Salon.com > Our Picks http://www.salon.com Fri, 03 May 2013 03:47:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist! http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13288181 “Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/feed/ 11 “Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286687 A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” casts a strange and powerful spell. While this is certainly a challenging film on many levels, and one rooted in observation of the natural world, it isn’t one of those drifty contemplative Terrence Malick spectacles where nothing much happens. It’s just that many of the events are puzzling and disconnected, and you have to work out for yourself the allusive or subterranean relationship between them. There’s a neon-red animated demon who invades a family’s home at night, a shooting, a hilarious and heartbreaking rural A.A. meeting, a visit to a perverted sex club and a guilt-ridden killer who commits suicide in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/feed/ 6 “Love Is All You Need”: Pierce Brosnan’s lovely, lightweight rom-com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285820 Danish director Susanne Bier has spent her career stuck in the mushy European middle, halfway between Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood. She has a tremendous gift for character and storytelling, coupled with a penchant for preachy, melodramatic message delivery in the Paul Haggis vein, especially as her films have attracted a global audience. She won the foreign-language Oscar for the Euro-guilt odyssey “In a Better World” in 2010 – a picture that was conspicuously trying to be meaningful – and has made one semi-unsuccessful American venture, the 2007 “Things We Lost in the Fire,” with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282238 With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/feed/ 27 “At Any Price”: Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid’s Corn Belt thriller http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280336 Movies about so-called ordinary people in the American heartland, even when they’re pretty good, tend to be driven by a reflexive and almost guilty sentimentality. Even the hardened, cynical coastal types who make films don’t want to challenge the national myth that life in rural America possesses a realness absent in more metropolitan surroundings. There’s some genuine history behind that myth, in the sense that over the course of the 20th century the nation’s population and economy permanently shifted away from the agrarian republic imagined by the founders, but a great many of us have rural roots in the not-too-distant past. One of my grandfathers was an Irish immigrant, but the other was born in a prairie town I’ve never even visited, to a father who sold Case tractors.

One of the best things about Ramin Bahrani’s bracing farmland thriller “At Any Price” is its refusal to condescend to the Iowa farm family at its center by depicting them as nobler, more innocent and less sophisticated than other people. Many people who see this movie will be understandably focused on Zac Efron’s intense performance as Dean Whipple, the family’s handsome but embittered youngest son who yearns to be a stock-car driver. But for me the breakthrough in “At Any Price” comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/feed/ 5 Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13275381 Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/feed/ 20 Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274179 Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/feed/ 1 Discovered: Crackerjack Danish political drama “Borgen” http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13272834 Each episode of the Danish TV series “Borgen” begins with a quotation from Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” and as the show proceeds, Denmark’s first female prime minister, an attractive and immensely likable moderate named Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), gets a systematic education in that collection of cynical wisdom. One could almost say that “Borgen” is a lesson built on the old saw about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely – but Birgitte is the head of a shaky coalition government in a European social democracy, not a tyrant, and what keeps us watching is the knowledge that she always has good intentions.

