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.”
[Read more]

Let’s get this straight: the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear writes an arti­cle highly crit­i­cal of John Barr, head of the Poetry Foun­da­tion. The next week, the New Yorker pub­lishes a poem (titled, coin­ci­den­tally, “After the Diagnosis”) by Chris­t­ian Wiman, editor of Poetry, which is pub­lished by the Poetry Foun­da­tion. Around the same time, David Orr, some­time con­trib­u­tor to Poetry, uses his occa­sional column in the New York Times Book Review to bite back at Goodyear and the New Yorker’s edi­tors, accus­ing the former of a con­flict of inter­est and the latter of nepo­tism and bad taste. At least one of the accu­sa­tions is con­firmed a few weeks later, when the New Yorker pub­lishes an editor’s note acknowl­edg­ing that Goodyear sub­mit­ted poems to Poetry as recently as 2003. Now this week, the NYT Book Review has pub­lished a review by one Dana Goodyear.

May the circle be unbroken.