If after all this your patriotism has taken a hit, re-up those ’merikan feelings with The Age of Lincoln (July 4, Hill & Wang), Orville Vernon Burton’s look at America during Honest Abe’s life. A more topical story would be Andro Linklater’s The Fabric of America (July 4, Walker), a look at how our borders — and our expansion of them — created American identity.
Poetry
If you’re on the road this summer, the best thing you could take — due to size, readability, and re-readability — is poetry. Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs’s Collected Poems II (August 30, Green Integer) won’t keep your pockets weighed down, nor will A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (August 7, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a collection of the Bard’s lyrics chosen by the late Ted Hughes. But the one upcoming volume that might eclipse them all is Poems from Guantánamo (August 15, University of Iowa), a book of 22 poems by 17 of the detainees languishing off the coast Cuba, for whom summer has become something of an abstract concept. Chances are their efforts will be worth pondering.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Related:
True romance, Review: Bright Star, Spring Arts, More 
- True romance
Bright Star is the best movie ever made about John Keats, the great Romantic poet who died at the age of 25. According to the Internet Movie Database, however, it is also the only one.
- Review: Bright Star
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art." That's the first line of a sonnet that John Keats did or did not write for Fanny Brawne, who was in either case the love of his brief life.
- Spring Arts
All the best this spring in music, movies, books, art, and theatre.
- By George, it's Barack!
Right now, everyone is focused on Barack Obama’s vice-presidential choice. But historically, convention acceptance speeches matter even more.
- Cannes job
Five goodies coming out of Cannes
- Happy endings
The end is nigh! And I’m not talking about the mortgage market.
- Sifting the trash heap
There’s an image in an old Warlock comic book by Jim Starlin that sums up a lot of the peculiar, shared pleasure of reading comics.
- Not TV
Big names, new names, and a handful of poets provide worthwhile reading this winter to distract you from the Sopranos reruns on A&E.
- War and peace
Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East.
- Good reads
According to the Greeks, spring is the season of rebirth, when Persephone was released from Hades and mom Demeter celebrated with flowers.
- October lite
We expected the vampires, the werewolves, the zombies, and the homicidal maniacs. Same thing with the android doubles, the alien abductors, the sexually abused pregnant teenager, the Apocalypse, and the post-Apocalypse. But kids' movies?
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Media, Books, Audre Lorde, More
, Media, Books, Audre Lorde, David Malouf, Lana Turner, Liberace, Louisa May Alcott, Peter Handke, Ron Currie, Stephen Carter, Less
