Books of the Year
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
This has been a superior year for superior books. Diarmaid MacCullough’s “Reformation” is history at its best, and Steven Englund’s book on Napoleon has much to say, and beautifully, on a subject seemingly exhausted a century ago. Amos Oz’s “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” though, was our unanimous choice for Book of the Year. It is the story of a family finding refuge in Jerusalem from the fierce anti-Semitism of pre-World War II Europe and the immense cultural richness that the Jews brought to the land that became Israel. It is a book that is difficult to put down, a marvel of physical detail, evocative anecdotes, and proverb. Mr. Oz’s description of what he learned from S.Y. Agnon is a telling admonition for his own book: “To cast more than one shadow. Not to pick the raisins from the cake. To rein and polish pain. And one other thing, that my grandmother used to say in a sharper way than I have found it expressed by Agnon: ‘If you have no more tears left to weep, then don’t weep. Laugh.'” We read no more beautiful book this year. – The Editors
THE NEW YORK SUN BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS: A MEMOIR
By Amos Oz
Harcourt, 538 pages, $26
Mr. Oz’s memoir tells the story of his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of the Mandate and the first years of the new state. Though he evokes a child’s world with magical strokes, his memoir is the story of his parents, and especially of his mother, as well as of the fantastic, obstreperous, eccentric, and often hallucinatory array of relatives – sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts, cousins – who surrounded them, both supporting and smothering. … We can smell the stones of the courtyard where he lay looking at the sky; we experience the iron hardness of the soil where he and his father labored to plant a garden. And we feel the warmth of his desperate mother who once crept into bed with him and sobbed herself to sleep on his chest. We are gathered into his family and can almost touch the hot glass of tea that is pressed into our hands as the poets and professors, the future statesmen and the rabble-rousers, the odd aunts and forlorn uncles, gather in the dim parlor for a friendly shouting match in six languages at once.
– Eric Ormsby
NONFICTION
THE ANCESTOR’S TALE
By Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 688 pages, $28
Read this book. Once you have, you will never again be carried away by emotion, poetry, or sophistry about the history and mind-boggling variety of life on this planet. Far from rendering you cold or indifferent to its awe, its loveliness, and mystery, it will raise your appreciation to levels that can bring respite to a heart beset with the day’s problems.
– Paul Gross
LOSING THE NEW CHINA: A STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE, DESIRE, AND BETRAYAL
By Ethan Gutmann
Encounter Books, 250 pages, $25.95
Mr. Gutmann deals with a friend who parrots the “convergence” line – the idea that under the surface, China is becoming more like the United States because, just as we have Democrats and Republicans, they have reformers and hardliners, who compete just as our political parties do – by asking “if [this scenario] was any different from, say, rival gangs such as Bloods and Crips. They compete. … But are these gangs accountable to the ghetto? And who elected them to run the ghetto by fear in the first place?”
– John Derbyshire
THE ROADS TO MODERNITY: THE BRITISH AND FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENTS
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Alfred A. Knopf, 284 pages, $25
The very word Enlightenment; Ms. Himmelfarb writes, automatically conjures up the French 18th century, not the British or the American; it means Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, not Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Yet the legacy of the French Enlightenment, in her judgment, is far less valuable than those of the British and American versions.
– Adam Kirsch
BLOOD HORSES: NOTES OF A SPORTSWRITER’S SON
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $24
In the last pages of the book, as the gate opens and the Funny Cide vs. Empire Maker Belmont Stakes begin, Mr. Sullivan grasps the feeling that his father must have had at Secretariat’s Derby: “The feeling – it is as if the bolting open of the doors were the click of a shutter, and you are suddenly frozen in a photograph of some historical moment. It is the seventies and you are in Life magazine. Everyone around you, they must be in the photograph, too, because it is, for the moment, not conceivable that you are here, or that it is now … What else have I been hoping to see for the last two years … if not to see a horse do it again – be perfect.”
– Max Watman
BIOGRAPHY
NAPOLEON: A POLITICAL LIFE – Best of 2004
By Stephen Englund
Scribner’s, 592 pages, $35
Here is a magnificent being, however great his failings, evoked in a great work of empathy by a deeply knowing biographer, who understands that he has not done it alone, and that his biography is built on the backs of other biographers. … One does not have to agree with Mr. Englund’s assessment to appreciate that he has written one of this new century’s towering achievements in biography.
– Carl Rollyson
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
By Ron Chernow
The Penguin Press, 818 pages, $35
Mr. Chernow shows how Hamilton’s achievements – such as creating a central bank and writing a good portion of “The Federalist Papers,” which secured the former colonies’ approval of the Constitution – barred him from the presidency. His enemies effectively caricatured him as a tool of big business, charging that he took kickbacks. Hamilton did himself no good by alternately keeping silent about false accusations and suddenly erupting with epithets against his adversaries.
– C.R.
THE NEW WORLD OF MARTIN CORTES
By Anna Lanyon
Da Capo, 272 pages, $24.95
Ms. Lanyon has an exquisite sense of history, derived from her sensitive reading of secondary sources and her research into the archives in Spain and in Mexico – not to mention her travels to sites where Martin resided. Even better, she involves us in her longing to revive her subject from the dusty documents that advert to his life: “Archival work requires an archeologist’s patience: the same gentle sifting, careful measuring, the endless searching for tiny fragments that might contribute to some larger story.”
– C.R.
DE KOONING: AN AMERICAN MASTER
By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35
Sad though this biography is, the portrait that emerges is of a compelling, handsome, winning, tender, determined man: After 600 pages we like our hero, and never more than when he himself identifies value in chaos. When a drunk chases a rolling quarter someone has thrown him through the swerving traffic, the artist remarks to his friends: “That’s my kind of space.”
