Authors:Robert B. Silvers, Barbara Epstein,
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: friendships, unforgettable, writers, company
Number of Pages: 316
Published: 2006-09-05
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 1590172035
ISBN-13: 9781590172032

Our most remarkable writers share what has influenced them the most: each other. Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships–most of them undeniably fraught with “idiosyncratic complexities.” One of the sweetest and funniest is Prudence Crowther’s memoir of her romance, at age thirty, with the seventy-fou

Author: V.S. Naipaul
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: account, personal, writing, reading
Number of Pages: 64
Published: 2000-02-28
List price: $16.95
ISBN-10: 0940322382
ISBN-13: 9780940322387

In this essay of literary autobiography, V.S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in Oxford, and his struggles as a young, poor and inexperienced writer in London. He describes his responses to his family’s native India, particularly his horror at the poverty and misery that he encountered on his first visit. He modestly reflects on the different possibilities that he found in the novel and the travel book for capturing the truth of his subjects and considers what makes a work piece of literature. He offers us a remarkably vivid acc

Author: Freeman Dyson
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: review, collections, york, new, rebel, scientist
Number of Pages: 400
Published: 2006-11-14
List price: $27.95
ISBN-10: 1590172167
ISBN-13: 9781590172162

An illuminating collection of essays by an award-winning scientist whom the London Times calls “one of the world’s most original minds.”From Galileo to today’s amateur astronomers, scientists have been rebels, writes Freeman Dyson. Like artists and poets, they are free spirits who resist the restrictions their cultures impose on them. In their pursuit of Nature’s truths, they are guided as much by imagination as by reason, and their greatest theories have the uniqueness and beauty of great works of art.Dyson argues that the best way to understand science is by understanding those who

Author: Ronald Dworkin
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: court, wing, bloc, right, new, phalanx, supreme
Number of Pages: 96
Published: 2008-05-13
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 1590172930
ISBN-13: 9781590172933

George W. Bush’s nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005 were widely expected to turn it sharply to the right. But no one foresaw the rapidity or the revolutionary zeal with which, as Ronald Dworkin writes, the Court would begin “overruling, most often by stealth, the central constitutional doctrines that generations of past justices, conservative as well as liberal, had constructed.”  Dworkin examines the key decisions of the Court’s 2006-–2007 term and argues that these two new justices, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, have c

Author: Ingrid Rowland
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: renaissance, profane, sacred, arcadia, heaven
Number of Pages: 324
Published: 2005-01-31
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 1590171233
ISBN-13: 9781590171233

In these essays, most of them originally published in The New York Review of Books, Ingrid Rowland explores topics pertaining to the art and culture of Renaissance Italy. She ranges from the lives and works of its greatest painters — Titian, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Correggio, and Botticelli — to the urban and political life of Venice, Florence, and Rome. She also discusses themes of sexuality and eroticism in Renaissance literature and society, the enduring fascination with ancient Egypt, and polymathic Renaissance scholars such as Girolamo Cardano, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and Athanasius Ki

Author: Mark Lilla
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: berlin, isaiah, legacy
Number of Pages: 208
Published: 2001-04-30
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 1590170091
ISBN-13: 9781590170090

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: New York Review Books
Keywords: america, ideas, fixed
Number of Pages: 56
Published: 2003-04
List price: $7.95
ISBN-10: 1590170733
ISBN-13: 9781590170731