| Author | Notes | Book | Reference | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ball, Edward | Slaves in the Family (1998) | NYTBR, 1 March 1998 Star Tribune, 19 April 1998 |
A descendant of slave owners tries to document and come to terms with the reality of his family history. | |
| Beatty, Jack | The World According to Peter Drucker (1998) | NYTBR, 11 January 1998 | Known primarily as a management visionary, Drucker turns out to be an exceptionally broad intellect and surprisingly ambivalent about capitalism. | |
| Berlinski, David | The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World (2000) | NYTBR, 21 May 2000 | As it says. | |
| Bobrick, Benson | Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution (1997) | NYTBR, 6 July 1997 | "What [the American Revolution] has needed in recent years is a storyteller fit to get it between two covers. Now it has found one." | |
| Boyd, Brian | Professor of English at the University of Auckland and the author of "an insightful two-volume biography of Nabokov." | Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (2000) | NYTBR, 5 March 2000 | It turns out Nabokov's masterpiece is an elaborate ghost story. |
| Brier, Bob | An Egyptologist of note. | The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story (1998) | NYTBR, 6 May 1998 | A reconstruction, from available evidence, of Brier's theory that Tutankhamen was murdered by his successor. |
| Brooks, David | Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) | NYTBR, 21 May 2000 | Tracing the rise of success of the "bohemian bourgeois," the dominant social caste in early-21st-century America. Who'd have guessed that the winners would be a synthesis of 60's-era social consciousness with 80's-style go-go capitalism? | |
| Bryson, Bill | A mildly overweight, middle-aged, self-described "cupcake:" "...a lumbering, droll, neatnik intellectual who comes off as equal parts Garrison Keillor, Michael Kinsley and...Dave Barry." | A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1998) | NYTBR, 31 May 1998 | Bryson decides to tackle the Appalachian trail, dispensing with the expected analogies to journeys of self-discovery in favor of witty observation. |
| Chang, Iris | The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) | NYTBR, 14 December 1997 | How the Japanese slaughtered 350,000 out of a city of 650,000 in a generally forgotten (and now politically sensitive) episode of the war. | |
| Conover, Ted | Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000) | NYTBR, 14 May 2000 | "Denied permission to write about the lives of correction officers, the author became one himself." | |
| Foveaux, Jessie Lee Brown | Any Given Day: The Life and Times of Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux (1997) | NYTBR, 26 October 1997 (advertisement) | Memoirs by an older woman from Oklahoma written as part of a seniors' writing seminar. Her relatives passed around copies; publishers picked up and bid on the story after it was written up in The Wall Street Journal. Unsparing look at a hard life in mid-twentieth century middle America. | |
| Fowles, John | Novelist, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman and Daniel Martin. | Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1998) | NYTBR, 31 May 1998 | As it says. |
| Gladwell, Malcolm | The Tipping Point (2000) | NYTBR, 5 March 2000 | "A journalist's study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads." | |
| Goldman, William | The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays (2000) | NYTBR, 9 April 2000 | ||
| Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade (2000) | NYTBR, 9 April 2000 | |||
| Harris, Judith Rich | The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998) | NYTBR, 13 September 1998 | The influence of peers on children's behavior is often overlooked in the psychological literature. | |
| Kermode, Frank | Shakespeare's Language (2000) | NYTBR, 25 June 2000 | "...reminds us that Shakespeare was a poet and that his plays are not idelogical constructs." | |
| Kutchins, Herb and Stuart A. Kirk | Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders (1997) | NYTBR, 16 November 1997 | ||
| Kelly, Thomas Forrest | First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (2000) | NYTBR, 4 June 2000 | ||
| Komar, Vitaly and Alexander Melamid | Expatriate Soviet dissident artists who came to U.S. in 1978. | Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art (1997; Ed. by JoAnn Wypijewski) | NYTBR, 4 January 1998 | Tongue only partly in cheek, Komar and Melamid poll people the world over on their artistic preferences (favorite color blue, landscapes preferred, &c), and focus groups confirm the poll's findings. They then create paintings that "scientifically" reflect each country's "favorite" qualities. A real-life controversy erupted in the art world as a result. ("I think that talking about what the people want is absurd." --Dore Ashton) |
| Leveridge, Brett | "...an occasional essayist for the public radio programs 'This American Life' and 'All Things Considered'" | Men My Mother Dated: And Other Mostly True Tales (2000) | NYTBR, 23 July 2000 | "...an aw-shucks portrait of small-town romance... [over] 20 chapters that range from Mom's first date at the age of 14 to a sneaky wager that required her to juggle (successfully) five men in a single day..." I love the idea. |
| Maier, Pauline | Professor of American history at M.I.T. | American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997) | NYTBR, 6 July 1997 | It turns out the Declaration is a product of a culture which turned out many similar documents around the same time. Jefferson may have contributed more substance (actually declaring independence) than form (memorable verbiage). |
| Nasar, Sylivia | A Beautiful Mind (1998) | NYTBR, 14 June 1998 | Portrait of John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia for thirty years after doing Nobel-prize-winning work laying the foundations of game theory. | |
| Perkins, Maxwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | Max and Marjorie (2000) | NYTBR, 2 July 2000 | The collected correspondence between the editor who discovered Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the author of "The Yearling" and "Cross Creek." | |
| Posner, Gerald | Author of Case Closed, a thoroughly masterful investigation of JFK assassination conspiracy theories. | Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998) | NYTBR, 26 April 1998 | James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, Jr. Case closed. |
| Rosenfeld, Richard N. | American Aurora (1997) | NYTBR, 20 July 1997 (advertisement) | Apparently, a history of a 1790 Philadelphia newspaper that printed afoul of the government, by which it was suppressed, becoming a test-case for the new republic's newly-defined rights. | |
| Shapiro, James | Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000) | NYTBR, 9 July 2000 | "A scholar examines art and anti-Semitism in the ancient play of Oberammergau." | |
| Shesol, Jeff | Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade (1997) | NYTBR, 26 October 1997 | ||
| Suskind, Ron | A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey From the Inner City to the Ivy League (1998) | NYTBR, 2 August 1998 | Suskind's circa-1994 reportage about "...how a deserving teen-ager from a ghetto school got into a brand-name college, and why it's not an inspirational story." | |
| Vogel, Steven | A professor at Duke University with an aptitude for good verbal explanation of biomechanics. | Cats' Paws and Catapults (1998) | NYTBR, 31 May 1998 | An examination of natural and human engineering, how they influence each other, and how nature doesn't always hit on the best way of doing something. |
| Wills, Gary | "...an eminent historian and one of the most intellectually distinguished members of Catholic laity in the United States." | Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) | NYTBR, 11 June 2000 | |
| Wolfe, Alan | A sociologist who teaches at Boston University and eschews quantitative sociological analysis for in-depth interviewing. | One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About: God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (1998) | NYTBR, 8 March 1998 | Wolfe interviews a great many mainstream, now rather conservative, middle-of-the-road families (avoiding skewing the results towards "godless liberal intellectuals") and finds that they have a healthy tolerance for diversity and don't like the Christian right's divisive political approach ("Them's the meanest people. They talk mean."). |
| Wolff, Michael | Founder of Wolff New Media, a WWW content provider. | Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (1998) | NYTBR, 26 July 1998 | How Wolff's venture burned through a great deal of money before ultimately failing. |
Have a suggested addition or correction? Let me know at knight@baldmt.com.
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