Thursday, August 21st   Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings by and about Maxim Gorky (Russian Literature and Thought) by Maksim Gorky

Enter your email address below and seven days a week a new review will arrive in your mail. Email address: Click here to read about Powells.com's privacy policy.

Low Truths A Review by Alexander Nemser Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, the future Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga River, and grew up in what he later described in his melancholy, violent autobiography as "that close-knit, suffocating little world of pain and suffering where the ordinary Russian man in the street used to live, and where he lives to this day." It was the world of the provincial petty-bourgeois -- neighbors cut the tails off each other's cats and sons besieged their fathers' houses, knocking all night on the doors with fists and clubs. Gorky was struck from the start by the chaos and the carelessness of the life that he saw around him. Many of the most lyrical passages in his autobiography describe the silences that followed the savage outbursts of his relatives. He remembered his lazy cousin Sasha, whose two rows of teeth were "the only interesting thing about him": "I liked to sit close to him," Gorky wrote, "neither of us speaking for a whole hour, and watching the black crows ...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online

The Challenge: Hamdan V. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power by Jonathan Mahler The executive branch maneuvers, and courtroom battles, where the rights and lives of detainees are concerned. A Review by Art Winslow No one should mistake the military commission trial and sentencing of Salim Hamdan, famously Osama bin Laden's driver, as marking the end of his legal problems, or of ours. The Aug. 6 verdict by six military jurors at the U.S. installation in Guantánamo Bay convicted Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism but exonerated him of charges of conspiracy. Sentencing the next day called for imprisonment of 66 months (prosecutors had asked for a minimum sentence of 30 years), but Hamdan has already served 61 months in detention, which has been credited to his sentence. The result? He is...   Read the entire review More reviews from Los Angeles Times				Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventionsof 1968 (New York Review Books Classics) by Norman Mailer Master of Conventions A Review by Christopher Hitchens "I am a 'left conservative.'" That was Norman Mailer's jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him, at the beginning of the 1980s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over his extraordinary journal of a plague year, written 40 years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of ...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly The Strange History of Birth Control A Review by Helen Epstein This review also covers Reproducing Inequities: Poverty and the Politics of Population in Haiti In the 1920s it was illegal to advertise contraceptive diaphragms in the US or send them through the mail, and anyone who wrote about them risked imprisonment for indecency. The devices were entirely banned in some states, and in others doctors prescribed them only to women for whom pregnancy posed a clear health risk, if at all. Most couples relied on condoms, withdrawal, and douches, including the popular disinfectant Lysol, which was advertised in magazines along with "fountain syringes."  Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books				The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu Who's Your Buddha? A Review by Howard W. French Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003. A tiny man with small, darting eyes and ears that were extremely hard of hearing, Deng had survived despite an irremediable fondness for his old pipe, which he relighted and puffed every few minutes as he spoke to Liao. A couple of pages into Liao's account of their conversation in The Corpse Walker, one quickly grasps that surviving a fondness for tobacco was the very least of...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Nation
Together Under One Roof: Making a Home of the Buddha's Household by Lin Jensen Together under One Roof A Review by Chris Faatz There are a few books that I turn to again and again for sustenance, succor, meaning. They include titles as diverse as books of sermons and Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace, books by the Christian radical Dorothy Day, and those by secular philosopher and eminent Humanist Bertrand Russell. It's a rare thing when something is added to that small pile of important texts, but I'm thrilled to say that this summer a book's been added. It's Lin Jensen's Together under One Roof: Making a Home of the Buddha's Household. Jensen's a rare bird, even among Zen teachers. He was born and raised in...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com				The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff Big Love A Review by Ron Charles After weathering the scrutiny and debates kicked up by Mitt Romney's run for the White House and Warren Jeffs's polygamous sect in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints probably deserves the rest of the year off. But, lo and behold, here comes an engrossing new novel that resurrects one of the Mormons' most destructive opponents: Ann Eliza Young, a beautiful, articulate woman who once shared Brigham Young's bed and then devoted her life to destroying him. She's brought back to vivid life by David Ebershoff, an editor at Random House who bears no grudge against Mormons but ...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World