make the whole thing wondrously work. (Random House, $26)
FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen. The author’s most deeply felt novel yet, “Freedom” is both a gripping portrait of a dysfunctional family and a telling, wide-angled snapshot of our troubled times. The book showcases its author’s impressive literary tool kit — all the essential storytelling skills, along with lots of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean window on American middle-class life.(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
FRANK: THE VOICE by James Kaplan. This is a biography that reads like a novel, a portrait of Frank Sinatra that captures his gifts and contradictions: the tough guy known for his tender love songs; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty heartthrob who turned his own heartache over Ava Gardner into classic torch songs. Mr. Kaplan does a nimble, brightly evocative job of tracing the development of Sinatra’s art, and his remarkable rise and fall and rise again before the age of 40. (Doubleday, $35)
CRISIS ECONOMICS: A CRASH COURSE IN THE FUTURE OF FINANCE by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. Although Mr. Roubini’s pessimistic forecasts once earned him the sobriquet Dr. Doom, his predictions of fiscal disaster came frighteningly true in 2008, when the global financial system teetered on the edge of the abyss. In “Crisis Economics,” he uses his gifts as a teacher to give the lay reader a lucid and engrossing account of the causes and consequences of that great meltdown.(Penguin Press, $27.95)
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason. This ingenious debut novel performs a series of jazzy, postmodernist variations on “The Odyssey,” imagining alternate fates for Homer’s characters and reinventing his hero’s relationships with his wife, his mistress and his comrades in arms. The book addresses Homer’s original themes — the dangers of pride, the protean nature of identity — while at the same time raising new questions about art and originality and the nature of storytelling. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO by Jaron Lanier. A pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, Mr. Lanier is a digital-world insider concerned with the effect that online collectivism and the current enshrinement of “the wisdom of the crowd” is having on artists, intellectual property rights and the larger social and cultural landscape. In taking on such issues, he’s written an illuminating book that is as provocative as it is impassioned. (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95)
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell. Best known in the past for his experimental, puzzlelike fiction, Mr. Mitchell has turned his hand, this time, to creating a historical novel set in Edo-era Japan. His suspenseful and meticulously observed story of forbidden love — between a young Dutchman and a Japanese midwife, who is abducted by a mysterious group of monks — unfurls, musically, to become a meditation on East and West, superstition and science, tradition and change. (Random House, $26)
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List
Use the list below to browse NPR's Best Books of 2010 recommendations. Each critic's list is
presented separately. Click on the article names to read our critics' comments about the books.
'Favorite Books of 2010'
November 19, 2010 text size A A A
In which we ask NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that stood out as a
favorite.
Mara Liasson Suggests Actually 'Reading Obama'
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, by James T. Kloppenberg,
hardcover, 296 pages, Princeton University Press, list price: $24.95
Guy Raz On The Terror Of 'Freedom'
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price:
$28
Lynn Neary Picks 'Goon Squad'
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, hardcover, 288 pages, Knopf, list price: $25.95
Michel Martin Basks in 'The Warmth of Other Suns'
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson,
hardcover, 640 pages, Random House, list price: $30
Scott Simon Picks Scott Turow's 'Innocent'
Innocent, by Scott Turow, hardcover, 416 pages, Grand Central Publishing, List price: $27.99
Peter Sagal On 'Sex At Dawn'
Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha,
hardcover, 416 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
'2010's Best Cookbooks: Real-Life Labors Of Love'
Recommended by T. Susie Chang
In the Kitchen With a Good Appetite, by Melissa Clark, hardcover, 464 pages, Hyperion & Co., list price:
$27.50
Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan,
hardcover, 544 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list price: $40
One Big Table: 600 Recipes From the Nation's Best Home Cooks, Farmers, Fishermen, Pit-Masters,
And Chefs, by Molly O'Neill, hardcover, 880 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $50
Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery, With Authentic Recipes and Stories, by
Grace Young, hardcover, 336 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $35
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 1 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Flour: Spectacular Recipes From Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe, by Joanne Chang, hardcover, 320
pages, Chronicle Books, list price: $35
The Gourmet Cookie Book: The Single Best Recipe From Each Year 1941-2009, by Gourmet
magazine, hardcover, 176 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list price: $18
The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, by Amanda Hesser,
hardcover, 932 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $40
Nigella Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home, by Nigella Lawson, hardcover, 512 pages,
Hyperion & Co., list price: $35
The Food Substitutions Bible: More Than 6,500 Substitutions for Ingredients, Equipment And
Techniques, by David Joachim, paperback, 696 pages, Robert Rose, list price: $24.95
'People Are Talking...About These Five Books'
Recommended by Heller McAlpin
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $28
So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, hardcover, 448 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
Room by Emma Donoghue, hardcover, 336 pages, Little, Brown and Co., list price: $24.99
36 Arguments For The Existence Of God by Rebecca Goldstein, hardcover, 416 pages, Pantheon, list
price: $27.95
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, hardcover, 384 pages, Crown, list price: $26
'Oh, To Be Young: The Year's Best Teen Reads'
Recommended by Gayle Forman
The Sky Is Everwhere by Jandy Nelson, hardcover, 288 pages, Dial, list price: $17.99
The Thing A Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt, hardcover, 256 pages, Wendy Lamb Books, list price:
$16.99
Anna And The French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, hardcover, 384 pages, Dutton Juvenile, list price:
$16.99
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, hardcover, 480 pages, HarperCollins, list price: $17.99
The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney, hardcover, 352 pages, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, list
price: $16.99
'Best Books Of Winter: Alan Cheuse Makes His List'
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 2 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Recommended by Alan Cheuse
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans, hardcover, 240 pages, Riverhead
Hardcover, list price: $25.95
20 Under 40: Stories From The New Yorker edited by Deborah Treisman, hardcover, 448 pages,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $16
Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007 by Nadine Gordimer, hardcover, 560 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
list price: $30
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, hardcover, 384 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price: $29.99
The Poets Laureate Anthology by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, hardcover, 762 pages, W. W. Norton &
Company, list price: $39.95
Man In The Woods by Scott Spencer, hardcover, 320 pages, Ecco, list price: $24.99
'Best Gift Books: Art, Nature, Cute Canines'
Recommended by John McAlley
Natural History: The Ultimate Living Guide To Everything On Earth by Dorling Kindersley, hardcover,
648 pages, DK Publishing, list price: $50
Finishing The Hat; Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies,
Grudges, Whines And Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim, hardcover, 480 pages, Knopf, list price:
$39.95
Decade by Eamonn McCabe and Terence McNamee, hardcover, 512 pages, Phaidon Press, list price:
$39.95
40: A Doonesbury Retrospective by G.B. Trudeau, hardcover, 696 pages, Andrews McMeel Publishing,
list price: $100
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century by Peter Galassi, hardcover, 376 pages, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, list price: $75
Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, hardcover, 256 pages, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, list price: $30
I Lego N.Y. by Christoph Niemann, hardcover, 32 pages, Abrams Image, list price: $14.95
I Found This Funny: My Favorite Pieces Of Humor And Some That May Not Be Funny At All by Judd
Apatow, hardcover, 224 pages, McSweeney's, list price: $25
The New Biographical Dictionary Of Film by David Thomson, hardcover, 963 pages, Knopf, list price:
$24.95
Barbara Kruger by Barbara Kruger, hardcover, 307 pages, Rizzoli, list price: $65
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 3 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
'Happy Holidays, Voyeurs: Nancy Pearl Picks Memoirs'
Recommended by Nancy Pearl
Blue Blood by Edward Conlon, paperback, 576 pages, Riverhead Hardcover, list price: $17
The Bill From My Father by Bernard Cooper, paperback, 256 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $14
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal, hardcover, 368
pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $26
Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, paperback, 432 pages, Mariner Books, list price: $16
Cakewalk: A Memoir by Kate Moses, hardcover, 368 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $26
Encyclopedia Of An Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, paperback, 368 pages, Three Rivers
Press, list price: $13
Half A Life by Darin Strauss, hardcover, 204 pages, McSweeney's, list price: $22
Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk, paperback, 256 pages, Vintage, list price:
$13.95
'Book Club Picks: Give 'Em Something To Talk About'
Recommended by Lynn Neary
Parrot And Olivier In America by Peter Carey, hardcover, 400 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, hardcover, 304 pages, Amistad, list price: $24.99
Faithful Place by Tana French, hardcover, 416 pages, Viking Adult, list price: $25.95
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, hardcover, 288 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $25
Sunset Park by Paul Auster, hardcover, 320 pages, Henry Holt, list price: $25
'Sex, Drugs, And 'Life' — The Year's Best Guilty Reads'
Recommended by Susan Jane Gilman
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler, hardcover, 256 pages, Grand Central, list price,
$25.99
I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron, hardcover, 160 pages, Knopf, list price: $22.95
Love, Lust, And Faking It by Jenny McCarthy, hardcover, 256 pages, Harper, list price: $24.99
Late, Late At Night, By Rick Springfield; hardcover, 336 pages; Touchstone, list price: $26
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 4 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Life by Keith Richards with James Fox, hardcover, 576 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price:
$29.99
'Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books Of 2010'
Recommended by Maureen Corrigan
Just Kids by Patti Smith, hardcover, 304 pages, Ecco, list price: $27
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley, hardcover, 368 pages, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, list price: $27
Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything For American Women by Rebecca Traister,
hardcover, 336 pages, Free Press, list price: $26
