Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
Finkel, David. Thank You for Your Service. Sarah Crichton Bks: Farrar. Oct. 2013. 272p. ISBN 9780374180669. $27. POLITICAL SCIENCE/INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Head of the Washington Post’s national reporting team and both a Pulitzer Prize winner and a MacArthur Fellow, Finkel did an extraordinary job of explaining the Iraq War to us in The Good Soldiers, a [...]
Atwood, Margaret. Maddaddam. Doubleday. Sept. 2013. 416. ISBN 9780385528788. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385537834. CD/downloadable: Random Audio. DYSTOPIAN FICTION In this wrap-up to the magisterial trilogy begun with Oryx & Crake and continued with The Year of the Flood, the waterless flood has indeed descended, wiping out most of humanity. Ren and Toby have rescued poor [...]
Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. Knopf. Sept. 2013. 144p. ISBN 9780385350778. $22.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385350785. MEMOIR Not a conventional memoir—did you really expect something so mundane from the multi-award-winning author of Flaubert’s Parrot and The Sense of an Ending?—this book aims to “put together two things that have not been put together before, and the [...]
McDermott, Alice. Someone. Farrar. Sept. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9780374281090. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781429969420. CD: Macmillan Audio. LITERARY FICTION As evidenced by her seamless National Book Award winner, Charming Billy, few authors are as good as McDermott at making the ordinary extraordinary. Her new novel opens with young, bespectacled Marie meeting free-spirited Pegeen, who declares herself [...]
Ellison, Keith. My Country, ’Tis of Thee. Gallery: S. & S. Sept. 2013. 304p. ISBN 9781451666878. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781451666892. POLITICAL SCIENCE Elected U.S. Representative to Minnesota’s 5th congressional district in 2007, Ellison is the first Black Muslim in the U.S. Congress and the first African American elected to the House from Minnesota. Not a [...]
Barker, Emily Croy. The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic. Pamela Dorman: Viking. Aug. 2013. 576p. ISBN 9780670023660. $27.95. FANTASY While not supervising international coverage as executive editor of the American Lawyer, first novelist Barker has been living in another world entirely; her heroine, hapless graduate student Nora Fischer, has passed through a portal to [...]
Anderson, Scott. Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Doubleday. Aug. 2013. 592p. ISBN 9780385532921. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385532938. HISTORY T.E. Lawrence himself called the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I “a sideshow to a sideshow,” but this little divertissement eventually remapped the [...]
Chaudhuri, Amit. Calcutta: Two Years in the City. Knopf. Aug. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9780307270245. $25.95. ebk. ISBN 9780307962171. HISTORY What to read after you have finished reading Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Chaudhuri’s blend of memoir and history as he profiles magnificent, wayward Calcutta, where he lived for two years. Chaudhuri details rich and [...]
Armstrong, Kelley. Omens: A Cainsville Novel. Dutton. Aug. 2013. 416p. ISBN 9780525953043. $26.95. FANTASY In this launch of a new series from the author of the hugely popular “Otherworld” books, wealthy, 24-year-old Ivy Leaguer Olivia Taylor Jones is happily engaged when she discovers that she is adopted—and that her biological parents are serial killers imprisoned [...]
Andersen, Christopher. These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack and Jackie. Gallery: S. & S. Aug. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9781476732329. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781476732343. BIOGRAPHY Once senior editor of People magazine, Andersen has a real track record when it comes to celebrity bios; he’s written 15 New York Times best sellers, with subjects [...]
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