No doubt Americans by the thousands have found ways to watch “Borgen,” whether strictly legal or not, since Stephen King declared it his favorite TV show of 2012. Now the first season of this intimate and addictive political drama is finally available on Region 1 DVD, so no mastery of streams and torrents, or ownership of an all-region player, is necessary. I for one am grateful: This is an immensely more satisfying and realistic show than the American version of “House of Cards,” not least because it depicts retail politics in a small European country with its own distinctive traditions, where left-right tensions often wear a deceptive veil of civility.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/discovered_crackerjack_danish_political_drama_borgen/feed/ 9 Pick of the week: Terrence Malick’s rapturous, religious love story http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13268331 Terrence Malick has followed the six-year creative struggle of his universe-spanning, would-be masterpiece “The Tree of Life” with a period of unprecedented, unexpected and indeed unexplained productivity. For whatever set of reasons, the famously reclusive director who had made five feature films in the previous 38 years has apparently completed four more since 2011. The first of these to reach the public is an abstract and perhaps allegorical story of love and heartbreak called “To the Wonder,” and even in beginning to speak about it I run the risk of leading you down the wrong path. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko are in the movie, as a man and woman who meet in Paris, fall in love and move to America, and then drift apart, for reasons we (and they) only partly understand.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/pick_of_the_week_terrence_malicks_rapturous_religious_love_story/feed/ 25 “Fists of Legend”: Ludicrous (and delicious) action extravaganza http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13267281 Not to indulge in cultural stereotypes about how Asian movies involve several different genres at once, along with a lot of ass-kicking – but that’s exactly what the overloaded and outrageous Korean martial-arts saga “Fists of Legend” is like. One of the mini-stories of global movie distribution in the last year has been the sudden emergence of Korean pop cinema in the American market, which is partly about the fact that the Asian-American audience is now spread across the continent and partly about the fact that Korean movies tend to draw so heavily on a blend of familiar Western and Eastern references, and aren’t likely to strike anyone as incomprehensible. Like the recent gangland thriller “New World,” “Fists of Legend” will open in numerous cities before moving rapidly to home video.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/fists_of_legend_ludicrous_and_delicious_action_extravaganza/feed/ 1 “Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13266018 With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: The year’s most divisive wannabe cult hit http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13261835 It’s definitely possible that Shane Carruth’s slo-mo science fiction allegory “Upstream Color” is total hokum, and there’s no doubt that many viewers will experience it that way. My own feeling after one viewing of this disorienting and fragmented fable of thwarted love and obscure interconnection, which caused a sensation at the Sundance and Berlin festivals, is divided and perhaps paradoxical. I was immediately drawn in by the mysterious, meticulous world of vision, sound and sensation Carruth creates, with its blown-out digital color scheme and intimate focus, which simultaneously seems to be contemporary America and also an alien zone of disconnection and isolation. Yet I emerged from that hypnotic dream state, 90 or so minutes later, feeling as if the story Carruth tells in that magical space doesn’t quite carry the transcendent resonance he intends.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/feed/ 7 Must Do’s: What we like this week http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_4/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_4/#comments Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13256340 BOOKS

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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/must_dos_what_we_like_this_week_4/feed/ 0 Pick of the week: Lost in Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinth http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13253996 It’s entirely possible that no movie in the history of the medium has attracted the same combination of film-school erudition, amateur scholarship and fanboy and/or fangirl intensity as Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” At first glance that might seem baffling: Although Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel was an eagerly anticipated film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, with a big-name director attached, it got middling reviews (or worse) on its 1980 release, and wasn’t a major hit. But give the Kubrick cultists and conspiracy-theory decoders full credit; over the years they have transformed “The Shining” from flop to classic, and it’s now widely understood as an enigmatic and literally labyrinthine masterwork that contains multitudes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/feed/ 51 “Wrong”: A demented, surrealist near-masterpiece http://www.salon.com/2013/03/26/wrong_a_demented_surrealist_near_masterpiece/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/26/wrong_a_demented_surrealist_near_masterpiece/#comments Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13252456 Surrealism is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, often without much sense of what it originally meant. Any movie or TV show that includes a dream sequence or fantasy where the laws of physics are suspended or impossible events occur is described as surrealist, and we more or less get the point. What distinguishes Quentin Dupieux’s profoundly strange movie “Wrong” is that it’s surrealist in the old-fashioned sense, the sense employed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and the sense applied to Buster Keaton, who might not have thought of himself in those terms but was a surrealist pioneer nonetheless.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/26/wrong_a_demented_surrealist_near_masterpiece/feed/ 1 Pick of the week: A Korean mob thriller that could teach Hollywood a thing or two http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13248054 Ever since the Hong Kong action-movie boom of the 1980s, the film industries of East Asia have arguably been better at making old-fashioned, hard-boiled crime thrillers than Hollywood has. Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed,” after all, was a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs” (albeit an excellent remake with its own spirit and considerable subtlety). While Asian pop cinema remains just off the radar screen of mainstream American culture, it’s a whole lot easier to find than it used to be. This week, Korean writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s byzantine, slick and bloody mob drama “New World” opens theatrically in numerous North American cities, just a few weeks after its smash-hit premiere in Korea.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/pick_of_the_week_a_korean_mob_thriller_that_could_teach_hollywood_a_thing_or_two/feed/ 7 Viggo Mortensen: Lay off the pope http://www.salon.com/2013/03/20/viggo_mortensen_lay_off_the_pope/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/20/viggo_mortensen_lay_off_the_pope/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13246123 Viggo Mortensen says he doesn’t have a plan. It’s a funny thing to say midway through a conversation about a movie called “Everybody Has a Plan,” a low-budget Argentine thriller that Mortensen produced and in which he plays two roles, as a pair of twin brothers. (Yes, it’s in Spanish, but this isn’t some postmodern-flavored stunt, à la Will Ferrell's “Casa de Mi Padre.” Mortensen spent much of his childhood in Buenos Aires and speaks fluent Spanish, along with English and Danish, and can get by in several other languages. Are you surprised?)