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
by Yunte Huang, hardcover, 354pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $26.99
There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America by Philip Dray, hardcover, 784 pages,
Doubleday, list price: $35
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand,
hardcover, 496 pages, Random House, list price: $27
Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton, hardcover, 328 pages, Univ of Nebraska Press, list
price: $26.95
Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages,; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price:
$28
So Much for That by Lionel Shriver, hardcover, 448 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel by David Mitchell, hardcover, 496 pages, Random
House, list price: $26
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, hardcover, 352 pages, Random House, list price: $26
'Fresh Delivery: Indie Booksellers Pick 2010 Favorites'
Recommended by Daniel Goldin
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, hardcover, 288 pages, William Morrow, list price:
$24.99
The Wilding by Benjamin Percy, paperback, 288 pages, Graywolf Press, list price: $23
The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman, hardcover, 416 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $26
Wordcatcher: An Odyssey Into The World Of Weird And Wonderful Words by Phil Cousineau,
paperback, 202 pages, Viva Editions, list price: $15.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 5 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
My Year Of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep Into The Heart of Cinematic
Failure by Nathan Rabin, paperback, 288 pages, Scribner, list price: $15
Recommended by Lucia Silva
A Week At The Airport by Alain de Botton, paperback, 112 pages, Vintage, list price: $15
Atlas Of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, hardcover, 144 pages, Penguin, list price: $28
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer, paperback, 608 pages,
Penguin, list price: $17
The Open Daybook edited by David P. Earle, hardcover, 384 pages, Mark Batty Publisher, list price:
$45
Where We Know: New Orleans As Home edited by David Rutledge, paperback, 304 pages, Broken
Levee Books, list price: $16
Recommended by Rona Brinlee
The Gendarme by Mark T. Mustian, hardcover, 304 pages, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, list price:
$25.95
It's A Book by Lane Smith, hardcover, 32 pages, Roaring Brook Press, list price: $12.99
My Name Is Not Isabella: Just How Big Can A Little Girl Dream? by Jennifer Fosberry and Mike Litwin,
hardcover, 32 pages, Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, list price: $16.99
The Tower, The Zoo, And The Tortoise by Julia Stuart, hardcover, 320 pages,Doubleday, list price:
$24.95
What Is Left The Daughter by Howard Norman, hardcover, 256 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list
price: $25
The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, hardcover, 208 pages, Algonquin Books,
list price: $13.99
'Us And Them: The Year’s Best Outsider Fiction'
Recommended by Danielle Evans
Three Days Before The Shooting... by Ralph Ellison, hardcover, 1,136 pages,Modern Library, list price:
$50
Death Is Not An Option by Suzanne Rivecca, hardcover, 222 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price:
$23.95
How To Read The Air by Dinaw Mengestu, hardcover, 320 pages, Riverhead Hardcover, list price:
$25.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 6 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Vida by Patricia Engel, paperback, 176 pages, Black Cat/Grove, list price: $14
Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts, hardcover, 80 pages,Alice James Books, list
price: $15.95
The Age Of Orphans: A Novel by Laleh Khadivi, hardcover, 304 pages, Bloomsbury USA, list price: $14
'Otherworldly — The Year's Most Transporting Books'
Recommended by Glen Weldon
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear, hardcover, 320 pages, Orbit, list price: $19.99
Temperance by Cathy Malkasian, hardcover, 240 pages, Fantagraphics Books, list price: $22.99
Hard Magic by Laura Anne Gilman, paperback, 336 pages, Luna, list price: $14.95
The Passage by Justin Cronin, hardcover, 784 pages, Ballantine, list price: $27
BodyWorld by Dash Shaw, hardcover, 384 pages, Pantheon, list price: $27.95
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, hardcover, 400 pages, Scholastic, list price: $17.99
A Little Bundle of New: Best Book Debuts of 2010
Recommended by John Freeman
Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account Of Life, Love, And War In His Homeland
by Basharat Peer; hardcover, 240 pages; Scribner, list price: $25
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed; hardcover, 304 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $25
The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee; hardcover, 592 pages;
Scribner, list price: $30
The Silver Hearted by Davide McConnell; paperback, 230 pages; Alyson Books, list price: $14.95
Vida by Patricia Engel; paperback , 176 pages; Black Cat/Grove, list price: $14
Fiction For Piecing This Crazy World Together
Recommended by Pankaj Mishra
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li; hardcover, 256 pages; Random House, list price: $25
The Collected Stories Of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg; paperback, 992 pages; Picador,
list price: $22
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; hardcover, 288 pages; Knopf, list price: $25.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 7 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco; hardcover, 320 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $26
Our Kind Of Traitor by John le Carre; hardcover, 320 pages; Viking Adult, list price: $27.95
comments
Discussions for this story are now closed. Please see the Community FAQ for more information.
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 8 of 8
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Use the list below to browse NPR's Best Books of 2010 recommendations. Each critic's list is
presented separately. Click on the article names to read our critics' comments about the books.
'Favorite Books of 2010'
November 19, 2010 text size A A A
In which we ask NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that stood out as a
favorite.
Mara Liasson Suggests Actually 'Reading Obama'
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, by James T. Kloppenberg,
hardcover, 296 pages, Princeton University Press, list price: $24.95
Guy Raz On The Terror Of 'Freedom'
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price:
$28
Lynn Neary Picks 'Goon Squad'
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, hardcover, 288 pages, Knopf, list price: $25.95
Michel Martin Basks in 'The Warmth of Other Suns'
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson,
hardcover, 640 pages, Random House, list price: $30
Scott Simon Picks Scott Turow's 'Innocent'
Innocent, by Scott Turow, hardcover, 416 pages, Grand Central Publishing, List price: $27.99
Peter Sagal On 'Sex At Dawn'
Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha,
hardcover, 416 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
'2010's Best Cookbooks: Real-Life Labors Of Love'
Recommended by T. Susie Chang
In the Kitchen With a Good Appetite, by Melissa Clark, hardcover, 464 pages, Hyperion & Co., list price:
$27.50
Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan,
hardcover, 544 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list price: $40
One Big Table: 600 Recipes From the Nation's Best Home Cooks, Farmers, Fishermen, Pit-Masters,
And Chefs, by Molly O'Neill, hardcover, 880 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $50
Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery, With Authentic Recipes and Stories, by
Grace Young, hardcover, 336 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $35
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 1 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Flour: Spectacular Recipes From Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe, by Joanne Chang, hardcover, 320
pages, Chronicle Books, list price: $35
The Gourmet Cookie Book: The Single Best Recipe From Each Year 1941-2009, by Gourmet
magazine, hardcover, 176 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list price: $18
The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, by Amanda Hesser,
hardcover, 932 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $40
Nigella Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home, by Nigella Lawson, hardcover, 512 pages,
Hyperion & Co., list price: $35
The Food Substitutions Bible: More Than 6,500 Substitutions for Ingredients, Equipment And
Techniques, by David Joachim, paperback, 696 pages, Robert Rose, list price: $24.95
'People Are Talking...About These Five Books'
Recommended by Heller McAlpin
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $28
So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, hardcover, 448 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
Room by Emma Donoghue, hardcover, 336 pages, Little, Brown and Co., list price: $24.99
36 Arguments For The Existence Of God by Rebecca Goldstein, hardcover, 416 pages, Pantheon, list
price: $27.95
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, hardcover, 384 pages, Crown, list price: $26
'Oh, To Be Young: The Year's Best Teen Reads'
Recommended by Gayle Forman
The Sky Is Everwhere by Jandy Nelson, hardcover, 288 pages, Dial, list price: $17.99
The Thing A Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt, hardcover, 256 pages, Wendy Lamb Books, list price:
$16.99
Anna And The French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, hardcover, 384 pages, Dutton Juvenile, list price:
$16.99
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, hardcover, 480 pages, HarperCollins, list price: $17.99
The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney, hardcover, 352 pages, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, list
price: $16.99
'Best Books Of Winter: Alan Cheuse Makes His List'
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 2 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Recommended by Alan Cheuse
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans, hardcover, 240 pages, Riverhead
Hardcover, list price: $25.95
20 Under 40: Stories From The New Yorker edited by Deborah Treisman, hardcover, 448 pages,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $16
Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007 by Nadine Gordimer, hardcover, 560 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
list price: $30
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, hardcover, 384 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price: $29.99
The Poets Laureate Anthology by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, hardcover, 762 pages, W. W. Norton &
Company, list price: $39.95
Man In The Woods by Scott Spencer, hardcover, 320 pages, Ecco, list price: $24.99
'Best Gift Books: Art, Nature, Cute Canines'
Recommended by John McAlley
Natural History: The Ultimate Living Guide To Everything On Earth by Dorling Kindersley, hardcover,
648 pages, DK Publishing, list price: $50
Finishing The Hat; Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies,
Grudges, Whines And Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim, hardcover, 480 pages, Knopf, list price:
$39.95
Decade by Eamonn McCabe and Terence McNamee, hardcover, 512 pages, Phaidon Press, list price:
$39.95
40: A Doonesbury Retrospective by G.B. Trudeau, hardcover, 696 pages, Andrews McMeel Publishing,
list price: $100
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century by Peter Galassi, hardcover, 376 pages, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, list price: $75
Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, hardcover, 256 pages, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, list price: $30
I Lego N.Y. by Christoph Niemann, hardcover, 32 pages, Abrams Image, list price: $14.95
I Found This Funny: My Favorite Pieces Of Humor And Some That May Not Be Funny At All by Judd
Apatow, hardcover, 224 pages, McSweeney's, list price: $25
The New Biographical Dictionary Of Film by David Thomson, hardcover, 963 pages, Knopf, list price:
