London Calling
Much recent goodness from the London Review Of Books.
Colm Tóibín’s review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life begins with “The Swimmer” and Cheever writing in his diary, after seeing a male figure by a swimming-pool, about the urge
to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world …
Eleanor Birne talks to Tracey Emin’s neighbors.
David Runciman reviews Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes, and knows that we think we know Bill:
In 1997, Bill and Hillary plan a celebration for Chelsea’s 17th birthday, but Hillary is late, so, Branch recounts, ‘Clinton found himself the delighted sole host to a dozen high school girls in raucous discussions of love and the world.’ I know what you’re thinking, and I was thinking the same. But a few pages later we discover what really turned Bill on about the occasion: he used it as an opportunity to give them all a little lecture about the scientific and moral implications of the cloning of Dolly the sheep.
Rebecca Solnit sees dry times ahead in Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell:
The central thread in this story of the West is the story of the Colorado River and the attempts to determine what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered, as it snakes through much of the major non-fiction of the West.
Might want to sell that house in Las Vegas sooner rather than later.
