10 New Books We Recommend This Week
Have you read my colleague Elisabeth Egan’s column Group Text yet? You should: Once a month she picks a book that lends itself to discussion and offers up a kind of review-slash-reading guide to help you navigate it. (That way you can feel like you’re in a book club even in lockdown, when your regular in-person book club might feel deadlier than normal.) This month Liz picked Michele Harper’s memoir “The Beauty in Breaking,” about the author’s life as an emergency room doctor, which is one of 10 new books we recommend this week: “Usually I read to escape,” Liz writes, explaining her choice. “This summer, I’m reading to learn.”
If you are too, we’ve got some other suggestions for you — from Julian Zelizer’s look back at an epochal moment in American politics to Maria Konnikova’s immersion into the world of high-stakes poker. In terms of pure escapism, there are wild new novels from David Mitchell and Jeff VanderMeer, as well as debut fiction from Kelli Jo Ford and Brian Castleberry. Finally, we also recommend a biography of Butch Cassidy, a personal history of eating disorders and — from the hosts of a popular podcast on the subject — a celebration of friendship that may feel more topical than they could have predicted when they started writing.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
CROOKED HALLELUJAH, by Kelli Jo Ford. (Grove, $26.) Ford’s debut novel follows three generations of Cherokee women in Oklahoma. In spare sentences, she summons the details of minimum-wage life in the last quarter of the 20th century: cans of Aqua Net, Ford Pintos, wood-grained contact paper on toilet lids. It’s a “more than promising first novel,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “The point of view shifts, vertiginously, from one chapter to the next, as if you are watching a heist from multiple security cameras. But ‘Crooked Hallelujah’ has a supple cohesiveness.”
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, by Julian E. Zelizer. (Penguin Press, $30.) Zelizer argues that much of what’s associated with the Republican Party under President Trump dates back to Newt Gingrich’s ascent in the late 1980s. It’s a “briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting)” book, our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Zelizer writes about all of this with aplomb, teasing out the ironies and the themes, showing that what made Gingrich exceptional wasn’t so much his talent as his timing.”
UTOPIA AVENUE, by David Mitchell. (Random House, $30.) Mitchell, the British master of formally intricate, elaborately interconnected and often fantastical novels, has long demonstrated a passion for music. That love, deployed with his usual narrative high jinks, is on full display in this story of a London rock band’s rise to fame in the Swinging Sixties. “An expert historical novel,” in the assessment of our reviewer, Daniel Mendelsohn, “it takes the form of an earnest Bildungsroman about a ragtag quartet of young Brits who briefly come together to make music and, in the process, find themselves. The choice of subject matter will come as no surprise to Mitchell’s longtime readers,” who throughout his career have had cause to “wonder when Mitchell was going to write a novel that put music front and center.”
BUTCH CASSIDY: The True Story of an American Outlaw, by Charles Leerhsen. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Made famous by Paul Newman and Hollywood, Butch Cassidy, as Leerhsen shows, was in real life a smallish cowboy of dubious morals, driven to crime by the harsh financial realities on the open range. “Leerhsen, who is the author of biographies of Ty Cobb and the harness horse Dan Patch, amply demonstrates that cowboys are in his corral,” Christopher Knowlton writes in his review. “He has taken the trouble to read the literature and track down the living descendants of the Wild Bunch in order to get the slippery details as straight as he can. Then he starts his own one-man posse in pursuit of the charismatic outlaw, visiting homesteads and following the historical trail all the way to Bolivia and Argentina.”
BIG FRIENDSHIP: How We Keep Each Other Close, by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Sow and Friedman, the hosts of the popular “Call Your Girlfriend” podcast, describe intense friendships as one of life’s foundations, neglected at our peril and, likely, our regret. Their book calls on us to stop seeing these relationships as something that we put on hold while we focus on careers, marriages or children. “With this book, Sow and Friedman remind us that laziness in tending to friendships is dangerous,” Trish Hall writes in her review, “and that regardless of the circumstance, whether geography or pandemic, friendships must be nourished, or they will wither.”
EMPTY: A Memoir, by Susan Burton. (Random House, $27.) Burton’s memoir of anorexia and binge eating is fueled by anger and honesty. This fearsomely intimate story brings perfectionism into tight focus and provides an unforgettable portrait of a different kind of addiction. “There’s quiet fury at its center — a nuclear sun that radiates not out at the world, but back at the author herself,” Claire Dederer writes in her review. “The author’s anger gives the book its considerable power, its substantial grace and even, in the end, its meaning.”
THE BIGGEST BLUFF: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova. (Penguin Press, $28.) Konnikova, a writer for The New Yorker with a Ph.D. in psychology, decided to study poker for its interplay between luck and determination. This is an account of her journey, which took her much further into the world of high-stakes gambling than she ever imagined. “Part of the book’s deliciousness is Konnikova’s journey from ‘novicedom,’ starting out in online poker cafes in Hoboken, N.J., and making it all the way to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas,” our reviewer, Michael Paterniti, writes. “Konnikova is like your smart friend who instantly contextualizes everything by sharing the latest data and sharpest insight, whom you come to quote too often to other friends and family.”
THE BEAUTY IN BREAKING: A Memoir, by Michele Harper. (Riverhead, $27.) When Harper was a teenager, she drove her brother to the hospital to get treated for a bite her father had inflicted. There, she glimpsed a world she wanted to join. “The Beauty in Breaking” is her memoir of becoming an emergency room physician — “a journey of a thousand judgment calls, including some lighter moments,” as Elisabeth Egan writes in her monthly Group Text column. “Each one leads the author to a deeper understanding of herself and the reader to a clearer view of the inequities in our country. … Just as Harper would never show up to examine a patient without her stethoscope, the reader should not open this book without a pen in hand. There are so many powerful beats you’ll want to underline.”
NINE SHINY OBJECTS, by Brian Castleberry. (Custom House, $27.99.) A reported U.F.O. sighting in 1947 inspires the characters in Castleberry’s far-reaching debut novel to search for a new way of life centered on family, belonging, and a loving and racially diverse community. In stand-alone chapters that often end in a moving and artful crescendo, the book follows nine characters connected in various ways to the sighting. “Discovering the nature of the characters’ associations and intersections across the chapters is one of the richest pleasures of the book,” Eleanor Henderson writes in her review. “Another pleasure: the detailed portraits of 20th-century American life. Each chapter is a neatly packed and well-researched time capsule.”
A PECULIAR PERIL, by Jeff VanderMeer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.99.) VanderMeer’s first sally into young adult fiction — about a teenager who discovers his grandfather’s overstuffed English country mansion is a portal to another world — is a madcap mash-up of everything from “Mary Poppins” to the Narnia books. “Readers young and old will find VanderMeer’s foray into fresh territory a welcome port of entry to a wildly imaginative universe,” Lair Hunt writes in his review. “Echoes there are aplenty, but there is no denying how exuberantly alive the whole feels.”
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