RIGGED Robert B.

Reich and
Zephyr Teachout on how the rich win out
OLIVER! A memoir of war and Hollywood
by the director Oliver Stone
FICTION Emma Donoghue’s pandemic,
an audio ‘Sandman,’ beach reads and more
AUGUST 16, 2020

THE AMERICANS
WRITERS WHO SHOW US WHO WE ARE

THE SECOND IN A SERIES

In the United States right now, it can feel as if all our

common experience has been cooked down to a sticky
residue of partisanship. But American literature tells a
different story — or rather, a great many different
stories. To read the work of writers from the near and
distant past, and some who are still active, is not
necessarily to encounter visions of consensus or
progress: Culture wars have always been part of the
culture. Still, the homegrown literary imagination has
shown the ability to flout, to short-circuit and even to
transcend the simplified, sloganized language of
politics, embracing what Henry James called the
“complex fate” of being an American.
These essays on American authors — some well
known, some unjustly forgotten, some perpetually
misunderstood — aim to restore a sense of that com-
plexity. The books under discussion don’t avoid the
perennial hot buttons of race, gender, sex, region and
religion, but they offer perspectives on the question of
American identity that challenge our pieties as well as
our cynicism. Reading them now, again or for the first
time, might represent a modest act of patriotism, a
pledge of allegiance to the republic of American letters.

Edward P. Jones
BY A.O. SCOT T
*8GB1*

IN JUNE, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas made a speech

opposing statehood for the District of Columbia, comparing
its residents unfavorably with the people of Wyoming, who
while fewer in number were in the senator’s view more
deserving of a star on the flag. Wyoming, he said, is a “well-
rounded working-class state,” while Washington is a city full
of “bureaucrats and other white-collar professionals.”
My first thought was that Cotton must not have read the
short stories of Edward P. Jones. There are 28 of them,
evenly divided between “Lost in the City” (1992) and “All
Aunt Hagar’s Children” (2006) and all set mostly within the
boundaries of the nation’s capital. They are populated by
hard-working people, some of them employed by agencies of
the federal government, many more striving to gain a foot-
hold in the middle class while toiling as chauffeurs, shop-
HOLDE SCHNEIDER/VISUM, VIA REDUX CONTINUED ON PAGE 20
 Congratulations to
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ji-xian-sheng

2 S U N DAY , AU G U ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
Book Review AUGUST 16, 2020 a barnes & noble
monthly pick

“A chilling, brilliant look

at the rise of fascism
in the 1930s that also works
Fiction 13 A FURIOUS SKY as a warning for today…
The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s
Hurricanes Vuillard’s writing is spare, angry and powerful.”
8 THE PULL OF THE STARS
By Emma Donoghue By Eric Jay Dolin —npr, best books of the year
Reviewed by Karen Thompson Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert

9 Crime 16 CHASING THE LIGHT

Reviewed by Marilyn Stasio Writing, Directing, and Surviving “Platoon,”
“Midnight Express,” “Scarface,” “Salvador,”
12 THE SANDMAN and the Movie Game
By Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs By Oliver Stone
Read by a full cast Reviewed by Benjamin Svetkey
Reviewed by Maya Phillips
17 THE BOHEMIANS
12 PEW The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance
By Catherine Lacey Against the Nazis
Reviewed by Fiona Maazel By Norman Ohler
Reviewed by Ariana Neumann
14 Beach Reads
Summer Stories 26 The Shortlist
Reviewed by Elisabeth Egan Women in Politics
Reviewed by Christina Cauterucci
18 22 MINUTES OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
By Daphne Merkin
Reviewed by Adrienne Brodeur Children’s Books
18 BONNIE 22 Graphic Novels
By Christina Schwarz Sheela Chari reviews “Shirley & Jamila
Reviewed by Elizabeth Brundage Save Their Summer,” by Gillian Goerz,
“Elvin Link, Please Report to the Principal’s WINNER
19 HIEROGLYPHICS Office,” by Drew Dernavich and “The
By Jill McCorkle
of the
Witch’s Hand,” by Nathan Page and Drew
Reviewed by Sylvia Brownrigg Shannon. PRIX GONCOURT

Nonfiction Features
10 THE SYSTEM 1 The Americans:
Who Rigged It, How We Fix It Writers Who Show Us Who We Are
By Robert B. Reich Edward P. Jones
BREAK ’EM UP By A. O. Scott
Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big
7 By the Book
Tech, and Big Money
By Zephyr Teachout Eugenia Cheng “A powerful argument against
Reviewed by Jeff Madrick
27 Bookshelf Detective the inevitability of history.”
11 THE ROAD FROM RAQQA By Gal Beckerman with Noor Qasim
—the guardian
A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and
Belonging
By Jordan Ritter Conn Etc. “The Order of the Day scripts the awful behind-
Reviewed by Jessica Goudeau the-scenes march, with all its corporate and
4 New & Noteworthy
11 THE YEAR OF DANGEROUS DAYS foreign complicity, from 1933 to Hitler’s rise to
Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 6 Letters
power in ways so closely observed it feels lived.”
By Nicholas Griffin 23 Best-Seller Lists
Reviewed by Gilbert King —boston globe, best books of the year
23 Editors’ Choice
24 Inside the List
24 Paperback Row
OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM

TO SUBSCRIBE to the Book Review by mail, visit nytimes.com/getbookreview or call 1-800-631-2580

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 3
 THE NE W DAV E ROBICHE AU X NOV EL New & Noteworthy
F ROM NE W YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AU THOR

VIA NEGATIVA, by Daniel Hornsby. (Knopf,

$23.95.) This promising, energetic debut nov-
el has a plot like the setup to a joke: A priest
who’s losing his religion is on the road with a
pistol, an injured coyote and a letter from an
estranged friend driving him to revenge.

by
ON CORRUPTION IN AMERICA: AND WHAT IS AT STAKE,
Sarah Chayes. (Knopf, $28.95.) A former NPR
reporter who went on to start a nonprofit orga-
nization in Afghanistan looks at the corrosive
effects of corporate and government malfea-
sance, including corruption that is legal or qui-
etly tolerated.

WHAT CAN A BODY DO? HOW WE MEET THE BUILT WORLD,

by Sara Hendren. (Riverhead, $27.) Thirty
years after the passage of the Americans With
Disabilities Act, Hendren shows how engi-
neering, architecture and product design af-
fect our dealings with the world, and asks how
they might better accommodate all users.

ENTITLED: HOW MALE PRIVILEGE HURTS WOMEN, by Kate

Manne. (Crown, $27.) The author, a philoso-
phy professor at Cornell, cogently and effi-
ciently recalls recent, highly publicized inci-
dents of egregious male behavior to argue
that misogyny is endemic and structural.

ANALOGIA: THE EMERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGY BEYOND PRO-

GRAMMABLE CONTROL, by George Dyson. (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, $28.) Is the future analog or
digital? Dyson, a historian of technology,
ranges far in this surprising discussion.

WHAT W E’RE RE A D IN G
After finding himself caught up in one of Louisiana’s oldest
and bloodiest family rivalries, Detective Dave Robicheaux must I came upon David Bradley’s novel THE
CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT as a graduate student in
battle the most terrifying adversary he has ever encountered. 1983, and it astounded me — so much so that I
read it twice. I hadn’t thought much about it
since, but digesting Colson Whitehead’s “The
“An imaginative blend of “Burke’s enduring voice “James Lee Burke is
Underground Railroad” last year sent me back.
crime and other genres, does justice to both one of a small handful “Chaneysville” is rich, complex and relentless:
Burke’s existential drama the region’s ancient of elite suspense writers a mystery, a history, a family drama and a meditation on race,
death and time, all wrapped around a cryptic incident in
is both exquisitely executed curses and its whose work transcends
Chaneysville, in western Pennsylvania, once a pathway on the Un-
and profoundly moving.” modern crimes.” the genre, making the leap derground Railroad. The protagonist, John Washington, is a Black
into capital-L Literature.” history professor from Chaneysville who returns to look after the
—P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY —T H E N E W Y O R K T I M E S
man who helped rear him. He leaves behind Judith, the white
(S TA R R E D R E V I E W) BOOK R EV IE W —B O O K PA G E
woman with whom he has a troubled relationship. Washington is a
challenging hero. He’s obsessive and merciless, harsh toward Ju-
dith and his mother. But the story brings a measure of empathy,
reconciliation and hope. The book jolted me in 1983. Nearly 40
years later, it reminded me of the redemptive power of truth.
ji-xian-sheng

—ER I C ASI MO V, WI NE CR I TI C
4 S U N DAY , AU G U ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
Pick up something you can’t put down.

Getting to “Yes”
A Brief Guide for First-Time Readers of Ulysses
Scunner Crabbit

Getting To “Yes” guides you through Ulysses by these numbers:

Four “Active Reading” skills the reader should have for approaching Ulysses.
Six Types of Occurring Instances that Joyce uses and which the reader needs to
be able to identify.
Ten Stylistic Techniques that Joyce uses and which the reader must be able
to recognize.
Twelve questions that readers need to ask themselves before starting to read Ulysses.
Passages from Ulysses’ 18 Episodes serve to illustrate Joyce’s techniques and
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When You Loving Me Went Wrong FIRST AND FOREMOST

I Had to Make it Right American Unity, The National Purpose and Preamble 2.0
Mamatoone Richard D. Cheshire, Ph.D.
This clever author, will help the readers get through the hurt and Richard D. Cheshire offers a Model of America’s Promise of meta civics
pain of divorce with her 5 stages to healing. from the principles first set forth in the Preamble of the Constitution.
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I’ll Bee There Walking in Love

Short Stories and Personal Essays Why and How?
Diane Gustafson Suzanne Miller
A collection of short stories about life’s challenges faced by men Walking in Love: Why and How? presents and explains a simple
and women of various time periods and locales segues into the process for overcoming human limitations on wisdom and power
author’s personal essays about communicating with the dead. and fulifilling our potential to love.
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Oscar, The Obstinate Osprey Healing Process After Divorce

C F Tomalin William K. Bach, Jr., Ph.D
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 5

 Letters
The events
shaping the world,
delivered daily.
Try more days of Times delivery.
Find the delivery choice
A melting iceberg near Greenland in August 2019.
that is right for you at
nytimes.com/deliveryupgrade
Not Denying the Problem
TO THE EDITOR:
Reviewing my book, “False
Alarm,” in the Aug. 9 issue, Joseph
E. Stiglitz misses its main argu-
ment: Climate change is a real,
man-made and substantial prob-
lem. For instance, the U.N. Climate
Panel estimates that hurricanes
might become fewer, but fiercer,
resulting in more damages.
The total negative climate
impact is estimated by climate
economics, spearheaded by the
only climate economist to win a
Nobel, William Nordhaus from
Yale University. Studies show
that while the cost of stronger
hurricanes will rise, resilience
from richer societies will counter-
act this effect. By 2100, one
highly quoted Nature article
suggests that fiercer hurricanes
will cost the world 0.02 percent of
G.D.P. Similarly, climate will
mostly make agriculture harder,
although adaptation will mitigate
this impact. The largest empirical
study finds the total cost by 2100
at 0.26 percent of G.D.P. Adding
up these and many other costs,
we can come to a total cost of
unmitigated climate change by
2100 of about 3 percent of G.D.P.
That makes climate change a
problem, but it seems counter to
much end-of-world media cover-
age. That is because most climate
stories are told without realistic,
moderating effects. The recent
headlines that 187 million people
will be flooded by 2100 assumes
no adaptation. With realistic
adaptation, the actual number is
600 times lower.
Climate policies are also costly.
Cutting 80 percent of the E.U.
emissions by 2050 will cost 5
6 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 0 2 0
percent of G.D.P. Going net-zero,
as proposed by the presidential
candidate Joseph Biden, has been
independently assessed by only
one nation, New Zealand. It
found the cost would be at least
16 percent of G.D.P.
The fundamental insight from
climate economics is that we
need to endure both the cost of
climate damage and climate
policy damage. Cutting too little
carbon makes the world endure
higher total costs, but similarly,
cutting too much will lead to
more total suffering.
In his rush to rubbish my book,
its central point, with which I
think Stiglitz would agree, gets
lost: Since many climate policies
are inefficient, we should be
careful to tackle climate change
with smart and effective policies
like a carbon tax, green innova-
tion and adaptation.
BJORN LOMBORG
PRAGUE
Pathbreaker
TO THE EDITOR:
Jon Meacham’s moving Aug. 2
essay on Jackie Robinson’s auto-
biography “I Never Had It Made”
overlooked an important moment
in Robinson’s history — and
America’s. It happened on July
18, 1949, when the baseball star
denounced the singer and civil
rights activist Paul Robeson
before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. White
America’s Red Scare had tried to
turn one Black hero against
another.
Robinson was midway through
his finest season when he was
summoned to the office of the
Brooklyn Dodger general man-
PHOTOGRAPH BY JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
ager Branch Rickey. The success
of their “great experiment,”
Rickey said, was at risk unless
Robinson testified in Congress
against Robeson. “Mr. Rickey
demanded that I go” to Washing-
ton, Robinson wrote. “At that
point in my life, if Mr. Rickey had
told me to jump off the Brooklyn
Bridge, I would have said, ‘Head
first or feet first?’” Weeks after
his testimony, concertgoers at an
outdoor performance by Robeson
were attacked by a rock-throwing
mob that set a cross on fire.
Meacham notes the disappoint-
ment Robinson felt at the end of
his life about America’s failure to
act against racism. But, as “I
Never Had It Made” also shows,
he reflected on his own actions as
well. “I knew that Robeson was
striking out against racial in-
equality in the way that seemed
best to him,” Robinson wrote. But
“I had much more faith in the
ultimate justice of the white man
than I have today.”
DAVID M. FRIEDMAN
NEW YORK
Fight the People
TO THE EDITOR:
I’m surprised to see Bill Keller
write, in his Aug. 2 review of Anne
Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democ-
racy,” that “virulent populist move-
ments have always existed in
America, on the right (the Klan,
say) and the left (the Weather
Underground, say).” There was
nothing populist about the
Weather Underground. One of
their early slogans, in fact, was:
“Fight the people.” They thought
that “bringing the war home” to
America would help revolutionar-
ies in the third world, not Ameri-
cans. Not a very rousing appeal in
the United States!
TODD GITLIN
HILLSDALE, N.Y.
The writer is the author of “The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of
Rage.”
CORRECTION
A biographical note with a review
on July 26 about Lauren Beukes’s
novel “Afterland” misstated the
title of the most recent book
written by the reviewer, Stephen
King. It is “If It Bleeds,” not “Let
It Bleed.”
BOOKS@NYTIMES.COM
 By the Book
Eugenia Cheng
The mathematician, whose new book is ‘X+Y,’ gravitates to reading
that reaches her mind and heart at once: ‘Intellectual stimulation is an
emotional experience for me.’
Are there any classic novels that you only
recently read for the first time?
“Yevgeny Onegin” (in translation). I’ve
known and loved the opera since I was a
teenager, but the only thing I read was
many articles about the difficulties of
translating it, and so shied away from
reading it in translation. Finally I decided
to just read it anyway, and was very glad
I did. There are interesting (to me) dis-
putes about whether the opera is a trav-
esty of the original, but to me that’s not
the point. They’re two very different art
forms and they operate in completely
different ways. Opera uses music in the
role of narrator, and characterizes people
and places by communicating with us
directly and viscerally without words.
One of my favorite examples of this is
“Billy Budd,” in which Melville spends
several pages characterizing Billy and
then Captain Vere, which Benjamin Brit-
ten does viscerally in about two meas-
ures of music in the opera.
Describe your ideal reading experience
ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI
(when, where, what, how).
My ideal reading experience is epic and
uninterrupted. I don’t like reading in
small daily installments; I like reading an
entire book in one sitting. That’s if it’s a
novel anyway, and if it’s any good. Deep
nonfiction takes longer to absorb, and
math books take years. I love the act of
turning pages when I’m reading a novel;
when I’m studying a math book I might
need to spend several weeks on one
paragraph.
Unfortunately this means I’m often
wary of starting a new novel because I
can be fairly sure it will wipe out the rest
of my day (and night).
You’re a concert pianist as well as a
mathematician. Who are your favorite
musician-writers? Your favorite memoir
by a musician?
I don’t read much about music actually; I
prefer just doing it, or learning by obser-
vation, that is, going to many many live
performances (in the pre-pandemic
world).
Do you prefer books that reach you emo-
tionally, or intellectually?
Both at the same time. I don’t see these
things as a dichotomy. In fact for me they
are intimately related. Intellectual stimu-
lation is an emotional experience for me,
and something will only be a really
deeply emotionally experience for me if it
engages me intellectually as well.
Which genres do you especially enjoy
reading? And which do you avoid?
Independent publishers and
I love reading novels, which for some authors of not-so-independent
reason seems to surprise people. Howev- means receive special
er, I am getting increasingly picky about discounted advertising rates
the subject matter and types of protago- every Sunday in The New York
nists I want to see in novels, and it’s hard Times Book Review.
to find ones that fit. I like novels that give
me insight into human nature, and that
don’t rest solely on suspense and plot For more information,
constructions, the kind of book I can read please contact Mark Hiler
hundreds of times and still enjoy al- at (212) 556-8452.
though (or indeed because) I already
know what’s going to happen. I have read Reachaninfluentialaudience
“Pride and Prejudice” perhaps twice a forless.
year since I was 11! I love a good murder
mystery, as long as it has those insights
into human nature. I quite often reread N D AY , N O V E M B E R 9 , 2 0 0 8
Agatha Christie. I loved reading her
when I was growing up, and as an adult I
notice a surprising amount of insight into
human nature in them (along with, alas,
some egregiously bigoted and/or imperi-
alist views that might be considered
typical of her era). She is also surpris-
ingly feminist for the time, with quite a
quantity of strong female characters and
indeed female mathematicians!
I also look for nonfiction that will ex-
pand my mind about inequality and op-
pression in the world today.
I have had a lifelong aversion to books
that take place at sea. When I was grow-
ing up I often used to get quite immersed
in a book and then groan when they went
to sea, because I knew I wouldn’t like it
any more. The funny thing is I really like
being on a boat. Anyway this means that
“Moby-Dick” is definitely not for me.
What book might people be surprised to
find on your shelves?
Aside from being surprised that I read
novels, people are often really surprised
that I read self-help. I love self-help books
because I definitely need help improving
myself and think it would be arrogant to
suggest that I don’t. Yes, some of what’s
written in self-help is phony and platitudi- Subscribe to the
nous, or I’m not really the target audi- New York Times Crossword.
ence, but there is plenty in there that has nytimes.com/solvenow
profoundly helped me to become a better,
more compassionate, more empathetic,
less stressed person. The key, I think, is
finding what helps and ignoring what
doesn’t. 0
An expanded version of this interview is
available at nytimes.com/books.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7