– David Cohen
THE AMERICANIZATION OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
By Gordon S. Wood
The Penguin Press, 299 pages, $25.95
I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced between the demands of the two genres. To say that Mr. Wood is a scholar steeped in his period hardly explains why his work is so seamless. In part, I attribute his success to a limpid style – what we now call “transparent” writing. Even more important, perhaps, is that Professor Wood has centered his biography on a theme: how Benjamin Franklin became an American.
– C.R.
HISTORY
THE REFORMATION: A HISTORY – Best of 2004
By Diarmaid MacCullough
Viking, 792 pages, $34.95
It is impossible to do justice to the full scope and depth of “The Reformation” in a review. Suffice it to say that, as a sophisticated but accessible survey of the period, it is ideal; anyone interested in the Reformation, or in history-writing at its best, should turn to Diarmaid MacCullough. What we learn from him, however, is sobering. It is not that Reformation Protestantism or Catholicism were uniquely vicious or bloodthirsty; what was done in their name between 1500 and 1700 has been done innumerable times, before and after, in the name of other ideas. But it remains an especially potent irony that all the wars and massacres, the tortures and burnings at the stake, should have happened in the name of a faith whose founder’s greatest maxim was “Love thine enemy.”
– A.K.
INSIDE THE VICTORIAN HOME: A PORTRAIT OF DOMESTIC LIFE IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
By Judith Flanders
W.W. Norton, 416 pages, $34.95
Ms. Flanders constantly delights with quirky details to satisfy house pornography addicts. There’s the nifty detail: washstands, for instance, were made out of birch because it doesn’t show water stains. And there’s the amazing fact: early Victorians didn’t have bedside tables. Ms. Flanders refrains from airy speculations, but this fact led me to wonder if bedside tables developed alongside triple-decker page turners. Can I blame the un-putdownable narrative pleasures of Dickens and Bronte for the mess by my bed?
– Alexandra Mullen
THE ALHAMBRA
By Robert Irwin
Harvard University Press 213 pages, $19.95
Mr. Irwin guides the reader through the complex itself from the Alcazaba and the Court of the Myrtles to the Court of the Lions and “the Alhambra of the Christian Kings.” He is the ideal companion: amusing, learned, curious, often eloquent. There are wonderful digressions. For example, he notes that Columbus witnessed the fall of Granada in 1492 and that when he set sail for the Indies in the same year, he took with him Luis de Torres, an Arabic-speaking Jew; after they landed in Cuba, thinking it was Japan, Torres proceeded “to address the mystified Tainos natives in Arabic.” The book abounds with such bizarre and comical anecdotes.
– E.O.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, THE SOVIET UNION, AND COMMUNISM
By Stanley G. Payne
Yale University Press, 400 pages, $35
A professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Stanley G. Payne is the most important of English-speaking writers on the Spanish Civil War. His new book stands as the authoritative analytical work in English on that conflict. … No ordinary review can do justice to the importance of Mr. Payne’s profoundly articulate and thought-provoking new book.
– Stephen Schwartz
MOSCOW 1812: NAPOLEON’S FATAL MARCH
By Adam Zamoyski
HarperCollins, 644 pages, $29.95
Mr. Zamoyski is both a superb storyteller and a meticulous historian; he has consulted original sources in Russian, Polish, French, German, and English, including letters, diaries, memoirs, official documents, and hundreds of historical monographs. As Mr. Zamoyski notes, in the century after 1812, more than 5,000 books were published on the Russian campaign, and twice as many journal articles; only he knows how many have appeared since 1912, but he seems to have consulted them all.
– E.O
FICTION
GILEAD – Best of 2004
By Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 245 pages, $23
In the end, “Gilead” demonstrates the differences between the mind of Greek tragedy and the mind of Christianity. Ames closes his long letter with mention of “prevenient grace,” that grace which, in theology, first comes from God to the sinner so that the sinner has the courage to then repent and ask for the full measure of grace. Ms. Robinson makes a similarly prevenient appeal, offering her honesty as a promise of fuller enjoyments for readers who, after hesitation, give themselves over to her excellent book.
– Ben Lytal
THE ISLAND WALKERS
By James Bemrose
Metropolitan Books, 450 pages, $25
This is full-blooded realism. Mr. Bemrose should be lauded not only for the quality of his novel, which will likely prove as fine as any you will read this year, but for his substantial ambition. His project is to portray a change in Western values by portraying the effects of that change on a small Ontario town called Attawan in the 1950s. … This is a slow, quiet, and patient book, but it is the kind of book we need.
– Tim Marchman
SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS
By Javier Cercas
Bloomsbury, 210 pages, $23.95
It telescopes the mad irrationality of the Spanish Civil War and its broader context into a single life, and that life into the single moment when Mazas found his life in the hands of a haunted soldier. Mr. Cercas’s chosen method is able to show how this moment defined the quivering poet/propagandist. This is an evocation of the appeal of fascism to an intellectual.
– T.M.
THE LINE OF BEAUTY
By Alan Hollinghurst
Bloomsbury, 438 pages, $24.95
In a book full of allusions to and invocations of Henry James, nothing is more Jamesian than Mr. Hollinghurst’s mastery of what criticism has named the free indirect style. … At its best, the effect is to make the entire novel function as an evocation of the hero’s consciousness: instead of simply witnessing his actions, we are taken into his mind.
– A.K.
THE MASTER
By Colm Toibin
Scribner’s, 338 pages, $25
Mr. Toibin has something to say insofar as he speaks for James’s life as an animal: James stretches his arms in comfort, he has a nightmare, he vainly wishes, in a dark moment, that he had somebody to hold him. The ease with James’s awkwardness, which might seem glib in a biography, is not jarring within “The Master.”
– B.L.
Also part of today’s Books of the Year:
