deas & Trends
By PETER S. GOODMAN
As the world gets complicated, regulation finds some new fans from an unlikely quarter.
'Modernism'
By PETER GAY
Reviewed by LEE SIEGEL
A cultural historian tries to make sense of modernism.
By STEVEN GDULA
Reviewed by DOMINIQUE BROWNING
A history of the kitchen in the 20th century explains how the room came to be so central to modern life.
By JONAH GOLDBERG
Reviewed by DAVID OSHINSKY
Jonah Goldberg argues that 20th-century Democrats are fascists.
By RONNIE WOOD
Reviewed by IRA ROBBINS
The autobiography of a Rolling Stones guitarist (not that one).
SAXONS, VIKINGS, AND CELTS: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, by Bryan Sykes. (Norton, $16.95.) Sykes reports on the results of a DNA survey of 10,000 volunteers from all around the British Isles conducted at Oxford. His conclusion is that most people in Britain are “rooted in a Celtic past” and that Saxons, Vikings and Normans had little effect. “The Irish, the Welsh and the Scots know this,” he writes, “but the English sometimes think otherwise.”
CHASING DAYLIGHT: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life, by Eugene O’Kelly with Andrew Postman. (McGraw-Hill, $14.95.) Eugene O’Kelly was the chief executive of a major accounting firm in May 2005 when he received a diagnosis of inoperable brain cancer. In the months before his death that September, he learned to live in the moment and to “unwind” his relationships with those closest to him. O’Kelly “described his situation with dignified restraint,” Janet Maslin said in The Times. “He wound up voicing universal truths.”
KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, by Deborah Rodriguez with Kristin Ohlson. (Random House, $14.95.) Rodriguez, a Michigan hairdresser, went to Kabul in 2002 as part of a charitable mission and stayed to help run a beauty school that gave Afghan women a marketable skill as well as “their own space where they were free from the control of men.” In The Times, William Grimes applauded Rodriguez’s “superior storytelling gifts and wicked sense of humor.”
TUNNEY: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey, by Jack Cavanaugh. (Ballantine, $15.95.) This biography by a veteran journalist reviews the unusual boxing career of Gene Tunney, who said he found “no joy in knocking people unconscious,” although he often did so. His description of Tunney’s defeat of Dempsey in the 1920s “crackles” and is “more fun” than watching the fight on YouTube, Shaun Assael wrote in The Times.
A STAR IS FOUND: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood’s Biggest Movies, by Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins with Rachel Kranz. (Harvest/Harcourt, $14.) Two experienced casting directors describe their craft, reminisce about films they’ve worked on and offer advice to actors, the most important piece of which is: Don’t take it personally.