Culture, from The Economist

C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. By Alister McGrath. Tyndale House; 431 pages; $24.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIN HIS inaugural lecture as professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, Clive Staples Lewis (Jack to his closest friends) referred to himself as a living “dinosaur”. Sixty years later Lewis seems more than ever like a figure from a distant age. Invariably dressed in tweed jacket, grey flannels and tie, even on holiday, he smoked a pipe and drank beer in pubs with his cronies, the “Inklings”. Lewis was an old-fashioned man of learning and lover of books, a classical scholar who never visited Rome. When he travelled to Greece in 1960, it was the first time he had left Britain since he fought in the trenches in the first world war.So why, half a century after he died (on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley), are Lewis and his writings still of interest? This biography by Alister McGrath, a theologian at Kings College London, provides an answer.There were three Lewises. The first was the distinguished Oxford don and critic who seemed to have...

Money: The Unauthorised Biography. By Felix Martin. Bodley Head; 336 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.ukONE story in this surprisingly entertaining book on the nature of money is about the Irish banking crisis. The country’s bank system ground to a complete stop, with branches closed, the clearing system suspended and customers unable to withdraw or deposit money. As cash ran out, people had to find a way of paying their regular bills, or even just stumping up for a pint of stout in a pub. What actually happened was that businesses started accepting IOUs or cheques for everything, even though there was no telling when the cash would be forthcoming. It helped that a lot of Irish life is lived locally: builders, greengrocers, mechanics and barmen all turned out to be dab hands at personal credit profiling.In short, Ireland developed a new class of money. Its currency was not backed by any central bank, but based solely on informal if surprisingly accurate credit scoring. And the currency was transferable: if certain people said the...

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire. By Neil Irwin. Penguin Press; 448 pages; $29.95. Headline; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukYOU can tell a lot about central banking from its architecture. America’s Federal Reserve is square, squat and solid. The European Central Bank (ECB) is an imposing tower. The Bank of England looks like a fortress at street level, with no windows and thick walls. They are all powerful places, and private ones.The history of financial crises is a good way to uncover why these banks are so powerful. Neil Irwin, an American economist and columnist with the Washington Post, explains how central banks exist in part because of previous crises. Take the Federal Reserve. In 1907 America had no central bank. But a series of events, including an earthquake, a market scam and an investment bubble, led to a banking collapse that proved that America’s system was brittle and prone to failure. A bank to prop up all the others in times of stress was needed, and so the Fed came into being.Mr Irwin’s sweep is impressive. He uses anecdotes from the main historic...

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. By Andrei Lankov. Oxford University Press USA; 283 pages; $27.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWESTERN politicians like to grandstand about North Korea, calling its leaders “mad”, “rogue” or “tinpot” (The Economist has been known to do this too.) In fact, North Korea is the world’s most rational despotic regime: a highly successful Communist absolute monarchy. Kim Jong Il, son of the country’s Stalinist founder, Kim Il Sung, failed as a leader by any of the usual standards—he enforced North Korea’s isolation and presided over a famine that killed between 400,000 and 2m people. But he succeeded in what counts. He lived a long time, died peacefully in late 2011 and passed power on to his son. In the same way that betting once raged about how briefly Kim Jong Il would last after his father’s death in 1994, so...

IN 1742 Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first and longest-serving prime minister, finally retired to the country. For more than 20 years Walpole had used his vast wealth, derived from his control over the public purse, to create a collection of art and sculpture that rivalled the greatest private collections of Europe.In the Palladian mansion he built on the site of his...

Groucho Marx liked a good one No Joke: Making Jewish Humour. By Ruth Wisse. Princeton University Press; 292 pages; $24.95 and £16.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHIS sharp and thoughtful study presents a reviewer with an unusual challenge: which joke do you quote? One cannot tell them all, both because space forbids it and because some of them replicate, in order to mock and render harmless, noxious Jewish stereotypes.The most telling joke is one that Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, attributes to Immanuel Olsvanger, a folklorist who was born in Poland in 1888 and who collected Yiddish humour. Here it is, paraphrased. When you tell a joke to a peasant, he laughs three times: once when you tell it, next when you explain it to him and finally when he understands it. The landowner laughs twice: once when you tell it and again when you explain it (he never...

