BOOKS
New York Times' Best Books of 2004
FICTION
Gilead
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950's.
The Master
By COLM TOIBIN
Scribner, $25.
A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian.
The Plot Against America
By PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin Company, $26.
An ingenious ''anti-historical'' novel set during World War II. Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences.
Runaway
By ALICE MUNRO
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
Her 11th collection of short stories about people, often women living in rural Ontario, whose vivid, unremarkable lives are rendered with almost Tolstoyan resonance.
Snow
By ORHAN PAMUK
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.
The forces of secular and Islamic Turkey collide in this prescient, complexly orchestrated novel, begun before 9/11 and completed shortly thereafter.
War Trash
By HA JIN
Pantheon, $25.
A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.
NONFICTION
Alexander Hamilton
By RON CHERNOW
The Penguin Press, $35.
An exemplary biography -- broad in scope, finely detailed -- of the founder who gave America capitalism and nationalism.
Chronicles: Volume One
By BOB DYLAN
Simon & Schuster, $24.
A memoir -- idiosyncratic and revelatory -- by the peerless singer-songwriter who journeyed from the heartland to conquer the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960's.
Washington's Crossing
By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press, $35.
An impressively researched narrative about the Revolutionary War that highlights the Battle of Trenton.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95.
Scholarship, speculation and close reading combine in a lively study that gives shape to the life and context to the work.
MUSIC
Bono spins around on his heels to take in the dazzling night above and behind him: the illuminated cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, lacing the sky like golden thread; the lighted offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the East River, staring back at him like jeweled eyes. "Look at this!" the singer yells. "It's wild! What a sight!"
He swings back to face the U2 fans packed on the riverside grass of Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park for a free concert, the climax of a November 22nd video shoot in which the Irish quartet plays all day, all over Manhattan, on a flatbed truck. "When you've been doing this for years," Bono tells the crowd, "you remind yourself why you wanted to be in a band in the first place -- to come to the U.S., over the bridge into Manhattan for the first time. An amazing, powerful time."
Then he introduces "City of Blinding Lights," from U2's magnificent new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb: "The chorus is set in New York," he says, "looking from Brooklyn." Guitarist the Edge fires up a steely barrage; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a jubilant gallop. At the mike, in black leather and dark glasses, Bono again becomes the excited, twenty-year-old Dubliner, the former Paul Hewson, who first saw these lights in December 1980, on the way to U2's U.S. debut at the old Ritz on East Eleventh Street: "Neon heart, day-glo eyes/A city lit like fireflies/They're advertising in the skies/For people like us."
Then as the Edge builds a wall of chime under him, Bono achieves liftoff. "I'm getting ready," he sings with delight, "to leave the ground."
Later, in the encore, Bono, 44, shows what that feeling sounded like in the beginning by leading U2 into a thrilling version of their first single, a song he wrote in 1978, on his eighteenth birthday: "Out of Control."
The next morning, Bono is in his Manhattan apartment, sipping a Diet Coke to nurse a throat ravaged by the long-weekend campaign for Atomic Bomb: the free gig, the flatbed shoot, a three-song appearance on Saturday Night Live. The payoff will be huge. The album debuts at Number One in Billboard with first-week sales of more than 840,000 copies, the third-best figure of 2004 (after Usher and Norah Jones) and the year's best for a rock band.
Bono, Clayton, Mullen and the Edge (real name David Evans) took two years to record How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, with a small army of producers and mixers, including Chris Thomas, Steve Lillywhite and new Irish wunderkind Jacknife Lee. Now U2 are in high rock-combat gear: chewing up screens with a TV ad for the Apple iPod that doubles as a knockout video for the single "Vertigo"; compiling a "digital boxed set" (Bono's phrase) of U2's catalog for iTunes, to go with a personalized U2 iPod; revving up for a world tour to start in the U.S. in March. But today, in his high-rise living room, Bono is looking back at the start of his life with U2, recalling the incident that inspired his flood of memories in "City of Blinding Lights."
Bono was attending the opening of a museum exhibition in Holland by U2's longtime photographer Anton Corbijn, "and he had a room full of Bonos, if you can think of anything worse," the singer says, chuckling with embarrassment. "But to see these giant pictures, through the years -- I got stuck in front of one, it must have been 1981 or '82, of me taking a ride in a helicopter. The eyes were so open. The whole face was so open.
"A journalist sidled up to me and said" -- Bono affects a thick, old-world accent -- " 'Vat vould Bono now say to dis Bono?' I went, 'Well, I would tell him, he's right -- and stop second-guessing himself.'
