This week’s New York Times Book Review features a number of books that have appeared hereabouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, calling it “a masterly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, personal, meticulous, deeply layered work of narrative journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Benjamin M. Friedman reviews Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Friedman seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypothesis even though he can’t find much evidence for it:

One frustrating aspect of Clark’s argument is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic…. Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term.

Click here for my preliminary take on Clark’s argument, which Ken Silverstein mentioned favorably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleeping and Waking, which he describes as “a quietly startling collection that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-world attention, but actual readers.”

O’Brien’s book hasn’t shown up previously on digital emunction, but we’re always glad to see Flood Editions get the attention it deserves. (This is the first full review of a Flood book by the NYT, though Stephen Burt included John Taggart’s Pastorelles in one of his “Poetry Chronicles.”) It’s worth mentioning, too that Devin Johnston, one of Flood’s publishers, has three poems in this month’s Poetry, all of which are available online.

+ And finally, George Saunders reviews the work Daniil Kharms, whose Blue Notebook Daniel Borzutsky reviewed in Chicago Review 51:3.

Saunders first considers, then rejects the idea that Kharms’s absurdism was a reaction to the awful political situation in which he found himself. (Kharms died in a Soviet prison at the age of 37.) Arguing that Kharms’s real crisis was aesthetic, not political, Saunders writes

Art requires artifice, but certain souls balk at artifice the way a horse balks at a snake-smelling stall. Stories make emotion and moral truth, or the illusion of these, but reading Kharms we sense his fear that the smallest false step at the beginning, magnified over the course of the tale, might produce monstrous results: falsity clothed as truth, whistling in the dark, propaganda or (worst of all) banality….

Here is Kharms, standing, saw in hand, before the woman in the box. He thinks of all the other magicians who have worked so hard over the centuries to be appearing to saw her in half, then puts down the saw, mutters, “Well, I could do it, but I’m not sure it’s honest,” and leaves the stage.