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Sickroom
Emma Donoghue shows how Dubliners struggled during the 1918 flu epidemic.
By KAREN THOMPSON WALKER
IN EMMA DONOGHUE’S ARRESTING new
page-turner of a novel, “The Pull of the
Stars,” an urban hospital is overwhelmed
by victims of a cruel new disease. The
sounds of wracking coughs cut through
the air as medical supplies run short, and
face masks become commonplace in the
streets. Meanwhile, the government touts
false cures and contends that the epidemic
is under control.
THE PULL OF THE STARS
By Emma Donoghue
304 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.
The parallels to 2020 are uncanny, but
this is history, not prescience. The year is
1918, and the illness, of course, is influenza.
As Donoghue writes in an author’s note,
“ ‘The Pull of the Stars’ is fiction pinned to-
gether with facts.”
When the novel opens, the pandemic
has left one Dublin hospital with “more
than twice as many patients as usual and a PETRA BÖRNER
quarter the staff.” Julia Power, a 29-year-
old midwife, suddenly finds herself the
bluish discoloration of the skin) in mere she expects her baby to emerge from her
only nurse on duty overnight in the “fever/
hours, and multiple premature labors, an navel.
maternity” ward, the makeshift section of
apparent side effect of the 1918 influenza At one point, Dr. Lynn notes that the
the hospital set aside for influenza pa-
tients who also happen to be pregnant.
strain. Their lives are intertwined in the word “influenza” comes from the Italian
constant struggle against the “bone man” phrase “influenza delle stelle,” the influ-
Readers familiar with Donoghue’s mas-
— Julia’s childhood nickname for death. ence of the stars. But this affecting novel
terly 2010 best seller, “Room,” will recall
The narrow aperture of the maternity suggests that the courses of these wom-
the focused intensity she can bring to bear
ward allows Donoghue to focus on one of en’s lives are ruled not so much by the
on constricted spaces. Like “Room,” “The
the novel’s most compelling preoccupa- heavens but by poverty, misogyny and
Pull of the Stars” takes place almost en-
tions: the lives and bodies of women. abuse — and a culture that forces women
tirely in a single room and unfolds at the
Donoghue goes into great physical detail to bear burdens that should be shared by
pace of a thriller. Over the course of three
as women labor and deliver, as their skin men, with children left to suffer the conse-
harrowing days in this “small square of
tears and bleeds, as they vomit and uri- quences.
the plague-ridden, war-weary world,” Ju-
nate and breast-feed — and, in some cases, Julia describes one of her doomed pa-
lia dashes from patient to patient adminis-
as they die. Even in Julia’s slightly euphe- tients this way: “Mother of five by the age
tering what little treatment there is:
mistic voice, the sheer attention devoted of 24, an underfed daughter of underfed
mostly whiskey and chloroform. A good
to these descriptions functions as a kind of generations, white as paper, red-rimmed
day is one when nobody dies.
unadorned reverence for the work and eyes, flat bosom, fallen arches, twig limbs
So desperate is the hospital for doctors
pain and strength of women — and how with veins that were tangles of blue twine.
that the higher-ups soon call in Dr. Kath-
the paths of their lives are so often defined Eileen Devine had walked along a cliff
leen Lynn, a rare female physician (and
by the workings of their bodies. edge all her grown life, and this flu had
real historical figure) who is considered a
The scenes in the “fever/maternity” only tipped her over.”
wanted criminal by the Dublin police, for
ward are so enthralling that the novel At one point in “The Pull of the Stars,” as
her role in Sinn Fein’s 1916 uprising. Bril-
loses a bit of its fire — and realism — Dr. Lynn criticizes the government for
liant and iconoclastic, Dr. Lynn eventually
whenever it leaves that room, but these Dublin’s high rates of poverty and infant
inspires a kind of political awakening in
departures are thankfully rare. Donoghue mortality, an exhausted Julia insists that
the practically minded Julia.
seems most interested in the dramas of she doesn’t have time for politics. But Dr.
Joining Julia and Dr. Lynn is a young
this one space — with which she manages Lynn shoots back with a sentiment that
volunteer, Bridie Sweeney, the product of
to make clear the broader constrictions seems as relevant to our own time as to
an orphanage so neglectful that she does
and injustices of an entire Irish society. hers: “Oh, but everything’s politics, don’t
not even know her exact age. What Bridie
Among the ward’s patients is an unwed you know?”
lacks in medical experience she makes up
mother from a “mother/baby home,” What she means is what we also know:
for in tenderness and good judgment.
whose baby will be confiscated by Ire- that bad health outcomes are not simply
Together, these capable women leap
land’s system of Catholic orphanages as parceled out by the stars. Instead they fall
from crisis to crisis: life-threatening hem-
soon as he is weaned. Another patient, de- most heavily on the groups that a society
orrhages, skyrocketing fevers that lead to
lirious from fever, is pregnant with her has mistreated and neglected. America’s
convulsions, a horrifyingly rapid case of
12th child, which reminds Julia of an ap- disproportionate rates of death from
influenza that progresses to cyanosis (a
parently common saying: “She doesn’t Covid-19 in the Black and Latinx commu-
love him unless she gives him 12.” The nities come to mind. As we are being re-
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER is the author of two ward’s youngest patient is 17 and lost her minded now, a pandemic can expose the
novels, “The Dreamers” and “The Age of own mother in childbirth; this girl arrives political order and the political choices
Miracles,” and is an assistant professor of eight months pregnant but so uneducated that have marked many of the sick or dy-
creative writing at the University of Oregon. about the female reproductive system that ing long before the disease arrived. 0
+
 CRIME / MARILYN STASIO
Risking Lives and Limbs
PLUCKY HEROINES make me
queasy. (It takes so much energy
to be plucky.) The protagonist of
Katie Tallo’s first novel, DARK
AUGUST (HarperCollins, tk pp., paper;
$16.99), is better than that. Au-
gusta (Gus) Monet is smart and
resourceful, just too stubborn to
know when to quit. When she
returns to her hometown — Elgin,
Ontario, “a town that once was
but is no more” — her instinct is
to burn it down. But “greed and
spite and toxic wastewater” from
fracking have taken care of that
already. So her only business here
is to claim the house (and the old
dog who comes with it) left to her
by her great-grandmother.
Once Gus is back in Elgin, “she
drops into the past,” with all its
hurtful memories and unfinished
business. Foremost among these
is a case that bedeviled her
mother, a police detective who
died when Gus was 8 years old. A
convenient stash of cash allows
Gus the luxury of losing herself in
that case, the murder of Henry
Neil, whose long-missing body
just happens to turn up shortly
after Gus moves into the ne-
glected house.
Despite the plot contrivances,
it’s easy to get caught up in this
story, especially after Gus finds
her mother’s original notes and
assembles them into a collage
that covers an entire wall — “a
timeline of events that took place
over the span of less than two
years, connected by evidence.”
Although she sees this project as
a kind of homage, an attempt to
finish what her mother started,
Gus doesn’t seem to be aware
that, on some deeper level, she’s
finally trying to deal with the
emotional baggage of their last
summer together.
To be sure, there are dedicated
bad guys in the story, and the usual
dangers to life and limb. But the
subordinate plot is the death of a
place people call home. In Elgin,
generations of settlers managed to
hold off the threat of unchecked
nature, “until an underground river
of toxins turned golden cornfields
to black muck and sent a town up
in a ball of fire.”
MARILYN STASIO has covered crime
fiction for the Book Review since
1988.
SO, YOU THINK you know your
neighbors? You might want to
think again after reading Jeff
Abbott’s NEVER ASK ME (Grand
Central, 356 pp., $27).
Lakehaven, a leafy, affluent
suburb of Austin, is thrown into a
panic when Danielle Roberts’s
son finds her dead on a park
bench. A lawyer who facilitated
overseas adoptions, including
some for her neighbors, Danielle
was currently arranging one from
Russia — if that had anything to
do with her murder. Pertinent or
PABLO AMARGO
not, the Russia connection allows
two prospective parents, the
likable if high-strung Iris and her
husband, Kyle, to travel to St.
Petersburg, providing the book
with its most dramatic scenes.
Abbott writes in an authorita-
tive way about the protocols,
many of them maddening, of
adopting a child. He also has a
real understanding of the emo-
tional roller-coaster couples going
through the process must endure.
His layered plot moves along at a
nice clip, until he starts piling on
the Russian oligarchs, C.I.A.
spies, undercover agents and
drug dealers, not to mention the
kitchen sink.
 health insurance — could protect
DON’T SAY we didn’t warn you
about the clunky writing in Elli-
son Cooper’s CUT TO THE BONE
(Minotaur, 323 pp., $27.99) — but
Recipes.
who could resist the sheer audaci-
ty of this plot? Some cuckoo has
murdered a teenage girl and
displayed her body in a ritualistic
pose at the foot of the Albert
Advice.
Einstein Memorial in Washington.
Special Agent Sayer Altair of the
F.B.I., a neuroscientist who stud-
ies the brains of serial killers (but
Inspiration.
shows her cool by riding a Match-
less Silver Hawk motorcycle),
catches the case.
The story really takes off when
a busload of high school kids is
hijacked. Although genre writers
have been known to fret about
using kids as victims, Cooper has
no such reservations and enthusi-
astically displays a mound of
bodies (11 of them children) for
Sayer to find. But it’s the re-
sourceful kids on the bus — who
are making their own escape
plans — who own this story.

