Richard Lea Monday March 5, 2007 Guardian Unlimited Granta magazine has unveiled its second list of the best young American novelists - a mixture of authors already familiar on this side of the Atlantic, such as Guardian first book award w…

THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. By Tom Bissell. Illustrated. 407 pp. Pantheon Books. $25. Bissell’s view of the war is supple, complex and a relief from the most recent wave of books about Vietnam, wh…

ミラン・クンデラ Milan Kundera Saturday March 3, 2007 The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience in the curriculum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly sees that self from a distance, astonished to find tha…

MOST writing about the benighted land of Burma, dubbed Myanmar by the grotesque junta running it, falls into one of two traps. Either it plumps for simplification, which is pardonable given the justness of its moral outrage. The conflict d…

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE A Biography Author Madison Smartt Bell Madison Smartt Bell seems to believe that most readers will bring a similarly blank slate to his latest work, a biography of the Haitian leader who led "the only successful slave …

So what's the really big whoop? "Les Bienveillantes" is clunkily written -- it often feels as if Littell is just regurgitating the enormous amount of research he obviously did -- and paradoxically uninvolving, considering its topic. Narrat…

NIXON AND MAO The Week That Changed the World. By Margaret MacMillan. Even as he was celebrating that triumph, the new chief executive and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were planning a comparably dramatic giant leap in di…

When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was published in English last year, something was left out. Just a few lines omitted from the introduction to the French edition that had appeared two years previously. Nothing to diminish the remark…

THE uncanny resemblance between Cormac McCarthy's recent novel, “The Road”, and Jim Crace's new book, “The Pesthouse”, does not mean Mr Crace is an imitator. He would have finished his manuscript by the time “The Road” came out. Yet within…

Chandrahas Choudhury reviews The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany tr by Humphrey Davies An imposing 10-storey edifice in downtown Cairo, the Yacoubian Building embodies Egyptian society in microcosm, housing in its plush apartments mem…

MOSCOW -- Maxim Kantor is a big man who thinks big thoughts. For almost 30 years, his apocalyptic paintings, grim despite their primary colors, have depicted Russia as a yawning void, devouring its citizens. Discovered as an underground ar…

Kiran Desai's Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss has been a bestseller in India for weeks now. It is displayed proudly in upmarket bookshops. Bootleg copies are brandished by boys, weaving in and out of traffic light fumes. These…

MEASURED by scale, dreadfulness or daring, the German campaign in east Africa from 1914 to 1918 can hardly be beaten. Over a vast territory, a small German colonial force, under the extraordinary leadership of General Paul Emil von Lettow-…

Emphasis apart, it is hard to say what is new in his account. The scheme discussed at the Tel Aviv meeting, Plan Dalet, has been known about for years. It has long been clear that the Palestinians were not, as used to be claimed, encourage…

James Buchan Saturday February 17, 2007Guardian The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al Aswany 255pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99 The Yacoubian Building is the sort of dense neighbourhood novel which, though quite out of style when set in London or Pa…

Giles Foden Saturday February 10, 2007Guardian Measuring Time by Helon Habila 383pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 Twins, quadratures and syzygies have long been part of Nigerian literature and myth, usually as a challenge to views of society ba…

SAY what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived under armed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman. Just 11 years after she arrived in the Neth…

Saul David reviews Forgotten Wars: the End of Britain's Asian Empire by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper Sixty years ago, on August 14, 1947, India and Pakistan were granted Independence and the jewel in Britain's imperial crown was no mor…

Nigel Jones reviews Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa by Edward Paice Twenty-first-century history students can be forgiven for forgetting that the Great War was a world war at all. So concentrated were the hostiliti…

Bruce Anderson reviews In the Service of the Sultan: A First-Hand Account of the Dhofar Insurgency by Ian Gardiner In the late 1960s and early 1970s, British troops played a vital part in winning a crucial war. It received little publicity…

by IAN WILLIAMS マデリーン・オルブライトの回想録"Madam Secretary"の書評。 [from the February 23, 2004 issue] A noticeable aspect of her memoirs is the convenient lacunae whenever she tries to cover her own rear and secondly Bill Clinton's-…

By MICHAEL JANOFSKY Published: February 19, 2006 ギャディスの"The Cold War: A New History"があんなにネオコン染みてたのはそういうわけか。 WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 ― One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a…

Tony Judt"Postwar"の書評。 Judt, however, is impervious to religion, unmoved by music and rather complacent about non-French and non-political branches of art and culture. Parisian intellectual warlords and east European dissidents, though…

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html?ei=5070&en=ba8ce3a98534d8d6&ex=1144555200&pagewanted=print 'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillipsの書評。 Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the R…

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/04/05/easterly/ "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good"出版に際して、イースタリーへのインタビュー。 Last year, celebrity economist and Un…

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1743898,00.html TS Eliot argued in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead." Eliot did not find it preposterous "th…

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/03/28/lopate/ "American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now",Ed. by phillip Lopateの書評。 "American Movie Critics" is doomed to be a frustrating book if only because it offers us j…