Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
Kimberling, Brian. Snapper. Pantheon. Apr. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9780307908056. $24.95; eISBN 9780307908063. LITERARY FICTION When a publicist tells me that a book is punch-in-the-gut affecting and that she wants to scream it from the rooftops, I do sit up and listen. Now I’m a convert. The topic might seem improbable—Nathan Lochmueller is a bird researcher [...]
Aldrich, Alexandra. The Astor Orphan: A Memoir. Ecco: HarperCollins. Apr. 2013. 256p. ISBN 9780062207937. $24.99; eISBN 9780062207968. lrg prnt. MEMOIR The name Astor conjures up the glorious Gilded Age, but by the time Aldrich came along, the Astors were a pretty tarnished bunch. Aldrich lived with her family in the servants’ quarters of Rokeby, the [...]
A National Book Award nominee on the Iron Curtain, the fourth volume of Bindman and Gates’s series on blacks in Western art, and Lattin’s compelling multimemoir
Bagli, Charles V. Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made. Dutton. Apr. 2013. 416p. ISBN 9780525952657. $27.95. BUSINESS/REAL ESTATE In 2006, real estate behemoth Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, bought Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class housing complex on New York’s [...]
Alter, Jonathan. Untitled on Obama. S. & S. Mar. 213. 448p. ISBN 9781451646078. $30; eISBN 9781451646108. CURRENT EVENTS No one knows how Alter’s book will end, as it will be essentially the story of how President Obama won or lost his bid for a second term. Author of the best-selling The Promise: President Obama, Year [...]
Reviews of Brian Leaf’s Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi and Benjamin Lorr’s Hell-Bent.
Every outfit tells a story. These stories tell of outfits.
Reviews of Joanna Brooks’s The Book of Mormon Girl and J. Spencer Fluhman’s A Peculiar People.
Hamid, Mohsin. How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). Mar. 2013. 240p. ISBN 9781594487293. $26.95. LITERARY FICTION The title could come from one of those get-rich-quick books that the young and ambitious eat up, and in fact Hamid imaginatively uses that genre’s format to shape his narrative. But this is [...]
Armitage, Simon. Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey. Liveright: Norton. Mar. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9780871404169. $24.95. MEMOIR A multi-award-winning British poet (he’s even a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was named Millennium Poet, writing a 1000-line poem), Armitage is a superb storyteller in all forms. He’s written novels, an opera libretto, and [...]
LJ Reviews Social Club