ONE day a statue will be raised in honour of Valery Gergiev (pictured right), since 1988 the artistic director of the Mariinsky theatre in St Petersburg. It will stand between the old imperial Mariinsky theatre, a birthday gift from Emperor Alexander II to his wife, Maria in 1860, and the new one, which cost $700m and which Mr Gergiev opened on May 2nd, his 60th birthday. A powerful presence with dark hooded eyes, Mr Gergiev is a gift to the sculptor, even if it is hard to imagine the conductor ever being still.The gala opening for the new Mariinsky captured the essence of the maestro. As Mr Gergiev plunged his orchestra into the dramatic Montagues and Capulets suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”, the video backdrop showed a crystal ball flying through the new theatre: up the shiny staircases, through the foyer, in and out of the dressing rooms, over the rooftop and up into the sky.Mr Gergiev too barely keeps his feet on the ground. Yet he stays focused on whatever he does, be it conducting Prokofiev or inspecting a building site. It has been this combination of focus and energy, despite the long years of stop-start planning, that has delivered the new...

The future is already here Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. By Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Brookings Institution Press; 400 pages; $29.95 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. By Alena Ledeneva. Cambridge University Press; 310 pages; $32.99 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukFragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. By Ben Judah. Yale University Press; 379 pages; $30 and £20. Buy from...

More than just a good read Americanah. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf; 496 pages; $26.95. Fourth Estate; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWITH her fountain of irrepressible corkscrew curls, it is hardly surprising that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is preoccupied with hair. In her new novel, “Americanah”, the Nigerian novelist and former Orange prize-winner writes copiously of braiding, curling, coiling, hair attachments, relaxer—anything to tame an African mane.Her heroine, Ifemelu, “grew up in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon…and when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, falling down her back like a celebration.”Ifemelu is a young Nigerian, part of the metropolitan Igbo elite that grows up in Lagos, goes to graduate school in America and dreams of returning home. While she waits,...

Only small change When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence. By Stephen King. Yale University Press; 304 pages; $30 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHE terrifying title of Stephen King’s latest book will tempt some people to dismiss it as an exercise in scaremongering to be filed alongside the efforts of his horror-writing namesake. But Mr King, the chief economist of HSBC, is not the kind of run-of-the-mill Jeremiah who calls for citizens to buy gold and shotguns and retreat to a mountain hideout; his book is well-written, thoughtful and highly convincing.The title is, as the author quickly admits, “a turn of phrase, not the literal truth…paper money never actually runs out”. But Mr King does believe that the ability of the developed world to generate significant economic growth, and thus wealth, has declined. As he points out, in the first four decades of his own...

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. By Richard Holmes. Pantheon; 404 pages; $35. William Collins; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. By David Edgerton. Penguin; 231 pages; £9.99. Buy from Amazon.co.ukRICHARD HOLMES, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, renowned for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, “The Age of Wonder”, which came out in 2008, he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, “Falling Upwards”, he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe’s early balloonists.Mr Holmes’s love of balloons was kindled at a village fete and his enthusiasm is one of the book’s many...

What a good show Margaret Thatcher—The Authorised Biography, Volume I: From Grantham to the Falklands. By Charles Moore. Knopf; 896 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukIT HELPS to be lucky if you are a politician and Margaret Thatcher was luckier than most: lucky that she came to power when the old order was crumbling and lucky that her opponents were so feeble. Now she is proving to be lucky in death. First came a semi-state funeral that had the British establishment on bended knee and the British public out on the streets; now comes the first volume of an authorised biography that may well turn out to be one of the great lives of modern times.This first volume takes the story from Mrs Thatcher’s childhood above a grocer’s shop in Grantham to victory in the Falklands war in 1982. A second volume, “Herself Alone”, will tell the rest of the story. Charles Moore...

Big Brother. By Lionel Shriver. HarperCollins; 373 pages; £16.99. To be published in America next month by Harper; $26.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukLIONEL SHRIVER knows the drawbacks of using her own family in her fiction. Famous for the bestselling “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, which won the Orange prize for fiction in 2005, she once lamented that her parents had not yet forgiven her for an unflattering portrait in an earlier book. The rift was unfortunate, even sad, Ms Shriver noted, but that did not mean she would not do it again. “Real-life people are like carcasses thrown to a carnivorous pet,” she observed.“Big Brother”, Ms Shriver’s 12th novel, may be her most plainly autobiographical. The author has written publicly before about her own big brother, an “obscenely smart” man who ultimately ate himself to death. The experience left her with not a few unresolved questions. What moves someone to eat to grotesque excess? Why is it so hard to deal with food in a healthy way in the overabundant 21st century? And what is the duty of kin when it comes to helping someone bent on self-destruction? These concerns...

