Review by New York Times Review
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. (Penguin, $17.) Dialogue is a gateway to developing introspection and compassion, Turkle argues, but as technology mediates more of our conversations, our interpersonal and emotional skills have deteriorated precipitously. Turkle cautions against the unquestioning embrace of technology, calling instead for a return to face-to-face talks and more personal interaction. THE VISITING PRIVILEGE: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. (Vintage, $16.95.) Gathered in part from her previous collections but including 13 stories new in book form, these tales exhibit Williams's trademark blend of grim humor and despair; in the title story, a woman finds unexpected solace in visits to her friend being treated for depression. The book amounts to what our reviewer, Ben Marcus, called "one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen." TRANS: A Memoir, by Juliet Jacques. (Verso, $19.95.) The author, who chronicled her sex-reassignment surgery and transition in columns for The Guardian, writes lucidly about her coming-of-age and experiences of feeling out of place. As she puts it, "I felt trapped not by my body but a society that didn't want me to modify it." AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING, by Elizabeth Poliner. (Lee Boudreaux/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Three Jewish sisters converge on a familiar summer destination, a stretch of Connecticut's coast known as Bagel Beach, and find comfort in domestic rituals, religion and one another. Poliner's wideranging novel, narrated by one of the sisters' children, flits back and forth in time over a nearly hundred-year period, with a family tragedy at the story's center. BIG SCIENCE: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the MilitaryIndustrial Complex, by Michael Hiltzik. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, played a role in the Manhattan Project, and his inventions helped set a trend of enormous projects. But chief among his contributions was developing, as one admirer put it, "the modern way of doing science." By forging closer ties between science and politics, he helped make science far more interdisciplinary. THE GREEN ROAD, by Anne Enright. (Norton, $15.95.) The members of an Irish family, after years in far-flung locales, return for what might be a final Christmas holiday together. In this masterly novel, Enright, the 2007 Man Booker winner, writes as expertly about the AIDS crisis in New York and humanitarian work in Mali as she does about Ireland. THE NIXON TAPES: 1973, edited by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.95.) In these illuminating transcripts, the president's words from a turbulent period speak for themselves. At the outset of this volume of the tapes, Nixon has won re-election but soon turns to obsessing over the gathering Watergate scandal and plotting his response. ?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 10, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When he was departing office, President Lyndon Johnson suggested to incoming President Richard Nixon that he consider secretly taping conversations within the White House, a presidential practice since F.D.R. Nixon initially declined, but in February 1971 changed his mind, installing recording devices throughout the White House which activated when someone began speaking. This volume from acclaimed historian Brinkley (Cronkite) and Nixon tape-specialist Nichter is a selection of those recordings from 1971 to February 1973. The recordings are not limited to Watergate and scandal, but present a broader portrait of Nixon as strategist, diplomat, and president at the height of his powers. Brinkley and Nichter's "episode" summaries lay out the scenes as such: "Nixon and Kissinger continued to read the political tea leaves as they considered their approaches to talks with the Soviet Union." From masterful dealings with the Chinese to Nixon's petty insults of Indira Gandhi or Kissinger's remarks about how American intellectuals "don't mind losing. They don't like America," there is both insight and eyebrow-raising commentary. Other noteworthy figures appear, like Rev. Billy Graham calling Nixon about Vietnam and noting "I'm putting all the blame of this whole thing on Kennedy." Brinkley and Nichter offer an intimate, fascinating, strange, and essential primary source of the inner workings of the Nixon Presidency. (July 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Surprisingly, the last of the nearly 4,000 hours' worth of tapes made by President Nixon was released only last August, and very little of this material has been transcribed and published. CBS News historian Brinkley (e.g., The Wilderness Warrior) and Nichter, an associate professor at Texas A&M University and former founding executive producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, have selected, edited, and annotated key passages from the tapes with topics ranging from negotiating with North Vietnam to managing the reelection campaign. The book will be released, along with accompanying digitized audio recordings, on the 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. Obviously important; with a 50,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eye-opening reckoning of crimes, misdemeanors and bugging technology 40 years after Richard Nixon's ignominious departure from the White House.Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; Cronkite, 2012, etc.) teams up with Nichter (Texas AM Univ., Central Texas; Richard M. Nixon: In the Arena, from Valley to Mountaintop, 2014, etc.) to look for the smoking gun in the vast mass of tapes3,700 hoursNixon secretly made during his time as president. As they note, the tapes "gave Nixon an accurate record of his meetings and phone calls without the need for someone to sit in and take notes." Of course, they also gave Nixon something to pore over as well, and they are so abundant that the authors reckon the whole corpus will probably never be completely transcribed. What we have here is damning enough, though not much that the tapes reveal comes as a real surprise: Henry Kissinger reckoned that owing to the weakness of our supposed allies in Indochina ("the South Vietnamese aren't going anywhere where they're going to suffer casualties right now"), it was justified to invade theoretically neutral Laos. U.S. ambassador Ellsworth Bunker believed that things were fine in Vietnam "except for this damn drug business." Nixon, reckoning that by sitting down to negotiate with the Soviet foe he would court a disastrous attack from the right wing of his own Republican Party, fell back on football metaphors: "this is just scoring a damn touchdown, but it's one that's going tomaybe, we'll be able to hold and still win the game in the public opinion field." The takeaway? Granted that it's nothing newsee Robert Altman's film Secret Honorbut Nixon's constant cynicism is the real hallmark of this anthology of transcriptions, most having to do with foreign policy in a fraught and tumultuous era. His conclusion? Said Nixon in May 1972, on the road to a landmark re-election victory: "The American people are suckers." Essential for students of the era and fascinating for those who lived it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
