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An old friend may be ready for a comeback
 Last Flight of the PhoenixBy ALEX WILLIAMSAt the end of his life, Jim Carroll wrestled with a novel he hoped to make his greatest reinvention.  Hot and Cool in the Big EasyWhen the Sazerac Bar in New Orleans reopened its doors in July for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, it reset the clock.
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addenda
The NYT Sunday (9/27) Book Review is unusually good - some samples follow
Sunday Book Review
'Her Fearful Symmetry'
By AUDREY NIFFENEGGER
Reviewed by SUSANN COKAL
Illustration by Andrea Deszo
In this intricate exploration of love, identity and obsession, a woman buried in Highgate Cemetery haunts the London flat she has left to the twin daughters of her own estranged twin.
'The Clinton Tapes'
By TAYLOR BRANCH
Reviewed by JOE KLEIN
The historian Taylor Branch’s conversations with Bill Clinton yielded deep insights and a revealing portrait of White House life.
Essay
When Writers Speak
By ARTHUR KRYSTAL
Why are wonderful writers sometimes such dull conversationalists? Blame it on the brain.
'Logicomix'
Reviewed by JIM HOLT
A comic-book tour of logic, math and madness, populated by Bertrand Russell and other superheroes of philosophy.
'Bicycle Diaries'
By DAVID BYRNE
Reviewed by GEOFF NICHOLSON
David Byrne tours the world and holds forth on music, art, beauty and the meaning of life, from bicycle level.
'Dancing in the Dark'
By MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Reviewed by ADAM BEGLEY
A high-minded cultural history of the 1930s, when sentimental populism could coexist with polished modernism.
'Cheerful Money'
By TAD FRIEND
Reviewed by FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
What makes a WASP? This winsome memoir chronicles the fancies and foibles of a declining caste.
'Seven Mile Beach'
By TOM GILLING
Reviewed by JOSH BAZELL
This novel’s protagonist, a Sydney journalist, is thrust into danger when he agrees to fib for a friend.
THE WRECKING CREW: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation, by Thomas Frank (Holt/Metropolitan, $16.) With muckraking reporting and stinging satire, Frank, the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” describes how “free-market ideologues . . . came to Washington to start a revolution and built a lucrative lobbying empire instead,” Michael Lind wrote in the Book Review. Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement “sacrifices complexity to caricature,” Lind said, but it reveals Frank as the Juvenal of the American left.
BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER, by John Darnton (Anchor, $15.) Bodies — bearing resemblances to real-life media figures — start turning up in the offices of a great metropolitan daily in Darnton’s playful novel. Part page turner, part satire, the book is an entertaining glimpse of a big-city newsroom and its adjacent bars.
SHARK’S FIN AND SICHUAN PEPPER: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, by Fuchsia Dunlop (Norton, $16.95.) Dunlop moved to Chengdu in 1994 and became the first foreigner to enroll in the professional chefs’ training course at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. This entertaining and carefully reported exploration of China’s foodways describes her gastronomic travels around the country as a “professional omnivore.”
THE GRIFT, by Debra Ginsberg (Three Rivers, $14.) In this cunning whodunit, a fake fortuneteller’s business falls apart when she discovers her true psychic gift, which makes it impossible for her to lie.
