New Book of the Week (December 11, 2018)
Seattle Now and Then: The Historic Hundred
by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard
For almost forty years, and over 1,800 installments, Paul Dorpat's Seattle Now and Then series, pairing a historical city photo with a current one and a short essay, has been one of the most beloved features in the Seattle Times's Sunday magazine, and now Dorpat and photographer Jean Sherrard have chosen 100 of their favorite pairs for what will certainly be one of the definitive Seattle history books on local coffee tables. Think our city's been transformed entirely in the last five or ten years? How about the last fifty or a hundred? You'll find remarkable changes in our urban landscape, and some surprising continuities: I was drawn to a 1953 photo of pedestrians celebrating the opening of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a celebration set to be repeated at its closing next month. —Tom
New Book of the Week (November 19, 2018)
Land of Smoke
by Sara Gallardo
I've been reading these stories for months, off and on in between other books. I'm not sure I could have read them any other way: they read easily, but take some digesting, in the best way. Gallardo wrote from the '50s through the '70s and was a well-known figure in Argentina, but this is her first book translated into English, and it landed (on me at least) like stone tablets from another world. She's described as a "magical realist," because she's South American and because there are fantastic elements in her stories, but she stands apart from her apparent peers, Garcia Marquez and Borges. Some of these many stories are only a page long, some are twenty. There are monsters, suicides, priests, exiles, and many, many animals. But more than anything there is her voice: spoken with utterly confident authority, able and willing to turn a story on a dime at any moment. —Tom
Old Book of the Week (December 10, 2018)
The Dog of the South
by Charles Portis
I hardly ever truly laugh out loud when I'm reading. But I make a racket when reading Portis, especially this novel, the third of the merely five he has written in fifty years. I could describe the plot, which—barely—consists of the hero's pursuit of his runaway wife through the south, Mexico, and a long, aimless sojourn in Belize City, or I could try to explain why Portis is so damn funny (I think it's partly from his exquisite taste for human oddity but mostly from his surprisingly tender understanding of the ways human hubris and humility can operate side-by-side, in the very same human). But really the best recommendation I could give is to request that you read the opening few pages of The Dog of the South, which begin, "My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time," and go on from there. My eyes are tearing up just reading them over again. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (December 10, 2018)
Got to Get to Bear’s
by Brian Lies
Got to Get to Bear's is a sweet and simply constructed tale of friendship ("If Bear asks, you gotta go!"), cooperation, and surprise, but what makes it special are Lies's illustrations, which evoke the special, adventurous thrill of a big winter snow and make you feel like you too are along for the ride, carried through the storm by this band of friends. It's delightful. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom
Old Book of the Week (November 19, 2018)
Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History
by Glen Berger
At some point in the previous decade, news filtered back to me that Glen Berger, the most talented person I knew in college, was writing a Spider-Man musical with U2 and Julie Taymor. What a break for an unknown playwright! Well, you may have heard how that turned out: a notorious Broadway disaster that still managed to survive for over a thousand performances. If you want to hear more, Berger told all in this 2013 memoir, written amid the wreckage left by a typhoon of artistic overambition and technical catastrophe. If there were any bridges left standing after that debacle, he burns them here, but with a rueful earnestness that makes it clear he wishes he could build them all back again. My favorite Broadway book is Act One, Moss Hart's delightful tale of his charmed debut. Glen's story is, sadly, its opposite, but a fascinating page-turner that might be just as useful for a young artist to read. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (November 19, 2018)
All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah
by Emily Jenkins and Paul O. Zelinsky
When I first started to read on my own I couldn’t get enough of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family chapter books, which I recently heard called the “Jewish Little House on the Prairie.” The series follows five sisters as they grow up in New York City during the first few decades of the 20th century, recording family dramas (low-key) and traditions. So I was thrilled to see that an award-winning children’s author and illustrator had teamed up to create a picture-book introduction to these not-all-that-well-known classics. Vibrant, page-filling pictures, which often give the delicious feeling of peeking into a dollhouse, are the backdrop for the story, starring 4-year-old Gertie, who is frustrated that she’s not old enough to help make the latkes, just before finding out that she is the perfect age to light the first candle on the menorah. Any young person who enjoys the book this year will most certainly be ready to start on the series by Hanukkah-time next year. (Ages 3 to 6) —Liz
