Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline...and the Rise of a New Economy (Free Press),
by Daniel Gross, offers up an alternative to all those who peer into their economic crystal balls and see nothing but bleakness for America. Instead, Gross exposes the decline crowd for what he insists it really is: a bunch of misguided purveyors of doomsday visions who would rather bemoan an impending apocalypse than do anything about it. His economic
analysis gels in a work of journalism that is less a mani-festo of blind optimism than it is an engaged, well-wrought critique of the freewheeling credit junky that was the pre-meltdown political economy. Yet unlike so many one-dimensional critiques, Gross finds cause to praise the phoenixes that arose from the ashes too, like BigBelly Solar, makers of the solar-powered, self-compact- ing garbage cans that promise to save cities millions of dollars per year in waste management. The cure to our economic ills will not come cheap, but with smart policy and savvy entrepreneurs on our side, Gross suggests you cast aside your grim outlook and double down your bets on the American resurgence.
Fairy Tale Interrupted (Gallery Books)
, by RoseMarie Terenzio, is much more than a fly-on-the-wall account of an administrative assistant during John F. Kennedy Jr.’s foray into pop-culture and politics magazine George in the nineties. It is more than Terenzio navigating life’s treacherous waters, where insecurity and breakups lurk in the depths. This book is a resurrection of John-John and Carolyn Bessette. Often when we think about the American tragedy that is synonymous with the Kennedy family, we gloss over the people themselves. Not Terenzio. With the tender and ruthless affection that only true friendship affords, she paints John as a man scarcely able to keep track of his wallet, capable of acts both gracious and insensitive, trying to reconcile his civic duty with his moneyed legacy. The complex portrait of Kennedy we are left with is one to
cherish against the backdrop of so many tabloid stories.
The Gentry Man: A Guide for the Civilized Male (Harper Design), edited by Hal Rubenstein, is what you get when you mix two parts men’s cultural anthology and one part coffee table book. Anthologist Hal Rubenstein, the current fashion director of InStyle, has resurrected Gentry magazine, a periodical that, during its brief 22-issue existence in the 1950s, paved the way for Esquire and GQ. In his introductions, Rubenstein shows how Gentry stood up to Eisenhower-era conformity by calling for men to stand up as free individuals—renaissance men—capable of so much more than coasting through life in suburban idyll. The archetypical Gentry man brings a samurai’s finesse to the carving of a holiday turkey, a chemist’s meticulousness to the mixing of a chilled martini. The feature stories in this anthology will entertain hungry readers with their stylistic panache and unique subjects, such as a comparison of Elvis hysteria to the ancient Greek practice of worshiping gods of virility. The photos of iconic decor and fashion will summon nostalgia for the heady days of film noir and the big finned Cadillac.
The 500 (Little Brown), by Matthew Quirk, picks up the mantle of zeitgeist thrillers right where it was last discarded by writers of heart-pumping techno-thrillers. It’s not that readers are new to high-octane prose tooling along at full throttle through marble-floored office lobbies with fountains seemingly plucked from the Parthenon. It’s just that in today’s world, in which Ponzi schemers and securities fraudsters and identity grifters walk among us so freely, it is refreshing to read a thriller that both humanizes and demonizes these characters, a thriller that ensnares the reader with delicious imbroglio, sordid details, and well-paced plot that indeed capture a piece of the spirit of these loose-cannon financial times.
