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    Try This Quiz on Books Written About America’s Gilded Age

    Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment celebrates novels written about or during America’s Gilded Age era, which many scholars roughly peg between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the early years of the 20th century. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books. More

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    Test Yourself on Popular Streaming TV Shows and the Books That Inspired Them

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights memoirs and other nonfiction books that were used as the inspiration and source material for television series. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions. More

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    Book Review: ‘2024,’ by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf

    “2024,” a campaign book by three seasoned political journalists, immerses readers in the chaos and ironies of the race for the White House.2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac ArnsdorfIn “2024,” the latest 400-page dispatch from last year’s presidential contest, the authors, a trio of veteran journalists from different august papers — Josh Dawsey (The Wall Street Journal), Tyler Pager (The New York Times) and Isaac Arnsdorf (The Washington Post) — write that “there was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it was started.”The authors end up arguing that things were not so fated, but reading what they have to report, I couldn’t help feeling those political insiders had a point. In this account, Biden’s operation resembles its candidate: listless, semi-coherent, sleepwalking toward calamity. It exists for its own sake, impervious to outside input, pushed along by inertia alone. The Trump campaign — at least after his first indictment provides a burst of energy and purpose — appears driven, disciplined, capable of evaluating trade-offs and making tough decisions. Trump seems to want to win; Biden just wants to survive.Things do change when Kamala Harris enters the fray. She gives Trump a run for his money, but her campaign is held back from the start by the slow-moving disaster that made it necessary in the first place.“2024” is a well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Donald Trump announced he was running for president again — at a Mar-a-Lago launch so disorganized and halfhearted, the authors write, that even sycophantic Trump allies admitted it was “a dud.”It is also perhaps the smelliest campaign book I can recall. Trump reflects on his future over fried shrimp and tartar sauce. A Biden aide picks at eggs and bacon in a lonely hotel restaurant. At a desultory Trump news conference in the summer of 2024, packages of sausage and gallons of milk are laid out as props to highlight rising food prices; flies circle the meat “spoiling in the August sun.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89

    An architect, he wrote in his book “Lost New York” about the many buildings that were destroyed before passage of the city’s landmarks preservation law.Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, “Lost New York,” offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89.His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.Mr. Silver’s book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University’s architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city’s long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed.“By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City,” he wrote. “It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera” — it was destroyed in 1967 — “and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.”He added, “While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion.”He found images in archives of “first-rate architecture” that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; the art collector Richard Canfield’s gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Teenage Soldier’s Wartime Scrapbook Inspired His Granddaughter’s First Novel

    Heather Clark’s debut novel, “The Scrapbook,” considers young love as buffeted by historical ruptures.To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.A photograph from Bud Clark’s scrapbook shows an Army buddy taking in the view of a French harbor from atop a river barge.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Match These Books to Their Movie Versions

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. With the summer-movie season here, this week’s challenge is focused on novels that went on to become big-screeen adventures. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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    How Many Memorable Lines Can You Match Up With Their Novels?

    Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that challenges you to match a book’s memorable lines with its title. This week’s installment is focused on quotations from books that are about books, stories, reading and writing. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books themselves if you want to get a copy and see that quotation in context. More

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    Jesus Has ‘More to Say Than Any Human Language Can Carry’: A Q&A With Rowan Williams

    Rowan Williams is among the most important religious thinkers in the world. A theologian, poet, playwright and literary critic, he served as the archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. I spoke to Dr. Williams about his journey of faith and doubt, why God allows the innocent to suffer and how to interpret the Bible (and how not to). He talked about the New Atheists and the influence on his theology of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, what makes Jesus such a compelling figure and what it means to pastor people through grief. Dr. Williams also talked about how, for him, the Christian faith is “the perspective that enriches.” Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the third in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.1. Dostoyevsky Led the WayPeter Wehner: Let me start out by asking you to describe your journey of faith. As a young adult, what was the pull toward Christianity for you? Was it primarily intellectual or aesthetic or an appeal to the imagination or some combination of those? Did you experience what C.S. Lewis called “Sehnsucht,” an intense longing and divine spark for something that’s unattainable in this material world?Rowan Williams: I’d grown up in a Christian environment but not a very intense one. It was really when I was a teenager that it began to speak to me, and it did so largely, to pick up your categories, at the imaginative level. It felt like a larger world to inhabit and at a time when I was discovering more and more about the literary world, about philosophical questioning, about the historical roots of our culture.All of that seemed to me, as a student, enriching and exciting. But it was also brought alive — and here was my good fortune — through particular people who were very important to me at the time, especially my parish priest, who was a huge influence — encouraging, supportive, giving me the message all the time that there’s room for all that in the life of faith.When I started as a university student — coming into contact with an awareness of human need and human suffering that I hadn’t quite registered before, meeting homeless people when I was a student in Cambridge, the sense that you needed to have quite a capacious picture of human nature in order to see the dignity and the need — that reinforced my feeling that the faith I’d grown into was something which actually allowed you to engage at depth with people.Wehner: Is the draw of faith for you now essentially what it was when you were younger?Williams: It’s probably pretty much what I grew up in, in many ways, which is not to say it’s not changed or developed. It’s certainly been battered and tested in various ways. But when I go back to what I was learning at that time, it’s still that same sense that this is the perspective that enriches. This is the perspective that enlarges.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More