Dystopias — dark, funhouse mirrors of our fears — will always be with us. Nineteen Eighty-Four was the product of a time when Big Brother Stalin was on the march, and the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine reflected H. G. Wells’s anxiety about where the onrush of 19th-century capitalism could lead. So what to make of the success of a “young adult” trilogy set in a North America that has — here a shout-out to a fashionably green vision of global catastrophe — emerged after “the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up [...]

Like the ideal victim in the rougher sort of slasher flick, the Motion Picture Production Code was clean-cut, gradually gutted and took a while to die. But there’s no need to mourn. Its slow passing (the code was finally scrapped in 1968) threw open a door through which tumbled the horror that turned the 1970s into a golden decade for the darkest of cinema. Born again in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), the Devil became a superstar in “The Exorcist” (1972). Meanwhile, monsters terrified the multiplex in movies such as “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977) and [...]

I got Dan Brown, I really did. The history was bunk, the prose was Lego, and yet there was something there — that maddening, tantalizing what’s-going-to-happen-next — that kept me turning, turning, turning the pages deep into the night. By contrast, the success of Stieg Larsson, the Swedish thriller writer, who would — had he not died tragically young (only 50) in 2004, leaving just three (completed) novels behind — now be seen as a challenger to the impious Mr. Brown, leaves me more than a little amazed. Collectively known as the Millennium trilogy, those three books have together sold over [...]

Right at the beginning of “Life,” there’s a hint of the glorious Spinal Tapestry that Keith Richards’s autobiography might have been. Using words that are rather less decorous than a family newspaper can permit, Mr. Richards recalls how: “[1975] was the tour of the giant inflatable [phallus]. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang ‘Starf—er.’ It was great was the [phallus], though we paid for it later in Mick’s wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities. There was a huge business of getting elephants on stage in Memphis until they ended up crashing [...]

We’ll never know for sure what the English writer William Golding (1911–93), a publicly private man, would have thought about the publication of this book. Thanks partly to Golding’s failure to cooperate, no biographies of him were published during his lifetime, but the assumption that follows from that would probably be wrong. Feast has followed famine: To help him in his work on this book, the Golding family granted John Carey, a prominent Oxford academic, distinguished literary critic, and acquaintance of Golding, access to the author’s previously closed archive. It was a hoard too extensive not to have been designed [...]

There are, I suppose, various possible things I might do after failing to reconcile with an estranged wife because of my refusal to give up alcohol. Becoming a drink columnist for a national newspaper is not one of them. Then I’m not Kingsley Amis. Then again, Elizabeth Jane Howard soon ceased to be Mrs. Kingsley Amis. Oh well. Some or all of those columns later re-appeared, clean-shaven, refreshed, and tidied-up as Every Day Drinking (“Being paid twice for the same basic work is always agreeable”), the second of three books (the other two are On Drink and How’s Your Glass?) [...]

Mark Ruttenberg, the hero of “An Ordinary Spy” (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $23.95), Joseph Weisberg’s deft, sour, and clever new novel of espionage, bureaucracy, and disenchantment, is — it is true — a spy. But he’s no James Bond. Just read what happens, or doesn’t, when he shows up for a celebration at the Russian embassy in the country to which, as a novice CIA agent, he has recently been posted. The poor fellow fails to make any real progress with the general who is the most important target in the room, he gets “tipsy” on two shots of vodka, and [...]

Despite unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural upheaval, there is, still, just a part of this country’s vision of itself that is forever Bedford Falls. That was an idea of nation as extended community, diverse, but not too diverse, a land of opportunity, certainly, but one where no one was left too far behind, or ended up too far ahead. There was Potter, but he was an outsider, the moneyed exception that proved the modest rule, the rule that was also an ideal, of an America where everyone was in the same boat. Robert Frank, the author of the entertaining, [...]

I was waiting to hear what the English poet Christopher Logue had done to the Iliad, and I was worried. The omens, threatening an evening of eat-your-greens earnestness, would have troubled the most phlegmatic of soothsayers. As for the theater in which I found myself, it was more depressing than Ford’s after Booth. A long way off Broadway in all but the most geographical sense, it was a hard-seat hall a few minutes’ walk from those now-vanished towers. The only thing emptier than the bleak, Beckett-bare stage was an auditorium begging for tumbleweed. We had been told that the entire [...]

Right at the beginning of this mad, maddening, provocative, and sometimes beautifully written book, “Nicole Kidman” (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95), David Thomson admits that he “loves” Nicole Kidman, a confession that is both essential and superfluous. Skeptical as we all should be about long-distance psychoanalysis, Mr. Thomson’s book is more love letter than biography, both a meditation on obsession and a monument to it. He writes: There she is in profile, her right shoulder raised, her chin lowered … with just a flap of brown cloth covering her breasts and a considerable expanse of white skin … a [...]

