BOOK BARN

#279: WITH TOOTHBRUSH AND WITHOUT. Colm Tóibín’s book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush is a fairly splendid example of how much you can convey in the short space of 125 pages, and how much those pages can tilt your image of an artist and their time. Lady Gregory, if she is only a name to you, was, with William Butler Yeats, one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which did so much to expand and alter the culture of Ireland, and a prime mover of the Irish Renaissanc

#278: WELCOME TO OUR WORLD(S). In 2011, the essayist Naomi Klein had her first experience—a conversation overheard in a public rest room in New York—of having her identity scrambled with that of another writer, Naomi Wolf. It wasn’t just the coincidence of their shared first name: both had written extensively on social, political, and climate issues. What was particularly disconcerting to Klein was that Wolf had abandoned her original feminist and leftish stances for a hea

#277. THE WHEREABOUTS OF EDEN. It may not have been inevitable that Pico Iyer should end up (in part) a travel writer, but circumstances do seem to have edged him in that direction. He was born to Indian parents, academics, in England; he recalls, “in our chill, gray flat in North Oxford,” being read stories from the Ramayana. The family eventually relocated to California, very nicely giving him ground points from which to go easily east or west. His full name is Siddart