THE CHARACTERS carry the day in
SOME GO HOME (Norton, 295 pp.,
$26.95), a polished debut novel by
Odie Lindsey. That includes Wal-
lis House, an antebellum manor
that captures the divided identity
of the New South. Steeped in the
history of its gracious setting, but
poised for a controversial renova-
tion, this living relic has become
something of a battleground for
the residents of Pitchlynn, Miss.,
What to cook
“a chatty little place” that doesn’t
quite know what to make of itself.
Will Wallis House become frozen
in time as a tourist magnet? Or
for anyone, anytime.
will it get that bright coral paint
job and declare its independence Discover thousands of expert-tested
from its past?
One thing is certain: That past recipes, how-to guides for every skill
won’t stay buried until Hare level, plus more.
Hobbs is finally judged for the
murder of a Black man he com- nytcooking.com
mitted during the civil rights era.
Hare’s story unfolds through the
lives of other characters, most
memorably his son, Derby, and
his daughter-in-law, Colleen, an
Iraq War veteran struggling with
the shock of leaving the Army.
“Coming home to Mississippi,
demobbed from active duty, she
had understood that nothing — no
family, no church, no job, house or
you. . . . At the end of the day, the
only armor against loss were the
acute reminders of your own
fragility.” 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9
The Plutocrats
Examining the impact of economic inequality on American society.
By JEFF MADRICK
ONE OF THE mysteries in politics for dec-
ades now has been why white working-
class Americans began to vote Republican
in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. Af-
ter all, it was Democrats who supported la-
bor unions, higher minimum wages, ex-
panded unemployment insurance, Medi-
care and generous Social Security, helping
to lift workers into the middle class.
Of course, an alternative economic view,
led by economists like Milton Friedman,
was that this turn toward the Republican
Party was rational and served workers’ in-
terests. He emphasized free markets, en-
trepreneurialism and the maximization of
profit. These, Friedman argued, would
raise wages for many and even most Amer-
icans.
THE SYSTEM
Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
By Robert B. Reich
224 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
BREAK ’EM UP
Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big
Tech, and Big Money
By Zephyr Teachout
320 pp. All Points Books. $28.99.
But wages did not rise. And yet many in
the working class kept voting Republican,
still seemingly angered by Lyndon John-
son’s Great Society, which was dedicated to
helping the poor and assuring equal rights
for people of color. In the 1980s, under Ron-
ald Reagan, income inequality began to
rise sharply; wages for typical Americans
stagnated and poverty and homelessness
increased. Capital investment remained
relatively weak despite deep tax cuts (as it
does today under Donald Trump). At the
same time, antitrust regulation was se-
verely wounded, and giant corporations
began to monopolize industry after indus-
try.
In 2004, Thomas Frank’s book “What’s
the Matter With Kansas?” tried to explain
why a once Democratic state had turned
resolutely Republican. His eloquent review
of the rhetoric of the age was instructive.
But the presidential election of 2016 sent
the sharpest message yet. Working-class
voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wis-
consin opted for Trump, and apparently
against their economic interests. Trump
had succeeded in appealing to their anger
and the Democrats were caught flat-footed.
Two new books, “The System,” by the
former labor secretary Robert B. Reich,
and “Break ’Em Up,” by the lawyer and ac-
tivist Zephyr Teachout, a onetime candi-
JEFF MADRICK, the author, most recently, of
“Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of
Child Poverty,” is the director of the Bernard
Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initia-
tive at the Century Foundation.
10 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
date for New York State attorney general,
are among the latest examples of an evolv-
ing set of explanations that try to make
sense of the 2016 results.
A powerful money-fueled oligarchy has
emerged in America that is an enemy of de-
mocracy, Reich writes. The self-interested
power of the nation’s wealthy often goes
unnoticed by voters, and is partly misdi-
rected by right-wing rhetoric about issues
like immigration. But it leads to lower
wages, less product choice and abusive la-
bor practices. Trump has harnessed the
frustration of the working class, Reich
says, but he was a “smokescreen” for the
oligarchy. Reich has an almost unmatched
ability to make insightful observations
about the nation’s inequities, and in “The
System,” he observes that the question is
no longer Democrat versus Republican or
left versus right, but “democracy versus
oligarchy.”
To Teachout, what’s behind our rigged
system is the close cousin of oligarchy: cor-
porate monopoly. Teachout lists her cul-
prits, among them familiar names: Ama-
zon, Google, Facebook, Monsanto, AT&T,
Verizon, Walmart, Pfizer, Comcast, Apple
and CVS. These companies “represent a
new political phenomenon,” she says, “a
21st-century form of centralized, authori-
tarian government.”
Two dramatic related facts underscore
the claims of both Reich and Teachout. The
much discussed rise of wealth among the
top 0.1 percent, which now has 20 percent of
the nation’s wealth compared with only 10
percent 40 years ago, has been brought to
light in recent years by the
innovative economists
Thomas Piketty and Em-
manuel Saez. The flip side is
that wages for the large ma-
jority of American work-
ers have stagnated
more or less over
this same period.
According to
Reich, the “anti-es-
tablishment fury”
that is the result of
such inequity su-
persedes racial
prejudice as the
cause of Trump’s suc-
cess. In 2001, more
than three out of four
workers were satisfied
that they could get
ahead by working hard. In
2014, only slightly more than one
out of two thought so. Voters wanted
badly to blame it all on the swamp Trump
promised to clean up.
For Reich, the big oligarchical compa-
nies have the lobbying and campaign-fi-
nancing muscle to mold the rules in their
own favor. They can win enormous tax
cuts, suppress financial and environmen-
tal regulations, acquire new patents and
subsidies, fight for free trade — it is a long
list. For years, they successfully battled
against higher minimum wages and labor
laws that restricted their union-busting ef-
forts.
Teachout, a dogged scholar, lays out a
comprehensive list of damage done to
American consumers by monopolized in-
dustries like Big Pharma, fossil fuels, Sili-
con Valley, health insurance, banking and
communications giants from Verizon to
Facebook and Google. She provides exam-
ple after example of how these companies
limit consumer choice and suppress regu-
lation. Google and Facebook may make ac-
cess to some news easier, but they also un-
dermine the profitability of the print news
organizations, putting many of them out of
business. Big Pharma is protected from
competition by questionable patents and
by ever lighter regulations. The nation’s
private health care system, dominated by a
relative handful of insurance companies,
keeps costs much higher in the United
States than in the rest of the rich world. For
Teachout, the solution follows as night fol-
lows day. Break up the big companies and
reintroduce competition. (Surprisingly,
this is straightforward mainstream eco-
nomic theory.)
But both Reich and especially Teachout
should temper their anticorporate zeal, at
least to a degree. Big companies have often
done good while also doing bad. In the
1800s, the A.&P. grocery chain provided a
wide range of products, though it put count-
less mom and pop stores out of business.
Ford built a cheap functional car in the
1920s, and Apple an affordable personal
computer in recent years. Some balance is
required.
Still, they are mostly right. Here is
Teachout’s general recommendation: “In-
stead of protesting Pfizer on Tuesday for
hiking drug prices, Comcast on Wednesday
for suppressing union voices and Amazon
on Thursday for getting billions in subsi-
dies, we should unite behind a coherent
agenda, demanding that antitrust authori-
ties break up Pfizer and Comcast, Amazon
and Facebook, Monsanto and Tyson.”
Both authors say that Ronald Reagan led
the way to the swift undoing of traditional
antitrust regulation in the 1980s. But Reich
is almost as harsh on the Clinton and
Obama administrations. Even when the
Democrats controlled both houses of Con-
gress, he writes, they allowed antitrust en-
forcement to “ossify,” let companies ham-
mer away at trade unions and went easy on
Wall Street. They were also soft on the is-
sue of campaign contributions, failing to
advocate for public financing of elections.
Why? Reich argues that the Democrats
chose to turn their backs on the working
class and pursue suburban swing voters.
He knows, he tells us. He was there. And he
reports that the Democrats “drank from
the same campaign funding trough as the
Republicans — big corporations, Wall
Street and the very wealthy.”
Reich makes an example of Jamie Di-
mon, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase.
For Reich, he is representative of the C.E.O.
class that talks about corporate social re-
sponsibility but rarely practices it. A life-
time Democrat, Dimon was a major sup-
porter of the Trump tax cut and does not
support an increase in the minimum wage.
Teachout by and large shares Reich’s an-
ger and may even exceed it. Yet both find
reasons for optimism in new laws and
grass-roots movements. America achieved
marriage equality for gays and lesbians,
elected a Black man president and made
the Affordable Care Act law. Reich insists
democracy will ultimately prevail over oli-
garchy. And Teachout sees America em-
barking on a new antimonopoly moment.
These are valuable books, and the anger
they will generate may prove politically en-
ergizing. But Reich’s claim that democracy
will somehow prevail underestimates the
dangers we face. As for Teachout, more
competition may help alleviate some prob-
lems, but it is in fact an idealized version of
free market thinking.
Meanwhile, the current president is
moving in exactly the opposite direction.
He is promising cuts in social policies that
may well increase middle-income and
working-class frustration. He wants to re-
write the official definition of poverty to
claim that there are fewer poor. He under-
mines the rule of law on a regular basis.
The Supreme Court has been stacked with
extreme conservatives. Voter suppression
is common.
Is it any wonder that many fear democ-
racy in America may not prevail? 0
ILLUSTRATION BY AARON LOWELL DENTON
Home No More
The divergent paths of two Syrian brothers separated by war.
By JESSICA GOUDEAU
“HUMANIZING”— THE WORD often used to
praise immigrant and refugee narratives
— should be unnecessary: The fact that we
are all human should be a baseline as-
sumption, not an argument or a writerly
achievement. Yet it’s never been clearer
that the basic humanity of others is some-
thing that is now continually in question,
both in the United States and around the
world. Jordan Ritter Conn’s riveting debut
book, “The Road From Raqqa,” is a well-
wrought portrait of two brothers, Riyad
and Bashar Alkasem, and their journeys
out of Syria: Riyad as a young lawyer who
went to California to learn English in 1990,
and Bashar, also a lawyer, who fled to Tur-
key and then Europe in the midst of the
Syrian civil war in 2016. Conn pushes be-
yond simply humanizing the Alkasems;
the book portrays Syria and the United
States as multifaceted and complex, both
THE ROAD FROM RAQQA
A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and
Belonging
By Jordan Ritter Conn
272 pp. Ballantine Books. $28.
capable of generosity and oppression, with
histories as interconnected as the broth-
ers’ own.
As a child, Riyad is steeped in family lore
that traces his ancestry back to the found-
ing of Raqqa, on the Euphrates River,
through a gracious act of generosity. In
government-run summer camps, he falls
in love with a version of Syria that exists
only in regime propaganda. Disillusioned
after learning of the massacre of members
of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama by the
Syrian Army in the 1980s, he leaves a bur-
geoning legal career to chase the ephem-
eral America of inspirational politicians
and tree-lined movie scenes. If Riyad’s tra-
jectory from dishwasher in Los Angeles to
restaurateur in suburban Nashville is
quintessentially American — success
comes after his restaurant, Café Rakka, is
featured on Guy Fieri’s show, “Diners,
Drive-Ins and Dives” — so too are the in-
dignities and injustices he faces. Espe-
cially after 9/11, Riyad asks: “Who is a big-
ot? Who is just a jerk? Does the difference
matter?” For Riyad, his new country is a
mixed place that has “confounded him,”
but also “delivered delirious joys.” As he
learns to live with the contradictions, how-
ever, he experiences a growing nostalgia
for the Raqqa of his childhood.
Meanwhile, until the civil war, Bashar
has preferred his stable, if not always safe,
life in regime-held Syria (where “the walls
have ears”) to his brother’s in America,
where he encounters a minefield of preju-
JESSICA GOUDEAUis the author of “After the
Last Border: Two Families and the Story of
Refuge in America.”
PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM LEFT: SAMANTHA HEARN; TOMAS GRIFFIN
Jordan Ritter Conn
dice when he makes an extended visit. He
takes up the legal career Riyad abandoned
and is on the cusp of becoming a judge
when the revolution ignites in 2011. Bashar
cannot fathom life outside the family home
where the Alkasems have resided for gen-
erations, even as the war escalates and the
Islamic State moves in.
Conn builds tension slowly and with
great sympathy, adding necessary context
to clarify political nuances. He alludes to
the background of Bashar’s wife, Aisha —
also a lawyer — who is more critical of Syr-
ia’s government and eventually persuades
her husband to leave; Conn describes Ai-
sha’s “passion, her will to fight” in contrast
to her more cautious husband and I found
myself wishing her story had been granted
more space, especially because she carries
much of the emotional weight of the book’s
Conn’s book is a resplendent
love letter to an obliterated
city.
final scenes. Conn keeps the stakes high
and the decisions fraught until the very
end, when Bashar, his wife and their chil-
dren plunge into a journey that feels like
both the wrong solution for a family that
never wanted to leave and the only choice
available to them.
As complicated and ever-shifting as
their views of Syria and the United States
are, the brothers’ affection for Raqqa is un-
wavering. Conn translates their memories
into a resplendent love letter to an obliter-
ated city, where Riyad swims as a boy in
the Euphrates and gathers recipes from
his relatives, and where Bashar poignantly
lays out pillows and blankets to look at the
stars with his daughters in the courtyard of
their family home at night before the
bombs drop. The loss of that Raqqa feels
unbearable. 0
Stranger Than Paradise
Before Miami was a leisure capital, it was beset by unrest.
By GILBERT KING
IN THE MID-1950S, LeRoy Collins, the gover-
nor of Florida, looked to the north for in-
vestments to bolster the state’s booming
economy, which, he claimed, rested on the
“three sturdy legs” of tourism, industry
and agriculture. “All three must grow and
thrive together,” he said, “or none can sur-
vive.” A quarter-century later, the United
States economy was in a deep recession,
and Miami’s first Latino mayor, Maurice
Ferré, was looking not north but to South
and Latin America to invigorate his city. To
realize his vision, Miami would have to get
THE YEAR OF DANGEROUS DAYS
Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami
1980
By Nicholas Griffin
318 pp. 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster. $26.99.
through the tumultuous year of 1980, when
three unstable legs threatened its exist-
ence: a flood of cocaine and narco dollars
that sent violent crime skyrocketing, an
unprecedented wave of immigration
courtesy of Fidel Castro, and
deadly rioting and civil unrest
ignited by the police killing of
an unarmed black man.
Such is the premise of
Nicholas Griffin’s utterly
absorbing “The Year of
Dangerous Days: Riots,
Refugees, and Cocaine in
Miami 1980.”
Griffin begins his first
chapter in December 1979,
when Arthur McDuffie, a 33-
Nicholas Griffin
year-old insurance salesman
and former Marine, was beat-
en into a coma by white police
officers. Edna Buchanan, a legendary
crime reporter at The Miami Herald, be-
came suspicious of police reports stating
that McDuffie’s injuries were caused by his
crashing his motorcycle while being pur-
sued by the police. Four days later, Mc-
Duffie was taken off life support, and Bu-
chanan’s reporting brought her into the or-
bit of Capt. Marshall Frank, who, as head of
the county homicide bureau, was tasked
with investigating McDuffie’s death. Dade
County’s rising star Janet Reno, Florida’s
first woman to serve as a state attorney,
prosecuted five officers in a trial that was
moved to Tampa. But an all-white, all-male
jury acquitted four of the defendants in less
than three hours (the fifth was acquitted
on a directed verdict before the case went
to the jury), setting off the worst race riots
in Miami’s history. The buildup to the Mc-
GILBERT KING received the Pulitzer Prize for
general nonfiction for “Devil in the Grove.”
His most recent book is “Beneath a Ruthless
Sun,” and he is currently a fellow at the Doro-
thy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars
and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Duffie trial and the incendiary response to
the verdicts form the backdrop of Griffin’s
deeply researched narrative.
THERE IS NEVER a dull moment in “The
Year of Dangerous Days,” and Griffin
adroitly captures the intrigue and deprav-
ity of South Florida at the time. During a
period of severe inflation, when major cit-
ies were running deficits, Miami’s unend-
ing flow of Colombian cocaine, coupled
with a plethora of banks that “welcomed
drug dollars with few questions,” created a
$7 billion cash surplus. “Money doesn’t
know that it comes from cocaine,” Mayor
Ferré said. “It’s terrible, it’s illegal and it’s
Miami’s salvation.”
Griffin has no shortage of fascinating
characters to work with. There are non-
chalant Colombian hit men like Anibal
Jaramillo, who killed in broad daylight and
believed that he could buy his way out of
legal trouble (“If you had money for a good
lawyer, you could effectively evade the
law”). And there’s a suave, multimillion-
aire money launderer, Isaac Kattan, who
eventually appears on the radar of Opera-
tion Greenback, a multiagency task force
that included D.E.A., I.R.S., F.B.I.
and customs agents targeting
drug trafficking.
Yet it’s Griffin’s account
of the 1980 Mariel boatlift,
when the Cuban president
Fidel Castro agreed to al-
low more than 125,000 Cu-
bans to emigrate to the
United States, that is most
startling, considering that
the majority of the refugees
were absorbed into Miami’s
Cuban community. Castro
used the opportunity to empty
prisons and mental hospitals,
forcing convicted criminals and trouble-
makers onto small boats bound for Miami.
Radio Havana gloated: “The United States
has always wanted to pick the best brains
of our people — so they can pick up also the
bums.”
“If 1980 was a diagnostic test for Amer-
ica, Miami was the biopsy,” Griffin writes.
Mayor Ferré not only survived the conflu-
ence of forces bearing down on his city, he
thrived, serving six terms, from 1973 to
1985. On the national front, President
Jimmy Carter was not so fortunate. In his
campaign for a second term, he got swept
away in a riptide of crises, including those
that Miami endured in 1980, leading to a
landslide win for his opponent, Ronald
Reagan. It’s impossible to read Griffin’s
timely and searing account without think-
ing about its implications for our current
moment — one of mounting social unrest
over immigration and racism. As Carter’s
domestic adviser would later write, “It is
difficult to conjure up a more catastrophic
final year in any American president’s
term of office than 1980, Carter’s last year
in the White House.” 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11
Waking Nightmare
Neil Gaiman’s classic comic book series, adapted for audio.
By MAYA PHILLIPS
THIS IS WHAT dreaming sounds like.
In the 1980s and ’90s Neil Gaiman first
showed us what dreaming looks like, with
his mythical, world-bending comic book
series “The Sandman.” Now Audible and
DC Comics give voice to Gaiman’s dreams
— and nightmares. The vibrant audio ad-
aptation adds a thrilling new dimension to
the original work; but it also misses out on
some of its fundamental elements.
Gaiman’s story follows Morpheus, the
king of dreams, a.k.a. the Sandman. But far
from the “candy-colored clown” Roy Orbi-
son sang of, Morpheus is a dark, brooding
figure with the power to give life to night-
mares and to consign those who’ve
crossed him to hell. “The Sandman” begins
with his imprisonment by a magic cult, and
follows its ripple effects, introducing us to
Morpheus’ siblings (the so-called Endless)
along the way: Death, Destiny, Desire, De-
spair, Delirium and Destruction.
THE SANDMAN
By Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs
Read by a full cast
10 hours, 54 minutes. Audible Originals.
Audible refuses to call this production an
“audiobook.” Fair enough: The term cer-
tainly feels too narrow for it. It’s not just
words, it’s theater, with James Hanni-
gan’s electric, textured sound-
scapes and the animated voice
acting of a talented cast, di-
rected by Dirk Maggs.
James McAvoy’s Mor-
pheus is an aural delight:
moody, subdued, like velvet
to the ear. Kat Dennings
pitches a plucky, youthful
Death, but sometimes reads too
juvenile. Likewise, Michael
Sheen’s a charming Lucifer, but Neil Gaiman
he occasionally loses his grasp
on the noble bearing of the leader of Hell.
Justin Vivian Bond purrs seductively as
the cruel, mischievous Desire, and Riz Ah-
med provides an effortless magnetism to
the dangerous nightmare of the Corin-
thian.
Leading this parade of vocal talents is
Gaiman himself, who intimately knows the
lifts, dips and turns of his own work, and
how to convey them. Gaiman is a storytell-
er not only on the page but also into the mi-
crophone, his tone always bearing the
slightest hint of impish mystery, as though
he can’t wait to reveal a secret; and yet his
pace is steady and patient, determined not
to lose you along the way.
Hannigan’s inviting and fanciful score is
MAYA PHILLIPS is the arts critic fellow at The
Times, and the author of the poetry collection
“Erou.” Her next book, “Nerd: On Navigating
Heroes, Magic, and Fandom in the 21st Cen-
tury,” is forthcoming.
12 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
reminiscent of the work of John Williams,
full of eerie creeps and triumphant swells.
And the sound effects — the puttering of a
car engine, the shuffling of linen sheets —
surround the listener as though we are
present in the scene. Thus are the story’s
horrors also viscerally real: the fleshy, wet
sound of a nurse’s head falling off her neck;
the gruesome thud of a man hammering a
nail into the back of his hand. The audio
version of Gaiman’s nightmares is more
unforgiving than the comic: You may not
actually witness the violence of the ice
pick, the poker or the pocketknife, but
thanks to the voices and effects, you can’t
help hearing them.
Though the adaptation hews closely to
Gaiman’s original writing, it has to fill in
the gaps that arise in translating a visual
medium to an aural one. Whereas the
comics’ illustrations provide a language all
their own, the audio version must fall back
wholly on the text, and deliver more. The
task gives Gaiman an opportunity to do
what he does best: bring images to life. He
describes one demon, for example, as “a
floating absence, a black amoebic nothing-
ness filled with myriad eyes and mouths.”
But the script cannot always talk itself
out of the pitfalls of adaptation. Gaiman’s
series indulges his love affair with broad
scopes and narrative indirection. He loves
to approach his plots from the outside in,
beginning with ancillary vignettes and
side characters, some of whom re-
appear and others of whom are
gone as quickly as they arrive.
These shifts are easier to
track in the comics, by the
visual cues and reminders.
The audio version tries to do
the same with the repetition
of sound effects and (some-
times awkwardly incorporat-
ed) exposition, but the world of
“The Sandman” is so large and
elaborately knotted that new-
comers may feel a bit lost.
Audible’s “The Sandman” also invites an
interesting conversation around the form.
This isn’t the first time comics have been
transformed into an audio format (Maggs
has also directed Superman and Batman
adaptations). But the beautiful visuals are
so essential to Gaiman’s original text that
the adaptation feels like a separate, lesser
beast. It necessarily neglects the changing
shapes and angles of the panels, the vari-
able aesthetics of the illustrations, their
myriad allusions to classical mythology
and even other comic books.
For those who’ve already ventured into
Morpheus’ domain, this production is des-
sert, a sweet way to dip back into the
Dreaming and discover it anew. But for
those more comfortable in the land of the
waking, who know nothing of the Endless
or their rule, it will require more work to
catch hold of the Sandman’s ever-changing
cloak and follow without falling through
the clouds. 0
Talk of the Town
An unidentifiable stranger plunges a community into crisis.
By FIONA MAAZEL
CATHERINE LACEY — the author of the
much heralded “Nobody Is Ever Missing”
and “The Answers” — returns with her
third novel, “Pew,” a timely entry into the
conversation this country’s been having for
years about “otherness.” Look, racism, sex-
ism, homophobia, xenophobia and a gen-
eral intolerance for dissent or even sensible