"The band was what I believed in then," Bono contends. "My faith in myself was a different matter. That innocence -- you don't just want to shed it. You want to beat it off you, scratch it off. You think that knowledge of the world will somehow give you an easier route through it.
"It doesn't," he says emphatically. "In a lot of ways, that's the essence of this album -- the idea that you can go back to where you started, that you can start again." To press his point, Bono quotes the last verse of Atomic Bomb's Who-ish blitzkrieg "All Because of You," chanting the words like a prayer: "I'm alive/I'm being born/I just arrived, I'm at the door/Of the place that I started out from/And I want back inside."
"We've closed the circle," he says, beaming, "back to our first album" -- 1980's echo-drenched thriller, Boy. "Maybe we should have called this one Man."
Three of the four members of U2 are on the stage at Studio 8H in New York's Rockefeller Center, sound-checking for Saturday Night Live. Bono is not one of them. He is late, which is not unusual.
It is not a problem, either. The Edge, Clayton and Mullen are used to Bono's long, frequent absences. They spent much of this and last year working on Atomic Bomb as a trio while he was busy with his other job: touring world capitals, debating and charming dignitaries into joining the fight against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bono first went to Africa in the mid-Eighties as a volunteer aid worker. In 2002, he co-founded the nonprofit activist group DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Live Aid creator Bob Geldof and billionaire philanthropists including George Soros and Bill Gates. Bono is nearly as well-known now for his tireless lobbying as for his singing. "He seems permanently on view," says U2's longtime manager Paul McGuinness. "Somebody once said to me, 'In America, you can only be famous for one thing at a time. That's clearly not true in Bono's case.' "
"I'm not sure if him being around more would have made a difference," the Edge, 43, says of the new album before the SNL sound check. He notes that he, Clayton and Mullen nailed five backing tracks in two weeks while Bono was gone. "But when he is around, he's completely fresh. Bono's creativity has always been a quick thing, a head rush. He often gets something amazing right away."
The U2 sound check is a revelation, a rare look at what goes on under Bono's voice and bravado: Mullen's natural, martial force; Clayton's melodic brawn; the pregnant echo and cutting distortion in the Edge's cathedral-guitar reveilles. A blast of "I Will Follow" from Boy and the trio's slow dance through the Atomic Bomb ballad "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," Bono's elegy for his late father, are so strong that the entire SNL stage crew stops to listen and applaud.
But when Bono arrives for the live-audience dress rehearsal, you can see what the Edge means by "head rush." Looking like a cross between a priest and a Ramone in a black leather jacket and black turtleneck sweater, with a crucifix hanging from a necklace and banging against his chest, Bono takes the band's vicious chop in "Vertigo" to higher catharsis. He pushes his voice up to a fighter-jet scream and punctuates the song's bridge ("Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt") by head-butting an SNL camera: "a Glasgow kiss," he calls it.
"People think I tell the band what direction to go in," Bono says later. "The truth is, they tell me. The singer has to put into words the feelings in the music." He quotes another of his favorite lines on Atomic Bomb, this time in "Vertigo": "A feeling is so much stronger than a thought."
"This is where U2 live -- a four-piece in a room, struggling to get it right," Mullen, 43, contends over a cup of tea one night during U2's New York stay. "We are deficient in many ways musically. We don't have the standard vocabulary. But to play at this level, you have to have commitment. You have to have really good reasons -- and they need to be your songs."
"We couldn't give you an analysis of what makes a U2 song," the Edge claims. He will tell you this: "You don't go into the studio unless you have a shot at making Album of the Year. We had no interest in being the biggest if we weren't the best. That was the only way being the biggest would mean anything."
Actually, Clayton, 44, can tell you what makes a U2 hit. " 'Pride,' 'With or Without You,' 'Beautiful Day' -- they're all simple structures," he says. "The verses and choruses have virtually the same chords. There is a build that starts slowly and keeps going. And you get a climax at the end. But you can't make a formula of it. So much of ending up with that simplicity is arguing about the complications along the way."
ART
Many of Botticelli's paintings are undated, but an Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi) has been dated by modern scholarship to c1475. This is important because it provides evidence of Botticelli having already secured the patronage of the Medici whose portraits (according to Vasari) appear in the picture. So well did this work establish Botticelli's reputation that in 1481-82 he was commissioned to join Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli (the most celebrated painters of the day) to paint frescoes for the Sistine Chapel.
The Adoration of the Magi
Botticelli
c. 1475
Tempera on panel
111 x 134 cm
Uffizi, Florence
Not long till Whistler.
