Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011

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November 21, 2011

Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011
By DWIGHT GARNER

ALFRED KAZIN’S JOURNALS by Alfred Kazin. The great American literary critic Alfred Kazin’s passions — for sex, for novels, for ideas, for talk, for city life — spill from these journals, edited by his biographer, Richard M. Cook. This is one of the great diaries and moral documents of the past American century. What it lacks in cohesiveness it makes up in its frankness, its quick-pivoting angularities. Kazin dismisses his journals at one point as a “disorderly pile of shavings.” That disorder only adds to their amplitude. (Yale University Press, $45)



THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Peter Englund. This intense and bighearted book, from a Swedish historian and journalist, contains few banner names, famous battles or major treaties. Instead it threads together the often moving and harrowing wartime experiences of 20 more or less unknown men and women. It’s not so much a book about what happened, the talented author explains, as “a book about what it was like.” It’s about “feelings, impressions, experiences and moods.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)



CHAVS: THE DEMONIZATION OF THE WORKING CLASS by Owen Jones. The noun chav, in Britain, essentially means “ugly prole”: loutish, tacky, probably drunken and possibly violent. Think Snooki with a cockney accent. Mr. Jones’s book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?” His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage. (Verso, $23.95)



IPHIGENIA IN FOREST HILLS: ANATOMY OF A MURDER TRIAL by Janet Malcolm. Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story. (Yale University Press, $25)



IS JOURNALISM WORTH DYING FOR? FINAL DISPATCHES by Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist who was shot and killed by an unknown assailant in Moscow in 2006, wrote about the dark side of Vladimir V. Putin’s reign: the brutal war in Chechnya; the top-to-bottom thuggery and corruption; the lack of an independent judiciary; the “bureaucratic black magic” that could poison, or snuff out, a life at a moment’s notice. Her prose fit her subject: it was mostly hard and balefully direct, wormy with unpleasant truths. This book collects some of her last and best work. (Melville House, $19.95)



OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1989-2010 by Geoff Dyer. Mr. Dyer, a shape-shifting British writer, is among the best essayists on the planet, and this book includes some of his finest work. He casts an almost perversely wide net here. There are pieces about Ian McEwan and the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue and the jazz cornet player Don Cherry. He goes on tour with the aging rockers in Def Leppard and goes up in a decommissioned Russian MIG-29 fighter plane. He wanders though Camus’s Algeria. He reflects upon the joy of having sex in good hotels. What these essays impart is ecstasy. (Graywolf Press, $18)



PULPHEAD: ESSAYS by John Jeremiah Sullivan. From a demonically talented Southern writer, essays on topics as varied as Axl Rose, Tennessee cave systems and the Southern Agrarian literary movement. The putty that binds them is Mr. Sullivan’s steady, subversive and unhurried voice. Reading him, I felt the way Mr. Sullivan does while listening to a Bunny Wailer song called “Let Him Go.” That is, I felt “like a puck on an air-hockey table that’s been switched on.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16)



RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE CURIE: A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT by Lauren Redniss. This illustrated biography of Marie and Pierre Curie lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story, their scientific collaboration and the way their toxic discoveries, which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion. This book is an unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. Her drawings are ambitious and spooky. Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that has become a dream city. (It Books, $29.99)



TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre Dubus III. This is a sleek muscle car of a memoir that growls like an amalgam of work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Mr. Dubus is the son of the writer Andre Dubus, a father who wasn’t around for most of the author’s difficult and impoverished childhood. This book could become, and I mean this fondly, one hell of a Ben Affleck movie. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)



THE VOYAGE OF THE ROSE CITY: AN ADVENTURE AT SEA by John Moynihan. This posthumously published book, from the son of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, tells the story of how the author left Wesleyan University during the summer of his junior year and joined the merchant marine. He spent four months crossing the equator on an oil supertanker called the Rose City. This is a young man’s book, for sure; it was written when its author was barely 20. But Moynihan has a good story to tell, one that’s flecked with briny bits of Melville and Conrad and Raban. His unshowy prose has genuine immediacy. He’s never less than frank, funny company on the page. (Spiegel & Grau, $22)