With his fourth novel, the great James
McBride “has tapped a whole fresh
seam of inspiration,” said Junot Díaz
in The New York Times. Its 71-year-
old title character, a beloved fixture in
his Brooklyn housing project, shoots
the ear off a young heroin dealer on
page 1. Yet the good deacon, also
widely known as Sportcoat, is so ad-
dled by booze and grief that he doesn’t
believe the incident occurred, let alone
that he has stirred up a drug war. Soon
Sportcoat is being hunted by hitmen, a
detective, an Italian smuggler, and the
ghost of his own wife, and the charac-
ters’ vividness “helps transform a fine
book into a great one.” It might read as
too sunnily absurdist, said Jonathan
Dee in The New Yorker. Even violence
here is played for laughs. But from time
to time, “a consciously suppressed
anger” emerges, and it makes the nov-
el’s comic form look like a philosophi-
cal choice. “A comedy, no matter how
frenetic on the surface, is an engine of
patience, of faith in the idea that lost
things will eventually be found.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
“If inequality has become the subject
of intense public attention, a good deal
of the credit goes to French economist
Thomas Piketty,” said Idrees Kahloon
in The New Yorker. His 2013 book
Capital in the 21st Century, which built
upon years of research that had already
changed the conversation about wealth
distribution, argued across 600 data-
packed pages that capitalism always
generates wealth at a faster pace for the rich
than for everyone below them, resulting in
intolerable inequality of the kind we now
see. His follow-up is “yet more ambitious”
and, at 1,100 pages, a cinder block. But
“there’s a reason for the heft.” After open-
ing with the “arresting pronouncement”
that “Every human society must justify its
inequalities,” Piketty provides a sweeping
history of societal organization, analyzes
capitalism’s faults, and recommends a
“breathtaking series of reforms.”
However many
previous George
Washington biogra-
phies can be found,
“it’s a safe bet that
none are quite
like Alexis Coe’s,”
said Rachel King
in Fortune.com.
Beginning with its
title, “the book just
jumps up and asks
you to pay atten-
tion,” said Karin Wulf in SmithsonianMag
.com. Coe, a historian, presents America’s
first president as a flawed but still impres-
sive human being, and does so by combin-
ing thorough research with an impatience
for myths. One of the cheeky lists that
opens the book is titled “Lies We Believe
About the Man Who Could Not Tell
Them.” A few pages later, Coe raps several
esteemed scholars as “the thigh men of dad
history” because of their odd fixation on
Washington’s apparently robust upper legs.
For the average history fan, “there is much
Book of the week
The book has its virtues, including
prose that’s “pithy and light,” said The
Economist. But the central argument is
one that Karl Marx made: Capitalism is
essentially as exploitative as feudalism or
slavery. For a remedy, Piketty advocates
a new socialism, said Raghuram Rajan in
the Financial Times. Rather than give the
state control over industry, he wants to
boost workers’ power within corporations
and establish a tax system that forces busi-
ness ownership to be passed along. Wealth
redistribution would also be achieved
by a 90 percent wealth tax on the very
richest and by providing every citizen a
substantial base income plus, at age 25,
a onetime $230,000 payout. “This is a
serious agenda. It is also, however, seri-
ously misguided.”
It at least “redefines the word ‘radical,’”
said Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg
.com. The tax on wealth would be so
severe that the richest would have no
time to convert their assets to cash to
make the payments. But Piketty’s pro-
posals could have the benefit of shock-
ing the center-left and center-right out
of seeking merely incremental change.
“If there is a case for optimism in this
book,” said Paul Mason in The Observer
(U.K.), it’s not, however, that today’s lead-
ers will become enlightened. It’s that capi-
talism can’t survive the growing evidence
that it fails in its promise to give every
person a fair chance at success. I only wish
Piketty had bothered to specify how today’s
divided working class might be roused into
embracing his agenda. In that sense, “my
objection is not that it is too radical, but
not radical enough.”
Capital and Ideology
by Thomas Piketty
(Belknap, $40)
Novel of the week
Deacon King Kong
by James McBride
(Riverhead, $28)
You Never Forget Your First:
A Biography of
George Washington
by Alexis Coe (Viking, $27)
to savor and enjoy,” said Marjoleine Kars
in The Washington Post. Our hero “comes
across as a man amply possessed of charm
and gravitas.” He could be petty and quick
to anger, though; he lost more battles
than he won; he was “downright brutal”
in his treatment of Native Americans;
and he managed, during his presidency,
to convert Thomas Jefferson and James
Monroe from admirers into critics. Then
there is Washington the slaveowner.
Though he spoke against slavery, he had
his own slaves whipped, paid meagerly
to extract their teeth for use as his own,
and freed only one slave in his will. His
wife, Martha, freed the other 123 within a
year—“lest they kill her.”
Coe’s imperfect Washington even resembles
our current president in one respect:
his intolerance for criticism, said David
Shribman in The Boston Globe. But Coe
ultimately shares previous biographers’
admiration for the man, even as she
remains less starry-eyed. Washington could
be stingy, hypocritical, and simply fallible.
But he understood that America’s chief
executive should be a sober, selfless leader
willing to relinquish power after a brief rule.
We can thank him for setting that prec-
edent, “and we can thank Coe, in her effort
to make him more accessible and real.”
Poverty confronts wealth in Rio de Janeiro.
Ge
tty