ARTICLE FROM SLATE.COM:
The 10 Best Books of 2010
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Published: December 1, 2010
FREEDOM
By Jonathan Franzen.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.
The author of “The Corrections” is back, not quite a decade
later, with an even richer and deeper work — a vividly realized narrative set
during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of “personal liberties” assumed
new and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures this through the
tribulations of a Midwestern family, the Berglunds, whose successes, failures
and appetite for self-invention reflect the larger story of millennial America.
THE NEW YORKER STORIES
By Ann Beattie.
Scribner, $30.
As these 48 stories published in The New Yorker from 1974
through 2006 demonstrate, Beattie, even as she chronicled and satirized her
post-1960s generation, also became its defining voice. She punctures her
characters’ pretensions and jadedness with an economy and effortless dialogue
that writers have been trying to emulate for three decades, though few, if any,
have matched her seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise
irony and consummate cool.
ROOM
By Emma Donoghue.
Little, Brown & Company, $24.99.
Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent
fiction: an ebullient child narrator, held captive with his mother in an
11-by-11-foot room, through whom we encounter the blurry, often complicated
space between closeness and autonomy. In a narrative at once delicate and
vigorous — rich in psychological, sociological and political meaning — Donoghue
reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side.
SELECTED STORIES
By William Trevor.
Viking, $35.
Gathering work from Trevor’s previous four collections, this
volume shows why his deceptively spare fiction has haunted and moved readers
for generations. Set mainly in Ireland
and England,
Trevor’s tales are eloquent even in their silences, documenting the way the
present is consumed by the past, the way ancient patterns shape the future.
Neither modernist nor antique, his stories are timeless.
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
By Jennifer Egan.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.
Time is the “goon squad” in this virtuosic rock ’n’ roll
novel about a cynical record producer and the people who intersect his world.
Ranging across some 40 years and inhabiting 13 different characters, each with
his own story and perspective, Egan makes these disparate parts cohere into an
artful whole, irradiated by a Proustian feel for loss, regret and the ravages
of love.
Nonfiction
APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet
By Jennifer Homans.
Random House, $35.
Here is the only truly definitive history of classical
ballet. Spanning more than four centuries, from the French Renaissance to
American and Soviet stages during the cold war, Homans shows how the art has
been central to the social and cultural identity of nations. She meticulously
reconstructs entire eras, describing the evolution of ballet technique while
coaxing long-lost dances back to life. And she raises a crucial question: In
the 21st century, can ballet survive?
CLEOPATRA: A Life
By Stacy Schiff.
Little, Brown & Company, $29.99.
With her signature blend of wit, intelligence and superb
prose, Schiff strips away 2,000 years of prejudices and propaganda in her
elegant reimagining of the Egyptian queen who, even in her own day, was
mythologized and misrepresented.
THE EMPEROR OF ALL
MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer
By Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Scribner, $30.
Mukherjee’s magisterial “biography” of the most dreaded of
modern afflictions. He excavates the deep history of the “war” on cancer,
weaving haunting tales of his own clinical experience with sharp sketches of
the sometimes heroic, sometimes misguided scientists who have preceded him in
the fight.
FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With
Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
By Stephen Sondheim.
Alfred A. Knopf, $39.95.
The theater’s pre-eminent living songwriter offers a master
class in how to write a musical, covering some of the greatest shows, from
“West Side Story”? to “Sweeney Todd.” Sondheim’s analysis of his and others’
lyrics is insightful and candid, and his anecdotes are telling and often very
funny.
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America’s Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson.
Random House, $30.
Wilkerson, a former national correspondent for The Times,
has written a masterly and engrossing account of the Great Migration, in which
six million African-Americans abandoned the South between 1915 and 1970. The
book centers on the journeys of three black migrants, each representing a
different decade and a different destination.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 12, 2010,
on page BK10 of the New York
edition.
♦
NEW YORK TIMES SELECTED BOOK
REVIEWS
We, Robots
By JONAH LEHRER
Published: January 21, 2011
In 1995, Sherry Turkle, a professor of the “social studies
of science” at M.I.T., published a book about identity in the digital age
called “Life on the Screen.” It was a mostly optimistic account, as Turkle
celebrated the freedom of online identity. Instead of being constrained by the
responsibilities of real life, Turkle argued, people were using the Web to
experiment, trying on personalities like pieces of clothing. As one online user
told her, “You are who you pretend to be.”