New York Times' Best Books of 2004
FICTION
Gilead
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950's.
The Master
By COLM TOIBIN
Scribner, $25.
A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian.
The Plot Against America
By PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin Company, $26.
An ingenious ''anti-historical'' novel set during World War II. Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences.
Runaway
By ALICE MUNRO
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
Her 11th collection of short stories about people, often women living in rural Ontario, whose vivid, unremarkable lives are rendered with almost Tolstoyan resonance.
Snow
By ORHAN PAMUK
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.
The forces of secular and Islamic Turkey collide in this prescient, complexly orchestrated novel, begun before 9/11 and completed shortly thereafter.
War Trash
By HA JIN
Pantheon, $25.
A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.
NONFICTION
Alexander Hamilton
By RON CHERNOW
The Penguin Press, $35.
An exemplary biography -- broad in scope, finely detailed -- of the founder who gave America capitalism and nationalism.
Chronicles: Volume One
By BOB DYLAN
Simon & Schuster, $24.
A memoir -- idiosyncratic and revelatory -- by the peerless singer-songwriter who journeyed from the heartland to conquer the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960's.
Washington's Crossing
By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press, $35.
An impressively researched narrative about the Revolutionary War that highlights the Battle of Trenton.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95.
Scholarship, speculation and close reading combine in a lively study that gives shape to the life and context to the work.
MUSIC
Bono spins around on his heels to take in the dazzling night above and behind him: the illuminated cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, lacing the sky like golden thread; the lighted offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the East River, staring back at him like jeweled eyes. "Look at this!" the singer yells. "It's wild! What a sight!"
He swings back to face the U2 fans packed on the riverside grass of Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park for a free concert, the climax of a November 22nd video shoot in which the Irish quartet plays all day, all over Manhattan, on a flatbed truck. "When you've been doing this for years," Bono tells the crowd, "you remind yourself why you wanted to be in a band in the first place -- to come to the U.S., over the bridge into Manhattan for the first time. An amazing, powerful time."
Then he introduces "City of Blinding Lights," from U2's magnificent new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb: "The chorus is set in New York," he says, "looking from Brooklyn." Guitarist the Edge fires up a steely barrage; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a jubilant gallop. At the mike, in black leather and dark glasses, Bono again becomes the excited, twenty-year-old Dubliner, the former Paul Hewson, who first saw these lights in December 1980, on the way to U2's U.S. debut at the old Ritz on East Eleventh Street: "Neon heart, day-glo eyes/A city lit like fireflies/They're advertising in the skies/For people like us."
Then as the Edge builds a wall of chime under him, Bono achieves liftoff. "I'm getting ready," he sings with delight, "to leave the ground."
Later, in the encore, Bono, 44, shows what that feeling sounded like in the beginning by leading U2 into a thrilling version of their first single, a song he wrote in 1978, on his eighteenth birthday: "Out of Control."
The next morning, Bono is in his Manhattan apartment, sipping a Diet Coke to nurse a throat ravaged by the long-weekend campaign for Atomic Bomb: the free gig, the flatbed shoot, a three-song appearance on Saturday Night Live. The payoff will be huge. The album debuts at Number One in Billboard with first-week sales of more than 840,000 copies, the third-best figure of 2004 (after Usher and Norah Jones) and the year's best for a rock band.
Bono, Clayton, Mullen and the Edge (real name David Evans) took two years to record How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, with a small army of producers and mixers, including Chris Thomas, Steve Lillywhite and new Irish wunderkind Jacknife Lee. Now U2 are in high rock-combat gear: chewing up screens with a TV ad for the Apple iPod that doubles as a knockout video for the single "Vertigo"; compiling a "digital boxed set" (Bono's phrase) of U2's catalog for iTunes, to go with a personalized U2 iPod; revving up for a world tour to start in the U.S. in March. But today, in his high-rise living room, Bono is looking back at the start of his life with U2, recalling the incident that inspired his flood of memories in "City of Blinding Lights."
Bono was attending the opening of a museum exhibition in Holland by U2's longtime photographer Anton Corbijn, "and he had a room full of Bonos, if you can think of anything worse," the singer says, chuckling with embarrassment. "But to see these giant pictures, through the years -- I got stuck in front of one, it must have been 1981 or '82, of me taking a ride in a helicopter. The eyes were so open. The whole face was so open.
"A journalist sidled up to me and said" -- Bono affects a thick, old-world accent -- " 'Vat vould Bono now say to dis Bono?' I went, 'Well, I would tell him, he's right -- and stop second-guessing himself.'
