Jon Stewart

Dave Eggers sends two slackers staggering off to save the world by giving money to strangers. Genius? No. Shrewdly observed, multileveled, highly funny? Definitely.

Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing sings a ponderous tune—and those lyrics! Richard Sennett's Respect mixes sociology, memoir, and music interestingly, if dissonantly.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel of the Long Island suburbs, Aloft, is billowing and insubstantial, like a cloud on a summer afternoon.

Managing a great fortune is a moral challenge. And David Rockefeller -- whatever you think of his accomplishments -- rose to it.

In his new book, ex-Republican Kevin Phillips writes less a work of history than a screed and a lament. He hasn’t changed; the GOP has.

Benjamin Franklin, genius and rake, the first American superstar, proves more than a match for Walter Isaacson in a new biography.

Firehouse
By David Halberstam

Steven Watson’s excellent new history of Warhol in the sixties shows him as a highly permissive father in a Manhattan avant-garde sitcom.

Bob Woodward’s Bush at War gets the trees (Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell) right. But the forest—the war on terror at home and abroad—is as dark as ever.