Reviews

Books

Presidential rebound

The president is a failure. His foreign policy is a mess, and he's hounded by scandals at home. A hostile opposition has seized the Congress, and he's fought to stay relevant in the face of humiliating approval ratings. George W. Bush today? No. Bill Clinton in 1995.

The Clinton of today is a kind of political demigod, with a White House legacy of peace and prosperity that shines all the more next to his successor's failures. But it's easy to forget that the man from Hope once appeared headed for failure, his name destined to join the likes of Pierce and Van Buren in the annals of forgettable one-term flops. The story of how Clinton nearly ruined his presidency and - with the help of domestic terrorists in Oklahoma City and the zealotry of Newt Gingrich - managed to resurrect it, is the focus of Nigel Hamilton's book Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency. Michael Crowley

The cost of utopia

Robert H. Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell University, is an anthropologist of the ultra-rich. His prior books Luxury Fever and The Winner-Take-All Society have explored how the earning and consuming patterns of the very wealthy affect society at large. In his new book Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, Professor Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age.

The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population - and not in a good way. Frank is the rare economist with a gift for irony. And economic ironies abound in The Economic Naturalist, a collection of nuggets culled from an assignment Frank gives to introductory economics students at Cornell. In 500 words or less, "pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed".

Frank sees this homework as part of an effort to bring more narrative into the teaching of economics and to make intimidated students realize they may already possess a rudimentary grasp of the dismal science.

Daniel Gross

The boy next door

What if it had been Mrs. Robinson who was the pursued, and Benjamin the pursuer? What if, when he refused to believe she couldn't love him, she didn't run to him, but from him? In Tessa Hadley's third novel, The Master Bedroom, that's the predicament faced by Kate Flynn, a brainy and forbidding beauty with delicate bones, "Nefertiti eyes" and a mean tongue, who has quit her professor's job in London and returned to her grand but crumbling childhood home in Wales to care for her 83-year-old, increasingly forgetful mother.

Appearing here at about the same time as the novel is Sunstroke, a collection of Hadley's miraculous short stories. Deft and resonant, they encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived. Liesl Schillinger

The New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 08/09/2007 page20)