Of the incontestable reasons to choose one book, one song, one painting over another is the caprice of personal preference. There being many worthy poets available to the loquacious commentator, in the case of Marie Ponsot—who has over half a century of versifying under her belt—it was the title of her new collection that drew my gaze—Easy (Knopf). Additionally, the elegance of her response to why poetry matters is endearing:

There’s a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief, that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us.

“Discovery and relief”—what a wonderful expression.

Here’s a poem from The Bird Catcher, her 1998 National Book Critics Circle award-winning collection.

Northampton Style

Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,

as if it swam to time us down a river
where we dive and leave a single track
as evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer

that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

When we disentangle you are not with her
I am not with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer

still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer

and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;

its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

And from her new anthology:

TV, Evening News
—seen on CNN, autumn 2005, Afghanistan


It’s a screenful of chaos but
the cameraman’s getting good framing shots
from behind one woman’s back.
The audio’s poor. The shouts are slices of noise.
I don’t know the languages.

No hot hit heroes are there.
No wicked people are there.

Achilles is not there, or Joshua either.
Rachel is not there, nor Sojourner Truth.
Iwo Jima flag boys? not there.
Twin Towers first defenders? not there.
My children are thank God not there
any more or less than you and I are not there.

I safe screen-watch. A youth
young in his uniform
signals his guard squad
twice: OK go, to the tanks
and the cameramen: OK go.

The tank takes the house wall.
The house genuflects. The tank proceeds.
The house kneels. The roof dives.
The woman howls. Dust rises.
They cut to the next shot.

The young men and the woman
breathe the dust of the house
which now is its prayer.
A dust cloud rises, at one
with the prayer of all the kneeling houses
asking to be answered
and answerable anywhere.

As it turns out, the ease that the collection’s title references is more about the joyfulness and lack of pretension with which Marie Ponsot addresses her calling. The subjects, drawn from life and its labors, are another matter entirely. Still, Easy does it.  —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 8, 2010

Whether Frank Gehry ranks as one of the greatest living architects or not, he is certainly one of the most famous—think the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Now comes a new monograph, Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli) written by Mildred Friedman, which exhibits his lesser-known work and designs for private houses.

Apparently it was in residential design that Gehry began his exploration of new methodologies and experimentation with an array of materials—perhaps most famously with his own house. His first steps as an innovator in use of materials and refining of how architects employ digital software were in residential applications as exemplified by the Schnabel House in Brentwood, Calif., the Winton Guest House in Wayzata, Minn., and the Lewis House in Lyndhurst, OH. All are spectacular examples of Gehry’s startling, postmodernist style.

As he is quoted in Friedman’s tome:

You can learn from the past, but you can’t continue to be in the past; history is not a substitute for imagination…I use art as a means of inspiration. There are no rules, no right or wrong. I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty.

Using an elucidating mix of color photography, sketches, and plans, this 300-page tome is a well-designed exhibit of the envelope-pushing, rule-breaking, sometimes dazzling creations of a singular artist. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 5, 2010

When I first became acquainted with Jonathan Dee back in the mid-’90s, he had two decent novels under his belt—A Lover of History, The Liberty Campaign—and he was a wisecracking senior editor at the Paris Review, educated at Yale and seemingly destined to write smart “well-crafted” novels. With The Privileges, Dee is on his fifth opus, and in a few words it is the kind of novel I prophesied that he would produce.

Dee is to be credited with writing a story by whose particulars I am normally repelled and doing it so well that The Privileges became a compelling read. Set in Manhattan, Adam and Courtney marry in their early twenties, have two Ralph-Lauren-catalogue-model-looking children, and continue to trade up and profit in the high-rent zone of the city as Adam accumulates wealth in the private equity world and career-less Courtney does the predictable pro-bono dance, sitting on various charitable boards.

Here’s Courtney:

You could stay home and write checks, of course, and when Adam stared making serious money that’s all she initially thought to do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial then send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved… She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities; there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won’t You Please Join Us in The Fight Against Death. She knew on some level that she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway.

And Adam (musing at a $1000-a-head gala):

Another Wall Street tyke… Another kid blowing his bonus money on a party where he thinks he’ll network with people that don’t even know he is alive. The whole bonus thing got to him actually, in a way it hadn’t before. He’d been given a big bonus this year, what did that even mean? Maybe he should buy himself a sailboat, or find more expensive hotels to stay in during the few weeks a year he was allowed to travel… or see if he could find an even more overpriced school to send his kids to? He felt like a sap. Everybody acted like the amount mattered, when what mattered was getting a bonus at all. Of bring outside the small circle wherein it was decided how much a man’s work was worth.

Elizabeth Strout’s blurb sums it up well:

Here is an incredibly readable, intelligent, incisive portrait of a particular kind of American family. Jonathan Dee takes us inside the world of what desire for wealth can do, and cannot do, for the self, the soul, and the family. The Privileges is told with admirable conciseness and yet with great breadth, and the reader is swept along, watching the complications of such desire unfold.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 5, 2010

Of the infamous quartet of apocalyptic equestrians, Famine seems to be the least studied or, perhaps more accurately, the least visible. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History (Princeton University Press) ameliorates that with a fine balance of storytelling and scholarship. There is no question about the catastrophic effects of famine and mass starvation, but their origins—ecological shocks or political policy—and their severity call for investigation.