New Book of the Week (November 12, 2018)
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death
by Maggie O’Farrell
As someone who thinks about death more than is probably average or healthy, I couldn’t resist diving into Maggie O’Farrell’s unconventional memoir. Told in non-chronological order, each chapter is the story of a near-death experience and is dated and named for the body part—neck, lungs, abdomen, etc.—we see become compromised. With direct, self-aware prose, O’Farrell conveys the fragility of life without melodrama as she takes us through memories of her childhood illness and her reckless adolescence, into her present, where she’s mother to a child who has a life-threatening immunological condition. O’Farrell is a wonderful storyteller, and her writing manages to be both gorgeous and harrowing, haunting and inviting. Throughout this book, I found myself holding my breath and pressing my hand to my own bragging heart. Then, once I breathed a final sigh of relief at another near miss coming to pass, I started recommending this book to everyone. —Anika
Old Book of the Week (November 12, 2018)
All Our Yesterdays
by Natalia Ginzburg
This one sneaked up on me. It’s the story of two bourgeois families, neighbors in a Northern Italian town, beginning with the deaths of both patriarchs and following the second generation as it comes of age and World War II comes to the country. Propelled by Ginzburg’s deceptively breezy style—plain language and charming humor—I doubted her young characters were substantial enough to bear the weight of unfolding history. Also, unlike Elena Ferrante’s melodrama, Ginzburg practices the opposite, relating traumatic events calmly and deploying single images or repeated phrases freighted with all the suppressed emotion. By the time the survivors were reunited in the old neighborhood, I was oddly surprised how their accrued layers of experience had given them density and war had aged them much more than the five years that had passed. I also realized I was in the presence of one of Italy’s best, a true literary lioness. —Liz
Kids Book of the Week (November 12, 2018)
Tiger Vs. Nightmare
by Emily Tetri
What do you do if the monster under your bed turns out to be a pretty great friend? Well, if you're Tiger, you bring back a little bit of dinner for your friend and play games until bedtime, before your friend fights off your nightmares until morning. But what do you do if your friend encounters a nightmare too strong to resist? That's the story of this beginner's graphic novel, painted in washes of bright orange and scary (but not too scary) grays, and full of the spirit of friendship and shared courage. (Age 3 to 6) —Tom
New Book of the Week (November 5, 2018)
The Alehouse at the End of the World
by Stevan Allred
This is a tough one to describe, because as soon as I start I'm afraid I'll scare some of you off. Avian demigods? Fertility goddesses? An epic journey to the Isle of the Dead to recover a lost love? Sure, fantasy fans will hear me out, but the rest of you should, too. Drawing on European, Asian, and North American folk traditions, Stevan Allred plows the oldest narrative field there is, the open commons that existed before anyone thought of subdividing it with genre fences. Pure story, in other words, once-upon-a-time stuff that doesn't seem fringy at all. Turns out that a modern version of ancient myth involving love, death, and talking birds is exactly what we need in these trying times. —James
Old Book of the Week (November 5, 2018)
The Glen Rock Book of the Dead
by Marion Winik
This tiny book is made up of tiny sketches of the departed, their brevity a reminder of the brevity of all of our lives. They are known only by the nicknames Winik gives them—the Clown, the Junkie, the Queen of New Jersey—and their lives are not summarized on their own terms but by their presence, slight or central, in her own, which makes the book a kind of memoir by indirection, by an author who could easily have shared the fate of her subjects. (In time, like all of us, she will.) You might be reminded of Jim Carroll's punk-junkie anthem, "People Who Died": she shares some of his made-it-out-alive-for-now bravado, and the poignancy of a life, and a death, defined in just a few words. —Tom
Old Book of the Week (November 5, 2018)
The Red Tenda of Bologna
by John Berger
This month's Phinney by Post selection (see above) was so tiny I added a couple of our popular Penguin Modern booklets to the package, including this perfect companion, Berger's marvelous elegy for his uncle: a ne'er-do-well, a curious and thoroughly idiosyncratic man, and a traveler with a love of, among other places, the old city of Bologna. It's as beautiful and off-handedly insightful as anything I've read of Berger's. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (November 5, 2018)
Carmela Full of Wishes
by Matt de la Pena and Christian Robinson
The duo behind Last Stop at Market Street, the rare picture book weighty enough to win the Newbery Medal, returns with another story balancing melancholy and hope. It's Carmela's birthday, and she gets her dearest wish, to finally go on family errands with her older brother, only to learn from him, in the usual mean-and-sweet big-brother way, that there is another wish to be made. It's a lovely and tender story. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom
