FICTION:
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.
By turns tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third
novel takes on the comedy and tragedy of American race relations from the
perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant. From the office politics of a
hair-braiding salon to the burden of memory, there’s nothing too humble or daunting
for this fearless writer, who is so attuned to the various worlds and shifting
selves we inhabit — in life and online, in love, as agents and victims of
history and the heroes of our own stories.
By Rachel Kushner.
Scribner, $26.99.
Radical politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle
racing all spring to life in Kushner’s radiant novel of the 1970s, in which a
young woman moves to New York to become an artist, only to wind up involved in
the revolutionary protest movement that shook Italy in those years. The novel,
Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to
explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces.
By Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown & Company, $30.
Tartt’s intoxicating third novel, after “The
Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” follows the travails of Theo Decker,
who emerges from a terrorist bombing motherless but in possession of a prized
Dutch painting. Like the best of Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and
populated with vivid characters. At its heart is the unwavering belief that
come what may, art can save us by lifting us above ourselves.
By Kate Atkinson.
A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown & Company, $27.99.
Demonstrating the agile style and theatrical
bravado of her much-admired Jackson Brodie mystery novels, Atkinson takes on
nothing less than the evils of mid-20th-century history and the nature of death
as she moves back and forth in time, fitting together versions of a life story
for a heroine who keeps dying, then being resurrected — and sent off in
different, but entirely plausible, directions.
Stories
By George Saunders.
By George Saunders.
Random House, $26.
Saunders’s wickedly entertaining stories veer from
the deadpan to the flat-out demented: Prisoners are force-fed mood-altering
drugs; ordinary saps cling to delusions of grandeur; third-world women, held
aloft on surgical wire, become the latest in bourgeois lawn ornaments. Beneath
the comedy, though, Saunders writes with profound empathy, and this impressive
collection advances his abiding interest in questions of class, power and
justice.
NONFICTION:
The
Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
By Alan S. Blinder.
The Penguin Press, $29.95.
Blinder’s terrific book on the financial meltdown
of 2008 argues that it happened because of a “perfect storm,” in which many
unfortunate events occurred simultaneously, producing a far worse outcome than
would have resulted from just a single cause. Blinder criticizes both the Bush
and Obama administrations, especially for letting Lehman Brothers fail, but he
also praises them for taking steps to save the country from falling into a
serious depression. Their response to the near disaster, Blinder says, was far
better than the public realizes.
Bush
and Cheney in the White House
By Peter Baker.
Doubleday, $35.
Baker succeeds in telling the story of the several
crises of the Bush administration with fairness and balance, which is to say
that he is sympathetic to his subjects, acknowledging their accomplishments but
excusing none of their errors. Baker, the chief White House correspondent for
The Times, is fascinated by the mystery of the Bush-Cheney relationship, and
even more so by the mystery of George W. Bush himself. Did Bush lead, or was he
led by others? In the end, Baker concludes, the “decider” really did decide.
Life
and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
By Sheri Fink.
Crown, $27.
In harrowing detail, Fink describes the hellish
days at a hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina, when desperate medical
professionals were suspected of administering lethal injections to critically
ill patients. Masterfully and compassionately reported and as gripping as a
thriller, the book poses reverberating questions about end-of-life care, race
discrimination in medicine and how individuals and institutions break down
during disasters.
How
Europe Went to War in 1914
By Christopher Clark.
Harper, $29.99.
Clark manages in a single volume to provide a
comprehensive, highly readable survey of the events leading up to World War I.
He avoids singling out any one nation or leader as the guilty party. “The
outbreak of war,” he writes, “is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of
which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse.” The participants
were, in his term, “sleepwalkers,” not fanatics or murderers, and the war
itself was a tragedy, not a crime.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.
On the day after Christmas in 2004, Deraniyagala
called her husband to the window of their hotel room in Sri Lanka. “I want to
show you something odd,” she said. The ocean looked foamy and closer than
usual. Within moments, it was upon them. Deraniyagala lost her husband, her
parents and two young sons to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Her survival was
miraculous, and so too is this memoir — unsentimental, raggedly intimate, full
of fury.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com
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