ALONE TOGETHER
Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other
By Sherry Turkle
360 pp. Basic Books. $28.95.
In Turkle’s latest book, “Alone Together,” this optimism is
long gone. If the Internet of 1995 was a postmodern playhouse, allowing
individuals to engage in unbridled expression, Turkle describes it today as a
corporate trap, a ball and chain that keeps us tethered to the tiny screens of
our cellphones, tapping out trite messages to stay in touch. She summarizes her
new view of things with typical eloquence: “We expect more from technology and
less from each other.”
“Alone Together” is really two separate books. The first
half is about social robots, those sci-fi androids that promise (one day) to
sweep the kitchen floor, take care of our aging parents and provide us with
reliable companionship. As always, though, she’s less interested in the
machines than in our relationships with them. Turkle begins with the troubling
observation that we often seek out robots as a solution to our own
imperfections, as an easy substitute for the difficulty of dealing with others.
Just look at Roxxxy, a $3,000 talking sex robot that comes
preloaded with six different girlfriend personalities, from Frigid Farrah to
Young Yoko. On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with the kind of desperate
loneliness that would lead someone to buy a life-size plastic gadget with three
“inputs.” And yet, as Turkle argues, Roxxxy is emblematic of a larger danger,
in which the prevalence of robots makes us unwilling to put in the work
required by real human relationships. “Dependence on a robot presents itself as
risk free,” Turkle writes. “But when one becomes accustomed to ‘companionship’
without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming.” A blind date can be a
fraught proposition when there’s a robot at home that knows exactly what we
need. And all she needs is a power outlet.
The reason robots are such a slippery slope, according to
Turkle, is that they take advantage of a deeply human instinct. When it comes
to the perception of other minds, we are extremely gullible, bestowing agency
on even the most inanimate of objects. After children spend a few minutes
playing with a Tamagotchi — a wildly popular “digital pet” — they begin to
empathize with the “needs” and “feelings” of the plastic device. And it’s not
just little kids: Turkle describes the behavior of Edna, an 82-year-old who is given
a robotic doll called My Real Baby during a visit with her 2-year-old
great-granddaughter. When Edna is asked if the doll is alive, she scoffs at the
absurdity of the question. But then the doll starts to cry. Edna cradles the
robot in her arms and gently caresses its face. “Oh, why are you crying?” she
asks the robot. “Do you want to sit up?” When her great-granddaughter starts
whining, Turkle reports, Edna ignores her.
After exploring the often disturbing world of social robots
— we treat these objects like people — Turkle abruptly pivots to the online
world, in which we have “invented ways of being with people that turn them into
something close to objects.” She rejects the thesis she embraced 15 years
earlier, as she notes that the online world is no longer a space of freedom and
reinvention. Instead, we have been trapped by Facebook profiles and Google
cache, in which verbs like “delete” and “erase” are mostly metaphorical. Turkle
quotes one high school senior who laments the fact that everything he’s written
online will always be around, preserved by some omniscient Silicon Valley
server. “You can never escape what you did,” he says.
But Turkle isn’t just concerned with the problem of online
identity. She seems most upset by the banalities of electronic interaction, as
our range of expression is constrained by our gadgets and platforms. We aren’t
“happy” anymore: we’re simply a semicolon followed by a parenthesis. Instead of
talking on the phone, we send a text; instead of writing wistful letters, we
edit our Tumblr blog. (Turkle cites one 23-year-old law student who objects
when friends apologize online: “Saying you are sorry as your status . . . that
is not an apology. That is saying ‘I’m sorry’ to Facebook.”) And yet, as Turkle
notes, these trends show no sign of abating, as people increasingly gravitate
toward technologies that allow us to interact while inattentive or absent. Our
excuse is always the same — we’d love to talk, but there just isn’t time. Send
us an e-mail. We’ll get back to you.
There is no easy reply to these critiques. The Internet is
full of absurdities, from the booming economy of virtual worlds — a user
recently paid $335,000 for land on a fictitious asteroid in Entropia Universe —
to the mass retweeting of Justin Bieber. It’s always fun to mock the stilted
language of teenagers and lament the decline of letter writing. But these
obvious objections shouldn’t obscure the real mystery: If the Internet is such
an alienating force, then why can’t we escape it? If Facebook is so
insufferable, then why do hundreds of millions of people check their page every
day? Why did I just text my wife instead of calling her?