$24.95
Barbara Kruger by Barbara Kruger, hardcover, 307 pages, Rizzoli, list price: $65
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 3 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
'Happy Holidays, Voyeurs: Nancy Pearl Picks Memoirs'
Recommended by Nancy Pearl
Blue Blood by Edward Conlon, paperback, 576 pages, Riverhead Hardcover, list price: $17
The Bill From My Father by Bernard Cooper, paperback, 256 pages, Simon & Schuster, list price: $14
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal, hardcover, 368
pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $26
Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, paperback, 432 pages, Mariner Books, list price: $16
Cakewalk: A Memoir by Kate Moses, hardcover, 368 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $26
Encyclopedia Of An Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, paperback, 368 pages, Three Rivers
Press, list price: $13
Half A Life by Darin Strauss, hardcover, 204 pages, McSweeney's, list price: $22
Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk, paperback, 256 pages, Vintage, list price:
$13.95
'Book Club Picks: Give 'Em Something To Talk About'
Recommended by Lynn Neary
Parrot And Olivier In America by Peter Carey, hardcover, 400 pages, Knopf, list price: $26.95
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, hardcover, 304 pages, Amistad, list price: $24.99
Faithful Place by Tana French, hardcover, 416 pages, Viking Adult, list price: $25.95
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, hardcover, 288 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $25
Sunset Park by Paul Auster, hardcover, 320 pages, Henry Holt, list price: $25
'Sex, Drugs, And 'Life' — The Year's Best Guilty Reads'
Recommended by Susan Jane Gilman
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler, hardcover, 256 pages, Grand Central, list price,
$25.99
I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron, hardcover, 160 pages, Knopf, list price: $22.95
Love, Lust, And Faking It by Jenny McCarthy, hardcover, 256 pages, Harper, list price: $24.99
Late, Late At Night, By Rick Springfield; hardcover, 336 pages; Touchstone, list price: $26
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 4 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Life by Keith Richards with James Fox, hardcover, 576 pages, Little, Brown and Company, list price:
$29.99
'Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books Of 2010'
Recommended by Maureen Corrigan
Just Kids by Patti Smith, hardcover, 304 pages, Ecco, list price: $27
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage by Hazel Rowley, hardcover, 368 pages, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, list price: $27
Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything For American Women by Rebecca Traister,
hardcover, 336 pages, Free Press, list price: $26
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
by Yunte Huang, hardcover, 354pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $26.99
There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America by Philip Dray, hardcover, 784 pages,
Doubleday, list price: $35
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand,
hardcover, 496 pages, Random House, list price: $27
Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton, hardcover, 328 pages, Univ of Nebraska Press, list
price: $26.95
Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages,; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price:
$28
So Much for That by Lionel Shriver, hardcover, 448 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel by David Mitchell, hardcover, 496 pages, Random
House, list price: $26
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, hardcover, 352 pages, Random House, list price: $26
'Fresh Delivery: Indie Booksellers Pick 2010 Favorites'
Recommended by Daniel Goldin
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, hardcover, 288 pages, William Morrow, list price:
$24.99
The Wilding by Benjamin Percy, paperback, 288 pages, Graywolf Press, list price: $23
The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman, hardcover, 416 pages, The Dial Press, list price: $26
Wordcatcher: An Odyssey Into The World Of Weird And Wonderful Words by Phil Cousineau,
paperback, 202 pages, Viva Editions, list price: $15.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 5 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
My Year Of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep Into The Heart of Cinematic
Failure by Nathan Rabin, paperback, 288 pages, Scribner, list price: $15
Recommended by Lucia Silva
A Week At The Airport by Alain de Botton, paperback, 112 pages, Vintage, list price: $15
Atlas Of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, hardcover, 144 pages, Penguin, list price: $28
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer, paperback, 608 pages,
Penguin, list price: $17
The Open Daybook edited by David P. Earle, hardcover, 384 pages, Mark Batty Publisher, list price:
$45
Where We Know: New Orleans As Home edited by David Rutledge, paperback, 304 pages, Broken
Levee Books, list price: $16
Recommended by Rona Brinlee
The Gendarme by Mark T. Mustian, hardcover, 304 pages, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, list price:
$25.95
It's A Book by Lane Smith, hardcover, 32 pages, Roaring Brook Press, list price: $12.99
My Name Is Not Isabella: Just How Big Can A Little Girl Dream? by Jennifer Fosberry and Mike Litwin,
hardcover, 32 pages, Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, list price: $16.99
The Tower, The Zoo, And The Tortoise by Julia Stuart, hardcover, 320 pages,Doubleday, list price:
$24.95
What Is Left The Daughter by Howard Norman, hardcover, 256 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, list
price: $25
The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, hardcover, 208 pages, Algonquin Books,
list price: $13.99
'Us And Them: The Year’s Best Outsider Fiction'
Recommended by Danielle Evans
Three Days Before The Shooting... by Ralph Ellison, hardcover, 1,136 pages,Modern Library, list price:
$50
Death Is Not An Option by Suzanne Rivecca, hardcover, 222 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., list price:
$23.95
How To Read The Air by Dinaw Mengestu, hardcover, 320 pages, Riverhead Hardcover, list price:
$25.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 6 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Vida by Patricia Engel, paperback, 176 pages, Black Cat/Grove, list price: $14
Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts, hardcover, 80 pages,Alice James Books, list
price: $15.95
The Age Of Orphans: A Novel by Laleh Khadivi, hardcover, 304 pages, Bloomsbury USA, list price: $14
'Otherworldly — The Year's Most Transporting Books'
Recommended by Glen Weldon
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear, hardcover, 320 pages, Orbit, list price: $19.99
Temperance by Cathy Malkasian, hardcover, 240 pages, Fantagraphics Books, list price: $22.99
Hard Magic by Laura Anne Gilman, paperback, 336 pages, Luna, list price: $14.95
The Passage by Justin Cronin, hardcover, 784 pages, Ballantine, list price: $27
BodyWorld by Dash Shaw, hardcover, 384 pages, Pantheon, list price: $27.95
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, hardcover, 400 pages, Scholastic, list price: $17.99
A Little Bundle of New: Best Book Debuts of 2010
Recommended by John Freeman
Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account Of Life, Love, And War In His Homeland
by Basharat Peer; hardcover, 240 pages; Scribner, list price: $25
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed; hardcover, 304 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $25
The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee; hardcover, 592 pages;
Scribner, list price: $30
The Silver Hearted by Davide McConnell; paperback, 230 pages; Alyson Books, list price: $14.95
Vida by Patricia Engel; paperback , 176 pages; Black Cat/Grove, list price: $14
Fiction For Piecing This Crazy World Together
Recommended by Pankaj Mishra
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li; hardcover, 256 pages; Random House, list price: $25
The Collected Stories Of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg; paperback, 992 pages; Picador,
list price: $22
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; hardcover, 288 pages; Knopf, list price: $25.95
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 7 of 8
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131566277/best-books-of-2010-the-complete-list 12/20/2010
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco; hardcover, 320 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, list price: $26
Our Kind Of Traitor by John le Carre; hardcover, 320 pages; Viking Adult, list price: $27.95
comments
Discussions for this story are now closed. Please see the Community FAQ for more information.
Best Books Of 2010: The Complete List : NPR Page 8 of 8
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Another Deficit Plan Targets Taxes By DAMIAN PALETTA
Another Deficit Plan Targets Taxes By DAMIAN PALETTA
A panel of Democrats, Republicans, economists and other experts said Wednesday that a complete overhaul of the U.S. tax code is the best way to address the nation's fiscal problems—a new and likely controversial idea aimed at tackling the growing deficit.
John Bussey discusses a new plan to reduce the deficit from a group led by Democrat Alice Rivlin and Republican Pete Domenici. The group envisions a complete overhaul of the U.S. tax code.
Journal Community
The report, co-authored by Democratic budget veteran Alice Rivlin and former Sen. Pete Domenici (R., N.M.), follows a separate proposal last week by the two chairmen of President Barack Obama's deficit commission. The many similarities between the two offer a window into the types of proposals that might win backing as Washington launches into what is likely to be a protracted debate on deficit cutting.
The most recent report, put together by a group called the Bipartisan Policy Center, calls for a one-year payroll-tax holiday in 2011 that it says will create between 2.5 million and 7 million jobs.
The plan would lower income and corporate tax rates and offset them with a 6.5% national sales, or "consumption," tax as well as an excise tax on sugar drinks like soda.
The Bipartisan Policy Center was created in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell with the aim of finding solutions to major national issues.
Last week's proposal, from Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican former Sen. Alan Simpson, also called for an overhaul of tax and spending programs. Other similarities include:
View Full Image
DEFICIT
Getty Images
Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici in January speaking about the U.S. debt.
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DEFICIT
• Changing the formula for social-security taxes so that they are levied against 90% of all wages, compared with the current system, which caps the tax at a certain income level.
• Major cuts in discretionary spending. Both singled out a government policy that allows military retirees to collect full benefits after 20 years.
• Cuts to farm subsidies and either eliminating or limiting certain politically popular tax breaks, such as the mortgage-interest tax deduction.
Democrats and Republicans are largely in agreement that the U.S. debt is on an unsustainable path, and ideas are pouring in from both sides. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.), a member of Mr. Obama's commission, offered her own proposal Tuesday, calling for $110.7 billion in defense spending cuts in 2015 and raising $132.2 billion in revenue by closing certain tax loopholes for companies that she said ship jobs overseas.
[DEFICIT]
Mr. Domenici, in an interview, said, "In some ways, [the debt] is a silent killer, eating away at our future,"
Because the proposals touch so many key parts of the economy, from taxes to spending, they have triggered opposition. The latest came Tuesday, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the proposal by Messrs. Bowles and Simpson to cut $100 billion from defense spending would have a "catastrophic" impact on national security.