If you need any confirmation that the glum little town that passes for this nation’s capital is hopelessly obsessed with itself, take a look at “Dog Days” (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $23.95), the Washington frolic and first novel by Ana Marie Cox, the below-the-Beltway blogger better known as Wonkette. To get the most out of this book, you need to know beforehand what Ms. Cox has been up to on her blog. Sleazy, sarcastic, funny, and salacious (“Politics for People With Dirty Minds”), Wonkette first began lurking around computer terminals back in January 2004, a remote era lost in blogging [...]

Tt’s enough to make you choke on your fava beans. In bookstore new-fiction aisles, this was meant to be the summer of Hannibal Lecter: aesthete, Renaissance scholar, and serial killer. Instead he has had to share the limelight with Harry Potter, the schoolboy hero of a series of British children’s books. The second of these, The Chamber of Secrets, was released in the U.S. at about the same time as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. On September 19, more than three months later, it was Number Three on the New York Times bestseller list, five places ahead of the unfortunate Dr. Lecter. [...]

With Clint Eastwood reduced to making films about ladies who box, Bond, James Bond, is the last true man’s man. He blows smoke in the face of surgeons-general, adds no fruit juice to his martinis, and gives the pieties of feminism a pass. He has survived knives, a wife, bullets, nasty mechanical pincers, beatings, grenades, piranhas, and tortures too beastly to describe in a family newspaper. He’s seen off Blofeld, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, No, Drax, and even that impertinent oaf, Austin Powers. He has weathered the challenges of SMERSH, Rosa Klebb’s shoes, Roger Moore’s safari suits, and the notion that M [...]

If you want to see what an apoplectic fit looks like in print, check out Michiko Kakutani’s review/denunciation in the New York Times of State of Fear, the latest book from Michael Crichton. Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, Disclosure, The Andromeda Strain, and much more (or, in the case of Prey, less); in State of Fear he dares to challenge the numbskull pieties of “global warming” and that has made Michiko very mad indeed. State of Fear is, she writes, “shrill,” “preposterous,” and, horror of horrors, “right-wing.” So many angry, foam-flecked adjectives jostle for attention in the text [...]

FOR those of us who like to believe, however tentatively, in human progress, the notion that there are 21st-century Americans who think that the brave, benign—and fictional—Harry Potter can be used as a recruitment officer for the occult is profoundly depressing. And yet there are surprisingly many who fear just that. For year after year now, different school districts across the country have faced complaints whenever the hero of Hogwarts rides his Nimbus 2000 broom- stick onto the curriculum or into the library. But the Lord, or the market, works in mysterious ways and those so harried by the thought [...]

Charles Murray have a difficult time in high school? Judging by what he writes, when he writes, and how he writes, he’s someone who would not have enjoyed the conformist, unimaginative world of contemporary American secondary education. A controversialist who never knows when to stop, a math geek who understands what counts, Murray was probably jostled in the school yard, pushed about in the cafeteria, and, in that hallmark of intellectual independence, repeatedly hauled up in front of the principal. “Murray, don’t ever, ever argue with your teachers again.” His best-known work, 1994’s The Bell Curve (co-written with Richard J. [...]

All it takes for evil to prevail, warned Burke, is “for enough good men to do nothing.” True; but that doesn’t mean that the good men cannot occasionally relax with a good laugh or two. It might even help them, especially in a situation of the kind the West faces today: a war with an ideology so dedicated to the destruction of happiness that, in the shape of the Taliban, it made laughing too loud in public a crime. (For women, anyway.) In Florence of Arabia, his dark, disturbing, and very funny new satire, Christopher Buckley highlights the cruelty of [...]

If there’s anything more guaranteed to set off my inner sans-culotte than pampered, arrogant Teresa Heinz Kerry, it’s a gathering of international bureaucrats, the spoiled, sanctimonious, worthless, and annoying aristocrats of our own sadly yet to be ancient regime. Locusts in limousines, they periodically descend on some unfortunate city, clogging the streets with their retinues, the restaurants with their greed, and the newspapers with their self-importance. Seen from this perspective, and judging by its remarkably unflattering cover photograph, “The World’s Banker” (The Penguin Press, 462 pages, $29.95) an account by the Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby of James Wolfensohn and the [...]

All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue CHRISTOPHER LOGUE has been a dealer in stolen property (briefly), a prisoner in a Crusader castle (16 months), a pornographer (the book Lust), and, probably no less discreditably, an actor, a poet, and a writer of screenplays. As if this weren’t enough, for over four decades this versatile Englishman has been engaged in a “reworking” of the Iliad. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a translation (he knows no Greek), but an episodic “account” of the ancient epic that has already taken far longer to produce than Troy took to [...]