discourse on any of the above have been
the portrait of American ruin for some time
now. Add to that the coronavirus, and
you’ve got a climate in which any book that
PEW
By Catherine Lacey
207 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
wants to tackle the problem of community,
bias and discordant experiences of the
same event will necessarily feel all the
more urgent. And so it is with “Pew.”
Beyond the coronavirus’s obvious toll, it
has a lot of us grappling with the “uncanny,”
in the potent, Freudian sense of the word —
the strange and terrifying revelation of
what we already know. Let’s call it acciden-
tal self-exposure. For instance, some peo-
ple have no problem calling Covid-19 the
“Kung flu” at campaign rallies; other peo-
ple find themselves struggling with such
thoughts in private with a mix of shame
and sanctimony. Which is all to say: Crises
tend to expose us to ourselves.
Enter into this madness “Pew,” in which
the Christian residents of a small town in
the American South find in their church an
interloper — a person with no readily dis-
cernible gender, ethnicity, name, history or
interest in talking to almost anyone. The
town’s minister, whose daughter once
named a stray cat after the gutter in which
it was found, dubs the stranger Pew, by the
same reasoning. And so the cuing begins.
Pew is a stray. Pew is rescued from the
church and installed in an attic bedroom by
Hilda and Steven, a local couple who just
want to do right, but who are menacing
from the start. In the grand tradition of
“The Stepford Wives” or just the carica-
tured hypocrisy of the Christian South, ev-
eryone in this town protests at length about
values and tolerance in the singsong patois
of cant.
Of Pew’s gender, the Reverend says,
“You need not be ashamed of looking the
way you do — as God loves all his children
exactly the same — but it’s simply not clear
to us which one you are and you have to be
one or the other, so unless you want us to
figure it out the hard way, I think you
should just tell us which one you are.”
Don’t be ashamed, but. . . . We want to
help you, but. . . .
The novel unfolds over the course of one
week, from Creation to Sabbath, and is nar-
FIONA MAAZEL’S most recent novel is “A Little
More Human.”
rated by Pew — as if from the vantage of a
worry stone that is passed from one
townsperson to the next. Who are these
people? You’ve seen them before, which
forecloses on opportunities the novel might
have taken to explore a more nuanced ver-
sion of, for instance, your standard mission-
ary who patronizes the savages in the
name of saving them. Still, it’s interesting
to see all this from the “savage’s” point of
view.
As each day passes, the townspeople be-
come increasingly intent on labeling Pew,
on naming Pew, by way of giving shape to
SALLY DENG
the shapeless. What kind of other is Pew? If
the town knew, its residents would know
exactly how to discriminate against it,
which is critical to the majority’s retaining
its power. This is how majorities work.
The longer Pew cannot be identified, the
more the town begins to come apart. Peo-
ple start talking. Sharing. Disclosing their
secrets to the worry stone, who (which?)
records it all with the stoicism of an an-
cient.
There’s been violence. Lynchings.
Doubt. And real sadness about being wed
to the community and its judgment. Here is
Hilda on the shame of being raised by a
stepmother who is “different — you know,
dark haired, sort of tan”: “We were the only
family like that in town, so we had to work
twice as hard to be . . . right. To sit right
with the community. It’s all we have here —
sitting right with the community. It’s all
anyone wants.”
At the end of the week, there is to be a
Forgiveness Festival — a bacchanal of self-
exfoliation, in which the town’s fraught re-
lationship with itself spills out into the
open. The town convenes to discuss
whether Pew should attend and what to do
about Pew in general: “to decide, as a com-
munity, how to proceed with the maximum
amount of people comfortable with what is
going on” — which crystallizes just how
sinister the residents’ good will really is.
Pew, for whom a Forgiveness Festival is
redundant at best (“I can sometimes see all
these things in people . . . through those
masks meant to protect a person’s wants
and unmet needs”), assents to it all. And so
we walk with Pew, as Pew bears witness to
an American community unmasking its
shame, as does the novel that bears Pew’s
name. 0
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROZETTE RAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
God of the Storm
A history of hurricanes in America and the devastation they have wrought.
By ELIZABETH KOLBERT
WHEN THE FIRST Europeans arrived in the
Americas, they had no word for “hurri-
cane.” In the Atlantic, hurricanes form off
the coast of Africa and travel west, so
they’d had no need for one. But the want
quickly asserted itself. In 1502, a hurricane
off Santo Domingo sank 24 Spanish ships,
killing almost everyone on board, including
Francisco de Bobadilla, who’d been dis-
patched to replace Christopher Columbus
as governor of Hispaniola. It’s believed
that “hurricane” is derived
from the Arawak word hu-
rakan, meaning “god of the
storm.”
In “A Furious Sky,” his lively
chronicle of five tempestuous
centuries, Eric Jay Dolin de-
scribes the 1502 hurakan as “a
A FURIOUS SKY
The Five-Hundred-Year History
of America’s Hurricanes
By Eric Jay Dolin
392 pp. Liveright. $29.95.
most appropriate prologue to
European settlement of the
New World.” Hopes of the
French to colonize what’s now
Florida were dashed by a hurri-
cane in 1565. Another hurri-
cane, in 1609, delayed aid to the
British settlers in Jamestown,
who, by that point, had proba-
bly resorted to cannibalism,
and a third, in 1635, spared the
life of the Puritan minister
Richard Mather, whose son, In-
crease Mather, later wrote of
his father’s experience that
“God turned the wind about.”
“Hurricane, Bahamas,” an 1898 watercolor and graphite drawing by the American artist Winslow Homer.
The course of the American
Revolution may have been al-
tered by a pair of hurricanes
that slammed into the Caribbe-
an in 1780. (According to this theory, the
storms prompted the French to send ships
they had docked in the Caribbean north,
aiding the Revolutionaries.)
Of course, hurricanes didn’t let up once
the new nation was founded, and Dolin pur-
sues them as they churn their way through
the first part of the 19th century, wreaking
havoc from New Orleans to Newport. In
September 1821, a powerful storm tore
through New England. The following
month, a meteorologically inclined mer-
chant named William Redfield was trav-
eling by carriage from his home in the town
of Cromwell, in central Connecticut, to his
in-laws, in Stockbridge, Mass. Along the
way, he noticed something odd. The
downed trees in his neighborhood were ly-
ELIZABETH KOLBERT is a staff writer for The
New Yorker and the author of “The Sixth
Extinction.”
IMAGE BY WINSLOW HOMER
ing with their tops pointing northwest,
while near Stockbridge, they faced south-
east. Pondering this strange fact, Redfield
concluded that hurricane winds blow in a
great, revolving circle. From this insight
was born what became known as the
“American Storm Controversy.”
James P. Espy, a classics scholar from
Philadelphia who also took a keen interest
in meteorology, opposed Redfield’s theory.
Espy argued that hurricanes form when
warm, moist air rises from the surface of
the ocean, releasing latent heat, and that,
rather than rotating, hurricane winds rush
from the edge of the storm toward the cen-
ter. The two men fought for decades, each
refusing to concede anything to the other,
even though, as Dolin points out, both were
partly correct.
As the century wore on, one scientific
breakthrough followed another. But little
progress was made in the science of hurri-
cane prediction, and even with the advent
of the telegraph and the creation of the
United States Weather Bureau, forecasting
remained largely a matter of luck.
For instance, the Weather Bureau called
for “light rain” in the New York area on the
evening of Aug. 23, 1893; instead the city
was hit by a Category 1 storm. Four days
later, the bureau warned that a hurricane
was about to make landfall near Savannah,
but by that point, the Category 3 hurricane
was already bearing down on the city and
even those who received the alert had no
time to prepare. Particularly devastated
were the islands to the northeast of Savan-
nah, off the coast of South Carolina, which
were on the “dirty,” or right-hand, side of
the storm. (In the Northern Hemisphere,
hurricanes rotate in a counterclockwise di-
rection; this means that whatever direc-
tion the storm is moving, the danger will be
greatest to the right of the eye, because
there the speed of the winds is increased by
the forward velocity of the tempest.) Some
2,000 people were killed in the so-called Sea
Islands Hurricane, most of them African-
The New York City forecast
called for ‘light rain’ on Aug. 23,
1893, not a Category 1 storm.
American. Relief was slow to reach the is-
lands, in part because of all the damage and
in part because South Carolina’s avowedly
white supremacist governor delayed call-
ing for help.
Four decades later, communications
technologies — radio, telephone — had
vastly improved, but, as Dolin recounts, the
bureau’s forecasts had not. In the hours be-
fore the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 made
landfall, the bureau missed the fact that the
storm had taken a sharp northern turn; the
result was that hundreds of unemployed
World War I veterans who’d been sent to
build a road connecting the Florida Keys
were killed. Ernest Hemingway, who rode
out the Labor Day Hurricane on Key West,
visited the vets’ camp, on Lower Mate-
cumbe Key, a few days after the disaster.
(He’d been drinking buddies with many of
the men.) The dead, he reported, were “ev-
erywhere and in the sun all of them were
beginning to be too big for their bluejeans
and jackets that they could never fill when
they were on the bum and hungry.”
Satellites now allow hurricanes to be
monitored from their inception, and com-
puter models take vast amounts of data
and spit out predictions. But as Dolin notes,
forecasting hurricanes re-
mains a “tricky endeavor.”
Hurricanes are susceptible to
the “butterfly effect” — small
changes in the initial condi-
tions ramify into very large
changes later on. Meteorolo-
gists try to deal with this prob-
lem by running their computer
models many times over, start-
ing with different initial condi-
tions, but they can never over-
come what’s known as the “lim-
it of predictability.” Thus, hurri-
cane forecasts will always
come with a range of uncer-
tainty.
At the start of “A Furious
Sky,” Dolin, who has written
several previous books on
maritime topics, writes that
“hurricanes have left an indeli-
ble mark on American history.”
He suggests that it’s particu-
larly important to attend to this
mark now because climate
change is only going to make
storms “more powerful and
more destructive in the future.”
But he never develops a clear
argument as to what the soci-
etal impact of hurricanes has
been (besides a lot of devasta-
tion and death), or what we can
expect it to be going forward
(aside from more of the same).
Where “A Furious Sky” is most compel-
ling is in its often harrowing details. It’s
filled with haunting personal stories. Con-
sider that of Joseph Matoes Sr., a dairy
farmer in coastal Rhode Island. On the af-
ternoon of Sept. 21, 1938, Matoes watched a
school bus carrying four of his five children
head toward a causeway that faced a nor-
mally placid cove. The deadliest hurricane
in modern New England history was bear-
ing down on Rhode Island, and the water in
the cove was roiling and crashing over the
road. Matoes waved to the bus driver to try
to get him to stop; instead he accelerated.
Halfway across the causeway, the bus
stalled. The driver helped the kids out and
told them all to hold hands. A wave wiped
them off their feet. Matoes could only
watch as his four children drowned. The
bus driver survived, but told Matoes he
wished that he hadn’t.
“Everything’s gone,” he said. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13
 Beach Reads / Summer Stories / By Elisabeth Egan
This summer, more than ever, indulge in some page-turning escapism.
Sxxx,2020-08-16,BR,014,Bs-4C,E1_+_+.pdf
WHAT A STRANGE SUMMER THIS has been. The lead-up
was an excruciating blend of boredom and heartbreak,
and the actuality is a series of quandaries that feel like an
unwinnable round of Scruples: Is it safe to eat a burger off
your neighbor’s grill? Do you need to wear a mask while
biking? Can the virus survive chlorine?
Then there’s the less fraught but still critical question of
when you will have a chance to grab a fat novel and hotfoot
it down to the water’s edge. We’ve given up so much al-
ready, do we have to add beach reading to the mix? I’m
planting a flag in the sand: The answer to this question is
no. But, just for this year, I’d like to propose a pared-down
vision of the traditional approach. It’s inspired by long-ago
family vacations on Bailey Island in Maine, where days
were diving into icy waves and doling out Pringles to peo-
ple with pruned fingers. Nights were for books.
After kids were tucked between gritty sheets, adults tip-
toed onto the porch with love stories, war sagas and family
dramas tucked under sweatshirted arms. The lamp tacked
to the side of our rental cottage was of toaster-oven watt-
age, barely bright enough to illuminate a page. The rock-
ing chairs were splintery, uncushioned, always missing a
slat where one was most needed. Even if you could locate a
match, the single spluttering citronella couldn’t hold back
the swarms of mosquitoes and gnats. But the reading! In
that cool, piney air, every book was a page-turner. Every
sentence was memorable and meaningful — quotable,
even — and let’s just say Shakespeare did not show his
spine in our stack of beat-up paperbacks.
CMYK
ELISABETH EGANis an editor at the Book Review and the author
of “A Window Opens.”
14 SUNDAY, AUG UST 16 , 20 20
So here’s the beach reading vibe I’m prescribing: kin-
dred spirits gathering in blue twilight with good books.
Crickets providing the soundtrack. A full day behind you,
sound sleep ahead. If you’re near water, mazel tov. If you’re
not where you thought you’d be, join the club. Grab one of
these novels, find a little light and plant yourself in its glow.
IF HAD A CHOCO TACO for every time a friend has asked me
to recommend a book like “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,”
I’d be the Good Humor woman. Happily, Lucie Britsch’s
slightly sour, witty debut, SAD JANET (Riverhead, 276 pp., $27),
fits the bill. It’s surprising and irreverent; the main char-
acter is a cantankerous, Christmas-loathing misanthropic
goth who works at a run-down dog shelter. (She also hates
summer: “People’s brains change in the summer. They go
from gray gloop to neon pink, dumb and throbbing like a
giant penis.”) While Bernadette lost herself in the logisti-
cal challenges of architecture, Janet’s means for escape is
the bone-wearying predictability of caring for canines.
As much as readers will enjoy snippets of Janet’s work
life — how the dogs get named, how shelter workers size
up potential adopters, why some pups get a McDonald’s
hamburger as a special treat — the main thrust of Britsch’s
story is about a new antidepressant that will help Janet
survive the holiday season. Her family wants her to give it
a whirl, but as she puts it: “People are really into this hap-
piness thing . . . and I’m really not that fussed. I’ve dabbled
with happiness, I want to tell them, but it never stuck.”
Eventually Janet swallows her skepticism and takes the
drug. Will it unravel her ennui? Will it help her find the
companionship she won’t admit she wants? That’s for you
to find out. Be prepared for edginess, dark humor and pro-
+ PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
fanity. The only sweet thing about “Sad Janet” is its cover,
which might be the most adorable one I’ve seen all year.
IN THE QUEEN OF TUESDAY (Random House, 336 pp., $27), Darin
Strauss places one of his forebears in an interesting hypo-
thetical, imagining that his grandfather had an affair with
Lucille Ball. To read one of Strauss’s novels and then his
memoir, “Half a Life,” is to think you’re in the hands
of two different authors. In fact, you’re
just in the hands of a gifted toggler — a
skill he brings to bear here, combining
both forms.
Even if you didn’t grow up watching Lu-
cille Ball stomping grapes or cramming
her cheeks full of chocolate before “The
Brady Bunch” came on, you will enjoy
Strauss’s fictionalized life of the comedian
who was calling her own shots at a time when
women were expected to fade into the back-
ground. She acted on her own terms, just as
she raised her family and struggled with her
philandering husband.
Ball first crosses paths with the character
based on Strauss’s grandfather at a party
hosted by Donald Trump’s father to mark the de-
molishment of a five-acre steel-and-glass pavil-
ion in Coney Island. (Guests throw bricks to get
the job started, making for rich symbolism.)
Their relationship unspools across decades and between
coasts. Strauss knows his grandfather did in fact attend
Fred Trump’s party, and that Ball was there too. Did they
meet? This book makes you hope they did.
As Strauss writes in his “Instead of an Afterword”
(which would have made more sense as a foreword): “In
families, at least in families like mine, a fact is interesting
or useful only if it’s been encrusted into myth. Strauss fam-
ily memories are dunked in legend; my relatives make fan-
ciful splashes.” Indeed they do, to the delight of the reader.
OF COURSE THIS WOULDN’T be a legit list of beach reads
without a novel about friends who have traveled through
life together and now find themselves up against a thorny
challenge. The winner of this summer’s Mary McCarthy
Award (so named for the author of “The Group”) goes to
Charlotte Wood for THE WEEKEND (Riverhead, 272 pp., $27), in
which three women converge on an Australian seaside
town to clean out the home of their newly deceased fourth.
Each arrives with her own baggage: loneliness, health
problems, career disappointment and near-insolvency, not
to mention all the long-simmering resentments that spice
up old friendships.
As we get to know Jude, Wendy and Adele — and Sylvie,
in absentia — we also get to know their younger, more vi-
brant selves, and we become familiar with the separate
journeys that led them to this cluttered cottage every
Christmas. Wood has several surprises up her sleeve; her
characters have loved often, lived large and taken plenty of
risks, which makes for quick, Liane Moriarty-esque read-
ing. She also has an eye for the little moments that link us,
sometimes past the point of reason, to people whose histo-
ries we share.
For instance, I thought I was OK with the cancellation of
my 25th college reunion until I read this: “The two wom-
en’s faces turned upward, to the sun, to Adele. At the same
moment, they each lifted a hand to shade their eyes, in a
motion Adele had seen hundreds, thousands of times
through all the decades of their friendship. She remem-
bered them from long ago, two girls alive with purpose and
beauty. Her love for them was inexplicable.”
THERE IS NOTHING discussion-worthy or thought-provok-
ing about Kevin Kwan’s fourth novel, SEX AND VANITY (Dou-
bleday, 315 pp., $26.95). In fact, the only deep thing about it is
the sea off the coast of Capri, where the book begins —
making it the perfect thing to read when you’re not on the
beach but pretending to be. Kwan parachutes readers into
the sumptuous wedding of a polo-playing Italian count and
an American-raised Taiwanese heiress, whose childhood
friend, Lucie, becomes our tour guide. Lucie’s chaperone is
Charlotte, a stern older cousin who proves to be a perfect
foil as her ingénue companion falls for a fellow guest with
unfortunate taste in swimwear. “What in the world pos-
sessed him to wear that ghastly Speedo?” Lucie wonders.
This pretty much sums up the tough questions at the
heart of “Sex and Vanity,” which is as much about food,
sightseeing and décor as it is about falling in love with the
right person instead of a bland amalgamation of qualities
prescribed by high society. Lucie gets engaged to a man
who fits the second description but later reconnects with
Speedo-guy in — wait for it — East Hampton. With this
sparkling confection of a potboiler, Kwan more than deliv-
ers on the promises of his title, and he does so with tongue
planted firmly in cheek, which makes his 1 percenters
slightly less vacuous. Watch for the snarky, surprisingly
informative footnotes; you’ll appreciate the genius of your
cruise director.
NO DOUBT CHARLOTTE would have choice words about
David Nicholls’s new novel, SWEET SORROW (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 405 pp., paper, $16.99), which tells the tale of star-
crossed teenagers who fall in love during a summer pro-
duction of “Romeo and Juliet.” She’d find it common; as a
sucker for warm-weather romance — from “Grease” to
“Goodbye, Columbus” — I found it delectable.
Sixteen-year-old Charlie joins the cast of a theater
troupe with the express purpose of getting to know Fran,
who plays Juliet. Despite having zero stage experience, he
gets cast as Benvolio. Their slow-burn courtship is on the
main stage, but I found the domestic sideshow even more
compelling. Charlie’s family has been torn in half: He’s
stuck at home, worrying over his beloved but directionless
dad after his sister moves out with their mum. (“Sweet
Sorrow” is set in small-town England, with crisp British
humor to match.)
Charlie’s relationship with Fran deepens, and so does
his dad’s depression. As you lose yourself in these yin and
yang narratives, be sure to keep your eye on the clever
scam Charlie has going at the petrol station where he
works. Eventually all three roads converge in an exqui-
sitely painful way. At the end, Nicholls treats you to a satis-
fying glimpse into the future, where characters make a
curtain call as adults. (I did find myself wondering, who
goes to a reunion of their high school theater troupe?)
Bombshells abound.
granddaughter, Simran. Each woman has a secret, and
these secrets drive wedges between them in ways that are
pleasantly relatable and occasionally semi-obvious.
The centerpiece of the book is Simran, who’s in a stag-
nant relationship with Kunal, her boyfriend from high
school. They might be the world’s first couple to get en-
gaged at their five-year reunion, with a ring stashed in a
locker and Usher blaring from the gym. “This is it,” says a
voice in Simran’s head. “This is what you’ve always
dreamed of.”
Except, it turns out not to be. She meets Neil Desai, a
(fictional) contributing opinion writer for this newspaper.
Their first encounter sets her heart aflutter and the two
feel an instant connection — but Simran is loath to let her
family down; they’re all in on the match with Kunal.
This is not complicated material, and that’s fine. For
each of her characters, Dave choreographs a dance of ap-
proach and retreat, evasion and deception, which is no less
entertaining for its predictability. The family dynamics are
familiar in the best way, reminding you that you’re not
alone with whatever soft-shoe you’re performing beneath
your own family tree.
LOOKING FOR A BOOK that fires up the synapses? Check
out Heidi Pitlor’s IMPERSONATION (Algonquin, 322 pp., $26.95),
which tells the story of Allie Lang, a struggling single mom
who is hired to rewrite the memoir of Lana Breban, a pow-
erhouse New York lawyer who may or may not run for of-
fice. (Her slogan: “Never apologize, never compromise,
never rationalize.”) The work in question was originally
titled “Oh Boy! Adventures in and Lessons From a Femi-
nist’s Attempt to Raise a Feminist Son,” but the word “fem-
inist” was deemed problematic. Allie is tasked with the
packaging of a subject so elusive, she evades all efforts at
substantive conversation. To make matters worse, Lana
doesn’t seem to know most basic biographical information
about her son, let alone have a shred of child-rearing ad-
vice to give.
How Allie navigates this impossible job, her financial
woes and her relationships with her boyfriend and judg-
mental mother could make for a grim read. “Imperson-
ation” is anything but. Pitlor’s voice is witty and brisk,
bringing warmth and light to questions of identity, inde-
pendence and, yes, intellectual property. Who owns your
stories? How much are they worth? Allie Lang’s answers
are complicated. Watching her reach them is like sitting
down with a refreshingly honest friend who skips the part
about how great her life is and dives right into the real
stuff. We need more friends like this. Authors, too.
“ELIKEM MARRIED ME in absentia; he did not come to our
wedding.” So begins Peace Adzo Medie’s mesmerizing de-
but novel, HIS ONLY WIFE (Algonquin, 288 pp., $25.95), which
lives up to both the power of its first sentence and the
promise of its author’s first name. This is not a book to read
with one eye on a beach volleyball tournament; it’s a story
to soak up in silence, on a long, cloudy afternoon when you
have time to think.
The bride at the wedding is Afi Tekple, an aspiring seam-
stress who is marrying Eli, the son of a wealthy Ghanaian
family, in a scheme to distract him from a woman his
mother has deemed unsuitable. As her relatives touch up
her makeup and bustle over pots of soup, Afi sums up the
dynamic: “Since my mother told me that I would be mar-
rying Eli, I had felt as though I was balancing our two fam-
ilies like a basin of water, which was full to the brim, on my
head. It wasn’t easy being the key to other people’s happi-
ness, their victory and their vindication.”
Afi finds her way from the crowded courtyard of her un-
cle’s house to a luxurious city apartment where she finally
meets her husband and tries to make the best of an impos-
sible situation. You, the reader, are just along for the ride.
At a time when adventure is scarce, Medie gives you a lot
to look forward to, think about and be grateful for. 0

