Piazza D'Italia con Cavallo, by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

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Whether you’re a longtime subscriber or just joined us yesterday, we hope that you have enjoyed our recommendations for the best in culture each week. As the year draws to a close, consider showing your support for The Critic’s Notebook by making a donation to The New Criterion. Throughout our thirty-third season, our online supporters have been crucial to sustaining TNC as an incisive and intelligent voice in today’s intellectual debate. Your donations will allow us to continue on in our mission to chronicle and critique the best in arts and culture today.

This week: Inventive fiction, malignant unions, and holiday cheer.

FictionHow to be both: A Novel, by Ali Smith (Pantheon): Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Smith’s inventive double novel deals with moral questions, gender issues, the value of art, the mutability of time, and a number of other important questions. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases—one version is narrated by an adolescent character mourning the death of her mother after a trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa, and the other narrated from the past by Francesco himself. Both views are captivating, challenging, and often puzzling, exemplifying the versatility of the novel as a literary form. CE

Nonfiction: Waterloo: A New History, by Gordon Corrigan (Pegasus): After twenty-three years in battle, at some points displaying signs of sheer military brilliance, Napoleon lost everything at Waterloo. Before the battle, Napoleon reckoned “the English are bad troops and this affair is nothing more that eating breakfast.” Wellington, his allies, and the Prussians proved Napoleon to be very wrong on June 15, 1815 in the battle fought in present-day Belgium. Gordon Corrigan, the member of the British Commission for Military History and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, revisits this important battle, and shows how the end of Napoleon was just the beginning for Britain’s military dominance in the world. –RH

Poetry: An Interview with Edward Hirsch: The talented poet Edward Hirsch is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the current president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Released this fall, Gabriel—a book-length poem about his son’s tragic and untimely death—has received significant critical attention and is now long-listed for the National Book Award. Many recent interviews have focused on Hirsch’s life and grief, but in this one he discusses the poetics of his extraordinary book.  CE

Art:  Four Freedoms Park: Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened at the southern tip of New York's Roosevelt Island in late 2012. Yet most of us (myself included) have been slow to make the trek to see one of Louis Kahn final works of architecture, realized nearly forty years after his death. This is a mistake for anyone looking for a contemplative, sea-girt retreat from the bustle of the city. With the austere lines of a de Chirico painting, Kahn's memorial is a work of crystalline modernism, now just a tram ride away from Midtown.  —JP

Music: Twelfth Night Festival (December 26 through January 6): Two weeks in a row for Trinity Wall Street: while other organizations are mostly shuttered between Christmas and the New Year, Trinity's celebration of the season continues with its Twelfth Night Festival. From December 26 to January 6, Trinity will present a rich lineup of musical offerings, both as part of regular church services and as stand-alone ticketed concerts. The programs will present works by Bach, Mozart, Rossini, Haydn, Handel, Rachmaninoff, and others. ECS

OtherGovernment Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences, by Daniel DiSalvo (Oxford University Press): The Republic will last, some sage has written, until a portion of the people realize it can vote itself money from the public purse. The insidious symbiotic relation between public-sector unions, which draw upon the taxpayer’s fisc to fund lavish benefits for its members, and the politicians who are beholden to them, has come close to realizing this destructive scenario. Even FDR warned against allowing public-sector unions, realizing that the conflict of interest they encouraged had the potential to be destructive of the very values they purported to support. In Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences by the Manhattan Institute’s Daniel DiSalvo expertly anatomizes the origin, growth, and malign influence of public-sector (as distinct from private-sector) unions, showing how their unprecedented power in political life constitutes a vivid threat not just to our economic future but to our liberty and the vitality of our democratic institutions.  This is a must-read book for anyone concerned about the future of American prosperity. –RK

From the archive: A prodigy of parody, by John Gross: A review of A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm.

From our latest issue: Eliot in full, by Denis Donoghue: A review of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volumes 1 & 2.

 

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