Those cuts are "math, not strategy," he said at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council in Washington.
Mr. Domenici, who spent 36 years in the Senate, called for a four-year freeze on defense spending as part of his report and said Pentagon officials should be less resistant. "Everybody must sacrifice, and our military leaders...must bear their share to get [the debt] under control," he said.
The Rivlin/Domenici proposal is likely to attract the most attention for its proposed 6.5% Debt Reduction Sales Tax, which some will liken to a value-added tax that exists in some parts of Europe.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), who is likely to become House majority leader in January, said Tuesday that many lawmakers wouldn't support VAT-type tax because its ties to Europe might make it politically poisonous in Washington.
"I don't think any of us want us to go the direction of the social welfare states around the world," Mr. Cantor said at the CEO Council.
Journal Community
* discuss
“ Changing the tax structure without controlling federal spending first is a waste of time. ”
—Edward Neis
Ms. Rivlin said the national sales tax was necessary to bring in revenue lost by cutting income and corporate tax rates and putting in the one-year payroll-tax holiday. A "consumption tax was a good way to go rather than try to put more burden on an income tax," she said.
Another change in the proposal would affect health-care costs. The proposal would, starting in 2018, encourage people to purchase private insurance plans by charging higher premiums for Medicare if costs rise faster than certain limits.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said at the CEO Council Tuesday that the administration was waiting to see what the specific proposals looked like before it weighs in on specifics. He said the ideal situation would combine short-term fiscal policies that help sustain growth with medium and long-term policies that cut the debt.
Write to Damian Paletta at damian.paletta@wsj.com
Bean Counters to the Rescue! By DAVID BROOKS AND GAIL COLLINS In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday
NOVEMBER 17, 2010, 12:31 PM
Bean Counters to the Rescue! By DAVID BROOKS AND GAIL COLLINS In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
Tags:
budget, federal deficit, Politics
The New York Times
Gail Collins: David, did you do the budget puzzle in The Times on Sunday? I really enjoyed seeing if I could eliminate all the shortfalls for the next 20 years. (Thank you, David Leonhardt and Co.) The first time I did it, about two-thirds of my savings came from increased tax revenue rather than spending cuts. But in the end, I got it down to 50-50. How about you?
David Brooks: Boy was I excited when I saw that chart. There I was with my cognac and slippers spending another leisurely morning brunching with Bill and Melinda, Sergey and Larry, Bruce and Bono, Kanye and Taylor when my eyes alighted on that chart. Well, of course, we threw back a few shots and played pin the tail on the deficit.
As I told Denzel when he arrived, you don’t want to be anywhere near a 50-50 spending-cuts-to-taxes split. That’s because international studies have shown repeatedly that higher tax revenues inevitably get spent whereas spending cuts really do go to reduce the deficit.
I was aiming for 70-30. Raising taxes on employer health benefits does double duty because it gets you revenue and it gives the health care system some cost control. Other than that, I was all over the mortgage interest deduction, agriculture subsidies, reducing our nuclear arsenal, raising the retirement age and the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment.
I was going to shelve the mortgage deduction but the housing market is in such a mess now that it seemed like a bad moment.
Gail Collins: Look, I had a glamorous weekend, too. After the dog threw up there were several hours of unmitigated excitement involving a mouse in the garbage can. But about that budget. Obviously, some of the options were of the meat-cleaver variety. For instance, I happily eliminated farm subsidies with my mind on big agribusiness, but if the ones to help small farmers practice better land conservation are in there, I want some of that money back.
David Brooks: My big personal hit was the mortgage interest deduction. I bought a house counting on it, but now I figure I have to give it up for the good of the country. I’m willing.
Gail Collins: This is why you are known among your friends as David the Celebrity Patriot. I was going to shelve the mortgage deduction but the housing market is in such a mess now that it seemed like, um, a bad moment. And I’m such a pessimist I suspect that particular bad moment could still be with us in 2030.
But we part company on this business of raising the Social Security retirement age. It sounds seductive. (Push it to 70 and get $247 billion by 2030.) The much-made argument is that people are living longer so they should retire later. But the longevity is skewed to the high-income earners, and if there’s one thing we already have enough of in this country it’s government programs to make the rich richer.
Sorry, we’ve got to raise the retirement age. There’s no way young people can subsidize the oldsters for nearly a quarter of their lives.
David Brooks: Sorry, we’ve got to raise the retirement age. If you are 60 right now, you can expect to live another 22.4 years. There’s no way young people can subsidize the oldsters for nearly a quarter of their lives. Especially when children today will be getting a negative net return on the money they put into the system. The whole thing will go kablooie if we ask people to surrender to a program that makes them worse off.
Gail Collins: We will agree to disagree on that one. On the positive side, there were some things I really did enjoy hitting the computer to delete. Cancel or delay some weapons programs: Yes! No more contracts for two different engines for the very same F-35. Return the estate tax to Clinton era levels! Get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy! And if Mitch McConnell’s ready to get rid of earmarks now, you aren’t going to see me standing in his way.
David Brooks: I’m actually with you on those weapons systems. I’m for keeping some earmarks though. They’re useful for getting legislation passed and they make congressmen so happy! I would repeal all the Bush tax cuts too, including the middle-class ones.
Gail Collins: There are some proposed cuts that I don’t really agree with but I’m tired of fighting about them. I don’t think medical malpractice reform is going to save any money — and even in this puzzle it’s only $13 billion over the next 25 years. But every time we start talking about health care costs there’s this shrieking about malpractice suits, and it just cuts off the conversation and gives people who don’t want to do anything an easy out. So I’ll concede malpractice reform, but I want an asterisk there saying we have to do it very, very carefully. Also, if foregoing the next 1.4 percent raise for federal civil service workers will get the Republicans to stop talking about laying them off, I concede.
David Brooks: In the spirit of compromise, I’m willing to give you the consumption tax if you’re willing to lower corporate taxes, to improve competitiveness.
Gail Collins: I’ll totally sign on to lowered corporate taxes if we get rid of all the loopholes, too.
Did you notice that at the beginning of the exercise, when the options were all discretionary domestic spending, the savings were $12 billion here, $14 billion there. Then you get to health care, and capping Medicare growth saves you $562 billion by 2030! It’s far and away the biggest single option.
Many of the same people who spent the last campaign wringing their hands over earmarks ($14 billion) were also warning the voters that Obamacare is going to cut Medicare or, in their parlance “get between you and your doctor.” They poisoned the well on the one issue that would actually solve the budget crisis they claim to be so worried about. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
David Brooks: I guess I also keep coming back to the biggest square on that page, Medicare. If we don’t cut that, nothing else matters.
I bet between us we could come up with a package in about five minutes. The problem is never with the policy substance. The problem is finding a political strategy to get it passed. Maybe next Sunday, David Leonhardt and his team could put together a chutes and ladders type game. Roll the dice and try to move your piece through the legislative process. Pass a bill and get re-elected!
That game would be really hard.
Bean Counters to the Rescue! By DAVID BROOKS AND GAIL COLLINS In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
Tags:
budget, federal deficit, Politics
The New York Times
Gail Collins: David, did you do the budget puzzle in The Times on Sunday? I really enjoyed seeing if I could eliminate all the shortfalls for the next 20 years. (Thank you, David Leonhardt and Co.) The first time I did it, about two-thirds of my savings came from increased tax revenue rather than spending cuts. But in the end, I got it down to 50-50. How about you?
David Brooks: Boy was I excited when I saw that chart. There I was with my cognac and slippers spending another leisurely morning brunching with Bill and Melinda, Sergey and Larry, Bruce and Bono, Kanye and Taylor when my eyes alighted on that chart. Well, of course, we threw back a few shots and played pin the tail on the deficit.
As I told Denzel when he arrived, you don’t want to be anywhere near a 50-50 spending-cuts-to-taxes split. That’s because international studies have shown repeatedly that higher tax revenues inevitably get spent whereas spending cuts really do go to reduce the deficit.
I was aiming for 70-30. Raising taxes on employer health benefits does double duty because it gets you revenue and it gives the health care system some cost control. Other than that, I was all over the mortgage interest deduction, agriculture subsidies, reducing our nuclear arsenal, raising the retirement age and the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment.
I was going to shelve the mortgage deduction but the housing market is in such a mess now that it seemed like a bad moment.
Gail Collins: Look, I had a glamorous weekend, too. After the dog threw up there were several hours of unmitigated excitement involving a mouse in the garbage can. But about that budget. Obviously, some of the options were of the meat-cleaver variety. For instance, I happily eliminated farm subsidies with my mind on big agribusiness, but if the ones to help small farmers practice better land conservation are in there, I want some of that money back.
David Brooks: My big personal hit was the mortgage interest deduction. I bought a house counting on it, but now I figure I have to give it up for the good of the country. I’m willing.
Gail Collins: This is why you are known among your friends as David the Celebrity Patriot. I was going to shelve the mortgage deduction but the housing market is in such a mess now that it seemed like, um, a bad moment. And I’m such a pessimist I suspect that particular bad moment could still be with us in 2030.
But we part company on this business of raising the Social Security retirement age. It sounds seductive. (Push it to 70 and get $247 billion by 2030.) The much-made argument is that people are living longer so they should retire later. But the longevity is skewed to the high-income earners, and if there’s one thing we already have enough of in this country it’s government programs to make the rich richer.
Sorry, we’ve got to raise the retirement age. There’s no way young people can subsidize the oldsters for nearly a quarter of their lives.