ANOTHER BEACH BAG MAINSTAY is the mother-daughter

saga, the more generations the better. This summer’s fix
comes from Saumya Dave’s debut novel, WELL-BEHAVED IN-
DIAN WOMEN (Berkley, 385 pp., paper, $16), which welcomes us
into the lives of Mimi Kadakia; her daughter, Nandini; and

+ T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W 15
The Stone Diaries
A noted director and screenwriter tackles a different sort of history: his own.
By BENJAMIN SVETKEY
WHENEVER OLIVER STONE makes movies
about real people, he ends up in hot water.
Whether the subject is Richard Nixon or
Alexander the Great, there’s always some
critic nit-picking about factual inaccura-
cies or perceived political agendas. Not
this time. With “Chasing the Light,” the 73-
year-old Oscar-winning director and
screenwriter has finally found a historical
figure he can portray with all the bias he
desires: himself.
And yet, Stone’s 330-page memoir, cov-
ering his life and career up to his first mile-
stone achievement — winning an Oscar for
his 1986 Vietnam drama, “Platoon” —
turns out to be a surprisingly sober and
cleareyed portrait of a rabble-rouser as a
young man. It’s sure to tick off some peo-
CHASING THE LIGHT
Writing, Directing, and Surviving “Pla-
toon,” “Midnight Express,” “Scarface,”
“Salvador,” and the Movie Game
By Oliver Stone
330 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
ple, like the actor James Woods, who likely
won’t be thrilled with the bit about his con-
stant whining on the set of “Salvador.” But
for the most part the Oliver Stone depicted
in these pages — vulnerable, introspective,
stubbornly tenacious and frequently
heartbroken — may just be the most sym-
pathetic character he’s ever written.
As one might suppose, some of the most
riveting parts are set in Vietnam, where, in
1967, after dropping out of Yale, 21-year-old
Stone volunteered for service in the war
that would shape so much of his worldview
(and provide the inspiration for “Pla-
toon”).
For a screenwriter, Stone has a notably
languid and elegant prose style — at times
downright novelistic — even if some pas-
sages can be rough to read. “Full daylight
revealed charred bodies, dusty napalm
and gray trees,” he writes about the after-
math of a battle near the Cambodian bor-
der. “Men who died grimacing, in frozen
positions, some of them still standing or
kneeling in rigor mortis, white chemical
death on their faces.”
What’s more unexpected, though, is how
engaging a tale he spins out of his early
family life in Connecticut and New York,
particularly his odd-couple parents — dad
a Republican stockbroker, mom a free-
spirited French glamour puss, both
cheated on each other — and how their di-
vorce shattered his childhood. Even more
than Vietnam, this war at home seems to
have molded Stone’s psyche, scarring him
with a suspicious nature that could go a
BENJAMIN SVETKEYis a former editor at The
Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment
Weekly and the author of the novel “Leading
Man.”
16 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 02 0 PHOTOGRAPHS IN CENTER, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ORION PICTURES, VIA PHOTOFEST; SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION; METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS; UNIVERSAL STUDIOS. ABOVE: PHOTOGRAPH FROM EVERETT COLLECTION.
(or “street Hamlet,” as Stone refers to him) set could fill a book on their own. “Jimmy
betrayed him in the editing room of “Scar- had been yelling so much in front of the
face” by wimping out during a battle over Mexican crew that he was suddenly and of-
the film’s cut with the director Brian De ficially warned by the Mexican govern-
Palma. How he originally considered ment that his behavior ‘as a guest in our
Keanu Reeves for Charlie Sheen’s part in country’ was ‘unacceptable,’ and that if it
“Platoon” (until the future “Matrix” star continued, he’d be asked to leave Mexico,”
turned it down because “he hated the vio- Stone writes of the actor who ended up
lence in the script”) and later courted Tom landing an Oscar nomination for his part in
Cruise to star in “Wall Street” (as well as the movie.
Michael J. Fox and Matthew Broderick be- Stone’s own bad behavior has raised
fore finally settling again on Sheen). And eyebrows over the years. Seemingly ev-
then there’s Stone’s portrait of Woods, erybody in Hollywood has some sort of Oli-
whose diva shenanigans on the “Salvador” ver Stone story. Although he doesn’t delve
too deeply into his drug use or sexual ad-
ventures (he writes about his ex-wives
with warmth and respect), he doesn’t
whitewash his excesses either. “Yes — and
I’d also gotten intoxicated in Hollywood
and drugged in public, with stupid, imma-
ture behavior,” is how he cops to his trans-
gressions. “I’d flirted with and teased
pretty women, sometimes in front of jeal-
ous men. I was at times rude, arrogant —
yet I’d say colorful too, the kind of guy who
you don’t know what he’ll do next.” In one
startling passage, he even confesses to
voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
His decision to end the memoir on Oscar
night 1987 does feel a bit abrupt — there’s
just so much more one wants to read about,
from how Stone dealt with the backlash
over his 1991 film “JFK,” to the controversy
he stirred up with 1994’s “Natural Born
Killers,” not to mention an explanation for
that fawning 2017 Showtime interview se-
ries he did with Vladimir Putin (you know,
the Russian strongman who’d just finished
meddling in the U.S. presidential election).
But, as the old showbiz saying goes, al-
ways leave them wanting more. And this
book — “a story about cutting corners, im-
provising, hustling . . . about lying outra-
geously, gritting it out with sweat and tears
. . . about growing up,” as he describes it in
his introduction — neatly sets the stage for
Clockwise from top left: Oliver Stone in 1986; John Hurt in “Midnight Express” (1978); James the possibility of that rarest of Stone pro-
Woods and Jim Belushi in “Salvador” (1986); Al Pacino in “Scarface” (1983). ductions: a sequel. 0
long way in explaining his penchant for
conspiracy theories later in life. “If my par-
ents had truly known each other before
they were married, they would never have
united, and I would never have existed,” he
writes. “Children like me are born out of
that original lie, and living a false front, we
suffer for it when we feel that nothing and
nobody can ever be trusted again. Adults
become dangerous. Reality becomes lone-
liness. Love either does not exist or cannot
survive.”
But, of course, the real payoff here, par-
ticularly for movie buffs, is Stone’s account
of his early struggles as a filmmaker. How,
within the course of a few years, he went
from being a 30-year-old cabdriver to one
of the top screenwriters in Hollywood, then
clawed his way to the director’s chair with
mostly forgotten horror flicks like
“Seizure” and “The Hand.” How Al Pacino Tom Berenger, left, and Willem Dafoe in the 1986 film ”Platoon.”
Brave Hearts
The young lovers who helped lead the anti-Nazi resistance.

By ARIANA NEUMANN
VERGANGENHEITSBEWÄLTIGUNG is an
amalgamation of the German words Ver-
gangenheit, “the past,” and Bewältigung,
“coping with,” and is often used to describe
the effort to grapple with the repercus-
sions of World War II.
THE BOHEMIANS
The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance
Against the Nazis
By Norman Ohler
Translated by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough
Illustrated. 293 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
$28.
Children of Holocaust survivors grow up
in the war’s shadow. Unwittingly, we remain
shackled to an inheritance that reverberates
through generations. Yet the trauma is not
limited to those close to victims. The families
of the perpetrators, of those who resisted
and of those who failed to act must all cope
with the past.
ARIANA NEUMANN is the author of “When Time
Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and
What Remains.”
The German writer Norman Ohler begins
“The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Ger-
many’s Resistance Against the Nazis” with a
powerful scene from his own life that per-
fectly encapsulates the guilt, grief, anger
and remorse that have haunted so many of
us. As a 12-year-old, Ohler asks his beloved
grandfather, his “Pa,” about his role in the
war. Then an engineer, now a frail old man,
he describes seeing SS guards, a freight
train and then a child’s hand through a crack
in the train car’s boards. But the grandfather
does nothing. “I was scared of the SS,” he
helplessly explains. Young Ohler is stunned,
and in that moment of “stillness you could
hear,” he cannot contain his hatred for his Pa.
Best known in Germany as a novelist,
Ohler is also the author of “Blitzed,” a con-
troversial 2017 best seller about rampant
drug use in the Third Reich. With the open-
ing scene of “The Bohemians,” another
work of nonfiction, he masterfully estab-
lishes his trustworthiness as a narrator,
which is crucial as we travel with him back
to the 1930s and then on through the war.
He weaves a detailed and meticulously re-
searched tale about a pair of young Ger-
man resisters that reads like a thriller but
is supported by 20 pages of footnotes. “I
find it particularly important in this case,
where the truth has been distorted many
times,” he writes, “not to add another leg-
end but to report as accurately as possible,
combining my skills as a storyteller with
the responsibility of the historian.”
The story he reconstructs is that of Harro
and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, drawing on
letters, articles, diaries and interviews to ac-
quaint us with the couple in all their com-
plexity — engaging, bold, flawed. Harro, a
student activist, underground writer and
eventually an employee of the German Air
Ministry, is the pair’s intellectual driving
force. He is ambitious and stoic, an idealist.
Libertas is more whimsical, and also initially
a Nazi Party member. She dreams of being a
poet and is working for Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer when she meets Harro. Her decision
to resist seems based more on circumstance
than principle, but she is deeply resourceful
and loyal. We feel the couple’s triumphs inti-
mately and, as the net tightens around them,
their sorrows.
Young, passionate and liberal, they defy
the regime with their unconventional life-
style — including an open marriage and
love of wild gatherings bringing together
people of diverse backgrounds and politi-
cal leanings. More dangerously, they pass
on information about Nazi atrocities to en-
emies of the Reich, support Jews, produce
pamphlets and establish links with Soviet
intelligence. At a time when, as Ohler puts
it, “propaganda and suppression increas-
ingly dominate daily life,” they cut remark-
able figures.
For decades, Ohler writes, historians
were reluctant to carry out a “genuine in-
vestigation” of the couple’s anti-Nazi cir-
cle. It was widely believed that German re-
sistance spread little beyond the White
Rose and the Stauffenberg plot. For politi-
cal reasons, both East and West Germany
sought to erase from history details of the
brave work of Libertas and Harro and their
group. Family and friends were silenced,
and in both East and West Libertas and
Harro were posthumously lionized as Sovi-
et spies. The reality was more subtle and
fraught. Theirs is a tragic tale of defiance,
espionage, love and betrayal.
Ohler employs the present tense
throughout, imbuing his account with ur-
gency and reminding us that the past in
many ways remains our present. His only
deviation into the past tense is in the fore-
word, where he discloses his grandfather’s
agonized recollection — a failure to act for
which the resistance narrative of “The Bo-
hemians” serves as a kind of atonement. 0