New Book of the Week (October 29, 2018)
Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas
by Tera Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross
What is Seattle? Anyone who has lived here more than a year has watched the city transform under our feet, as it has many times before. The three creators of Seattleness use their expertise in design, architecture, and geography to turn our ideas of Seattle inside-out again and again on the page. See our familiar topography of hills and inlets remapped to reveal layers of history and patterns of behavior: two of the pages I lost myself in most thoroughly were a color-coded 3D map of downtown's building booms and a stylized grid showing the density and influence of corporate and independent coffee shops. And of course I was fascinated by a chart measuring the frequency of various plot elements in Seattle-set novels. (Also, Phinney Books gets a mention!!) Open it up, and rethink your own city. —Tom
New Book of the Week (October 29, 2018)
Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany
Those of you who know Jane Mount only from her colorful illustrations of shelved and stacked book spines might be surprised—as I was—that her new book of literary "miscellany" is as miscellaneous as it is, full not only of her trademark spines but of profiles of bookstores and libraries, lists of recommended reading, and general celebrations of bookishness in all its varieties. Whatever self-congratulatory preciousness you might fear would lie within such a project is overwhelmed by the warmth and open-eyed joy she makes you feel for the physical presence of books and the places they inhabit. To say her illustrations leap off the page is not quite right; rather, they remind you how much leaping can take place on a page. —Tom
Ex-Kids Book of the Week (October 29, 2018)
Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ‘80s and ‘90s Teen Fiction
by Gabrielle Moss
Return with Gabrielle Moss to what she calls a "pastel parallel universe," the moment in teen and tween fiction between the '70s heyday of Judy Blume and the millennial rise of J.K. Rowling. In that interregnum, two other queens reigned: "foxy blonde sociopaths" named Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the heroines of dozens of Sweet Valley High romances that were less likely to be recommended by librarians than bought by the handful at Waldenbooks. Moss revisits their era with the same affectionate analysis as her publisher's previous Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction, going beyond contempt or nostalgia to do justice to an entire generation's imaginative life, as blonde and blow-dried as it might have been. (Ages 35 to 50) —Tom
New Book of the Week (October 22, 2018)
Heavy: An American Memoir
by Kiese Laymon
Heavy is a book unsatisfied with itself, by a writer unsatisfied with himself, and with us. He begins by saying he "wanted to write a lie," a happier, less messy memoir, but he couldn't. Instead, he wrote an almost unbearably intimate book, framed as a letter to his mother, who has been his champion, his protector, his abuser. Reading it, you may at first focus on the pain he reveals, but what becomes even more overwhelming is the tenderness he feels toward even his tormentors. There is plenty of theory behind Laymon's thinking about living as a black person in Mississippi and in the United States—as he says, and as his professor mother made sure, he has read everything—but you will rarely read a book so fully weighted in a body and all its messy, destructive, tender desires, or one that argues so convincingly that bodies are where thinking—and change—must begin. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (October 22, 2018)
Mix-a-Mutt
by Sara Ball
We're all getting used to seeing labradoodles and puggles, but this new oversized board book takes the canine combos a step further. Three sets of flip pages let you concoct your own new breeds: how about a dachshund-shar pei-komondor, or a greyhound-Yorkshire terrier-Dalmatian? The wittily drawn dogs add to the good humor, and the useful descriptions of breed characteristics makes it surprisingly edifying too. (2 and up) —Tom
New Book of the Week (October 15, 2018)
Man with a Seagull on His Head
by Harriet Paige
Ray Eccles is leading a modest, unassuming existence when he's abruptly struck on the head by a falling bird and finds his whole life changing course. Read Harriet Paige's new novel and you may find yourself similarly affected. The opening of Man with a Seagull on His Head tempts you with its brisk prose and summery seaside setting to pick it up as a momentary diversion, but it quickly establishes powerful links among its many characters, connecting hearts and minds across distance, time, and cultural barriers. By the end it takes them, and you, much further than you'd have ever expected. —James
New Book of the Week (October 15, 2018)
Crudo
by Olivia Laing
The reputation that Olivia Laing gathered from her books on writers and nature (To the River), writers and drinking (The Trip to Echo Spring), and writers and loneliness (The Lonely City) caused quite a bit of anticipation for this, her first novel. It's a slim one, and immersed in the moment, in the summer of 2017 in particular, a time, as she writes, of increasing cruelty, and of people warming to it. She's writing in the style of the new "autofiction"—some parts of the story seem taken from her life—but with a twist: rather than a mere "I" her main character is "Kathy," filled with the spirit of the late writer Kathy Acker. That turn brings a nicely unsettling shift in identity, and also a melancholy sort of hope, as we watch Kathy (the real Acker died in 1997) surviving into this terrible time, and also into a late discovery of love. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (October 15, 2018)
