Friday, July 25th   The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick

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Master Swindler A Review by Daniel Stashower In Amsterdam at the close of World War II, a dapper little man named Han van Meegeren, a noted art dealer, faced a charge of collaboration with the Nazis. At issue was a painting by Johannes Vermeer that had found its way, with Van Meegeren's help, into the hands of Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command. If the court found him guilty, Van Meegeren faced a death sentence. For several days the prisoner had been vague about his role in the transaction, but at length, under persistent questioning, his composure broke: "Idiots!" he yelled. "You think I sold a Vermeer to that fat Goering. But it's not a Vermeer. I painted it myself!" "This is the true story of a colossal hoax," writes Edward Dolnick at the start of this gripping historical narrative. "The time was World War II. The place, occupied Holland." If that has the stentorian ring of an old RKO "Radio Picture," it must be said that the broad strokes of Van Meegeren's story sound like a vintage Hollywood two...   Read the entire review More reviews from Washington Post Book World

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Dead Left A Review by Jonathan Chait It seems like a very long time -- though in truth only a few years have passed -- since the most sinister force on the planet that the left could imagine was Nike. In 2001, Time proclaimed that the anti-globalization movement had become the "defining cause" of a new generation, and that the spokesperson for the cause was the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. For puzzled outsiders grasping to understand why bands of youths had begun following the World Trade Organization wherever it went, brandishing oversize puppets and occasionally smashing up the local Starbucks, Klein was there to...   Read the entire review More reviews from The New Republic Online				Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism) by A. M. Rosenthal Thirty-Eight Witnesses: A Review A Review by Art Winslow When a 78-year-old pedestrian was downed by a hit-and-run driver in Hartford, Conn., in June, street surveillance video showed multiple cars passing by without stopping and fellow pedestrians staring at the victim without any visible move to aid him. This provoked public outrage and claims of a Kitty Genovese syndrome. Last year, a sexual assault in the hallway of an apartment building in St. Paul, in which surveillance video suggested there may have been up to 10 witnesses (the police were summoned only after a lapse of some 90 minutes), also resurrected comparisons to the Genovese murder ...   Read the entire review More reviews from Chicago Tribune
Scenes of Clerical Life (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot Classic Review A Review by Unknown Author [Ed note: This review first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly May 1858]. Fiction represents the character of the age to which it belongs, not merely by actual delineations of its times, like those of Tom Jones and The Newcomes, but also in an indirect, though scarcely less positive manner, by its exhibition of the influence of the times upon its own form and general direction, whatever the scene or period it may have chosen for itself. The story of "Hypatia" is laid in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, but the book reflects the crudities of modern English thought; and even Mr...   Read the entire review More reviews from The Atlantic Monthly				Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by J. H. Elliott A Tale of Two Empires A Review by Linda Colley The polymath and politician Francis Bacon wrote his "Short View to Be Taken of Great Britain and Spain" in 1619. At this point, Spain laid claim to the largest, most widely dispersed, and by far the richest empire in the world, but Bacon detected frailties in the giant. Philip III, king of Spain, might be "accounted the greatest Monarch of Christendom," he argued, "yet if his estate be enquired through, his roots will be found a great deal too narrow for his tops." As Spain's wealth and military power subsequently contracted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ...   Read the entire review More reviews from New York Review of Books
Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg and Monica Scott Stuck in second A Review by Aisling Foster "Nobody wants to be a second wife . . . . It's like moving into a new house that still has half the previous owner's furniture in it. You'd like to get rid of the all-plaid living-room set, but somehow you're stuck with it, forever. "In my case, the plaid living-room set is called Theresa." Morality tales are never quite like this. This one is set in California, in "a country where a divorce occurs every thirty seconds"; each character is a blend of modern knowingness and storybook classic. The narrator is delightfully lacking in the preachy righteousness of the genre, describing the...   Read the entire review More reviews from Times Literary Supplement				Flicker (05 Edition) by Theodore Roszak Apocaflicks Now A Review by Gerry Donaghy Recently I was having a discussion with a publisher's sales rep about Steve Erickson's Zeroville, one of my favorite novels of 2007. The novel is set in the era of 1970s Hollywood, which produced films ranging from Bonnie and Clyde to The Godfather to Apocalypse Now. The rep is someone I often discuss films with, and he was mentioning that he had finally gotten around to reading Zeroville. Through the course of our conversation, I asked if he'd read another great novel centered on the movies, this one from 1991 and recently republished, called Flicker. He had never heard of it. A quick...   Read the entire review More reviews from Powells.com