The New Republic

The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity by Irad Malkin (University of California Press, 331 pp., $45)  Celebrating Homer's Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited by J.V. Luce (Yale University Press, 260 pp., $35) READ MORE >>

I. Marcel Proust by Edmund White (Lipper/Viking, 165 pp., $19.95) READ MORE >>

I. Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey by Michael Dobbs (Henry Holt, 466 pp., $27.50) READ MORE >>

The massacre at Columbine High School in April brought a flood of agonized responses. The whole country was sickened--yet again--by teenage mayhem, which didn't end with Columbine High. Causes for these horrors are being sought, and high among the suspected causes is the abhorrent film and TV violence now gorged on by teenagers. It is certainly hard to believe that so much slavering murder on large and small screens is not affecting adolescent fantasies. READ MORE >>

Step into room 316 of the 42nd Street library any day of the week and you will find a dozen or more people slowly making their way through "Nabokov Under Glass," a salute to the writer, who was born 100 years ago, on April 23, 1899. Nabokov enthusiasts are a varied lot--including the young and the old, the straitlaced and the very casually dressed--but I expect that they are all mesmerized, as I am, by a show of rare books and manuscripts that makes them laugh out loud. READ MORE >>

The Stakeholder Society By Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott(Yale University Press, 296 pp., $26) READ MORE >>

Later Auden By Edward Mendelson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pp., $30) W.H. Auden: A Commentary By John Fuller (Princeton University Press, 613 pp., $35) READ MORE >>

For two decades now, the Pritzker Prize has mirrored the best and the worst in contemporary architecture. For many observers of the arts, indeed, the very idea of such a prize is deeply problematic. Applying competitive standards to creative efforts is at best irrelevant and at worst destructive, prompting feelings of superiority, envy, and inadequacy among artists already prone to such low and distracting emotions. But high-priced awards, particularly in architecture, have proliferated in recent decades, and the publicity that they generate has grown accordingly. READ MORE >>

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank (Free Press, 326 pp., $25)   READ MORE >>

I. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperFlamingo, 546 pp., $26) Barbara Kingsolver is the most successful practitioner of a style in contemporary fiction that might be called Nice Writing. Nice Writing is a violent affability, a deadly sweetness, a fatal gentle touch. But before I start in on Kingsolver's work, I feel I must explain why I feel that I must start in on it. READ MORE >>