Weekend reviews.

Exhibition

An overdue General Idea retrospective at the AGO. (James Adams, Globe and Mail)

Films

 
Steve Carell and Julianna Moore in Crazy, Stupid Love. (studio handout)

Crazy, Stupid Love. Consensus of reviews has this teen coming-of-age flick enjoyable if not profound. (Salon, CNN, Christian Science Monitor) Salon calls it "a mashup of Fight Club and American Beauty, with the laff-meter turned up and nobody getting killed." "Smart, sweet, funny," says Rick Groen, Globe and Mail.

 
Claire Sloma in Myth of the American Sleepover. (studio handout)

Myth of the American Sleepover. An exquisite teenage dream, says Salon. AP says "Not a single moment rings false" in this quiet film shot in Detroit on a $30,000 budget. Hope, confusion, anxiety, loss and love come together among teen friends on the last night of summer - a familiar but undocumented rite. 

Books

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Douglas Edwards' offers an even-handed look at how Google achieved world domination. (Nicholas Blincoe, Daily Telepgraph) And James Gleick in the New York Review of Books has a more holistic look at Google by reviewing all the recent tomes spawned by the search juggernaut.  

 
Niccolo Machiavelli (Getty Images)

Alan Wolfe on Miles Unger's Machiavelli. (New Republic) The most famous Florentine advisor in history fails to follow his own best advice in this riveting bio.

 
Americans in Paris. (Getty Images)

David McCullough's The Greater Journey on Americans' long-standing love affair with Paris is under-researched but has moments of revelation. Paris, world capital of medical innovation in the 19th century, attracted U.S. med students, for whom cadavers were in short supply at home but could be had for $2.50 in the City of Light. (David Bell, New Republic)

Excerpt

 
Boys will be boys. (Wikipedia Commons)

In a brilliant introduction to a new edition of Lord of the Flies, Stephen King describes how William Golding tutored him for life on the dark side of human nature. (Daily Telegraph)

Essay

 
The late author Stieg Larsson. (Reuters)

Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian right. (Joan Acocella, New Yorker) The late author's warnings about the rise of fascism movements in the region, dating from the 1990s, were ignored. Even now Larsson's prescience is ignored. Are the Norwegians in denial?

Related

What the popularity of book clubs tells us about social (and gastronomic) trends. (Nathan Heller, Slate)

Hooray for the bravest Booker longlist of all time.(Louise Doughty, Daily Telegraph)