The New York Times-20080127-Paperback Row
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Full Text (829 words)THE GOOD FIGHT: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart. (Harper Perennial, $14.95.) Beinart (pictured at right), a columnist at Time magazine and The Washington Post, urges Democrats to prepare for the future by remembering the past -- the heyday of cold-war liberalism during the 1940s. He urges a foreign policy based on humility, restraint and generous foreign aid to fragile democracies, as well as domestic policies that embody the humane values we promote abroad. Beinart writes clearly and concisely, with a pellucid intelligence, our reviewer, Joe Klein, said. The political scientist Thomas F. Schaller's advice to the Democrats focuses on tactics. In WHISTLING PAST DIXIE: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon & Schuster, $15), he argues that the party should let go of their electoral past and begin building a non-Southern majority coalition by solidifying the coastal states and the Midwest and reaching out to the Southwest. The recipient of Beinart's and Schaller's advice may be Hillary Clinton. In A WOMAN IN CHARGE: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Vintage, $15.95), Carl Bernstein, who helped break the Watergate story, surveys Clinton's career. Bernstein has written a serious, energetically researched and largely fluent book, Michiko Kakutani said in The Times, often sympathetic toward the former first lady as an individual ... just as often critical of judgment calls she's made on both policy and politics.
DANCING TO ALMENDRA, by Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Picador, $14.) This delightful novel -- part hard-boiled gangster story, part love story -- is set in Havana in the late 1950s and is narrated alternately by a reporter investigating the murder of a Mafia capo and by a woman who ran away with the circus and may be the lover of a Mafia boss. This is the ninth novel by Montero, a Cuban who now lives in Puerto Rico.
THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, by Heidi Julavits. (Anchor, $13.95.) The title of this clever novel comes from Bruno Bettelheim, but Freud's analysis of Dora is its primary text. Its protagonist is either a victim or a false accuser, either abducted as a 16-year-old by an older man or not. The novel begins in the present, when its protagonist returns home for her estranged mother's funeral. The central section consists of her therapist's hilariously wrongheaded notes. In chapters titled What Might Have Happened, what passes for the real story is revealed.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: A Memoir of Survival, by Stanley N. Alpert. (Berkley, $15.) Walking in Greenwich Village on Jan. 21, 1998, the night before his 38th birthday, Alpert was grabbed at gunpoint by three thugs who took him to an A.T.M. When they saw how much money he had in his account, they decided to hold on to him. Blindfolded in a Brooklyn apartment, Alpert kept his wits about him and managed both to stay alive and to remember the details that would assure his kidnappers' conviction. This account of Alpert's horrific yet ridiculous captivity makes the book one of the most exhilarating, improbable New York stories ever told, William Grimes wrote in The Times.
THE TERROR, by Dan Simmons. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $14.99.) The Terror was one of the Royal Navy ships that set out from England in search of the Northwest Passage in 1845 and was irretrievably stuck in the polar ice. Simmons, a much-honored writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, imagines what happens next in this ambitious and very long novel.
AMERICAN ISLAM: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, by Paul M. Barrett. (Picador, $15.) As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Barrett wrote about Muslims in the United States after 9/11. The seven profiles in this book grew out of that work, as Barrett seeks to illustrate the diversity of Islam in the United States.
AMERICAN YOUTH, by Phil LaMarche. (Random House, $14.) Showing off to two brothers who are his friends, a 14-year-old New England boy loads his father's .22. Then one brother accidentally shoots the other. This brief, briskly told first novel describes the boy's life after the incident as he lies to the police on his mother's orders and is taken up by a right-wing vigilante group called American Youth.
AMERICAN FASCISTS: The Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges. (Free Press, $14.) Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for The Times, describes a Christian movement known as dominionism, which calls on the radical church to take political power and shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements.
MONOPOLY: The World's Most Famous Game -- And How It Got That Way, by Philip E. Orbanes. (Da Capo, $14.95.) This spirited pop history describes Monopoly's early-20th-century origins in the Landlord's Game, based on the anti-monopoly theories of Henry George; the current version was released by Parker Brothers during the Depression. Orbanes advises the player to forget Park Place and build a portfolio of cheaper properties.
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