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17

Under the Influence
A novel about sexual obsession and storytelling.
By ADRIENNE BRODEUR
“A BOOK IS a heart that only beats in the
chest of another,” Rebecca Solnit writes of
the symbiotic relationship between writers
and readers. How, exactly, this transplant
works is as mysterious as love itself. But
not when the book is Daphne Merkin’s new
novel, whose narrator invites us into the
operating room to observe the procedure:
22 MINUTES OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
By Daphne Merkin
244 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
“So come with me and watch Judith Stone
collide with her destiny in the shape of a
man named Howard Rose.”
“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love”
tracks an unusual episode in the otherwise
unremarkable life of Judith Stone, a smart
and anxiety-prone young editor in Manhat-
tan. Inexperienced in affairs of the heart,
Judith longs to find a good man and start a
ADRIENNE BRODEUR is the author of “Wild
Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me,”
which is now out in paperback.
Poet With a Pistol
Christina Schwarz’s fifth novel shows the softer side of an outlaw.
By ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE
THE OUTLAW ARCHETYPE has long been a
staple of American storytelling, champion-
ing unlikely heroes who, driven by an elu-
sive notion of freedom, embrace lawless-
ness in pursuit of a higher justice. Bonnie
and Clyde are no exception, and their tragic
romance has been recycled countless
times, most memorably in Arthur Penn’s
visionary film of 1967, starring Faye Dun-
BONNIE
By Christina Schwarz
337 pp. Atria Books. $27.
away and Warren Beatty. In her absorbing
fifth novel, Christina Schwarz trains her
lens on Bonnie Parker, investigating how a
girl from the humdrum plains of West
Texas became one of the most notorious
criminals of the 20th century.
The novel begins when Bonnie’s newly
widowed mother, Emma, moves with her
ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE is the author, most re-
cently, of “All Things Cease to Appear.” Her
new novel, “The Vanishing Point,” will be
published in May 2021.
18 S U N DAY , AU G U ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
MELANIE LAMBRICK
family. Instead, she chances upon Howard
Rose, a charismatic and moody lawyer 13
years her senior, who becomes the object of
her desire. Needless to say, Howard is not
husband material. If anything, he’s a ro-
mantic antihero, skilled in the giving and
withholding of sexual pleasure, and able to
“turn his interest on and off like a light
switch.” Despite initial reluctance, Judith
quickly succumbs to Howard’s emotional
and sexual manipulations; the details of
her erotic compliance are breathtaking.
This is not unusual territory for Merkin, a
children back to her parents’ home in Ce-
ment City — the arid industrial town out-
side Dallas where the air has a “sharp, un-
pleasant tang,” and where Emma stitches
overalls for the factory men. As the middle
child, Bonnie is plucky, mischievous and
bright enough to be restless. Early on, she’s
singled out for her writing talents and wins
a literary contest, securing her private con-
viction that she’s destined for better things,
but in high school, an English teacher sti-
fles her enthusiasm. “Womanhood, like a
colt, apparently required breaking,” Bon-
nie surmises; in retaliation, she marries
her high school sweetheart and drops out of
school. The marriage doesn’t last, and Bon-
nie moves home and starts waitressing as
the Depression looms. In Clyde Barrow,
whom she meets through a friend, she sees
a man who’s going places and admires “his
desire to be special, because it matched her
own.” When Clyde is arrested, he per-
suades her to bring him a gun so he can
bust out of jail, but his freedom is short-
lived and he’s soon recaptured. He serves
two more years in a harsher prison before
he chops off two toes with an ax to get re-
leased.
Reunited at last, the young lovers set out
across the drought-weary plains of Texas,
literary critic and novelist known for her
revealing personal essays, which have
chronicled her sexual fixation on spanking
as well as her struggles with depression.
But, dear reader, how do you feel about
interruptions? Would it bother you if in the
thick of this steamy story of sexual obses-
sion, the narrator butts in to solicit your
opinion, discuss a plot decision or opine on
some bit of literary trivia? If so, consider
yourself forewarned. There are five chap-
ters, each titled “Digression” and num-
bered one through five, devoted to doing
just this, which may challenge your staying
power.
“Peekaboo, I see you, out there in the
world holding this book,” the narrator calls
out cheekily, addressing us for the first
time. She drops clues to her identity: “You
don’t really believe, do you, that I’m any-
one but a writer pretending to invent a
character,” adding elsewhere that she
“might very well be you.” Seductive one
moment (“I stand here . . . offering you my-
self in all my guises”) and dismissive the
next (“Perhaps you are not the reader I
want after all”), our narrator is as skillful
an orchestrator of emotion as Howard him-
self.
getting by on Clyde’s robberies of grocery
stores and, less frequently, of banks. With
Clyde’s brother, Buck, and a young accom-
plice named W.D., they form the Barrow
Gang, all crammed together in a stolen car
along with Buck’s wife, Blanche, whose pa-
rochial sniveling grates on Bonnie’s
nerves. Unlike Blanche, Bonnie relishes
her status as a partner who gets her fair
share. Schwarz abandons the mythical ex-
citement of the open road for its punishing
realities: the gut-wrenching pressure of es-
cape and the injuries that result, bullet-rid-
dled cars, little food and rare sleep, and the
dead they leave in their wake. Unwittingly,
Bonnie achieves the fame she’s always
dreamed of when the papers publish her
poetry and a picture, taken on a whim, de-
picting her as a hardened moll, brandishing
a pistol and cigar. When she is nearly crip-
pled in an automobile accident, her poign-
ant, often heartbreaking downfall begins in
earnest, with pills and booze her only re-
course. As Bonnie discovers, she and Clyde
were “doomed to circle the edges of civiliza-
tion and snap up scraps, like feral dogs.”
Schwarz is a vivid storyteller, but keeps a
polite distance from the darker impulses
that shaped Parker’s life. The couple’s sup-
posed sexual bond lacks nuance, as though
If you’re like me, you might not be a fan
of metafiction. I follow Hansel and Gretel
into the woods because I’m curious about
their fate, not to know why the Brothers
Grimm chose gingerbread as construction
material. Simply put, I read for the trans-
portive magic, not the trick. But here’s the
shocker: Thanks to Merkin’s literary le-
gerdemain and stylish prose, her rumi-
native digressions — about memory, sub-
jectivity and the interplay between reality
and fiction — contribute as much to the
book’s artistic, emotional and intellectual
payoff as her story does. There is delight in
each intrusion, of the sort that I experience
on a leisurely Sunday morning when I’m
able to wake up only to fall back to sleep
again, taking pleasure in crossing the
boundary of consciousness.
“22 Minutes of Unconditional Love” is an
arresting novel that explores the alchemy
of contradictions that exist in all great
works of literature. Observant and witty,
Merkin makes each sentence pack a pro-
vocative wallop. So, come for the promise
of a compulsively readable novel — “Ob-
session makes for good copy,” the narrator
tells us — and stay for a fascinating lesson
on the making of art. 0
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the 1967
film “Bonnie and Clyde.”
the author is blocking a scene rather than
pursuing the complex emotions that drive
it — and, like so many heroines before her,
Bonnie accepts Clyde’s physical mistreat-
ment as a preamble to “tenderness,” mis-
construing her bruises as proof of his love.
Ultimately, it is never fully established
what motivates Bonnie, deep in her bones,
to live such a reckless, unfulfilled life.
As Bonnie perceives it: “Their existence
might be chaotic and dirty and sickeningly
violent, but if they lived and died for that
existence together it seemed, if not virtu-
ous, at least significant and exceptional.
She could still tell herself it was a love
story.” 0
PHOTOGRAPH FROM WARNER BROTHERS
Left Behind
Examining the end of life through the stories of an aging couple and a murder trial.
By SYLVIA BROWNRIGG
A GOOD NOVEL can perform the same per-
ception-bending trick as a lockdown: slow-
ing time, throwing light on shadowed cor-
ners, reminding us of the interdependen-
cies among us that we once took for
granted.
In her vibrant, engaging fiction, Jill Mc-
Corkle has given voice to characters on
both sides of the divide between profes-
sionals and the essential workers who sus-
tain them — her sixth and most recent nov-
el, “Life After Life,” was set in a retirement
home in North Carolina. McCorkle’s art lies
HIEROGLYPHICS
By Jill McCorkle
312 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $26.95.
in chronicling the many minor episodes
that build one person’s unique life. In her
new novel, “Hieroglyphics,” 85-year-old Lil
Wishart and her husband, Frank, have re-
cently moved from Massachusetts to North
Carolina to be closer to their adult daugh-
ter. There Lil is assembling selections from
her years of journal entries: memories of
kids’ arguments, affectionate stories and
painful ones about Frank. In a letter to their
children, Becca and Jeff, Lil describes this
anthology as “my contribution to evolu-
tion, the unearthing and dusting of the
prints and markers that led me here.”
If McCorkle’s imagined group home,
Pine Haven, connected the large cast of
“Life After Life,” a single house links the
two families of “Hieroglyphics”: Shelley, a
diligent court recorder, lives with her two
sons in the house (now somewhat run-
down) where Frank grew up. Since return-
ing to North Carolina, Frank is eager to vis-
it his old home, where he and his mother
lived after the tragedy that marred his
childhood. Shelley warily waves Frank
away with a line about her soon-to-return
husband, though in fact she is raising her
sweet 6-year-old, Harvey, alone — her old-
er son, by a different absent father, has re-
cently started college. Shelley’s long days
are spent logging the proceedings of a grim
murder trial, her mind filled with its dis-
tressing details and worries over Harvey.
The murder victim worked as an aesthe-
tician in a retirement home, her death
staged to look like a suicide by the married
doctor with whom she was having an affair.
These circumstances form a closing
episode in “Life After Life,” and though
“Hieroglyphics” is self-contained, it will be
a richer story for readers already familiar
with some of these characters. Shelley is
haunted by the young woman’s fatal mis-
take, feels pity for the young son she left be-
hind and silent rage at the entitled doctor.
Having come from an abusive family, Shel-
ley “learned early that she was treated best
SYLVIA BROWNRIGG is the author, most recently,
of the novel “Pages for Her.”
when not noticed . . . no one wants what the
average or below-average person has, and
so they leave you alone, and sometimes be-
ing left alone seems the best choice.”
The novel is full of ghosts and hauntings,
tombs and cemeteries. Harvey’s anxious
imagination dwells on murder stories his
older brother told him, of Lizzie Borden, the
Menendez brothers and local horrors.
Frank, a retired academic, used to study
burial rituals, “the myths of death and all
the ancient beliefs of the afterlife,” so he
knows well the importance of relics and the
magical thinking of trying to keep the dead
alive. Lil’s earlier years volunteering in
hospice care helped her sort through her
own grief over the early loss of her mother,
in a devastating accident that created the
coincidence that first drew Frank and Lil
together.
Lil’s mother died in the terrible (real-life)
Cocoanut Grove fire that killed almost 500
people in Boston in 1942, and Frank’s father
died in a December 1943 train accident
(also real) outside of Fayetteville, N.C. His
mother, returning to Massachusetts with
her husband, only survived the wreck be-
cause she was using the train’s bathroom
when the crash occurred; badly injured,
she stayed in North Carolina to convalesce,
and eventually brought young Frank down
to join her. The shock of these losses has re-
verberated throughout Frank’s and Lil’s
lives, giving them both a stark sense of the
before and after of tragedy, and driving Lil
to be for her own children the focused
mother she herself lacked.
The tone of “Hieroglyphics” is dreamier
The Book
Review
Podcast
We speak
to the books
that speak
to you.
YIFAN WU
Hosted by Pamela Paul.
McCorkle knows that facing “The Book Review”
death allows us, as this terrible podcast leads the
conversation on
pandemic has, to focus on what
is essential. noteworthy books
and the authors who
write them.
and more interior than that of McCorkle’s
The praise, the
previous novel. Alternating sections center
on Frank and Lil, Shelley and Harvey — disagreements, the
but mostly when they are alone, reflecting protests, the prizes.
on their past or present. Frank walks the Join us for the latest
tracks where his father died, still imagining in criticism and
the accident, while Lil stays home tethered
discussion, featuring
to her oxygen tank, worrying that Frank
might take things in hand to forestall a bad Times editors and the
ending. McCorkle explores the poignant biggest authors in the
territory of an aging couple discussing how literary world today.
to die, as Lil writes to Jeff and Becca, “Your
father has lately pitched death like one of
his adventurous trips or a romantic ren-
dezvous.”
The novel builds slowly toward both the
end of the murder trial as well as a resolution
for Frank and Lil. McCorkle, a generous, hu-
mane writer, knows that facing death allows
us, as this terrible pandemic has, to focus on
what is essential: how to take care of our vul-
nerable, and to appreciate the connections
that sustain us. The maternal hearts of Lil
and Shelley are the central force of “Hiero-
glyphics.” If Lil is making sense of her own
life for her children, it is partly so that down
the line, they can do the same for theirs. “My Download now at:
wish is that you both are in lives that provide nytimes.com/TBRpodcast
loving and trustworthy souls who can hear
your story.” 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19
The Americans: Edward P. Jones
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
keepers, retail workers and bus drivers.
A few are doctors, lawyers and soldiers.
There are some criminals and layabouts
in the mix too, but even Wyoming has its
share of those. A population granted such
exquisitely detailed literary representa-
tion might also deserve the political kind.
This may be the place to note that nearly
all of Jones’s Washingtonians, like
roughly half of their real-life counter-
parts, are Black.
I know that it’s silly to imagine that a
hard ideological position could be dis-
solved by fiction, and I should point out
that statehood doesn’t figure explicitly
among the concerns voiced by Jones’s
characters, who are of course entirely
imaginary. Although nobody who has
read these books will quite believe that
they aren’t real.
The city they live in very much is. “All
the places that I write about are real,”
Jones said in an interview with Hilton Als
in 2013. Every story abounds in specific,
knowable locations — blocks, intersec-
tions, street addresses, all encrypted in
the abstract alphabetical-mathematical-
geographical code of Washington’s neigh-
borhoods: the barbershop “on the corner
of 3rd and L Streets, Northwest”; “Geor-
gia had always considered the corners of
5th and M as her lucky corners”; “Miss
Jenny had come out of Hahn’s shoe store,
crossed New York Avenue and was going
up 7th Street”; the building at 1708 10th
Street, “around the corner from the fire
station on R Street.”
That last address, the home of a do-
mestic worker named Roxanne Stapleton
who is suddenly and mysteriously struck
blind, was one of Jones’s childhood
homes. “I never knew anybody that
happened to,” Jones told Als. “But I had
to put her someplace to live, so I might as
well put her in our 10th Street apartment,
in a building that I knew.”
The cumulative effect of this kind of
knowledge, this abundance of verifiable
local information, is to endow the stories
with a distinctive credibility. If Jones tells
you someone found a parking space “on S
Street, between 10th and 11th,” you be-
lieve him. And this trust extends beyond
geography into matters of history, gene-
alogy and family life. The word “realism”
isn’t quite adequate, and in any case not
everything that happens in Jones’s Wash-
ington can be called realistic. The Devil,
having swum across the Anacostia River,
appears in a Safeway supermarket to
tempt and bamboozle a young mother
who secretly lusts after a man who isn’t
her husband. Another woman experi-
A.O. SCOTTis a critic at large for The Times and
the author of “Better Living Through Criti-
cism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure,
Beauty and Truth.”
20 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 0 2 0
Jones’s prose is always exacting in its observation and meticulous in its accounting.
ences a series of “miracles” — an unset-
tling euphemism for horrifying mishaps
in which she is the only survivor. Super-
stition and formal religion shape the
thinking of many characters, especially
those old enough to remember the South-
ern places where they lived before the
capital summoned them.
But “magical realism,” a worn-out phrase
in any case, doesn’t capture what Jones is
doing in these stories from “All Aunt Ha-
gar’s Children,” or in the sections of his
novel “The Known World” (2003) that
depart from a narrow set of assumptions
about what might happen and why. While
he was making his way as a writer, Jones,
who was born in Washington in 1950, spent
time working at Science magazine and
then at a journal called Tax Notes, and
there is a patient, empirical precision in his
writing that might be said to fit in with the
missions of those publications. His prose,
even when it evokes natural mysteries and
complex emotions, is always exacting in its
observation and meticulous in its account-
ing. The world he invites us to know is a
scrupulously documented, carefully quanti-
fied world. The attentive reader will notice
the profusion of numbers: ages calculated
to the month, times something has hap-
pened noted as if in a ledger, significant
events measured mathematically. In the
second paragraph of “Old Boys, Old Girls,”
we learn that “seven months after he
stabbed the second man — a 22-year-old
with prematurely gray hair who had ven-
tured out of Southeast for only the sixth
time in his life — Caesar was tried for
murder in the second degree.” At the end of
the story “Common Law,” we are told that
Georgia, a woman who has been trapped in
an abusive relationship, is “one and a half
years from marrying Alvin Deloach,”
“more than eight years from marrying
Vaughn Anderson,” “just about 30 years
from seeing her first grandchild come into
the world” and “more than 40 and a half
years from death.”
Sometimes the numbers are from
literal receipts — bills of sale for goods
and services, and in “The Known World,”
which takes place mostly in Virginia in
the decade before the Civil War, for hu-
man beings. Jones also offers receipts in
a more recent, metaphorical sense — as
evidence of something that somebody
might have reason to doubt, as proof
against equivocation, indifference and
outright denial.
What risks being denied is what has
historically, in America, been dismissed
and devalued: the matter — the material,
human actuality — of Black lives. Jones
isn’t an overtly political writer. Historical
currents like the civil rights movement
and abolitionism flow past and over his
characters, but don’t tend to sweep them
up. Apart from an occasional reminder
that the president also lives in Washing-
ton, the drama of American politics takes
place far from the parts of Northeast,
Northwest and Anacostia where Jones’s
people work, love and dream. This is
partly an effect of segregation, which,
depending on the decade, is either a
matter of overt policy or of longstanding
practice. Jones’s depiction of the pleas-
ures of life in Washington’s Black neigh-
borhoods might seem nostalgic if some
fundamental change had taken place to
sweep away a social environment defined
by racism, but that isn’t the kind of re-
assurance he is inclined to provide.
As for the gospel singers, doctors,
nurses and clerks — which is also to say
the grandparents, husbands, ex-lovers,
orphans and spinsters — who populate
these places, they hardly need to spell
out the facts of American life to them-
selves or one another. Toni Morrison
often said that her goal as a writer was
never to solicit or pander to “the white
gaze,” in other words to cast off the bur-
den assumed by many earlier Black
writers of explaining and instructing
white readers in matters of race. Jones,
like many African-American writers who
arrived in Morrison’s wake, renders his
world with a similar kind of confidence.
This isn’t a matter of exclusion or sepa-
ratism — a book can be opened by any-
body, and open any mind — but of fidelity
to the truth of experience.
So it might go without saying — though
nothing really does — that a white reader
enters Jones’s world from a different
angle. What comes as news to me may
strike you as a gentle reminder of some-
thing you always knew. What I feel as
revelation you might experience as rec-
ognition. Places that seem strange to my
eyes are no doubt home in someone
else’s.
And realities that white people have
the privilege of ignoring, euphemizing or
attempting to justify are part of the infra-
structure of Black existence. Children in
Jones’s stories are told that movie the-
aters and other amusements are off
limits to them. Neighborhoods are broken
up for redevelopment, discovered by
gentrifying “pioneers,” allowed to fall into
PHOTOGRAPH BY HILTON ALS
decay. The police show up now and then
— useless, brutal, occasionally helpful.
The violence and cruelty of the Jim Crow
South, and of slavery before that, is an
aspect of shared memory, as is the sweet-
ness of life in a region about which some-
one says, “It’s the worst mama in the
world and it’s the best mama in the
world.”
An ordinary word that Jones uses
frequently enough to make it feel
freighted with special meaning is “peo-
ple.” It can refer to kin and community,
but also to powerful collective entities
that periodically assert their will and
influence. “White people,” of course, and
“the world the white people had made for
themselves,” but also specialized depart-
ments within that world. “The Social
Security people.” “The city government
people.” “The American military people
in Okinawa.” There is, I think, a quiet
point being made by this locution, which
is that however much we may think
about power and racism as systemic or
structural phenomena, they are never
truly impersonal. Every injustice, like
every kindness, is carried out by human
beings, even if they are unaware of the
effects of or reasons for what they do.
Sometimes “the government people” and
others are benevolent, sometimes mean
(generally they are less brutal than their
equivalents in Louisiana or Arkansas),
but their presence is always at once
intimate and alien, their rules and atti-
tudes arbitrary and often inscrutable.
In “Marie,” the final story in “Lost in
the City,” Marie Delaveaux Wilson, a
widow living in an apartment at 12th and
M, finds herself ensnared in a Kafka-
esque bureaucratic nightmare, sum-
moned by “the federal government peo-
ple” to a meeting with a Social Security
official who is never available to see her.
“Given the nature of life — particularly
the questions asked by the Social Securi-
ty people — she always took more than
they might ask for — her birth certificate,
her husband’s death certificate, doctors’
letters.” Receipts for her existence.
In the face of this indignity, Jones al-
lows Marie a small gesture of rebellion:
She slaps the face of an inconsiderate
receptionist named Vernelle. But the
story isn’t primarily about oppression
and defiance. It’s more about the way
certain dramatic moments occur in the
flow of time and consciousness that de-
fines who a person is. The
episodes at the Social Security
office (at 21st and M, North-
west) are threaded through
other memories and encoun-
ters, including a series of inter-
views conducted by a Howard
University student named
George Carter as part of an
oral history project. Marie is
willing to share reminiscences
of her arrival in D.C. (where her mother
had thought “God and his people” must
live), and the reader samples some ex-
cerpts, but in the end she stashes the
tapes in a drawer, “away from the things
she needed to get her hands on regu-
larly,” and resolves never to listen again.
Her biography is thus consigned to a
kind of epistemological limbo, recorded
but not entirely known. And this kind of
half-light — the intuition that the whole
story can only be grasped through the
flickers and shadows cast off by the facts
— is part of the atmosphere of Jones’s
world. There is always more to be discov-
ered within its boundaries. Read a few
chapters of either collection and you will
become aware of a distinctive chronolog-
ical rhythm, a way of pulling time for-
ward, backward and sideways, slowing it
down and speeding it up.
Jones comes close to inventing new verb
tenses. “One day, you will see that Tennes-
see Creek again for the first time,” a wom-
an writes in a letter to a child she has
recently met. “And I will see the house
again for the first time.” The beginning of
“Tapestry,” the closing story in
“All Aunt Hagar’s Children,”
offers a vivid, richly detailed
narrative of events that didn’t
actually happen, but that would
have happened “were it not for
the sleeping car porter.” It’s not
until four pages in that we learn
the porter’s name, and at the
end, after he has married Anne
Perry (who might otherwise
have married Lucas Turner, but
definitely not Ned Murray),
Jones shifts back to a slightly
different subjunctive mood, as Anne pic-
tures what would happen if she were to
abandon her new husband.
His name, by the way, is George Carter,
just like the young man in “Marie,” who
might be one of the 21 grandchildren or
even 12 great-grandchildren noted in the
final passage of “Tapestry.” That seems
likely. The temporal loops and echoes
don’t just happen within the stories, but
between them. We are frequently meet-
ing people again for the first time. Read-
ing the part of “Marie” in which she
deters a would-be mugger by stabbing
his hand with a seven-inch knife she
keeps in her coat pocket casts you back
to “Young Lions,” the fourth story in
“Lost in the City,” whose main character
is Marie’s assailant, Caesar
Matthews. He will return in
“Old Boys and Old Girls,” the
fourth story of “All Aunt Ha-
gar’s Children,” which follows
him through a stretch in prison.
The links and knots are too
many to enumerate, and I’m by
no means sure that, after multi-
ple readings, I have accounted
for all of them. “Lost in the
+ THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
City” begins with a delicate
vignette called “The Girl Who
Raised Pigeons.” The man who
gave the girl those pigeons is a
barber named Miles Patterson
whose remarkable origins are
related in the first story of “All
Aunt Hagar’s Children,” called
“In the Blink of God’s Eye.”
Georgia, the survivor of domes-
tic abuse in “Common Law,”
figures in the title story of
“Lost in the City.” Those are, by the way,
the eighth stories in their respective
books.
After a while, you learn to pay close
attention to the names and addresses.
Have I met this person before? Will I be
seeing her again? Didn’t she and that
other family live on the same block of H
Street? Was it at the same time? Did they
know each other? These aren’t just puz-
zles to solve, but invitations to reread, to
retrace your steps until you feel as if
those people know you too.
There is precedent for this method, of
course, though I can’t think of any writer
who has sustained this kind of
intricate symmetry in books
published more than a decade
apart. James Joyce’s “Dub-
liners” is 15 stories set in and
around a single city, with some
similar echoes and overlap-
pings. In the story “Bad
Neighbors,” Jones has a book-
loving high school student
named Sharon Palmer fall for
a pair of books that seem to
provide a clue to her author’s
influences: “The Street,” Ann
Petry’s multivocal, time-shifting 1946
novel of life in Harlem; and the Irish
writer Mary Lavin’s “Tales From Bective
Bridge.”
“Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Ha-
gar’s Children” communicate with each
other across the mighty expanse of “The
Known World,” which won a Pulitzer
Prize. The novel is a major work about
American slavery that grows out of what
Jones calls the “footnote” that there were
a few Black slaveholders in the antebel-
lum South. The principal “master” in the
book is Henry Townsend. Henry’s father,
a skilled woodcarver named Augustus,
purchased his own freedom and then his
wife’s and their son’s, and was dismayed
when his son grew up to purchase slaves
for himself.
“In 1855 in Manchester County, Virgin-
ia” — a fictional “postage stamp,” like
William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha,
slotted into the geography of the real
world — “there were 34 free Black fam-
ilies, with a mother and father and one
child or more, and eight of those free
families owned slaves, and all eight knew
one another’s business.” This business,
intimate and economic, is the broad sub-
ject of the book, which centers
on Henry’s death and its after-
math.
But like the stories in “Lost
in the City” and “All Aunt
Hagar’s Children,” “The
Known World” moves freely, at
times vertiginously, in time
and space, propelling charac-
ters and their descendants
suddenly into the decades
after Emancipation and invok-
ing the perspectives of invented 20th-
century scholars to illuminate Manches-
ter County’s history. We are led on jour-
neys to Louisiana, Texas, the Carolinas,
Philadelphia and Boston — and Washing-
ton too, naturally — always circling back
to the knotted destinies of the people,
white and Black, enslaved and free, who
live on and around Henry’s plantation.
Their lives are linked, and defined, by
the institution of slavery, another ab-
stract, dehumanizing system of laws and
customs that is also a network of human
choices, desires, crimes and mercies. The
essential cruelty of the system is stark
and simple — the threat and arrival of
horrific violence, the forcible separation
of families, the unending plunder of dig-
nity, labor and joy — but life within it is as
complicated as anywhere else. Like the
people we meet in Jones’s stories, every-
one in “The Known World,” however brief
our encounters with them, has a mind, a
soul and a destiny that defy caricature or
easy summary. They dwell in a terrible,
beautiful place that draws you back to it
again and again.
Edward P. Jones, who turns 70 this
year, has produced a compact body of
work that keeps growing. I hope that he
adds to it, but I also think it’s bad man-
ners for critics to demand more work
from the artists we admire. I’m content to
set aside a month each year to make my
way, a story a day, through “Lost in the
City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,”
and to make room on the calendar for
further explorations of “The Known
World.”
I’m also aware that every writer is
unique, and that it’s absurd to dream of
an Edward P. Jones for Wilmington, Del.,
or Cincinnati, or Salt Lake City. Washing-
ton, D.C., a city as neglected by our litera-
ti as it is scorned by our politicians, is
lucky to have this one.
But I do occasionally allow myself to
wish that Jones could somehow become a
government agency, something like the
Census Bureau or the I.R.S., with a reach
that could extend beyond Washington,
across the Potomac and Anacostia
Rivers, past the Virginia and Maryland
state lines, moving block by block, house
by house, in every direction, until every
lost child and forgotten grandparent is
accounted for and we see our country
again for the first time. 0
21
 Children’s Books / Graphic Novels / By Sheela Chari
Dynamic duos set out to solve mysteries for others
and end up uncovering truths about themselves.
RECENTLY MY DAUGHTER was searching
for her sketchbook when she found her
missing paintbrushes instead. Such is the
recovery of lost belongings. You’re looking
for one thing, you find something else. I’ve
stumbled onto story ideas this way. I’m so
sure I’m writing about a missing brother,
when I discover I’m actually writing about
empathy and self-acceptance. Most good
mysteries strike a graceful balance be-
tween plot and character development.
These three do just that, by inviting you to
look and look again, to uncover the stories
underneath.
SHIRLEY & JAMILA SAVE THEIR SUMMER
By Gillian Goerz
224 pp. Dial. $20.99.
(Ages 8 to 12)
ELVIN LINK, PLEASE REPORT TO THE PRIN-
CIPAL’S OFFICE
By Drew Dernavich
224 pp. Christy Ottaviano/Holt. $16.99.
(Ages 8 to 12)
THE WITCH’S HAND
The Montague Twins series, Vol. 1
By Nathan Page and Drew Shannon
352 pp. Knopf. $25.99.
(Ages 12 and up)
IN GILLIAN GOERZ’S “Shirley & Jamila Save
Their Summer,” 10-year-old basketball-
loving Jamila Waheed moves to a new
neighborhood, where she meets 10-year-
old loner Shirley Bones, who solves crimes
for kids. Shirley orchestrates a deal be-
tween her mother and Jamila’s mother:
She will accompany Jamila to the basket-
ball court every day so they can get out of
going to their respective summer camps.
Then one day, a boy named Oliver needs
Shirley’s help. Someone has stolen his pet
gecko, which he brought to the pool. The
girls investigate.
Goerz’s easy, comic style, reminiscent of
the art in Raina Telgemeier’s books, brings
her characters to life. She also thoughtfully
portrays a diverse ensemble that includes
Jamila, whose family speaks Urdu and
whose mother wears a hijab outside the
home. Dynamic action and backdrops help
to frame the mystery. It’s fun to study a
full-page crime scene: the layout of the
pool, the “doody” chocolate bar thrown in
the water, the callous lifeguards, the shady
SHEELA CHARI’S new mystery novel, “The
Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel,”
will be published in October.
22 S U N DAY , AU G U ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
12-year-old poolgoer, a lurking stranger in
a hat. Cucumber-cool Shirley breaks down
the clues, but she isn’t the only sleuth. Does
Jamila want to be friends with this prickly
know-it-all? She weighs the evidence
(Shirley is “weird, but an interesting
weird”) and concludes their friendship is
indisputably worth it. Meanwhile, Shirley
finds it easier to solve crimes with Jamila
around. Here the novel deepens as the girls
discover another surprising truth: Every-
one deserves a chance to have his or her
story heard, even the guilty. With a sly nod
to the original Holmes and Watson, Shirley
and Jamila use their wits to connect, with
each other and their community.
FRIENDSHIP ALSO DRIVES “Elvin Link,
Please Report to the Principal’s Office,” by
the New Yorker cartoonist Drew Der-
navich. Fifth-grader Elvin Link doodles —
on desks, walls and lockers. The principal
gives him an ultimatum: Stop it or face
summer school. But when a hasty student
breaks a teacher’s eyeglasses in the school
parking lot during an ice-cream truck visit,
before fleeing the scene, Elvin offers to
draw a composite sketch from the Eazy
Freezy vendor’s description of the suspect.
He does such a good job that the student is
nabbed. Unfortunately it’s Carlos, Elvin’s
best friend. Fortunately, Carlos forgives
him. Elvin soon has a bigger problem: Pe-
ter Zorber, a notorious bully who’s bent on
giving Elvin the wedgie of his life. Not only
that, but the T-shirts for Field Day go miss-
ing, and Elvin and Carlos are suspects.
From “Elvin Link, Please Report to the Princi-
pal’s Office.”
From “Shirley & Jamila Save Their Summer.”
Readers will keep turning pages to find secret society of mages, Rowan is assigned
out if Elvin will solve his compounding to initiate them.
problems and stay out of trouble. Fans of Meanwhile, the wealthy Roger Brad-
“The Strange Case of Origami Yoda” and ford, a descendant of the town’s colonial
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” will appreciate founders, unleashes an avalanche of con-
Dernavich’s hilarious doodles, sight gags servative vitriol to suppress civil rights.
and silly asides, including his renderings of His daughter, Rachel, to save herself from
Elvin’s favorite expletive: “Turdmuffins.” her mother’s murderer, invokes Hecate,
There is more text here than in the typical the goddess of witchcraft. How Rachel is
graphic novel, but the story moves quickly, linked to Pete, Al and Charlie is revealed
and the deadpan illustrations will make deftly from panel to panel. Key illustra-
you laugh out loud. The plot becomes zani- tions that require a second look are richly
er as Elvin’s twin sisters get involved. rewarding. Bookended by the Stonewall
Throughout, Elvin and Carlos play a varia- Rebellion, which spurred gay rights, and
tion of Frisbee they invented called Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, “The
flipdisc: Right before the toss, the thrower Witch’s Hand” reflects the turbulence of its
yells something desirable or disastrous, time. On the surface, it’s a spooky ghost
“so you have to make a quick decision story, but the deeper mystery is how these
whether it’s something you want to catch kids work together to rise above the terror
. . . ‘Limo full of robots that clean your of being persecuted for who they are. 0
room!’ . . . or not. ‘Poison-spitting llama!’ ”
When you finish reading, you might just
make flipdisc your new summer sport.
SPEAKING OF SUMMER, Nathan Page and
Drew Shannon’s “The Witch’s Hand” — a
gorgeously illustrated mystery that recalls
the Hardy Boys yet feels entirely fresh and
new — transports us to the summer of
1969. After their parents’ unresolved dis-
appearance, the twins Alistair and Pete,
now teenagers, were raised by a famed
professor and his wife, who also have a
teenage daughter, Charlie. Al is a brash
photographer who locks himself up in a
closet to process his photos. Sweet, tender
Pete is in a closet, too, and his emotional
coming out to his brother is one of the hall-
mark moments of the novel. Together, the
three teenagers investigate the haunts of
their sleepy beach town. But following
their discovery of a mysterious box and
their sighting of a female spirit, the profes-
sor’s protégé, Rowan, finally tips them off:
The teens have magical powers. Part of a From “The Witch’s Hand.”
Best Sellers
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COMBINED PRINT AND E-BOOK BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF JULY 26-AUGUST 1