The Lost Words
by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
We had heard about this book for a while—it was wildly popular and a "book of the year" in the UK, and Macfarlane, Britain's leading nature writer, is becoming beloved in the States too. But seeing it in person is something else entirely. Macfarlane and Morris have set about reclaiming basic words of nature ("acorn," "heron") that, they noticed, have been taken out of children's dictionaries in favor of tech terms like "broadband." But the book they made is not a dictionary—it's a thing of exquisite beauty, celebrating both these simple, evocative words (with poems of Macfarlane's) and the animals and plants they represent (with Morris's glorious paintings). It's a giant book, and one that both kids and grown-ups are likely to cherish. (Age 3 and up) —Tom
Upcoming Book of the Week (October 1, 2018)
Milkman
by Anna Burns
I usually watch the Booker Prize unfold with nothing at stake. But this year I picked up Milkman: within ten pages I was in love, and when I saw it on the shortlist, I finally understood how my husband feels when his team makes the Final Four. I say “in love” because Milkman is told in a singular voice—a smart, funny middle-aged “middle sister” looking back on a few months during her eighteenth year. She has a large vocabulary (sometimes invented) and deploys it off-kilteredly (but not confoundingly). And while she eschews proper nouns, the other characters—“wee sisters,” “maybe boyfriend,” “real milkman,” etc.—are fully realized individuals too. The political situation however—also unnamed but obviously the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s—is rendered eerily generic. It could be any situation in which violent tribalism reigns and one’s ability to see beyond the accepted wisdom is the only—but risky—way to escape. I just hope I can remain philosophical if the Booker judges make a mistake and pass over Milkman. “It is better to have loved and lost...” blah, blah, blah. —Liz
New Book of the Week (October 1, 2018)
The Order of the Day
by Éric Vuillard
The Prix Goncourt is France's highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It's an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it's really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it's not a bog-standard war story about generals and infantrymen or even suffering civilians. Instead it focuses on the bureaucrats and businessmen who quietly and cravenly capitulated to a Fascist regime that in the 1930s didn't yet have a stranglehold on power. Over and over again in Vuillard's account, civility outweighs principle, as in the chilling scene where Chamberlain and Ribbentrop linger over a diplomatic dinner while Nazi forces drive unopposed across the German-Austrian border. Every detail marshaled here is devastatingly accurate, which brings us to a final point of interest: this isn't really fiction. Sure, there's creative description on every page, but at its heart, The Order of the Day is history as it was made. As fact-based as it is, it probably wouldn't be eligible for an American fiction prize, but the French don't worry about categories, just beautiful writing. In this case, I'm on their side. —James
New Book of the Week (October 1, 2018)
To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
by Terrance Hayes
Poetry is such a compressed art that for me it often requires some space, some context, in which to breathe. Terrance Hayes has taken an entire book to put the work—really a single poem, the appropriately titled "The Idea of Ancestry"—of one of his predecessors, the Black Arts-era poet Etheridge Knight, into context. The result feels like a whole ecosystem, full of air shared and recycled and revived from poet to poet, tracing not only Hayes's debt to Knight but his embeddedness in a written and lived world of friends, fellow artists, mentors. Some of my favorite books—Nicholson Baker's U and I, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage—are structured like this one: one writer reckoning with a lifelong obsession with another writer, in all its flaws and failures and excesses. I loved this book too. —Tom
New Book of the Week (September 24, 2018)
The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq
by Dunya Mikhail
The recently announced longlist for the first National Book Award for translated literature inspired me to pick up, finally, a book I'd had my eye on: this remarkable account of Iraqi women who escaped their imprisonment and sexual slavery under ISIS (or Daesh, as they are referred to there). Mikhail is an Iraqi poet and journalist, living in exile in Michigan; her link to these stories (via spotty cell-phone calls) is a man named Abdullah, a former beekeeper who has responded to the crisis by becoming a full-time hostage smuggler and negotiator. It is a story of almost unimaginable—but horribly familiar—cruelty, and also of matter-of-fact human decency and heroism. Mere decency, in this case, often feels heroic, even if, unbearably, it may not be enough. —Tom
New Paperback of the Week (September 24, 2018)
Mrs.
