Editors’ Choice Are you finding it tough to read right now? Week in and week out, the authors who answer our By the Book questions tell us that their ideal reading experience involves nesting in place with all outside obligations erased — a pretty good description of where the coronavirus pandemic has obligingly left us, if you can tune out the crippling anxiety and the very real, very scary implications for our health and our economy and the fabric of our society. It turns out that peace of mind is as important for reading as time and a comfortable chair. Who knew?
Still, try. Because it’s also the case that books have the almost magical ability to bestow their own peace of mind, by distilling our concentration and making the outside world fall away. (That’s true even for the books we argue with, as our critic Parul Sehgal noted in a recent review. ) They entertain us, and educate us, and widen our perspective: happy qualities any time, but absolutely essential at the moment.
This week we recommend novels about the Plymouth Colony and post-9/11 New York and an emergency room doctor with a missing boyfriend. In nonfiction, you might like Barry Sonnenfeld’s Hollywood memoir, or Alexander Norman’s biography of the Dalai Lama, or Sierra Crane Murdoch’s account of fracking and murder on an Indian reservation in North Dakota. There are a couple of books relating to World War II — one about Hitler and one about Churchill — as well as an argument against the Electoral College, Katie Roiphe’s personal look at gender and power dynamics, and a loving look back at the lost world of Jewish dairy restaurants. Try any of those, and I’ll see you next week.
Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, BooksTwitter: @GregoryCowles THE DAIRY RESTAURANT, by Ben Katchor. (Nextbook/Schocken, $29. 95. ) The writer and illustrator Ben Katchor has produced a study of, and love song to, Jewish dairy restaurants, which began to flourish in New York City and elsewhere in the late 1800s; a century later, nearly all were defunct.
It’s an “obsessive, melancholy and hungry-making” book, our critic Dwight Garner writes. “This is an encyclopedic book, history as told through old newspapers and telephone books and scraps of detail found in letters and memoirs. ” HITLER’S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche. (Basic Books, $32.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
) The historian Peter Fritzsche shows how Hitler and the National Socialists wasted little time after he was appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, transforming Germany into a place unrecognizable from the republic it had been just a few months before. “There’s something particularly clarifying about the hundred-days framing, especially as it’s presented in this elegant and sobering book, which shows how an unimaginable political transformation can happen astonishingly quickly,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. THE RED LOTUS, by Chris Bohjalian.
(Doubleday, $27. 95. ) In Chris Bohjalian’s new novel, a young man disappears and his girlfriend, an emergency room doctor, falls into a new world of uncertainty and danger when she tries to figure out what happened. “Bohjalian strikes a fine balance between disclosure and secrecy” in deciding what to reveal and when, our reviewer Sarah Lyall writes.
And “as suspenseful as it is, ‘The Red Lotus’ is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents. ” BEHELD, by TaraShea Nesbit. (Bloomsbury, $26. ) In this plain-spoken and lovingly detailed historical novel, the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony is refracted through the prism of female characters.
Despite the book’s quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone. “At the novel’s core,” Samantha Harvey writes in her review, lies “a critique of Englishness itself. There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly. On the one hand, the English pilgrims regard themselves as epitomizing civility, manners and thus superiority.
On the other hand, they deploy barbaric cruelty in order to defend that superiority. ” THE EXHIBITION OF PERSEPHONE Q, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.
“) This debut novel centers on a young pregnant newlywed in post-9/11 New York City, who unexpectedly finds herself the subject of an ex-boyfriend’s photography exhibit.”
Implicitly, the book poses the question: How do affections alter appearances? “Stevens’s writing proves that both time and technology are best understood in retrospect, sequences made logical long after each moment has passed,” Haley Mlotek writes in her review. “The novel has a romantic slowness, unfurling gracefully, little by little, to show how quickly the present gives way to the future, or concedes to the past. ” THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson.
(Crown, $32. ) Larson’s account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during the 12 turbulent months from May 1940 to May 1941, when Britain stood alone and on the brink of defeat, is fresh, fast and deeply moving. “Through the remarkably skillful use of intimate diaries as well as public documents, some newly released, Larson has transformed the well-known record,” Candice Millard writes in her review. “The Blitz — its tense, terror-filled days, the horrors it inflicted — is palpable throughout this book, often by way of the kind of wrenching, carefully chosen facts that not only bring a story to life but also make a reader stop, look up and say to whoever happens to be nearby, ‘Listen to this.
’” LET THE PEOPLE PICK THE PRESIDENT: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, by Jesse Wegman. (St. Martin’s, $27. 99.
) The Electoral College has distorted American politics throughout the country’s history and, as Wegman shows, if it didn’t already exist, no one would think to invent it. “People have been arguing against the Electoral College from the beginning,” Josh Chafetz writes in his review. “But no one, at least in recent years, has laid out the case as comprehensively and as readably as Jesse Wegman does. ” YELLOW BIRD: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, by Sierra Crane Murdoch.
(Random House, $28. ) This painstakingly reported and beautifully written book, Murdoch’s first, examines the effects of fracking on a North Dakota reservation through the eyes of its title subject: a remarkable Native American woman who, determined to solve a murder related to the oil boom, exposes the greed and corruption that fueled it. “Murdoch resists easy portraiture (Indians as pitiful or pathetic or damaged) and blind compassion (Indians as noble sufferers or keepers of special knowledge),” David Treuer writes in his review. “Rather, she finds a way to balance her journalistic curiosity with respect for these complicated people.
And Yellow Bird, as a person and as a guide through the mystery surrounding Clarke, is complicated. A fanatic, an addict, sure, but also brilliant, dogged, brave, funny, prickly, radically informed and just as radically nonjudgmental. ” BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker, by Barry Sonnenfeld. (Hachette, $29.
) Sonnenfeld’s moment at the top of Hollywood’s food chain may have been short-lived, but the director of “Men in Black” and “The Addams Family” is an ideal tour guide through the vagaries and hypocrisies of the entertainment industry. “This is also a book about how Sonnenfeld became the artist that he is and the people he blames — namely, his parents — for how he turned out,” Dave Itzkoff writes in his review, noting that the memoir recounts moments of childhood sexual abuse and early work as a cameraman on porn films. But “it’s when Sonnenfeld turns to his career in legitimate cinema that the book really comes alive. As he perceptively observes, the same hang-ups that have inhibited him elsewhere in life are likely what drove him to become a great director of photography.
” THE POWER NOTEBOOKS, by Katie Roiphe. (Free Press, $27. ) Best known for her polemical stances on feminist issues, Roiphe here turns her gaze on her romantic relationships, noting moments when she has ceded power to men or even endured their abuse. “Roiphe’s larger goal here is to investigate the lived reality of her romantic dynamics, not to get on a soap box and opine,” Lauren Elkin writes in her review.
“The result is a beautifully written and thoughtful book. ” THE DALAI LAMA: An Extraordinary Life, by Alexander Norman. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30. ) A longtime associate of the Dalai Lama provides the most detailed biography to date, exploring the 84-year-old’s life on the world stage and his life inside the world of Tibetan Buddhism.
Norman “reveals the Dalai Lama to be a sophisticated thinker and consummate scholar, one whose feet remain firmly on the ground, a trait often obscured by his broken English,” Donald S. Lopez writes in his review. “In keeping with a religion so obsessed with prophecy, the book, written in an engaging prose, ends with an insightful prediction of the legacy of the 14th Dalai Lama, and a cleareyed assessment of the challenges that the 15th will face.
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