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3 8 ON TYRANNY, by Timothy Snyder. (Tim Duggan) Twenty lessons from the 20th century
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4 5 HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi. (One World) A primer for creating a more
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2
6 2 THE ANSWER IS ..., by Alex Trebek. (Simon & Schuster) Who is the Canadian-American
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social media?

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publisher on an island off the coast of Ireland turns deadly. 7 9 BEGIN AGAIN, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown) An appraisal of the life and work of James
Baldwin and their meaning in relation to current events.
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8 6 28 SUMMERS, by Elin Hilderbrand. (Little, Brown) A relationship that started in 1993 7

between Mallory Blessing and Jake McCloud comes to light while she is on her deathbed
and his wife runs for president.
8 4 HOW TO DESTROY AMERICA IN THREE EASY STEPS, by Ben Shapiro. (Broadside) The
conservative commentator describes what he perceives as threats to American ideals.
2

9 11 THEN SHE WAS GONE, by Lisa Jewell. (Atria) Ten years after her daughter disappears, a
woman tries to get her life in order but remains haunted by unanswered questions.
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9 6 THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED, by John Bolton. (Simon & Schuster) The former
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10 9 AMERICAN DIRT, by Jeanine Cummins. (Flatiron) A bookseller flees Mexico for the United
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11

The New York Times best sellers are compiled and archived by the best-sellers-lists desk of the New York Times news department, and are separate from the editorial, culture, advertising and business sides of The New York Times Company. Rankings
reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. ONLINE: For complete lists and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers.

Editors’ Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review

CASTE: The Origins of our Discontents, by Isabel
Wilkerson. (Random House, $32.) The Pulitzer-win-
ning author advances a sweeping argument for
regarding American racial bias through the lens of
caste. Drawing analogies with the social orders of
modern India and Nazi Germany, she frames barri-
ers to equality in a provocative new light.
YOU HAD ME AT HOLA, by Alexis Daria. (Avon, paper,
$15.99.) This romantic tale of two actors who meet
cute on the set of a Latinx series — after her messy
breakup and his career setback — is a solid 7.5 on
the angst scale, and an absolutely pitch-perfect
summer escape.
THE VAPORS: A Southern Family, the New York
Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, Ameri-
ca’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, by David Hill. (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, $28.) Hill grew up in Hot Springs,
Ark., decades after its 20th-century heyday as the
boozy, freewheeling hangout of choice for gamblers,
mobsters and crooked politicians; his book recre-
ates the giddy era with a delightfully light touch and
a focus on the nightclub of the title.
KINGS COUNTY, by David Goodwillie. (Avid Reader,
$28.) Goodwillie’s novel about a group of youngish
friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, depicts its
thoughtful, appealing characters with genuine
sympathy and good-fellowship. Spanning a decade,
the story goes deep on friendship and the basic
decency of humanity.
THE BEAUTY OF LIVING: E.E. Cummings in the Great
War, by J. Alison Rosenblitt. (Norton, $35.) This biog-
raphy zeros in on the poet’s formative years, first at
Harvard, where he fell under the spell of the Euro-
pean avant-garde, and then, during World War I, in
France, where he spent time in prison, an experi-
ence that, Rosenblitt deftly shows, profoundly
affected his work.
RAISING A RARE GIRL: A Memoir, by Heather Lanier.
(Penguin Press, $27.) What happens when your baby
isn’t who you expected? Lanier writes movingly and
honestly of discovering her newborn has a genetic
disorder — and what it has been like to adore and
advocate for a child who isn’t (as she tells her
sister) what she signed up for.
TO START A WAR: How the Bush Administration
Took America Into Iraq, by Robert Draper. (Penguin
Press, $30.) Draper offers the most comprehensive
account of the Bush administration’s road to war,
underscoring that there was never any debate about
not invading Iraq.
FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER, by Rachel Bean-
land. (Simon & Schuster, $25.99.) Set in Atlantic City
in 1934, Beanland’s debut novel explores the lives of
a Jewish family struggling to conceal the drowning
of a cherished daughter for fear that her pregnant
sister will miscarry. Secrets abound — and so does
warmth.
LAKE LIFE, by David James Poissant. (Simon & Schus-
ter, $26.) This tale of a family getaway gone very
wrong novel opens with a fatal accident, setting the
tone and pace for what follows. There’s a lot of bad
behavior here, perhaps because Poissant is so good
at writing it.
The full reviews of these and other recent books
are online: nytimes.com/books