by Caitlin Macy
Every so often I feel like reading about rich people in New York. Not just any book—it needs to be a bit sociological (I don't want to ogle, ahem, but to analyze) and if it provides some schadenfreude, well, I won't complain. So when I heard that Caitlin Macy had written a new novel (18 years after her first) I knew it was the one. Not only is she well-attuned to pecuniary nuance, she can really tell a story! As in her earlier book, The Fundamentals of Play, which riffs on The Great Gatsby, she starts with a classic of class-consciousness: Mrs. is full of echoes of The House of Mirth—social-climbing, stock market shenanigans, addiction, blackmail. Her focus is a trio of women from different social strata but she also voices characters from a Wall Street trainee to a seven-year-old with hilarious and touching fluency, saving most of her snark for a Greek chorus of private pre-school mommies. After laughing and tearing up and thoroughly enjoying myself, I came to feel what I was least expecting: a kind of Go, Girl! compassion for Phillippa, Gwen, and Minnie. —Liz
New Paperback of the Week (September 24, 2018)
Henry David Thoreau: A Life
by Laura Dassow Walls
From the very start of his career, Thoreau has been one of the most divisive members of the American literary canon—visionary or crank? self-reliant or sponge?—in large part because he offered his own eccentric life as a model. Walls (who first discovered Walden on the shelves of Island Books on Mercer Island!) has made a beautiful and moving story of that life: wonderfully dense with the details of his world and his writing but still graceful and light on its feet. She makes clear his passionate engagement and his continued relevance to our lives, and most strikingly, reminds us of the constant importance of friendship and society to our country's best-known hermit. —Tom
New Book of the Week (September 17, 2018)
Berlin
by Jason Lutes
Over twenty years in the drawing, Berlin covers just a few crucial years in the city's history, from late 1928 to the end of the Weimar Republic in early 1933. Lutes's scope is wide—he marks the major political turning points, and his lovingly detailed cityscapes are often his most powerful panels—and his cast includes dozens of characters, some of them, including the courageous editor Carl von Ossietzky, taken from real life, but his most vivid stories are the personal ones, particularly those of the young art student Marthe Müller and the older journalist Kurt Severing. Lutes's nature, in his brilliant compositions and his clean lines (evocative equally of Tintin and Los Bros Hernandez), is optimistic, but the story he has to tell isn't, and he knows it. His panoramic, 550-page epic makes you want to turn back to the first page and put it all together again. —Tom
Old Book of the Week (September 17, 2018)
Ulverton
by Adam Thorpe
I’ve become a bit obsessed with English villages. Not that I want to live in one—it just seems the most inviting microcosm through which to read about history happening. Whether over years (Reservoir 13), decades (Akenfield), or centuries, change is absorbed at a pace gradual enough that it becomes legible. In Ulverton, Thorpe traces the topographical, architectural, agricultural, and biographical transformations of a fictional village from the time of Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher. Even more amazingly, he tells each succeeding tale in a different resident’s voice—rendering a survey of nothing less than the evolution of Homo britannicus rusticum.* Some chapters are harder to penetrate than others, but for Anglophile history buffs the effort is worth the rewards. When I spotted a clue and gleaned a meaning I felt like a veritable archeologist. —Liz
*Not official Latin nomenclature. Or even really Latin.