Ó Gráda (Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory) extends scrutiny back to the Egyptians for the first recorded famine and transverses the centuries, explicating and elucidating the Great Famine of the Middle Ages, the so-called Irish Potato Famine of 1847, the famines in the Soviet Union in both 1921 – 1922 and 1932 – 1933, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, the 1959 – 1961 famine in China, Ethiopia in 1984 – 1985, North Korea in 1995 – 1996, and down to Niger in 2005. In its course, this history reviews the work of Malthus and Adam Smith as well as contemporary scholars Mike Davis, Alex de Waal, and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Ó Gráda observes:

It is a great irony that the most deadly famines of the last century—including the worst ever in terms of sheer numbers—occurred under regimes committed, at least on paper, to the eradication of poverty. The history of the USSR (1917 – 1989) is pockmarked by famine. Post-1949 China’s remarkable record of achievements in terms of life expectancy and material progress will always be marred by the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-61, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. Today, the people of the Democratic Republic of North Korea struggle to survive in the wake of a smaller famine.

For what it is worth he goes on to claim:

…as much as anything else, the slow, onward march of accountable government will rid the world’s last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine… The prospect of a famine-free world hinges on improved governance and peace. It’s as simple—or difficult—as that… At present, only the poorest regions of Africa remain at risk, and prolonged famine anywhere is conceivable only in contexts of endemic warfare or blockade.

Which, when you consider it, is a remarkable development. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 4, 2010

The velocity with which books can be—dare I use the verb “written?”—published these days is astonishing. Barely has a disaster decimated an unfortunate number of humans and their habitat, a scandal titillated millions, or a suspected-pederast superstar passes to his greater, when out pops a, uh, tome.

Now I was apparently mistaken in thinking that the tea-party movement is a very recent phenomenon, as I found out while perusing A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending, and More Taxes (Wiley) by John O’Hara, “a young rising star in the center-right movement” and self-named counterrevolutionary.

If one can stomach the exercise one would do well not to be dismissive of this new crusade. Michelle Malkin (Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild), not one noted known for judicious commentary and analysis, writes in the foreword:

In this passionate and illuminating book O’Hara chronicles the roots, rise, and future of the New American Tea Party movement… O’Hara dispels the leftwing myths of a top-down ‘angry mob;’ eschews the vulgar and derogatory descriptions of the Tea Party protesters used by everyone from cable TV smear merchants to former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama; beats back attacks on those peaceful ordinary citizens as “racists” and “terrorists”; and shows how the modern day Tea Party patriots embody the founding spirit and principles of our great nation…[This] book is a living history and a call to arms. Now is the time for all good taxpayers to turn the tables on their free-lunching countrymen and enablers in Washington.

You, no doubt, want to know what stirred up those peaceful, ordinary citizens (those gun-toting patriots with the signs likening the President to Hitler) referencing the American Revolution. O’Hara explains:

Beginning with the bailouts of the Bush Administration, Americans awoke day in and day out to headlines chronicling the radical transformation of our nation’s political, legal, and economic structures imposed for “the common good.” By February 2009, a rightfully skeptical public rose up in cities and towns across the country to tell their elected officials loud and clear to support not undermine the free-market economy that has made the US the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history.

Oh boy! —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 4, 2010

There was a time when people would joke that they read Playboy for the interviews, eschewing any interest in the centerfolds and other decorative editorial. It should be obvious that what you can find on the newsstand is indicative of something about the cultural moment, and Loyola (of Chicago) University mentor Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s new tome, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (Oxford University Press), effectively makes that point.

Hugh Hefner did not invent the titty magazine, but in the case of Playboy he imbued it with a pastiche of elements—serious interviews of interesting people, sex advice, mixological information, cartoons by the inimitable Gahan Wilson—that distinguished it from the other skin publications. Hefner explained (circa 1953):

Playboy isn’t very serious… [It offers] the kind of life part of the reader would like to live. It offers him an imaginary escape into the worlds of wine, women, and song. Then the other part of him says he has to go back to his family responsibilities and his work… If we have an editorial policy it’s only by implication; live and let live. It’s a wonderful life and lett’s enjoy it. It’s a kind of argument for a liberal democratic society with emphasis on the freedom of the individual.

This doesn’t refer to the money machine that became Playboy Enterprises—calendars, clubs, bunny tchotchkes, a Hefner TV program, the Playboy Mansion (in Chicago), and other shrewd branding. But those marketing initiatives were a large part of the deal. Ambitious lotharios could look to Playboy for style tips and necessary accoutrements for that sought-after good life.

Fraterrigo concludes:

Playboy took the figure of the carefree bachelor as a model for an elongated period of youthful enjoyment, sexual fulfillment, and pleasurable consumption, suggesting that young men who followed the advice of the magazine would ultimately lead more rewarding lives. The views and values of this iconic magazine have come to flow freely in the mainstream of modern America. Along the way, popular discussions of Playboy have become, in effect, debates about American life, then and now much more about the cultural preoccupations and anxieties of American society.

The transformation of mid-century America is an interesting moment to look back on. One does marvel at the way Hefner’s creation rooted itself in the mainstream, especially in light of those wild, drug-crazed, and orgiastic ‘60s. The Making of the Good Life does well in making sense of that. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 3, 2010