David Brooks: Sorry, we’ve got to raise the retirement age. If you are 60 right now, you can expect to live another 22.4 years. There’s no way young people can subsidize the oldsters for nearly a quarter of their lives. Especially when children today will be getting a negative net return on the money they put into the system. The whole thing will go kablooie if we ask people to surrender to a program that makes them worse off.
Gail Collins: We will agree to disagree on that one. On the positive side, there were some things I really did enjoy hitting the computer to delete. Cancel or delay some weapons programs: Yes! No more contracts for two different engines for the very same F-35. Return the estate tax to Clinton era levels! Get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy! And if Mitch McConnell’s ready to get rid of earmarks now, you aren’t going to see me standing in his way.
David Brooks: I’m actually with you on those weapons systems. I’m for keeping some earmarks though. They’re useful for getting legislation passed and they make congressmen so happy! I would repeal all the Bush tax cuts too, including the middle-class ones.
Gail Collins: There are some proposed cuts that I don’t really agree with but I’m tired of fighting about them. I don’t think medical malpractice reform is going to save any money — and even in this puzzle it’s only $13 billion over the next 25 years. But every time we start talking about health care costs there’s this shrieking about malpractice suits, and it just cuts off the conversation and gives people who don’t want to do anything an easy out. So I’ll concede malpractice reform, but I want an asterisk there saying we have to do it very, very carefully. Also, if foregoing the next 1.4 percent raise for federal civil service workers will get the Republicans to stop talking about laying them off, I concede.
David Brooks: In the spirit of compromise, I’m willing to give you the consumption tax if you’re willing to lower corporate taxes, to improve competitiveness.
Gail Collins: I’ll totally sign on to lowered corporate taxes if we get rid of all the loopholes, too.
Did you notice that at the beginning of the exercise, when the options were all discretionary domestic spending, the savings were $12 billion here, $14 billion there. Then you get to health care, and capping Medicare growth saves you $562 billion by 2030! It’s far and away the biggest single option.
Many of the same people who spent the last campaign wringing their hands over earmarks ($14 billion) were also warning the voters that Obamacare is going to cut Medicare or, in their parlance “get between you and your doctor.” They poisoned the well on the one issue that would actually solve the budget crisis they claim to be so worried about. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
David Brooks: I guess I also keep coming back to the biggest square on that page, Medicare. If we don’t cut that, nothing else matters.
I bet between us we could come up with a package in about five minutes. The problem is never with the policy substance. The problem is finding a political strategy to get it passed. Maybe next Sunday, David Leonhardt and his team could put together a chutes and ladders type game. Roll the dice and try to move your piece through the legislative process. Pass a bill and get re-elected!
That game would be really hard.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
One Way to Trim Deficit: Cultivate Growth
By DAVID LEONHARDT
We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody.
As late as 1998, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a deficit for 1999. In fact, Washington ran its biggest surplus in five decades.
What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems.
Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush (who doesn’t get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton, working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits.
But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury.
Today’s looming deficits are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference.
If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades — no easy feat, to be fair — the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.
To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times’s online deficit puzzle. It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts.
So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth.
There are two main ways to do so. First, we shouldn’t plunge ourselves back into another economic slump by raising taxes and cutting spending too quickly. President Franklin Roosevelt made that mistake in 1937, and this time (one hopes) the country won’t be able to rely on war mobilization spending to undo the error.
In the short term, we should actually spend more. “Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt,” argues a new bipartisan deficit plan that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin, a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici, a Republican, put it: “We can do both. We can put money in people’s pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run.” .
The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that’s a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday — or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama favors — is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits.
Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn’t simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do.
This task is not an easy one, because advocates and lobbyists inevitably claim that their idea, whatever it is, will help the larger economy. Just look at farm subsidies, a form of welfare for agribusiness that is supposedly crucial to the American economy. Or look at President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which, after being sold as an economic elixir, were followed by the slowest decade of growth since before World War II.
The two bipartisan deficit proposals that have come out over the last week each do a pretty good job, but not quite good enough, of focusing on economic growth. The most pro-growth part of both proposals — the Domenici-Rivlin plan and the one from Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson — is their emphasis on tax reform.
Today’s tax code is a thicket of deductions, credits and loopholes that force people to change their behavior and waste time trying to avoid too large of a tax bill. A tax code with fewer deductions and lower rates — which, to be clear, is not the same thing as a tax cut — would instead let businesses and households focus on being as productive as possible. The potential to make good money would drive more decisions, and the ability to qualify for a tax break would drive fewer.
Beyond tax reform, both deficit plans mention the importance of making investments that will lead to future growth. In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.
These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the world’s most prosperous economy last century in large measure because it was the world’s most educated country. It no longer is. Federal science dollars, meanwhile, led to the creation of the intercontinental railroad, the airline industry, the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet and numerous medical breakthroughs. Yet science funding is scheduled to decline as stimulus money runs out.
Unfortunately, the plans don’t get more specific than saying that education and science are important. The only dedicated money for specific investments in either plan is the infrastructure fund financed by the gas tax. And, realistically, exhorting a future Congress to avoid wasteful spending and prioritize growth has about as much chance of success as exhorting it to find the political will to revamp Medicare.
The two bipartisan deficit groups deserve a lot of credit for starting to move the debate beyond vagaries. There is one more step they can take, though: making sure we remember that cutting the deficit is not only about making cuts.
By DAVID LEONHARDT
We look back on the late 1990s as a rare time when the federal government ran budget surpluses. We tend to forget that those surpluses came as a surprise to almost everybody.
As late as 1998, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a deficit for 1999. In fact, Washington ran its biggest surplus in five decades.
What happened? Above all, economic growth. And that may be a big part of the answer to our current problems.
Yes, the government became more fiscally conservative in the 1990s. Both President George H. W. Bush (who doesn’t get enough credit) and President Bill Clinton, working with Congress, raised taxes to attack the 1980s deficits.
But those tax increases were the second most important reason for the surpluses that followed. The most important was the fact that the economy grew more rapidly than expected. The faster growth pushed up incomes and caused more tax revenue to flow into the Treasury.
Today’s looming deficits are almost surely too large to be closed exclusively with growth. The baby boom generation is too big, and the rise in Medicare costs continues to be too steep. Yet growth could still make an enormous difference.
If the economy grew one half of a percentage point faster than forecast each year over the next two decades — no easy feat, to be fair — the country would have to do roughly 40 to 50 percent less deficit-cutting than it now appears, based on my reading of budget data from the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.
To get a concrete sense for what this would mean, you can play around with the The Times’s online deficit puzzle. It asks you to find almost $1.4 trillion in annual spending cuts and tax increases by the year 2030. If growth were a half point faster than expected, the needed savings would instead drop to less than $700 billion. That would mean many fewer painful choices, be they tax increases or Medicare cuts.
So arguably the single best way to cut the deficit is to make sure that any deficit-cutting plan does not also cut economic growth. Ideally, it will lift growth.
There are two main ways to do so. First, we shouldn’t plunge ourselves back into another economic slump by raising taxes and cutting spending too quickly. President Franklin Roosevelt made that mistake in 1937, and this time (one hopes) the country won’t be able to rely on war mobilization spending to undo the error.
In the short term, we should actually spend more. “Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt,” argues a new bipartisan deficit plan that will be released Wednesday, the second such plan to come out in the last week. As Alice Rivlin, a Democrat who oversaw the writing of the plan with Pete Domenici, a Republican, put it: “We can do both. We can put money in people’s pockets in the short run and trim government spending in the long run.” .
The plan calls for a one-year payroll tax holiday for employers and workers, costing $650 billion. But remember that’s a one-time sum, while the needed deficit cuts will be hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Relative to those cuts, a payroll tax holiday — or more spending on roads and bridges, as President Obama favors — is a rounding error. And, of course, putting people back to work has its own benefits.
Even more important than the next couple of years is the second part of a pro-growth strategy: the long term. A good deficit plan doesn’t simply make across-the-board cuts for years on end. It cuts funding for programs that do not spur economic growth and increases funding for those relatively few that do. Likewise, it raises tax rates that do not have a clear record of promoting growth and cuts those that do.
This task is not an easy one, because advocates and lobbyists inevitably claim that their idea, whatever it is, will help the larger economy. Just look at farm subsidies, a form of welfare for agribusiness that is supposedly crucial to the American economy. Or look at President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which, after being sold as an economic elixir, were followed by the slowest decade of growth since before World War II.
The two bipartisan deficit proposals that have come out over the last week each do a pretty good job, but not quite good enough, of focusing on economic growth. The most pro-growth part of both proposals — the Domenici-Rivlin plan and the one from Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson — is their emphasis on tax reform.
Today’s tax code is a thicket of deductions, credits and loopholes that force people to change their behavior and waste time trying to avoid too large of a tax bill. A tax code with fewer deductions and lower rates — which, to be clear, is not the same thing as a tax cut — would instead let businesses and households focus on being as productive as possible. The potential to make good money would drive more decisions, and the ability to qualify for a tax break would drive fewer.
Beyond tax reform, both deficit plans mention the importance of making investments that will lead to future growth. In particular, the Bowles-Simpson plan calls for a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to pay for highways, mass transit and other projects. The plans also urge the government to prioritize education and science.
These are clearly among the best ways to promote growth. The United States created the world’s most prosperous economy last century in large measure because it was the world’s most educated country. It no longer is. Federal science dollars, meanwhile, led to the creation of the intercontinental railroad, the airline industry, the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet and numerous medical breakthroughs. Yet science funding is scheduled to decline as stimulus money runs out.
