The Book Depository blog

The Boston Times takes a look at Peter A. Carlin's life of my fellow Scouser, Sir Paul McCartney:

The story is familiar: As arguably the greatest rock n' roll band, the Beatles ruled 60s culture. John Lennon was the smart one and the leader; Paul McCartney, the cute No. 2; George Harrison, the restless genius-in-waiting; and Ringo Starr, the funny reality check.

In Paul McCartney: A Life, Peter A. Carlin offers a reconsideration of the dynamics of the band and McCartney's role in it, arguing that Paul was as much a leader as John. But he also offers a complex portrait of an artist whose insecurities were fanned when he was in the presence of talented musicians with strong artistic visions, but who did his best work when around them.

As primary evidence, Carlin presents an appropriately unflattering analysis of McCartney's work after the Beatles broke up in 1970. Despite occasionally great post-Beatles music like the singles Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, and the albums Band on the Run and the fabulously retro Run Devil Run, he observes that McCartney failed to grow beyond the work he did with Lennon.

For this warm, fair book, Carlin interviewed childhood friends, former business associates, and members of various McCartney bands, particularly Wings -- but was not, unfortunately, granted interviews with McCartney or Starr. Carlin's description of the process involved in McCartney's creation of Yesterday and of the influence McCartney's effortless musicality had on the group underscore how much influence he had on the direction of the iconic band (more...)

This looks superb: Best European Fiction 2010, edited by the excellent Aleksandar Hemon (author of The Lazarus Project and The Question of Bruno):

Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, styles, and ways of seeing the world. Yet times have changed, and how much do we even know about the richly diverse literature being written in Europe today?

Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe.

Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur "Genius-Award" winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the US, UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what's happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered.

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Sad news: Howard Zinn, the great American historian, playwright and author of many books including the bestselling A People's History of the United States has died aged 87.

The Boston Globe quote Noam Chomsky in saying: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture... He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

There is lots more information over at via howardzinn.org.

The Financial Times gets to grips with Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declaring it "the best book so far on the financial crisis":

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, is knowledgeable about the historical background, immersed in the policy debate and a pioneer of the economic theories needed to understand the origins of the problems. Although the material is necessarily difficult at times, the book is also easy to read. It is therefore indispensable not just for those who (like me) are broadly sympathetic to the Stiglitz position but for those who would rebut these charges.

Stiglitz's account begins in the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatisation. The symbol of these changes for financial markets was the replacement of Paul Volcker by Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This set the way for light regulation of the banking system and created a willingness to respond to any market setback with a relaxation of monetary policy -- the "Greenspan put". These developments were not the result of policy oversight but of policy design. Conservatives and Wall Street got the policy framework they had sought (more...)

Michiko Kakutani, over at the New York Times, has her take on Don Delillo's latest novel Point Omega... and she isn't that impressed. Kakutani reckons that "DeLillo extracts considerable suspense from his story, while building a Pinteresque sense of dread [but] there is something suffocating and airless about this entire production":

Richard Elster, the central character of Point Omega, Don DeLillo's slender new novella, is a scholar who helped the Pentagon conceptualize an intellectual framework for the Iraq war. He is being courted by a filmmaker named Finley, who wants to make a documentary with him talking about the war. Picture Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice and some American Enterprise Institute thinkers put in a Cuisinart along with Robert S. McNamara as he appeared in Errol Morris's movie The Fog of War.

Like many of Mr. DeLillo's earlier books, Omega is preoccupied with death and dread and paranoia, and like many of those books, it has an ingenious architecture that gains resonance in retrospect. But even its clever structural engineering can't make up for the author's uncharacteristically simplistic portrait of its hero: a pompous intellectual who shamelessly justifies sending thousands of young soldiers off to die in an unnecessary war with abstract, philosophical arguments, but who suddenly comes to know the meaning of death and loss firsthand when his beloved daughter abruptly disappears.

Instead of the jazzy, vernacular, darkly humorous language he employed to such galvanic effect in White Noise and Underworld, Mr. DeLillo has chosen here to use the spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose he used in his 2001 novella, The Body Artist, and his 1987 play, The Day Room.

And in place of the electric, highly detailed observations of American life that animate Libra and Mao II, he has substituted dreary and highly portentous musings about mortality and time. There is talk about how time feels different in the desert from the way it does in a city, talk about life versus art and art versus reality, talk about an "omega point" where "the mind transcends all direction inward" -- whatever that might mean (more...)