Reviews and Essays
The Road to Stardom
December 2, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Josh Brolin is a postmodern cowboy. Masculine but too vulnerable to be macho, at ease on a motorcycle or on horseback, he looks best with dust in the grooves of his skin. Some of his scars are self-inflicted. “I have made life harder than it’s needed to be,” the actor concedes in his memoir
The Call of the Climb
November 27, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Modern mountaineering is a quest for niche glory. The Earth’s highest peaks have been climbed and reclimbed so many times now that elite alpinists must distinguish themselves with obscure prizes: ascend faster, or by a harder route,
A Faculty for Espionage
October 25, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
The U.S. entered World War II with an intelligence deficit. Its allies and enemies had long-established clandestine operations, some of them dating back centuries. But the Americans had no dedicated spy service and relied
Echos of an Imperial Composer
August 23, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Was Tchaikovsky a tempest or a drudge? The great Russian composer of iconic works like “The Nutcracker” and the “1812 Overture” is generally thought to have lived a life of melodrama. An alcoholic and an insomniac, he endured a catastrophic marriage and suffered
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
July 6, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
In an extraordinary gesture of trust, the American president left Washington, D.C., on September 9, 1943, and handed the British prime minister his keys. “Winston, please treat the White House as your home.
Sharp Bookmark
May 15, 2024 | The Millions
Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage
Paul Auster’s Voice
May 8, 2024 | The Millions
Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books.
Great Lakes Odyssey
April 5, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
In a time of pessimism and uncertainty, storytellers have recently turned to the future to predict a grim world that yet retains flickers of light. HBO’s recent series “The Last of Us” explored the familiar terrain of the zombie apocalypse through the bond between
The Killing of an IRA Man
April 1, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
The political conflict in Northern Ireland that not so long ago involved a cycle of terror and reprisal has given way to a series of dry bureaucratic spats. The regional parliamentary assembly in Belfast recently reconvened
Emptying the Bookshelves
December 22, 2023 | The Wall Street Journal
“We’re going through Dad’s bookshelves and wondered if you’d like us to save some things for you?” This innocent question, posed by phone in the fortnight between my father’s death and his memorial service
Plains Writing
November 30, 2023 | The Economist
The American West is a great setting for a story, but a hard place to live. That is the theme of new biographies of Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry, 20th-century novelists who abandoned a life
Writing in Reverse
November 20, 2023 | The Millions
Hilary Mantel wrote with a novelist’s flair and a historian’s mind. Her fiction overflows with the busy detritus of life: this plate of fruit, that whispered threat, children at play, a plucked string. The accretion of detail