Unfortunately, the plans don’t get more specific than saying that education and science are important. The only dedicated money for specific investments in either plan is the infrastructure fund financed by the gas tax. And, realistically, exhorting a future Congress to avoid wasteful spending and prioritize growth has about as much chance of success as exhorting it to find the political will to revamp Medicare.
The two bipartisan deficit groups deserve a lot of credit for starting to move the debate beyond vagaries. There is one more step they can take, though: making sure we remember that cutting the deficit is not only about making cuts.
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Party of No By ROSS DOUTHAT
November 14, 2010
The Party of No By ROSS DOUTHAT
By offering up their joint recommendation last week for balancing the budget, the co-chairmen of Barack Obama’s fiscal commission didn’t solve our deficit problem once and for all, or clear a path through the political thickets facing would-be budget cutters. But Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson performed a valuable public service nonetheless: the reaction to their proposals demonstrated that when it comes to addressing the long-term challenges facing this country, the Democrats, too, can play the Party of No.
Last week’s media coverage sometimes made it sound as if Bowles and Simpson were taking the same amount of fire from left and right. But the reaction from Republican lawmakers and the conservative intelligentsia was muted, respectful and often favorable; the right-wing griping mostly came from single-issue activists and know-nothing television entertainers. The liberal attacks, on the other hand, came fast and furious, from pundits and leading Democratic politicians alike — starting with the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who pronounced the recommendations “simply unacceptable” almost immediately after their release.
Liberals defended this knee-jerk response on the grounds that the commissioners’ vision, ostensibly bipartisan, was actually tilted toward Republican priorities. And it’s true that Bowles and Simpson proposed more spending cuts than tax increases over all. But most of the programs and tax breaks that they suggested trimming — from farm subsidies to Defense Department bloat and the home-mortgage tax deduction — represent the American welfare state at its absolute worst. And the duo went out of their way to avoid balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. (Social Security, for instance, would be strengthened through a mix of tax increases and benefit cuts for wealthier seniors; retirees close to the poverty line would see their benefits increase.)
Their proposals certainly weren’t flawless, but they did manage to include good ideas from right and left alike. And it’s illuminating, and very depressing, that Democrats were so immediately outraged by a plan that reduces corporate welfare, makes Social Security more progressive, slashes the defense budget, raises the tax rate on millionaires’ summer homes — and does all of this while capping the government’s share of gross domestic product, not at some Scrooge-like minimum but at the highest level in modern American history.
Needless to say, none of the liberal lawmakers attacking the Simpson-Bowles proposals offered alternative blueprints for restoring America’s solvency. The Democratic Party has plans for many things, but a balanced budget isn’t one of them.
But pondering what Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for. It’s a world where the government perpetually warps the real estate and health care marketplaces, subsidizing McMansions and gold-plated insurance plans to the tune of billions every year. It’s a world where federal jobs are sacrosanct, but the private sector has to labor under one of the higher corporate tax rates in the developed West. It’s a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs. And it’s a world where federal spending rises inexorably to 25 percent of G.D.P. and beyond, and taxes rise with it.
Liberals sometimes justify this vision by arguing that government has to permanently subsidize the middle class and affluent in order to maintain public support for any safety net at all. (Most voters won’t support a system of basic social insurance for the poor, the theory goes, unless they’re getting something out of it as well.) And they defend the ever-rising tax rates required to finance these ever-expanding entitlements by noting that America thrived economically in the wake of World War II, when income-tax rates were much higher than they are today.
The first argument ignores the lessons of liberalism’s usual teacher, Western Europe, where governments have successfully reduced spending on their pension and entitlement systems without compromising their commitment to their neediest citizens. The second argument ignores the fact that the postwar United States didn’t have any serious economic competitors (the rest of the globe having been brought to its knees by total war), whereas today, an overtaxed America would struggle to compete with China and India and Brazil.
But the deeper problem is that the entire approach treats Americans as moral midgets, incapable of providing for the elderly and indigent without being bribed with giveaways and propped up with subsidies. The alternative sketched by Bowles and Simpson last week has its weaknesses, but it has this great virtue: It treats Americans not as clients but as citizens, and not as children but as adults.
The Party of No By ROSS DOUTHAT
By offering up their joint recommendation last week for balancing the budget, the co-chairmen of Barack Obama’s fiscal commission didn’t solve our deficit problem once and for all, or clear a path through the political thickets facing would-be budget cutters. But Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson performed a valuable public service nonetheless: the reaction to their proposals demonstrated that when it comes to addressing the long-term challenges facing this country, the Democrats, too, can play the Party of No.
Last week’s media coverage sometimes made it sound as if Bowles and Simpson were taking the same amount of fire from left and right. But the reaction from Republican lawmakers and the conservative intelligentsia was muted, respectful and often favorable; the right-wing griping mostly came from single-issue activists and know-nothing television entertainers. The liberal attacks, on the other hand, came fast and furious, from pundits and leading Democratic politicians alike — starting with the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who pronounced the recommendations “simply unacceptable” almost immediately after their release.
Liberals defended this knee-jerk response on the grounds that the commissioners’ vision, ostensibly bipartisan, was actually tilted toward Republican priorities. And it’s true that Bowles and Simpson proposed more spending cuts than tax increases over all. But most of the programs and tax breaks that they suggested trimming — from farm subsidies to Defense Department bloat and the home-mortgage tax deduction — represent the American welfare state at its absolute worst. And the duo went out of their way to avoid balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. (Social Security, for instance, would be strengthened through a mix of tax increases and benefit cuts for wealthier seniors; retirees close to the poverty line would see their benefits increase.)
Their proposals certainly weren’t flawless, but they did manage to include good ideas from right and left alike. And it’s illuminating, and very depressing, that Democrats were so immediately outraged by a plan that reduces corporate welfare, makes Social Security more progressive, slashes the defense budget, raises the tax rate on millionaires’ summer homes — and does all of this while capping the government’s share of gross domestic product, not at some Scrooge-like minimum but at the highest level in modern American history.
Needless to say, none of the liberal lawmakers attacking the Simpson-Bowles proposals offered alternative blueprints for restoring America’s solvency. The Democratic Party has plans for many things, but a balanced budget isn’t one of them.
But pondering what Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for. It’s a world where the government perpetually warps the real estate and health care marketplaces, subsidizing McMansions and gold-plated insurance plans to the tune of billions every year. It’s a world where federal jobs are sacrosanct, but the private sector has to labor under one of the higher corporate tax rates in the developed West. It’s a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs. And it’s a world where federal spending rises inexorably to 25 percent of G.D.P. and beyond, and taxes rise with it.
Liberals sometimes justify this vision by arguing that government has to permanently subsidize the middle class and affluent in order to maintain public support for any safety net at all. (Most voters won’t support a system of basic social insurance for the poor, the theory goes, unless they’re getting something out of it as well.) And they defend the ever-rising tax rates required to finance these ever-expanding entitlements by noting that America thrived economically in the wake of World War II, when income-tax rates were much higher than they are today.
The first argument ignores the lessons of liberalism’s usual teacher, Western Europe, where governments have successfully reduced spending on their pension and entitlement systems without compromising their commitment to their neediest citizens. The second argument ignores the fact that the postwar United States didn’t have any serious economic competitors (the rest of the globe having been brought to its knees by total war), whereas today, an overtaxed America would struggle to compete with China and India and Brazil.
But the deeper problem is that the entire approach treats Americans as moral midgets, incapable of providing for the elderly and indigent without being bribed with giveaways and propped up with subsidies. The alternative sketched by Bowles and Simpson last week has its weaknesses, but it has this great virtue: It treats Americans not as clients but as citizens, and not as children but as adults.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
A Parallel Universe to TV and Movies By MIKE HALE
November 12, 2010
A Parallel Universe to TV and Movies By MIKE HALE
HAS any art form — or entertainment category or visual medium or whatever you want to call it — grown so large so fast as the online serial, while remaining so consistently outside the mainstream cultural conversation? Quick, name a Web series. We’ll wait.
Did you come up with “lonelygirl15”? Two years after that initial series ended, it’s probably still the best known online serial — not because of its quality, but because of the fuss when it was revealed to be fiction.
If you’re an aficionado, or just have a lot of time on your hands, you may actually be watching better serials, like Felicia Day’s role-playing-game satire, “The Guild,” which recently completed its fourth season, or Lisa Kudrow’s latest deconstruction of 21st-century self-absorption, “Web Therapy,” which just resumed its third. But you’re probably not reading or hearing about them anywhere but online.
And still the Web series get made, hundreds of titles numbering thousands of short episodes: dramas, comedies, Webisodes accompanying television series, cartoons, talk shows, reality shows, newsmagazines, documentaries — a cheaper and quicker parallel universe to television and film.
Beginning this week in Arts & Leisure we will periodically round up some current and recent examples of purpose-made (as opposed to spur-of-the-moment) online video, focusing on original content but also keeping an eye out for hard-to-find television shows and films that have been given a home on the Web. We hope it will serve as both a snapshot of what’s being made and a guide for the casual but interested consumer.
Web Therapy
Ms. Kudrow’s series starring herself as Fiona Wallace, an abrasive and unhelpful online therapist, posted its 46th episode last week, and it’s a good one. The “Web Therapy” viewer sees both sides of Fiona’s iChat conversations; here she discusses her husband’s sexuality with his therapist, played by a hilariously winsome and breathy Meryl Streep. (The stagy reflexive laugh that’s marred some of Ms. Streep’s recent performances in film comedies doesn’t make an appearance.)