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 23

Inside the List
EL I SA B E TH E GA N
...................................................
Writer’s Block Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
says he first envisioned “Begin Again,”
now at No. 5 on the hardcover nonfiction
list, as an intellectual biography of
James Baldwin: “But then I ran into this
wall. A year went by
and I hadn’t written a
sentence.”
While on sabbatical
from Princeton Uni-
versity, where he is a
professor of African-
American studies,
‘I found my- Glaude rented an
self grappling apartment in St.
with my own Thomas, figuring: “If
complex past.’ I’m going to write a
book on Baldwin, I
need to be out of the
country. Baldwin said the best way to
think about America is not to be in
America.” Hurricane Maria interfered
with this plan, so Glaude headed to
Heidelberg, Germany. Within an hour of
his arrival, he witnessed a horrific scene
at a train station that changed the trajec-
tory of his book: Four white policemen
piled on top of a distraught Black man.
Glaude describes the incident in the
introduction to “Begin Again”: “One
officer had his knee in the man’s back;
the others twisted his arms.”
In a phone interview, Glaude says: “I
went back to my apartment and started
writing furiously. I realized what I
needed to do. I needed to work through
my own rage, my own despair, and offer
an account of this moment.”
That account — weaving biography,
literary criticism and social criticism
with a thread of memoir — was origi-
nally scheduled to come out on April 24.
Then the pandemic hit and Glaude’s
publication date was moved to Aug. 4;
after George Floyd’s murder, it changed
again, to June 30. Glaude says: “We
thought the book spoke to the moment.
It was heart-wrenching. When I was
asked to comment, I found myself reach-
ing for Baldwin.”
Glaude was an undergraduate at
Morehouse College when he first read
Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” He was
fascinated by the author’s ability to hold
onto rage and love at the same time, but,
he says, “it wasn’t until graduate school
when I started reading him seriously. I’d
been avoiding him because I knew what
he was going to do to me, how seriously
he took the dictum that an unexamined
live is not worth living.” Baldwin’s out-
spokenness helped Glaude become a
more ambitious writer: “In order for me
to be able to take a risk on the page, I
had to be honest with myself. I found
myself grappling with my own complex
past. Part of that involves confronting
the fact that my father deposited fear in
my gut from a very young age; I’ve
been trying to prove that I’m not scared
ever since. I have these clusters of
stories around that fear that I have to
write through.” 0
24 S UNDAY, AUGUST 1 6 , 2 0 2 0
PRINT | HARDCOVER BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF JULY 26-AUGUST 1
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Fiction WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Nonfiction WEEKS
ON LIST
1 1 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, by Delia Owens. (Putnam)
In a quiet town on the North Carolina coast in 1969, a young
100
1 1 TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, by Mary L. Trump. (Simon
& Schuster) The clinical psychologist gives her assessment
3
woman who survived alone in the marsh becomes a murder of events and patterns inside her family and how they
suspect. shaped President Trump.
2 4 THE VANISHING HALF, by Brit Bennett. (Riverhead) The
lives of twin sisters who run away from a Southern Black
9
2 4 HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi. (One World)
A primer for creating a more just and equitable society
22
community at age 16 diverge as one returns and the other through identifying and opposing racism.
takes on a different racial identity but their fates intertwine.
3 6 UNTAMED, by Glennon Doyle. (Dial) The activist and 21
3 1ST CASE, by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts. (Little,
Brown) After getting kicked out of M.I.T., Angela Hoot
1 public speaker describes her journey of listening to her inner
voice.
interns with the F.B.I. and tracks the murderous siblings
known as the Poet and the Engineer.
4 2 THE ANSWER IS ..., by Alex Trebek. (Simon & Schuster)
Who is the Canadian-American game show host whose
2
4 3 THE ORDER, by Daniel Silva. (Harper) The 20th book in the 3 pronunciation of the word “genre” has been shared widely on
Gabriel Allon series. social media?
5 2 NEAR DARK, by Brad Thor. (Emily Bestler/Atria) The 19th
book in the Scot Harvath series.
2
5 7 BEGIN AGAIN, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown) An appraisal
of the life and work of James Baldwin and their meaning in
5
relation to the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trump
6 5 28 SUMMERS, by Elin Hilderbrand. (Little, Brown) A
relationship that started in 1993 between Mallory Blessing
7 presidency.
and Jake McCloud comes to light while she is on her
deathbed and his wife runs for president.
6 3 HOW TO DESTROY AMERICA IN THREE EASY STEPS, by
Ben Shapiro. (Broadside) The conservative commentator
2
describes what he perceives as threats to American ideals. (†)
7 6 THE GUEST LIST, by Lucy Foley. (Morrow) A wedding 9
between a TV star and a magazine publisher on an island off
the coast of Ireland turns deadly.
7 5 THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED, by John Bolton. (Simon
& Schuster) The former national security advisor gives his
6
account of working for President Trump.
8 DEADLOCK, by Catherine Coulter. (Gallery) The 24th book 1
in the F.B.I. Thriller series. A young wife, a psychopath and
three red boxes puzzle agents Savich and Sherlock.
8 8 BREATH, by James Nestor. (Riverhead) A re-examination of
a basic biological function and a look at the science behind
7
ancient breathing practices.
9 MEXICAN GOTHIC, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. (Del Rey) In 4
1950s Mexico, a debutante travels to a distant mansion
where family secrets of a faded mining empire have been
9 9 BECOMING, by Michelle Obama. (Crown) The former first
lady describes how she balanced work, family and her
86
kept hidden. husband’s political ascent.
10 8 CAMINO WINDS, by John Grisham. (Doubleday) The line 14
10 10 EDUCATED, by Tara Westover. (Random House) The 128
between fact and fiction becomes blurred when an author of daughter of survivalists, who is kept out of school, educates
thrillers is found dead after a hurricane hits Camino Island. herself enough to leave home for university.
An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.
Paperback Row / B Y JEN N IF ER KRAU S S
HABEN: The Deafblind Woman SWIFT: New and Selected Poems, TOUGH LOVE: My Story of the
Who Conquered Harvard Law, by by David Baker. (Norton, 208 pp., Things Worth Fighting For, by
Haben Girma. (Twelve, 288 pp., $15.95.) These autobiographical Susan Rice. (Simon and Schuster,
$16.99.) In this inspiring memoir, poems are arranged in reverse 560 pp., $20.) The descendant of an
Girma recounts her Eritrean- chronological order, a choice our American slave on one side of her
American childhood, her parents’ reviewer, Eric McHenry, found family and Jamaican immigrants
“curiously affecting”: “Parents die on the other, Rice shares the trials
harrowing refugee experience, her
triumph as the first deafblind and then decline. A marriage ends, and triumphs of her career in
graduate of Harvard Law School then flourishes. A child grows public service — assistant secre-
and her career as an advocate younger. ... It’s as though the book’s tary of state, United Nations am-
fighting for people with disabilities. structure were another protest bassador, national security adviser
Along the way, she helps build a against time’s passage and the — and closes her book, according
school in Mali, develops an innova- world’s degradation.” to our reviewer, Abby D. Phillip,
tive text-to-braille communication with “prescriptions for the exces-
system, climbs an iceberg in THE BUTTERFLY GIRL, by Rene sive divisions and partisanship she
Alaska and meets with President Denfeld. (Harper Perennial, 288 pp., believes ail America.”
Obama at the White House. $16.99.) As this crime novel with a
murderer on the loose builds to THE REVISIONERS, by Margaret
what our reviewer, Ivy Pochoda, Wilkerson Sexton. (Counterpoint, 288
FIND ME, by André Aciman. (Picador,
referred to as “a propulsive de- pp., $16.95.) This novel that our
272 pp., $17.) The long-awaited
sequel to Aciman’s 2007 novel, nouement,” Naomi Cottle, the reviewer, Stephanie Powell Watts,
“Call Me by Your Name,” picks up investigator from Denfeld’s previ- called “stunning” — narrated in
the story of Elio and Oliver — ous thriller, “The Child Finder,” alternating chapters by two Black
played by Timothée Chalamet and meets Celia, a 12-year-old homeless women experiencing racism a
Armie Hammer in the Oscar- runaway whose only solace is a century apart — won the NAACP
nominated film — 15 years later. fantasy world of butterflies. Image Award.
AUDIO MONTHLY BEST SELLERS
THIS
MONTH Audio Fiction
1 THE SANDMAN, by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs.
(Audible Originals) Lord Morpheus confronts an
array of fictional and historical characters. Read by
Riz Ahmed, Kat Dennings, Taron Egerton, et al. 10
hours, 54 minutes unabridged.
2 PEACE TALKS, by Jim Butcher. (Penguin Audio)
The 16th book in the Dresden Files series. Read by
James Marsters. 12 hours, 52 minutes unabridged.
3 THE GUEST LIST, by Lucy Foley. (HarperAudio)
A wedding between a TV star and a magazine
publisher on an island off the coast of Ireland turns
deadly. Read by Jot Davies, Chloe Massey, Olivia
Dowd, Aoife McMahon, Sarah Ovens and Rich
Keeble. 9 hours, 54 minutes unabridged.
4 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, by Delia Owens.
(Penguin Audio) A young woman who survived
alone in the marsh becomes a murder suspect.
Read by Cassandra Campbell. 12 hours, 12
minutes unabridged.
5 THE VANISHING HALF, by Brit Bennett. (Penguin
Audio) The lives of twin sisters who run away from
a Southern Black community at age 16 diverge but
their fates intertwine. Read by Shayna Small. 11
hours, 34 minutes unabridged.
6 THE ORDER, by Daniel Silva. (HarperAudio) The
20th book in the Gabriel Allon series. Read by
George Guidall. 9 hours, 55 minutes unabridged.
7 THE SUMMER HOUSE, by James Patterson and
Brendan DuBois. (Hachette Audio) Jeremiah Cook,
a veteran and former N.Y.P.D. cop, investigates a
mass murder near a lake in Georgia. Read by Ari
Fliakos. 10 hours, 19 minutes unabridged.
8 28 SUMMERS, by Elin Hilderbrand. (Hachette
Audio) A relationship that started in 1993 between
Mallory Blessing and Jake McCloud comes to
light. Read by Erin Bennett. 15 hours, 26 minutes
unabridged.
9
PRETTY THINGS, by Janelle Brown. (Random
House Audio) The daughter of a con artist and an
heiress team up to pull off a big deceit. Read by
Julia Whelan, Lauren Fortgang and Hillary Huber.
16 hours, 6 minutes unabridged.
10 AMERICAN DIRT, by Jeanine Cummins. (Macmillan
Audio) A bookseller flees Mexico for the United
States with her son while pursued by the head of a
drug cartel. Read by Yareli Arizmendi. 16 hours, 54
minutes unabridged.
11 NEAR DARK, by Brad Thor. (Simon & Schuster
Audio) The 19th book in the Scot Harvath series.
Read by Armand Schultz. 11 hours, 20 minutes
unabridged.
12 THE DUTCH HOUSE, by Ann Patchett.
(HarperAudio) A sibling relationship is impacted
when the family goes from poverty to wealth and
back again over the course of many decades. Read
by Tom Hanks. 9 hours, 53 minutes unabridged.
13 THE SILENT PATIENT, by Alex Michaelides.
(Macmillan Audio) A famous painter stops
speaking after shooting her husband. Read by Jack
Hawkins and Louise Brealey. 8 hours, 43 minutes
unabridged.
14 MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION, by Jim Carrey
and Dana Vachon. (Random House Audio) A
character named Jim Carrey navigates stardom and
its excesses in a satire that borrows heavily from
the life of the celebrity Jim Carrey. Narrated by Jeff
Daniels. 7 hours, 50 minutes unabridged.
15 MEXICAN GOTHIC, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
(Random House Audio) In 1950s Mexico, a
debutante travels to a distant mansion where
family secrets of a faded mining empire have been
kept hidden. Read by Frankie Corzo. 10 hours, 39
mintues unabridged.
Audiobook rankings are composed of sales in the United States of digital and physical audio products from the previous month. Sales of titles are statistically weighted to represent
and accurately reflect all outlets proportionally nationwide. Free-trial or low-cost trial audiobook sales are not eligible for inclusion. Publisher credits for audiobooks are listed under
the audiobook publisher name. ONLINE: For more lists and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers.
SALES PERIOD OF JUNE 28-AUGUST 1
MONTHS THIS MONTHS
ON LIST MONTH Audio Nonfiction ON LIST
1
1 TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, by Mary L.
Trump. (Simon & Schuster Audio) The clinical
1
psychologist gives her assessment of events and
patterns inside her family and how they shaped
President Trump. Read by the author. 7 hours, 5
minutes unabridged.
1
2 WHITE FRAGILITY, by Robin DiAngelo. (Beacon)
Historical and cultural analyses on what causes
3
defensive moves by white people. Read by Amy
2 Landon. 6 hours, 21 minutes unabridged.
3 HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi.
(Random House Audio) A primer for creating a
4
more just and equitable society through identifying
and opposing racism. Read by the author. 10 hours,
43 minutes unabridged.
23
4 BREATH, by James Nestor. (Penguin Audio) A
re-examination of a basic biological function and
1
a look at the science behind ancient breathing
practices. Read by the author. 7 hours, 18 minutes
unabridged.
2
5 THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED, by John Bolton.
(Simon & Schuster Audio) The former national
2
Make sense of the
security advisor gives his account of the 17 months
he spent working for President Trump. Read by
news, every day, with
Robert Petkoff. 20 hours, 52 minutes unabridged. David Leonhardt.
1
6 UNTAMED, by Glennon Doyle. (Random House
Audio) The activist and public speaker describes
5
her journey of listening to her inner voice. Read by
2 the author. 8 hours, 22 minutes unabridged.
7 ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by Ron Chernow.
(Penguin Audio) A biography of the first Treasury
2
T5H8PZ0
secretary and one of the Founding Fathers of the
United States. Read by Scott Brick. 36 hours, 2
2 minutes unabridged.
8 HOW TO DESTROY AMERICA IN THREE EASY
STEPS, by Ben Shapiro. (HarperAudio) The
1
conservative commentator describes what he
perceives as threats to American history, ideals and
The Morning
1 culture. Read by the author. 6 hours, 19 minutes
unabridged.
9 BECOMING, by Michelle Obama. (Random House
Audio) The former first lady describes how she
21
balanced work, family and her husband’s political
7 ascent. Read by the author. 19 hours, 3 minutes
unabridged.
10 TALKING TO STRANGERS, by Malcolm
Gladwell. (Hachette Audio) Famous examples
11
of miscommunication serve as the backdrop to
1 explain potential conflicts. Read by the author. 8
hours, 42 minutes unabridged.
11 BORN A CRIME, by Trevor Noah. (Audible Studios)
A memoir by the host of “The Daily Show.” Read by
30
10 the author. 8 hours, 50 minutes unabridged.
12 THE NEW JIM CROW, by Michelle Alexander.
(Recorded Books) A law professor on the “war
2
on drugs” and its role in the disproportionate
incarceration of Black men. Read by Karen Chilton.
18 16 hours, 57 minutes unabridged.
13 EDUCATED, by Tara Westover. (Random House
Audio) The daughter of survivalists, who is kept out
28
of school, educates herself enough to leave home
for university. Read by Julia Whelan. 12 hours, 10
1 minutes unabridged.
14 BEGIN AGAIN, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Random
House Audio) An appraisal of the life and work of
1
James Baldwin and their meaning in relation to
current events. Read by the author. 7 hours, 44 Sign up for the newsletter
minutes unabridged.
nytimes.com/themorning
1
15 EXTREME OWNERSHIP, by Jocko Willink and Leif
Babin. (Macmillan Audio) Applying the principles of
27
Navy SEALs leadership training to any organization.
Read by the authors. 8 hours, 15 minutes
unabridged.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 25
 The Shortlist / Women in Politics / By Christina Cauterucci
THIS IS WHAT AMERICA LOOKS LIKE
My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman
By Ilhan Omar
275 pp. Dey Street. $27.99.
“I am still trying to figure out where I fit in,”
Omar writes in the prologue to her memoir.
During her childhood in Somalia, her four
years in a Kenyan refugee camp and her
adolescence in Minneapolis, Omar felt at
odds with her peers: as a tomboy, as the
child of parents from two different Somali
clans and as a teenager caught between American dat-
ing culture and family expectations of modesty. Adult-
hood brought more barriers to belonging. Somali elders
in Minnesota opposed Omar’s entry into politics, deem-
ing it an unsuitable venture for a woman. After she won
her first political campaign — “the most painful and
joyous thing I’ve ever done outside of giving birth” — a
fellow legislator mocked her hijab. “This Is What Amer-
ica Looks Like” is the origin story of a leader who, find-
ing no set path that would take a person like her to the
places she wanted to go, was forced, and free, to chart
her own.
The memoir offers breathing room for Omar, who has
been the target of racist attacks and whose history-mak-
ing tenure in Congress has been marked by disputes with
colleagues, especially over their support for Israel, in the
claustrophobic confines of Twitter threads. Her efforts to
deter further outrage are evident throughout the book,
which barely touches topics that have inflamed her crit-
ics. (She explains her criticism of Israel by quoting from a
2019 op-ed she published in The Washington Post.) But,
with unrepentant recollections of schoolyard brawls with
bullies, Omar bolsters her image as a scrapper constitu-
tionally incapable of backing down. “Fighting didn’t feel
like a choice,” she writes. “It was a part of me.”
The hardships Omar has endured in her adopted home
country, which she recounts in unsparing detail, make a
strong argument for the value of diversity in public office.
Unfamiliar with the landscape of American higher educa-
tion, she enrolled in an unaccredited college that didn’t give
her adequate financial aid. Later, she struggled to cope
with an unplanned pregnancy and her role as her family’s
sole breadwinner and caregiver. These are common experi-
ences in this country, but ones that remain unfamiliar to a
large majority of federal legislators. The Somali-American
congresswoman who fled a war zone overseas may be
more representative of the average American than her
colleagues who’ve lived here since birth.
CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI is a staff writer at Slate and host of the podcast “Outward.”
26 S U N DAY , AU GU ST 1 6 , 2 02 0
SAY IT LOUDER!
Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our
Democracy
By Tiffany D. Cross
240 pp. Amistad. $23.99.
A free press works as a pillar of democracy
only to the degree that it reflects the society
it covers. So argues Cross, a political ana-
lyst, in this lively memoir and polemic,
which traces the history of white media from
Southern newspapers that facilitated lynch-
ings in the early 20th century — precursors
to Breitbart, Cross says — to the CNN newsroom she
entered in the early 2000s, where white colleagues
bonded over cultural references she didn’t share. Cross
insists that, by ignoring Black perspectives and misrep-
resenting Black lives, the American press has never fully
served its purpose as a driver of informed civic engage-
ment. “If, as The Washington Post declares, democracy
dies in darkness, it also dies in whiteness,” she writes.
“Say It Louder!” doesn’t offer much in the way of
original reporting. Instead, Cross aggregates several
generations’ worth of media trends — under-covering
voter suppression, blaming the victims of police killings
for their own deaths — to show how the industry has
failed to earn Black Americans’ trust. Cross’s straight
talk might be hard for some news editors and pundits to
hear, but she makes clear that it’s in the country’s best
interest for them to listen: In 2016, hungry for public
voices that reflected and affirmed their lives, Black
voters were especially vulnerable to Russian social
media postings aimed at keeping them home on Election
Day.
While Cross’s sense of the media’s impact on individual
candidates may be exaggerated, her proposed solutions
are practicable and wise. Pollsters should retire the
imprecise concept of “the Black vote” with larger sample
sizes and more disaggregation of Black respondents;
journalists should spend less time parsing the “full-on
minstrel show” of Black Trump supporters, who make up
a vanishingly small proportion of Black voters. As for
politicians, Cross’s book could be a wake-up call for those
whose careers hinge on Black support — including Joe
Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nomi-
nee, who in May said Black voters “ain’t Black” if they’re
still deciding between him and Trump. The way Cross
tells it, taking Black voters for granted is the fastest way
to lose them: “Black people are not loyal to any particu-
lar political party; Black people are loyal to ourselves.”
SHE WILL RISE
Becoming a Warrior in the Battle for True Equality
By Katie Hill
304 pp. Grand Central. $28.
Hill, a former congressional representative
from California, has written her political mani-
festo as a battle plan. In this impassioned
introduction to the gender inequities of 21st-
century America, women are warriors, the
battlefield is our lives and the mission is a
policy agenda somewhat myopically aligned
with bills Hill supported during her months in Congress.
Early in “She Will Rise,” Hill grapples with the possibility
that her resignation — in response to the publication of
intimate photos of her with a campaign staffer — will
discourage other young women from entering politics. (Hill
maintains that her estranged husband leaked the photos;
he claims he was hacked.)
Despite the strides made against de jure sexism in the
past century, Hill argues, women’s lives remain hemmed in
by policies — and, in some cases, a lack thereof — devised
by men. Her solution is simple: “We should vote for wom-
en . . . *gasp* BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN.”
Her whirlwind recap of past feminist movements can be
reductive, and her liberal use of the first-person plural —
“when we are assaulted . . . our minds are already warped
to the point that we are afraid it’s our fault if a man hurts
us” — suggests a commonality of experience at odds with
contemporary feminist thought. But if Hill’s intended audi-
ence is politically disaffected young women who could be
nudged into action by a dismal cascade of data points, “She
Will Rise” makes a decent primer. Hill heads off familiar
lines of skepticism with frank explanations for why some
women need abortions later in pregnancy, why rape sur-
vivors don’t always file police reports and why women
often stay with perpetrators of domestic abuse. The last is
a struggle Hill knows well; her personal revelations
ground that chapter’s statistics in the urgency of real life.
Yet her self-reflection doesn’t extend to the scandal that
prompted her book. Hill brushes off her relationship with
the staffer as a “gray area” that can’t be explained in the
“zero-tolerance” terms of the #MeToo movement, and
insists that her husband constrained her social circles so
completely that her campaign was her only outlet for
intimacy. Her unwillingness to call her relationship with
the staffer what it was — an unambiguous ethical violation
— is all the more glaring in light of the book’s premise: that
women in office conduct themselves better than the men
who outnumber them.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
Close-Up / The Bookshelf Detective Is Back / By Gal Beckerman with Noor Qasim
Let’s gawk at famous people’s bookshelves.
Tom Hanks
On the “Today” show, July 7
1. The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson: Transcripts
of 700 hours of telephone conversations that Johnson secretly
recorded that include his dealings with the Kennedys, cursing
about Vietnam and his push to help the cause of civil rights.
2. “St. Marks Is Dead,” by Ada Calhoun: This close-up look at the
history of an idiosyncratic New York City street where both
Emma Goldman and the Beastie Boys partied is also a medita-
tion on all that changes in urban spaces and all that stays the
same.
3. “The History of Manned Space Flight,” by David Baker: A very
complete history of the early space missions — Mercury, Gemi-
ni, Apollo and onward — for the NASA geek.
Yo-Yo Ma
On Instagram, May 23
1. “The Black Count,” by Tom Reiss: The true story of General
Alex Dumas, the son of a Black slave who inspired “The Count
of Monte Cristo” and other swashbuckling tales written by his
son, Alexander Dumas.
2. “With Your Own Two Hands,” by Seymour Bernstein: A best-sell-
ing guide from the early 1980s that advertises itself on the cover
as a way to “overcome stage fright and nervousness” and “real-
ize your full potential.”
3. “Play It Again,” by Alan Rusbridger: How Rusbridger, who was
the editor of The Guardian, decided to solve his midlife crisis by
attempting to master, within a year, Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G
minor, a notoriously challenging piano composition.
GAL BECKERMAN is an editor at the Book Review. NOOR QASIM is an editing fellow at the Book Review.
PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NBC(2); CBS; MONTGOMERY COLLEGE; BROADWAY.COM
Regina King
On “Late Night With Seth Myers,” June 12
1. “Waiting to Exhale,” by Terry McMillan: The 1992 hit about the
friendship of four women in their 30s supporting one another
through the frustrations of looking for love.
2. “Tupac Shakur Legacy,” by Jamal Joseph: Curated by a family
friend, this “interactive biography” of the rapper includes
photos of Shakur’s home life and reproductions of handwritten
lyrics.
3. “Barack Like Me,” by David Alan Grier: A memoir by the co-
median best known for his work on “In Living Color” that
muses on politics and race in the age of Obama.
Patti LuPone
On “Take Me to the World:
A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration,” April 26
1. “All the Little Live Things” and “Wolf Willow,” by Wallace Steg-
ner: Sweeping novels about the joys and quirks of life out West.
2. “Unity Mitford,” by David Pryce-Jones: A biography of the Mit-
ford sister who became an unabashed fascist.
3. “My Life in Art,” by Konstantin Stanislavsky: The 1924 autobi-
ography of the great Russian actor and theater director whose
“method” came to define acting as an art for generations.
4. “Stage Left,” by Jay Williams: A history of the radical theater
movement of the 1930s, when the Depression brought left-wing
ideas to the stage.
Charlamagne tha God
On “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” June 3
1. “Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity From the Lyri-
cal Genius,” by Rakim: This writing guide from the legendary
rapper offers tips on how to get the lyrics flowing.
2. “Raw,” by Lamont “U-God” Hawkins: One of the founding mem-
bers of the Wu-Tang Clan tells the story of his rise from the
streets of Brownsville in New York City to the world’s biggest
stage.
3. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” by Malcolm X and Alex Ha-
ley: The classic about the radicalization of Malcolm Little.
4. “Civil War Battlefields,” by David T. Gilbert: Maps and archival
photos of more than 30 Civil War battlefields.
Colin Powell
On Montgomery College’s YouTube account, May 22
1. “Slave Nation,” by Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen:
On the role of slavery in the drafting of the United States Consti-
tution.
2. “Bloods,” by Wallace Terry: An oral history of 20 Black men
who were drafted to fight in Vietnam.
3. “Black Spark, White Fire,” by Richard Poe: Poe proposes that it
was Black Egyptian explorers who planted the rudiments of
Western civilization in Europe 3,000 years ago.
4. “Warriors of Color,” by Harold Ray Sayre: A look at Black sol-
diers of the 10th Cavalry who served in the military just after
the Civil War.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 27
 A collection of reviews for the
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influential movies of all time.
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