"The band was what I believed in then," Bono contends. "My faith in myself was a different matter. That innocence -- you don't just want to shed it. You want to beat it off you, scratch it off. You think that knowledge of the world will somehow give you an easier route through it.
"It doesn't," he says emphatically. "In a lot of ways, that's the essence of this album -- the idea that you can go back to where you started, that you can start again." To press his point, Bono quotes the last verse of Atomic Bomb's Who-ish blitzkrieg "All Because of You," chanting the words like a prayer: "I'm alive/I'm being born/I just arrived, I'm at the door/Of the place that I started out from/And I want back inside."
"We've closed the circle," he says, beaming, "back to our first album" -- 1980's echo-drenched thriller, Boy. "Maybe we should have called this one Man."
Three of the four members of U2 are on the stage at Studio 8H in New York's Rockefeller Center, sound-checking for Saturday Night Live. Bono is not one of them. He is late, which is not unusual.
It is not a problem, either. The Edge, Clayton and Mullen are used to Bono's long, frequent absences. They spent much of this and last year working on Atomic Bomb as a trio while he was busy with his other job: touring world capitals, debating and charming dignitaries into joining the fight against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bono first went to Africa in the mid-Eighties as a volunteer aid worker. In 2002, he co-founded the nonprofit activist group DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Live Aid creator Bob Geldof and billionaire philanthropists including George Soros and Bill Gates. Bono is nearly as well-known now for his tireless lobbying as for his singing. "He seems permanently on view," says U2's longtime manager Paul McGuinness. "Somebody once said to me, 'In America, you can only be famous for one thing at a time. That's clearly not true in Bono's case.' "
"I'm not sure if him being around more would have made a difference," the Edge, 43, says of the new album before the SNL sound check. He notes that he, Clayton and Mullen nailed five backing tracks in two weeks while Bono was gone. "But when he is around, he's completely fresh. Bono's creativity has always been a quick thing, a head rush. He often gets something amazing right away."
The U2 sound check is a revelation, a rare look at what goes on under Bono's voice and bravado: Mullen's natural, martial force; Clayton's melodic brawn; the pregnant echo and cutting distortion in the Edge's cathedral-guitar reveilles. A blast of "I Will Follow" from Boy and the trio's slow dance through the Atomic Bomb ballad "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," Bono's elegy for his late father, are so strong that the entire SNL stage crew stops to listen and applaud.
But when Bono arrives for the live-audience dress rehearsal, you can see what the Edge means by "head rush." Looking like a cross between a priest and a Ramone in a black leather jacket and black turtleneck sweater, with a crucifix hanging from a necklace and banging against his chest, Bono takes the band's vicious chop in "Vertigo" to higher catharsis. He pushes his voice up to a fighter-jet scream and punctuates the song's bridge ("Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt") by head-butting an SNL camera: "a Glasgow kiss," he calls it.
"People think I tell the band what direction to go in," Bono says later. "The truth is, they tell me. The singer has to put into words the feelings in the music." He quotes another of his favorite lines on Atomic Bomb, this time in "Vertigo": "A feeling is so much stronger than a thought."
"This is where U2 live -- a four-piece in a room, struggling to get it right," Mullen, 43, contends over a cup of tea one night during U2's New York stay. "We are deficient in many ways musically. We don't have the standard vocabulary. But to play at this level, you have to have commitment. You have to have really good reasons -- and they need to be your songs."
"We couldn't give you an analysis of what makes a U2 song," the Edge claims. He will tell you this: "You don't go into the studio unless you have a shot at making Album of the Year. We had no interest in being the biggest if we weren't the best. That was the only way being the biggest would mean anything."
Actually, Clayton, 44, can tell you what makes a U2 hit. " 'Pride,' 'With or Without You,' 'Beautiful Day' -- they're all simple structures," he says. "The verses and choruses have virtually the same chords. There is a build that starts slowly and keeps going. And you get a climax at the end. But you can't make a formula of it. So much of ending up with that simplicity is arguing about the complications along the way."
ART
Many of Botticelli's paintings are undated, but an Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi) has been dated by modern scholarship to c1475. This is important because it provides evidence of Botticelli having already secured the patronage of the Medici whose portraits (according to Vasari) appear in the picture. So well did this work establish Botticelli's reputation that in 1481-82 he was commissioned to join Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli (the most celebrated painters of the day) to paint frescoes for the Sistine Chapel.
The Adoration of the Magi
Botticelli
c. 1475
Tempera on panel
111 x 134 cm
Uffizi, Florence
Not long till Whistler.
posted by D @ 9:18 AM
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