“We take the homo out of sexuality,” Ms. Streep purrs, before revealing that Fiona’s husband has responded more positively to a photograph of David Hasselhoff than to one of a naked Fiona. Then she has to pause for a moment because her bra has popped open.
Ms. Streep will reportedly appear in two more episodes while this ministory arc plays out; new episodes are posted on Wednesdays at lstudio.com/web-therapy.
Riese
The Canadian production “Riese” is not a new series; 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv. What’s interesting about its current run at Syfy.com is that it’s explicitly a tryout for television. Syfy wants to see whether “Riese” can make the same Internet-to-cable move that “Sanctuary” made in 2008. (Ten nine-minute episodes, with commercials, equals a two-hour pilot.) In case the connection wasn’t clear enough, Amanda Tapping, the star of “Sanctuary,” narrates “Riese.”
Less interestingly “Riese” exemplifies the recent resurgence of the steampunk aesthetic, which has journeyed from Western science fiction through Japanese animation and comic books (where it produced wonderful things like “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Howl’s Moving Castle”) and back into geeky Western popular culture. That mash-up of Victorian and Industrial Revolution visual motifs with science fiction or Tolkien-esque fantasy is represented in “Riese” by the usual goggles and arcane headgear, and a few dirigiblelike sailing ships floating in the air.
Christine Chatelain, a lithe beauty who has also done time on “Sanctuary,” is a bit glum as the title character but still makes a convincing exiled princess-action heroine. “Sanctuary” has made it to a third season on Syfy by being mediocre but mildly addictive, so the bar isn’t set too high for “Riese.” The 7th of the show’s 10 episodes will be posted on Tuesday; new episodes go up Tuesdays and Thursdays at syfy.com/riese.
Kids Reenact
The Babelgum.com original series “Kids Reenact” isn’t exactly satire at a high level, but it doesn’t need to be. Having 6- and 7-year-olds act out mock scenes from shows like “The Hills” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” complete with sighs, head tosses and rolled eyes, is inherently funny.
In the latest episode, “Kids Reenact Project Runway,” a tiny Tim Gunn in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses marches around spouting his namesake’s pet phrases. (“This worries me. Go go go. Follow your vision. Make it work.”) A mini Michael Kors dresses down a bashful designer in terms he can understand: “It looked like Princess Jasmine showed up drunk to Little Mermaid’s birthday party.”
Tales From Beyond the Pale
A project of the cult horror auteur Larry Fessenden (“Wendigo,” “The Last Winter”) and the writer and director Glenn McQuaid (“I Sell the Dead”), “Tales From Beyond the Pale” could be described, uncharitably, as a podcast site. But what Mr. Fessenden and Mr. McQuaid are really trying to do is revive the radio drama in a new setting. Those old enough to remember previous attempts like “CBS Radio Mystery Theater” — as well as fans of shows from “A Prairie Home Companion” to “This American Life” that take their stylistic cues from radio’s glory days — should enjoy these macabre R-rated tales.
Three half-hour dramas are available, including “British and Proud,” a satirical take on Anglophilia, imperialism and sex with the natives, by the filmmaker Simon Rumley (“Red, White & Blue”), and “Is This Seat Taken” by the novelist Sarah Langan, a meet-not-so-cute story set on the Long Island Rail Road. The schedule includes episodes written by Mr. Fessenden and the Eli Roth protégé Paul Solet (“Grace”). The site, talesfrombeyondthepale.com, offers free preview clips, but hearing an entire drama means buying a $1.99 download.
Dark Echo
Once again Showtime is offering a set of animated Webisodes to accompany its serial-killer-drama, “Dexter.” The six two- to three-minute episodes of “Dark Echo” tell a self-contained story, opening with the funeral of Dexter’s adoptive father, Harry.
The storytelling in the Webisodes is carried entirely by the animation and by the internal-monologue narration of Michael C. Hall as Dexter. The narration is the weakest part of the television series and a steady diet of it here is deadening. The compensation: The first three episodes are drawn by the top-flight comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz (“Elektra: Assassin,” “Daredevil: Love and War”).
Salesman/Princess Jellyfish
There are gems to be found among the “Real Housewives” and “Cops” episodes on Hulu.com. Its Criterion Collection channel, begun in February with a group of “Zatoichi” sword-fighting movies, most recently added “Salesman” (1968), the seminal direct-cinema documentary by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin (hulu.com/salesman).
In a completely different vein Hulu is posting episodes of the charming anime series “Princess Jellyfish,” based on an award-winning shojo manga (women’s comic) about a group of socially awkward young women sharing an apartment with a cross-dressing man, more or less simultaneously with their broadcast on Fuji TV in Japan. New episodes have been going up on Thursdays at hulu.com/princess-jellyfish.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 21, 2010
The Watchlist column last Sunday, about the growth of the online serial, referred incorrectly to the history of one such series, “Riese,” currently running on Syfy.com. Only 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv, not all 10.
A Parallel Universe to TV and Movies By MIKE HALE
HAS any art form — or entertainment category or visual medium or whatever you want to call it — grown so large so fast as the online serial, while remaining so consistently outside the mainstream cultural conversation? Quick, name a Web series. We’ll wait.
Did you come up with “lonelygirl15”? Two years after that initial series ended, it’s probably still the best known online serial — not because of its quality, but because of the fuss when it was revealed to be fiction.
If you’re an aficionado, or just have a lot of time on your hands, you may actually be watching better serials, like Felicia Day’s role-playing-game satire, “The Guild,” which recently completed its fourth season, or Lisa Kudrow’s latest deconstruction of 21st-century self-absorption, “Web Therapy,” which just resumed its third. But you’re probably not reading or hearing about them anywhere but online.
And still the Web series get made, hundreds of titles numbering thousands of short episodes: dramas, comedies, Webisodes accompanying television series, cartoons, talk shows, reality shows, newsmagazines, documentaries — a cheaper and quicker parallel universe to television and film.
Beginning this week in Arts & Leisure we will periodically round up some current and recent examples of purpose-made (as opposed to spur-of-the-moment) online video, focusing on original content but also keeping an eye out for hard-to-find television shows and films that have been given a home on the Web. We hope it will serve as both a snapshot of what’s being made and a guide for the casual but interested consumer.
Web Therapy
Ms. Kudrow’s series starring herself as Fiona Wallace, an abrasive and unhelpful online therapist, posted its 46th episode last week, and it’s a good one. The “Web Therapy” viewer sees both sides of Fiona’s iChat conversations; here she discusses her husband’s sexuality with his therapist, played by a hilariously winsome and breathy Meryl Streep. (The stagy reflexive laugh that’s marred some of Ms. Streep’s recent performances in film comedies doesn’t make an appearance.)
“We take the homo out of sexuality,” Ms. Streep purrs, before revealing that Fiona’s husband has responded more positively to a photograph of David Hasselhoff than to one of a naked Fiona. Then she has to pause for a moment because her bra has popped open.
Ms. Streep will reportedly appear in two more episodes while this ministory arc plays out; new episodes are posted on Wednesdays at lstudio.com/web-therapy.
Riese
The Canadian production “Riese” is not a new series; 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv. What’s interesting about its current run at Syfy.com is that it’s explicitly a tryout for television. Syfy wants to see whether “Riese” can make the same Internet-to-cable move that “Sanctuary” made in 2008. (Ten nine-minute episodes, with commercials, equals a two-hour pilot.) In case the connection wasn’t clear enough, Amanda Tapping, the star of “Sanctuary,” narrates “Riese.”
Less interestingly “Riese” exemplifies the recent resurgence of the steampunk aesthetic, which has journeyed from Western science fiction through Japanese animation and comic books (where it produced wonderful things like “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Howl’s Moving Castle”) and back into geeky Western popular culture. That mash-up of Victorian and Industrial Revolution visual motifs with science fiction or Tolkien-esque fantasy is represented in “Riese” by the usual goggles and arcane headgear, and a few dirigiblelike sailing ships floating in the air.
Christine Chatelain, a lithe beauty who has also done time on “Sanctuary,” is a bit glum as the title character but still makes a convincing exiled princess-action heroine. “Sanctuary” has made it to a third season on Syfy by being mediocre but mildly addictive, so the bar isn’t set too high for “Riese.” The 7th of the show’s 10 episodes will be posted on Tuesday; new episodes go up Tuesdays and Thursdays at syfy.com/riese.
Kids Reenact
The Babelgum.com original series “Kids Reenact” isn’t exactly satire at a high level, but it doesn’t need to be. Having 6- and 7-year-olds act out mock scenes from shows like “The Hills” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” complete with sighs, head tosses and rolled eyes, is inherently funny.
In the latest episode, “Kids Reenact Project Runway,” a tiny Tim Gunn in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses marches around spouting his namesake’s pet phrases. (“This worries me. Go go go. Follow your vision. Make it work.”) A mini Michael Kors dresses down a bashful designer in terms he can understand: “It looked like Princess Jasmine showed up drunk to Little Mermaid’s birthday party.”
Tales From Beyond the Pale
A project of the cult horror auteur Larry Fessenden (“Wendigo,” “The Last Winter”) and the writer and director Glenn McQuaid (“I Sell the Dead”), “Tales From Beyond the Pale” could be described, uncharitably, as a podcast site. But what Mr. Fessenden and Mr. McQuaid are really trying to do is revive the radio drama in a new setting. Those old enough to remember previous attempts like “CBS Radio Mystery Theater” — as well as fans of shows from “A Prairie Home Companion” to “This American Life” that take their stylistic cues from radio’s glory days — should enjoy these macabre R-rated tales.
