In his latest novel, Michael Cunningham writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. But he goes beyond that, anchoring his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, [...]

By Harvey Blume

Short Fuse and the Arts Fuse will continue to follow and comment on this story. We welcome your thoughts as well. Updates on the Marc Hauser story here, here, and, here. And now more — here and here.
As of August 12, 2010, Marc Hauser has taken a year leave from his position as [...]

Critic Paul Berman’s problem with the arts plays too significant a role in his work to be written off as but the tin ear of an historian and social thinker with weightier matters on his mind; his misreading of the arts is a fulcrum of his social thinking.
The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul [...]

The major problem with these treatments of Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg is that they portray their main characters as if there was no possible resonance between them, as if they came from different eras.

The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin, HarperOne, 256 pages, $24.99.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon
Papers, [...]

American author Robert Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species.
Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged [...]

An engaging book from a London-based journalist that sets out to illuminate a challenging slice of Jewish history.
“Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance” by Michael Goldfarb, Simon and Schuster, 408 pages, $30.00.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Michael Goldfarb is an American-born, London-based contributor to NPR (as well as to THE [...]

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $16.95.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
In 1916, as Europe waged an horrific war that, nearly a century later, makes even less sense, if possible, than it did at the time, refugees, renegades, draft dodgers, opportunists, revolutionaries and artists massed in [...]

When discussing Friedrich Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from a damning portrayal.
Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt. Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
Among the most memorable words Karl Marx ever wrote [...]

By Harvey Blume
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) Directed by Uli Edel
At Kendall Square and Coolidge Corner Cinemas
There are some things the German Red Army Faction — the RAF, or Baader Meinhof Gang — had in common with ultra-militant elements of the American New Left, as I knew and participated in it in [...]

Counterfactual thinking came to my mind while watching a documentary about the Kennedy clan that ran on public television after Ted Kennedy died.

By Harvey Blume
When Niall Ferguson is not slugging it out with Paul Krugman about whether deficit spending by the Obama administration will wreck the economy, as he swears it will, or rescue [...]