Kids Book of the Week
Charlotte Sometimes
by Penelope Farmer
As far as time-travel goes, Charlotte takes a minimal leap—she only goes forty years into the past. But since she is living in 1958, today’s reader goes back a nice round century. Details about the Great War, the influenza epidemic, and women’s suffrage might surprise kids these days even more than they do Charlotte, but the book’s real focus is that perennial stumper, “Who am I, really?” Is Charlotte who she feels she is, or who people thinks she is? If I had found this book when I was ten I would have adored the old-fashioned setting and pondering the logistics of alternate history. Reading it now, I am most delighted by the writing. Farmer’s style is idiosyncratic enough to be noticeable but never overwhelms the story. When she evokes a boarding school in wartime by describing the soap as “glum and parsimonious," and the carpet under her bare feet as “unfriendly," we know Charlotte has a singular self—and that it can make itself known through language. In the right ten-year-old hands, this book could create a writer, or at least a life-long book-lover. (Fun Fact: Charlotte Sometimes inspired the Cure song of the same name.) —Liz
New Book of the Week (Sept. 10, 2018)
Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs
by Bill Cunningham
Part of what made the documentary Bill Cunningham New York so fascinating was the enigma of its subject: the photographer infatuated with fashion who himself lived an ascetic and deeply private life. One of his secrets, revealed after his death in 2016, was that he had written a memoir, apparently in the '60s. Does it lift that veil of privacy? Not really, but it's fascinating nonetheless. Covering his beauty-loving youth in a dour Boston family and his gleeful, intrepid life as a '50s hat designer and '60s fashion journalist (after women stopped wearing hats), it's a further testament to his marvelous insistence on living a life in pursuit of your passion. More inspiring than introspective, the young Bill—naive but ambitious, prim but open-minded—comes across as a combination of Mr. Rogers and Andy Warhol. What a wonderful life. —Tom
Old Book of the Week (September 10, 2018)
Phinney by Post Book #45
War in the Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944
by Iris Origo
A few weeks ago I recommended Origo's diary from the first years of the war, but this book, for good reason, is the one that made her famous, in part for the understated clarity of her style, and in part from the drama of reading a record written from within a tumultuous time, during the chaos of the Allied invasion of Italy. But it may be best-loved for what Origo and her landowner husband did: made their Tuscan estate a refuge for children bombed out of Italian cities, for partisan guerrillas, and for various soldiers in transit, until the Origos themselves became temporary refugees. It’s a model of aristocratic behavior: using her privilege to protect others with a generosity that seems both savvy and instinctual. The time, and their values, seem far from our own, even if the crisis she responded to does not. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week (September 10, 2018)
Phinney by Post Kids Book #33
A Big Mooncake for Little Star
by Grace Lin
One sign of how much Lin's new picture book feels like a timeless classic is how surprising it is to turn to the book's last pages and learn that the fable she tells—of a girl whose nighttime nibbles of a big cake create the slowly waning moon—is one of her own invention. It's such a beautiful and simple tale I was sure she had borrowed it from traditional legends. Add her subtly evocative illustrations—how I love Little Star's starry pajamas!—and you have one of my favorite picture books of the year, easily. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom
New Book of the Week (August 27, 2018)
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
by David Quammen
Is there such a thing as a tree of life, or is it closer to a web? With his explanation of the branching of species, Darwin made the tree one of the central images of biology. But the last half-century of discoveries, especially the molecular-level understanding of what's known as horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material makes its way into cells in newly comprehended ways, has complicated that picture. Quammen, one of the most authoritative of science journalists, not only explains those discoveries but tells the equally non-linear story of their development, with room for both idiosyncratic legends like Carl Woese as well as the lesser-known lab-bench heroes who also made them possible. Science, it seems, can be as messy as the structures it unearths. —Tom
New Book of the Week (August 27, 2018)
French Exit
by Patrick deWitt
When I started listening to the audiobook edition of French Exit, I thought, "Oh, this narrator [the book is read by Lorna Raver] is a bit much." Well, it turned out she was just right, because French Exit itself, especially its two main characters, moneyed widow Frances Price and her coddled adult son Malcolm, is a bit much too, in the best way. DeWitt has turned his comic mind to westerns (The Sisters Brothers), Mitteleuropean fairy tales (Undermajordomo Minor), and now to what he calls a "tragedy of manners." It's an inspired choice. The novel is kept afloat, for the most part, by Frances's sour, witty remarks, and by the fun of their tiny family's receding fortunes ("moneyed," in their case, is in the past tense), and for me that was plenty. It's horribly enjoyable. —Tom
Kids Book of the Week
Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood
by James Baldwin, illustrated by Yoran Cazac
Not many kids' books come with a foreword, an introduction (with endnotes), and an afterword, but the reappearance of the only children's book by the great James Baldwin (nearly forgotten after it was published, to little notice, in 1976) does carry some weight. But the story, as soon as you begin it, claims its own rhythm, locking onto the voices of TJ, WT, and Blinky, the kids on a Harlem block, who see the adult lives around them with the knowing eyes of children (it reminded me most of Lynda Barry's Marlys comics). Is it a kids' book, or, as Baldwin described it, a "child's story for adults"? Either way, it possesses the patient subtlety of revealed character and the measured empathy for human pain of his finest stories. (Ages 8 and up) —Tom