Three half-hour dramas are available, including “British and Proud,” a satirical take on Anglophilia, imperialism and sex with the natives, by the filmmaker Simon Rumley (“Red, White & Blue”), and “Is This Seat Taken” by the novelist Sarah Langan, a meet-not-so-cute story set on the Long Island Rail Road. The schedule includes episodes written by Mr. Fessenden and the Eli Roth protégé Paul Solet (“Grace”). The site, talesfrombeyondthepale.com, offers free preview clips, but hearing an entire drama means buying a $1.99 download.
Dark Echo
Once again Showtime is offering a set of animated Webisodes to accompany its serial-killer-drama, “Dexter.” The six two- to three-minute episodes of “Dark Echo” tell a self-contained story, opening with the funeral of Dexter’s adoptive father, Harry.
The storytelling in the Webisodes is carried entirely by the animation and by the internal-monologue narration of Michael C. Hall as Dexter. The narration is the weakest part of the television series and a steady diet of it here is deadening. The compensation: The first three episodes are drawn by the top-flight comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz (“Elektra: Assassin,” “Daredevil: Love and War”).
Salesman/Princess Jellyfish
There are gems to be found among the “Real Housewives” and “Cops” episodes on Hulu.com. Its Criterion Collection channel, begun in February with a group of “Zatoichi” sword-fighting movies, most recently added “Salesman” (1968), the seminal direct-cinema documentary by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin (hulu.com/salesman).
In a completely different vein Hulu is posting episodes of the charming anime series “Princess Jellyfish,” based on an award-winning shojo manga (women’s comic) about a group of socially awkward young women sharing an apartment with a cross-dressing man, more or less simultaneously with their broadcast on Fuji TV in Japan. New episodes have been going up on Thursdays at hulu.com/princess-jellyfish.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 21, 2010
The Watchlist column last Sunday, about the growth of the online serial, referred incorrectly to the history of one such series, “Riese,” currently running on Syfy.com. Only 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv, not all 10.
Safer Social Security By PETER ORSZAG
November 14, 2010
Safer Social Security By PETER ORSZAG
Social Security is not the key fiscal problem facing the nation. Payments to its beneficiaries amount to 5 percent of the economy now; by 2050, they’re projected to rise to about 6 percent. Over the same period, federal health care costs will increase six times as much.
Nevertheless, Social Security does face an actuarial deficit. Current projections suggest that, after 2037, benefits would need to be reduced by more than 20 percent to match revenue. Measured over the next 75 years, the deficit in Social Security is expected to amount to 0.7 percent of the economy — not a huge amount, but a deficit nonetheless.
So it would be desirable to put the system on sounder financial footing. And that is precisely what the co-chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt have bravely proposed to do. It’s too bad their proposal has been greeted with so much criticism, especially from progressives — who really should look at it as an opportunity to fix Social Security without privatizing it. Although the plan leans too much on future benefit reductions and not enough on revenue increases, it still offers a good starting point for reform.
The proposal put forward last week by Alan Simpson, the former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine Bowles, who was a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, has four main elements.
First, it would make the payroll tax more progressive by increasing the maximum earnings level to which it applies. Over the past several decades, as higher earners have enjoyed particularly rapid wage gains, a growing share of their wages has escaped the tax because they have been above the maximum taxable level. Today, about 15 percent of total wages are not taxed. The chairmen recommend gradually raising the maximum threshold so that, by 2050, only 10 percent of total wages wouldn’t be taxed — decreasing the 75-year Social Security deficit by more than a third.
Second, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Bowles recommend indexing the age at which full Social Security benefits can be received to increases in life expectancy. This age is already increasing to 67, and under the proposal the gradual rise would continue, to 68 by 2050. A better approach would be to leave the full benefit age alone and instead directly reduce the monthly benefits as life expectancy rises, to keep average lifetime benefits roughly constant. But the chairmen’s approach would by itself narrow the Social Security gap by about a fifth.
The third suggested change is to make the formula for determining Social Security benefits more progressive, by reducing future payments to high earners while increasing them for people at the bottom. These adjustments would close at least another third of the projected deficit. And they would also help offset a little-noticed trend: affluent Americans are increasingly living longer than others. This pushes the Social Security system toward being less progressive, as higher earners collect benefits for more years.
Finally, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson would have Congress adjust the cost-of-living index that’s used to determine annual increases in Social Security benefits so that it would measure inflation more accurately. Making this switch would fill in more than a quarter of the long-term deficit, because the new index would grow more slowly.
If Congress were to take all four of these recommended steps, it could not only eliminate the long-term deficit in Social Security but also make the system much more progressive. Even compared with the benefits promised by the current system, the recommended benefits for the poorest 20 percent of recipients would increase by about 5 percent, while those for the wealthiest retirees would fall by almost 20 percent.
Furthermore, the plan would not create private accounts within Social Security — the most controversial issue that came up when reform was last debated in 2005. Why not lock in a reform when private accounts are off the table? (Note to progressives: the Social Security plan put forward by Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the expected new chairman of the House Budget Committee, does include private accounts.)
The main flaw in the proposed Social Security plan is that it relies too little on revenue increases and too much on future benefit reductions. A reasonable objective would be a 50-50 balance between changes in benefits and changes in revenues. But the way to bring reform into better proportion is to adjust the components of this proposal, not to fundamentally remodel it.
Finally, even though Social Security is not a major contributor to our long-term deficits, reforming it could help the federal government establish much-needed credibility on solving out-year fiscal problems — which in turn could improve the political prospects for providing additional short-term stimulus for the economy. All of which suggests that Democrats in Congress should support the basic construct of the Bowles-Simpson proposal, while arguing for some changes to improve it. That has not, however, been their reaction thus far.
It is therefore crucial that the Obama administration recognize the opportunity and respond to it more positively. The White House has been handed a highly progressive reform plan for Social Security that could attract Republican support as well.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010 and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
Safer Social Security By PETER ORSZAG
Social Security is not the key fiscal problem facing the nation. Payments to its beneficiaries amount to 5 percent of the economy now; by 2050, they’re projected to rise to about 6 percent. Over the same period, federal health care costs will increase six times as much.
Nevertheless, Social Security does face an actuarial deficit. Current projections suggest that, after 2037, benefits would need to be reduced by more than 20 percent to match revenue. Measured over the next 75 years, the deficit in Social Security is expected to amount to 0.7 percent of the economy — not a huge amount, but a deficit nonetheless.
So it would be desirable to put the system on sounder financial footing. And that is precisely what the co-chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt have bravely proposed to do. It’s too bad their proposal has been greeted with so much criticism, especially from progressives — who really should look at it as an opportunity to fix Social Security without privatizing it. Although the plan leans too much on future benefit reductions and not enough on revenue increases, it still offers a good starting point for reform.
The proposal put forward last week by Alan Simpson, the former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine Bowles, who was a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, has four main elements.
First, it would make the payroll tax more progressive by increasing the maximum earnings level to which it applies. Over the past several decades, as higher earners have enjoyed particularly rapid wage gains, a growing share of their wages has escaped the tax because they have been above the maximum taxable level. Today, about 15 percent of total wages are not taxed. The chairmen recommend gradually raising the maximum threshold so that, by 2050, only 10 percent of total wages wouldn’t be taxed — decreasing the 75-year Social Security deficit by more than a third.
Second, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Bowles recommend indexing the age at which full Social Security benefits can be received to increases in life expectancy. This age is already increasing to 67, and under the proposal the gradual rise would continue, to 68 by 2050. A better approach would be to leave the full benefit age alone and instead directly reduce the monthly benefits as life expectancy rises, to keep average lifetime benefits roughly constant. But the chairmen’s approach would by itself narrow the Social Security gap by about a fifth.
The third suggested change is to make the formula for determining Social Security benefits more progressive, by reducing future payments to high earners while increasing them for people at the bottom. These adjustments would close at least another third of the projected deficit. And they would also help offset a little-noticed trend: affluent Americans are increasingly living longer than others. This pushes the Social Security system toward being less progressive, as higher earners collect benefits for more years.
Finally, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson would have Congress adjust the cost-of-living index that’s used to determine annual increases in Social Security benefits so that it would measure inflation more accurately. Making this switch would fill in more than a quarter of the long-term deficit, because the new index would grow more slowly.
If Congress were to take all four of these recommended steps, it could not only eliminate the long-term deficit in Social Security but also make the system much more progressive. Even compared with the benefits promised by the current system, the recommended benefits for the poorest 20 percent of recipients would increase by about 5 percent, while those for the wealthiest retirees would fall by almost 20 percent.
Furthermore, the plan would not create private accounts within Social Security — the most controversial issue that came up when reform was last debated in 2005. Why not lock in a reform when private accounts are off the table? (Note to progressives: the Social Security plan put forward by Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the expected new chairman of the House Budget Committee, does include private accounts.)
The main flaw in the proposed Social Security plan is that it relies too little on revenue increases and too much on future benefit reductions. A reasonable objective would be a 50-50 balance between changes in benefits and changes in revenues. But the way to bring reform into better proportion is to adjust the components of this proposal, not to fundamentally remodel it.
Finally, even though Social Security is not a major contributor to our long-term deficits, reforming it could help the federal government establish much-needed credibility on solving out-year fiscal problems — which in turn could improve the political prospects for providing additional short-term stimulus for the economy. All of which suggests that Democrats in Congress should support the basic construct of the Bowles-Simpson proposal, while arguing for some changes to improve it. That has not, however, been their reaction thus far.
It is therefore crucial that the Obama administration recognize the opportunity and respond to it more positively. The White House has been handed a highly progressive reform plan for Social Security that could attract Republican support as well.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010 and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
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