Mortensen’s non-plan looks a lot like a plan to me, although maybe not an entirely conscious one. He has used the worldwide fame he earned for playing Aragorn (son of Arathorn) in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to declare his independence from the celebrity economy and follow his own idiosyncratic career path, which has included painting, poetry, music and three films with David Cronenberg, including an Oscar-nominated turn as a brutal Ukrainian mobster in “Eastern Promises.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/20/viggo_mortensen_lay_off_the_pope/feed/ 38 Pick of the week: Dick Cheney has no regrets http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13229670 There are so many jaw-dropping moments in “The World According to Dick Cheney” that I’m sure to forget several of them. One comes right at the beginning, when interviewer and co-director R.J. Cutler asks the most “consequential” vice president in American history – that’s Cheney’s word – a series of softball questions to get him warmed up. Cheney looks undeniably older and thinner after his recent heart transplant (talk about jokes that write themselves!), and he does deliver a few minuscule nuggets of warm-and-fuzzy: Happiness is fly-fishing on the Snake River, and misery is the loss of a family member. In case you’ve been wondering, his favorite food is spaghetti. Then Cutler asks Cheney about his biggest flaw. It’s a standard Barbara Walters-style question, for which every skilled politician has a faux-humble answer at the ready.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/feed/ 43 “Reality”: Toxic celebrity, Italian-style http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/reality_toxic_celebrity_italian_style/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/reality_toxic_celebrity_italian_style/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:35:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13229290 No doubt the recent Italian comedy we should be watching this week is Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam,” released last year, in which Michel Piccoli plays a newly elected pope who suffers a panic attack and refuses to greet the throngs in St. Peter’s Square. So far the reign of Pope Francis lacks that degree of zany melodrama, though he’s got time. But there are plenty of spiritual and cultural lessons to be dug out of Matteo Garrone’s colorful and intriguing “Reality” – the English word is also the Italian title – the farcical fable of a Neapolitan everyman seduced by the lure of celebrity.

If “Reality” isn’t quite as impressive as Garrone’s 2008 “Gomorrah,” an operatic and many-stranded saga about the long tentacles of Naples’ criminal underworld, it makes clear that he’s a filmmaker who can take a familiar story and infuse it with strangeness and vitality. While “Gomorrah” seemed more akin to the big-canvas social and moral criticism of the late Michelangelo Antonioni, “Reality” recalls other models – a little bit Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” and a whole bunch Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/reality_toxic_celebrity_italian_style/feed/ 1 Joan Didion’s “Salvador” delves into the heart of darkness http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/joan_didions_salvador_delves_into_the_heart_of_darkness/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/joan_didions_salvador_delves_into_the_heart_of_darkness/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13229085 Over the last few years, I’ve been sent 400 to 500 review copies of books and audiobooks. I haven’t read them all, although I have tried to read at least a handful of pages of all of them, or listen to at least the first couple of minutes. Most of them have offered at least some pleasures to reward the time, and I’m happy in general that we live in a world where there is a place even for books and audiobooks that appeal to the narrowest of audiences.

The most striking thing about all this reading  and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic.  It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

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