Rational exuberance ELLEN GALLAGHER was born in 1965 in Rhode Island, the daughter of an African-American father with ties to Cape Verde in West Africa and an American-Irish mother. Now she divides her time between New York and Rotterdam. Ms Gallagher mines sci-fi, marine biology and black history for her art, variously making use of cut-up paper, pencil, plasticine, printed matter, rubber, gold leaf and photogravure. It is out of this rich interbreeding of method and materials that her astonishing work arises.This summer two new Gallagher exhibitions will open, one on each side of the Atlantic. A substantial survey at Tate Modern in London will be followed by a 20-year retrospective at the New Museum in New York.The first room at the Tate Modern show has been covered with ruled writing paper, a reminder of the importance that the line and the grid play in Ms Gallagher’s work and of the inspiration of minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. This humble papering provides a formal background for her work and helps steer it away from pomposity. But there is much more to Ms Gallagher’s work than linear scaffolding—much to be...

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. By Evgeny Morozov. PublicAffairs; 415 pages; $28.99. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWho Owns the Future? By Jaron Lanier. Simon and Schuster; 397 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukThe New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. By Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Knopf; 319 pages; $26.95. John Murray; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, ...

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. By Mary Roach. Norton; 352 pages; $26.95. OneWorld; £11.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukLITTLE mattered more to Horace Fletcher than the thorough mastication of food. For one-fifth of an ounce of the midway section of a shallot, Fletcher, an American health-food nut, championed 722 chomps. In 1912 Robert Owen, senator for Oklahoma, became so persuaded by the value of “Fletcherising” that he declared excessive chewing a “national asset” worthy of compulsory teaching in schools.Fletcher is just one of the digestion fanatics who enrich “Gulp”, the latest offering from Mary Roach, an American science writer whose 2003 book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”, proved such an unexpected success. She also introduces Claude Bernard, a French physiologist who, having found a dog with a hole in its stomach, promptly dangled the legs of a frog through the fistula to...

Hero and fascist Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941. By Lynne Olson. Random House; 548 pages; $30 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukWHEN “the chips are down”, David Cameron declared on a visit to Washington last year, Britain and America know that they can always count on each other. Standing beside Barack Obama on a sun-drenched White House lawn, Britain’s prime minister invoked the memory of their respective grandfathers, serving in the same campaign to drive Hitler’s forces from France. The message was clear. Seven decades on, when the British need to claim a special relationship with America, nothing approaches the second world war’s talismanic power.In truth, for two terrifying years after it declared war on Germany, Britain did not know that America would come to its aid. Winston Churchill’s government wavered between...

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. By Michael Pollan. Penguin Press; 480 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukBEFORE Michael Pollan came along, eating as a form of politics was a fringe activity. Dubbed the “liberal foodie intellectual” by the New York Times, the American activist and author has spent the last two decades writing bestselling books, such as “In Defence of Food” (2008) and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), in an effort to popularise cooking and highlight the defects of the food industry and the rich world’s bad eating habits.Mr Pollan’s latest book, “Cooked”, is divided into four sections: fire, water, air and earth. Although something of an authorly conceit, these divisions allow him to explore a range of culinary topics from the joy of making soufflés that rise to why bacteria are needed in fermentation. He also returns to a conundrum he has previously...

Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World. By William Leach. Pantheon; 416 pages; $32.50. Buy from Amazon.com“BUTTERFLIES and butterflies”, wrote Walt Whitman, “continue to flit to and fro, all sorts, white, yellow, brown, purple”. Whitman may have had an eye for colour, but as a mere journalist and poet with perhaps a touch of lepidopterophilia, he does not quite qualify as one of William Leach’s “Butterfly People”.True butterfly people were far more serious. They were enthusiasts and obsessives who took advantage of the unfettered access to undeveloped land afforded by a young country pressing its frontier westward. They were artisans and aesthetes: scientists of a sort that gradually ceased to exist as the natural sciences grew more formal and mature.Mr Leach’s compelling thesis is that 19th-century America provided a uniquely hospitable time and place for lovers, and especially collectors, of butterflies. Agricultural toil and westward expansion brought droves of ordinary people into intimate contact with...

Memorial to a moment Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution. By Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking; 398 pages; $32.95. Buy from Amazon.comPROPAGANDA is an essential, sometimes decisive, weapon in war, and not just in modern times. It helped shape the course of the American revolution and so figures prominently in yet another fine history from Nathaniel Philbrick, who wrote “In the Heart of the Sea” (2000) and “Mayflower” (2006). In his latest book, “Bunker Hill”, he examines how the 18th-century equivalent of today’s spin doctors played a crucial role in the incendiary incidents in and around Boston that led up to the first and bloodiest battle of the American war of independence.It was a time when public opinion in the 13 British colonies was split three ways. The “patriots” were inclined to support rebellion, the “loyalists” keen to remain faithful to the crown. Others were not sure where they stood. These, Mr Philbrick reckons, were perhaps the largest group of all.Winning over the don’t knows and don’t...