Rutten Book Reviews: An Archive of Past Reviews
May 6, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Losing Mum and Pup' by Christopher Buckley
Some years ago, when they still lived in Malibu, the late John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, entertained a prominent magazine journalist and author at dinner. It was December and, afterward, they invited their guest to accompany them to their daughter's grammar school Christmas pageant.
April 29, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Dust and Shadow' by Lyndsay Faye
Arthur Conan Doyle famously tired of Sherlock Holmes and repeatedly tried to end the series of stories featuring the detective he dismissively called "my most notorious character." On each occasion, though, an intense popular clamor -- and the opportunity it afforded to shore up the author's shaky finances -- coaxed Conan Doyle into an additional sequence of stories. Holmes' adventures total four novels and 56 short stories.
April 22, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Who Is Mark Twain?'
When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country's most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.
April 15, 2009
Opinion
Tim Rutten: The poetry, and wisdom, of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney, the greatest living English-language poet, turned 70 this week.
April 8, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Nomad's Hotel' by Cees Nooteboom
Cees Nooteboom, now 75, is one of the two Dutch writers -- along with his slightly older contemporary, Harry Mulisch -- whose name always turns up on those mysterious annual short lists of Nobel Prize contenders so beloved of European literary journalists.
March 25, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6' by Gordon Thomas
The experience of empire seems to leave a people with at least a taste, if not a particular talent, for conspiracy. Certainly, that's true of the Russians for whom the one place at which the history of czarism and Bolshevism most clearly conjoins is in a lasting predilection for plots and plotting. It's true as well for the British, who transmuted the gifted amateurism of Kipling's "great game" into the modern world's first recognizable professional intelligence agencies.
March 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940' edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
Death's shadow frequently sends literary reputation into critical eclipse.
February 18, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Dissident or not, Ismail Kadare is one of the greats
Ismail Kadare is, in many ways, among the most problematic of major writers in contemporary Western letters.
February 10, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Gamble' by Thomas E. Ricks
"In 2005 the United States came close to losing the war in Iraq."
February 4, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Angel Maker: A Novel' by Stefan Brijs
If you're one of those who has been mesmerized by the problematic complexities of the still-unfolding Whittier octuplets saga, then "The Angel Maker" might be just the novel for you.
January 28, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'A World of Trouble' by Patrick Tyler
Patrick Tyler is a veteran foreign and Washington correspondent who more recently has applied his formidable reporting skills and narrative gifts to diplomatic history. His latest effort, "A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East -- From the Cold War to the War on Terror," couldn't be more timely.
January 14, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'The Holy City: A Novel' by Patrick McCabe
At some point, there's a large and interesting essay to be written on why so much of the most interesting new English-language fiction comes to us from Indian and Irish writers.
January 7, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
'Family of Secrets' by Russ Baker
The tendency Richard Hofstadter so aptly labeled "the paranoid style" in American politics operates independent of ideology.
December 20, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'Samuel Johnson: The Struggle' by Jeffrey Meyers
If you survey the geography of modern letters, three books stand out as signposts marking the beginning of paths that lead decisively away from all that went before. Augustine's "Confessions," the first memoir of an inner life, is one such work. So is Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote," which is the first inarguably modern novel. The third is James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson," the earliest recognizable modern biography.
November 12, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening' by Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel, who died last month at the age of 96, was America's most popular oral historian.
October 8, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism' by Bernard-Henri Levy
IT IS impossible to imagine any country but France that could produce Bernard-Henri Levy.
October 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'The Forever War' by Dexter Filkins
THE LITERATURE of human conflict divides itself into two schools: One -- the more ancient -- is bardic and celebrates war and warriors; the other is the tradition of witness, which elucidates war and records the fates of those caught up in it.
September 16, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'Indignation' by Philip Roth
ONE OF THE ways to recognize truly great writers is that even their mistakes engage us.
September 10, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
"The War Within" by Bob Woodward
ONE OF modern warfare's founding fathers, the 19th century Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke, was of the opinion that no military plan, however well and carefully conceived, could survive its first contact with the enemy.
August 20, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar' by Paul Theroux
IN 1973, an expatriate American novelist possessed of great ambitions, pretty good reviews and slender means set out from London's Victoria Station to circumnavigate the great Eurasian land mass, mostly by train. Two years later, he published an account of that epic journey, "The Great Railway Bazaar."
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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