Profoundly Disturbing:  Shocking Movies that Changed History by Joe Bob Briggs The title is reassuringly lurid and the cover comfortingly nasty, but, on opening this book, anxious readers may worry that Joe Bob has left the drive-in. Now that would be profoundly disturbing. Author, journalist, cable-TV stalwart, and former NR columnist, Briggs overcame fictitious origins and nonexistent competition to become America’s finest drive-in-movie critic. He saw Nail Gun Massacre and he watched All Cheerleaders Die. Who else could take on that sort of responsibility? He is the Zagat of the Z-movie, the one indispensable guide for those who like slaughter, sex, [...]

Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests, by Frederick Fleitz. With his good intentions and his blue helmet, the U.N. peacekeeper was an icon of post-World War II internationalism. He was G.I. Joe for the Eleanor Roosevelt set, muscular assurance that the days of the feeble League of Nations would never return. And for a while it seemed to work. The record was far from perfect, but from Cyprus to West New Guinea to Namibia, the presence of relatively small numbers of U.N. troops was sufficient to separate warring forces and supervise the return to peace. The [...]

Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein The Englishman said to me, “oh you are writing for an American magazine.” The eyebrow arched, the lip curled, the cliché was confirmed over a smugly sipped cup of tea. English snobbery, again. To the rest of the world, it is our defining vice (full disclosure: I’m also from the scepter’d isle), something as English as military defeat is French. Fair enough: mine is a country obsessed by class. Only in England could a humorous essay (published in the 1950s by one of the Mitfords, naturally) on the distinctions between the language (“U”) [...]

The His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman IT was, some said, the moment that literature for the young finally came of age. On January 22, Philip Pullman, a children’s writer (although he objects to that label), was awarded Britain’s prestigious Whitbread prize for the final installment of his best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. In the opinion of the judges, The Amber Spyglass was Britain’s book of the year. It was an unprecedented honor for a work aimed at younger readers, but Pullman is a man who must be getting used to praise, and not just in Britain. His writing [...]

IT’S enough to make you choke on your fava beans. In bookstore new-fiction aisles, this was meant to be the summer of Hannibal Lector: aesthete. Renaissance scholar, and serial killer. Instead be has had to share the limelight with Harry Potter, the schoolboy hero of a series of British children’s books. The second of these. The Chamber of Secrets, was released in the U.S. at about the same time as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. On September 19, more than three months later, it was Number Three on the New York Times bestseller list, five places ahead of the unfortunate Dr. Lecter. [...]

SPACE aliens are a nasty, bug-eyed lot, always plotting to subjugate the galaxy and firing off death rays. Not much use to us humans, you might think. But you would be wrong. As a plot device, the extraterrestrial can he most useful, a light shone on the peculiarities of this planet. And so, in his latest, and very funny, novel, Christopher Buckley employs a motley and distinctly home-grown bunch of ETs to take a look at a close encounter between two different worlds, both of which happen to be located here on Earth. His hero, John Banion, is a king [...]

SUMMER reading is supposed to be light. But those who prefer a bit of darkness, to give them some shade from the heat of the sun, may wish to consider this fascinating book by Mark Fuhrman, whose theme may put them in mind of Shakespeare. Yes, Shakespeare, Yes, that Mark Fuhrman. “Murder,” wrote the Bard, “moves like a ghost.” For a ghost always leaves trails of ectoplasm bebind it, and so in its way does murder. Its victims haunt us, and it has long been believed that their restless spirits wander the earth calling for revenge. And that is the [...]

Witch doctors! It’s an engaging title, promising bile, sarcasm, and maybe, just perhaps, a sneer or two. After all, this is a book about management gurus, those experts whose ever-changing theories fill bookstores and empty factories. Well paid and annoying, they scream out for a little abuse. In this book, they don’t get it. As the authors note, somewhat smugly (they do write for The Economist), “it would have been much easier (and often far more pleasurable) to have trashed the industry.” But they reject the hatchet in favor of a “scalpel job.” In many respects they succeed. Often drily [...]

THIS entertaining, thought-provoking, and frequently amusing book will disturb those who believe that the American financial community has learned from past disasters. Rather, as the author writes, the best that can be said is that “sons and daughters tend to re-enact the errors of their grandparents more so than those of their parents.” To prove his point Mr. Grant takes the reader through recurring crises in such areas as real estate, lending, and farmland. While Mr. Grant explains that “‘More’ is the best brief description of the evolution of credit in the United States,” this is not his only theme. [...]