Is O'Brien's Writing a Fiction Or a Reality? - Fantha Tracks

Is O'Brien's Writing a Fiction Or a Reality? - Fantha Tracks


Is O'Brien's Writing a Fiction Or a Reality? - Fantha Tracks

Posted: 23 Dec 2019 11:00 AM PST

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Tim O'Brien is a famous author and Vietnam war veteran whose works have won many literary awards. O'Brien was drafted into the American army is 1968 and served as a soldier in the 23 Infantry Division, also known as America Division. Although O'Brien vehemently opposed the war, he went on to serve in the Vietnam war from 1968 to 1970, alongside the battalion that had orchestrated the My Lai massacre shortly before his arrival.

Tim O'Brien contains a unique talent for blurring the lines between fiction and reality in his literary works, often juxtaposing real events with fictional situations. He leaves his readers wondering what's true and what's not. Some of his acclaimed pieces include the famous collection of short stories The Things They Carried, Vietnam in me, and his very first novel, which he calls more of a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. 

The Things They Carried

Of all his works, The Things They Carried is by far the most famous and is often used as study material in high schools as well. If, however, you don't want to read the entire book or only want in-depth essay samples or examples, then there are several essay samples on The Things They Carried that can be found online on sites such as StudyDriver. You can also read this article if you want to have a better understanding of what O'Brien wanted to tell his audience.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien introduces a character with the same name and many of the same biographical details as himself. Leaving readers to wonder what is real and what, as he so aptly says himself, does not "exist in the world of material objects."

The protagonist of the 1990 novel, much like O'Brien himself, is Tim, a young lad who fiercely opposes the Vietnam war when he is suddenly drafted. The rest of the stories chronicle Tim's life as he enters the war as a soldier, and his life after it as he battles with the traumatizing memories of war. Two of the most exciting stories in this collection are "On the Rainy River" and "Field Trip." This is because both these chapters are widely assumed to be true. In "On the Rainy River," a young O'Brien escapes to a Canadian fishing outpost when he learns that he has been drafted into the army. Here he ponders over whether he should go back and serve in the military in a war he doesn't agree with or whether he should live the rest of his life as a draft evader. His careful play on words makes readers wonder whether evading army duty and sticking to one's internal beliefs is an act of cowardice or courage. In reality, although the real Tim O'Brien did agonize over the decision for quite some time, there was no running away to a Canadian fishing post.

The other important story in The Things They Carried is "Field Trip." In this story, the protagonist takes his 10-year-old daughter Kathleen to Vietnam to try to explain the effects of war on her. The father also wants to gain some closure from his horrifying experiences of losing a close friend and comrade during the war. The story is so well put together and touches on emotional issues with such ease that readers are usually confident the event mirrors reality, even if they have fictional elements in them.  However, readers may be surprised to find out that the entire event described in the story was fictional. You see, the real Tim O'Brien never had any children, and so the whole trip is completely made up.

In the same way, O'Brien uses many fictional instances to portray some real emotions that result from war. O'Brien talks about events such as dedications to soldiers, who turn out to be entirely fictional, and some situations that O'Brien himself was in. These stories seem to be very plausible abut are, in fact, not true. Thus, they confuse readers when it comes to determining what fact and fiction are. In the original version of the book, which is a compilation of his earlier short stories, O'Brien was quick to notify audiences at the end of his stories that what they've just been reading is actually fiction.

However, in the revised editions, O'Brien's editor Camille Hykes has carefully erased such reality checks. Both O'Brien and his editor felt that the book would be much more impactful if his "tricks" weren't exposed so promptly and carried some element of mystery. The audience, though, is divided, with many feelings that O'Brien's inserts about fact and fiction added a new and different dimension to the book, an element which is lost in the latest editions.

Tim O'Brien's Literary Accolades

  • In 1979 Tim O'Brien won the National Book Award in fiction for his novel Going After Cacciato. His collection of short stories The Things They Carried, won Book of the Century award by the New York Times and was also a Pulitzer finalist.
  • Other acclaimed novels written by Tim O'Brien include Northern Lights and Tomcat in Love.
  • Tim O'Brien's memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, the title of which is based on a military cadence, was a national bestseller.
  • The Society of American Historians awarded Tim O'Brien's novel In the Lake of the Woods with the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. This book also won the title of the best novel of 1994 by Time magazine.
  • Tim O'Brien won the Katherine Anne Porter Award in 2010 for being a distinguished author with an eminent body of work
  • In 2012 Tim O'Brien was awarded the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.
  • Tim O'Brien's final award was the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing which he received in 2013

Conclusion

Tim O'Brien is an acclaimed military writer whose work reflects his time served in the American army in the notorious 23 Infantry Division during the Vietnam war. O'Brien has won numerous awards for his work, and reading his novels explains why. What makes O'Brien's work stand apart from the rest is his uncanny ability to mix fact with fiction, reality with fantasy, leaving readers to wonder if everything they read is true or just the musings of a wounded war veteran. His 1990 collection of short stories The Things They Carried is one of the few excellent examples of a masterfully written military novel that artfully juxtaposes fact with fiction.

References

https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2017/06/20/the-textual-truth-behind-tim-obriens-the-things-they-carried/

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/the-things-they-carried/tim-obrien-biography

https://www.enotes.com/topics/tim-obrien/in-depth?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=0ceeb5761ca25d2f4b2891ae12a3e1a51019c040-1576779024-0-AZM3HYfhAQssdNTn8spv3tiZWtcsK2JRhPwq5vZWl3qR3VzemVLpQWCc_mgOxX12xvWkP3ibU30RWtKa1aHEkPZ0es8HkOQHnQFjRi95sWBIvjTHxHsCmRjGrBLJUs-04GLBODHAyovdeevq9GEusQW-sAmkp7WL9MEIyx5HGY7kDLUWLqbJNcFFZwRd6D89h5lzZoEgmfmJNj2frYkbyfMxo6tKBhid3rx6rtWCAefleWOvdvABe8c_-aRANFHYNS73Mew7flF1DG7drETp_azHcvbNzGCcPAo2mwWoGc-d2IwlKoxu_gg2QO_Fm_b2OIHnf_uU2OC2v6n2AnauB0ZUu97rV4A-fiRygSqP27Y-

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/my-lai-interview-author-tim-obrien/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O%27Brien_(author)

John Cariani Adapts His Almost, Maine Into YA Novel - Playbill.com

Posted: 23 Dec 2019 07:27 AM PST

John Cariani's YA book adaptation of his play, Almost, Maine, will be published March 31, 2020, by Feiwel & Friends, the young adult branch of Macmillan Publishing.

The play—seen Off-Broadway in 2006—follows the residents of a remote town near the border of Canada over the course of nine vignettes. During one winter night under the northern lights, the townsfolk fall in and out of love, discovering new meanings of romance. Since its 2004 premiere at the Portland Stage Company in Maine, the play has gone to to be a popular choice for high schools and regional theatres, topping the list of most-produced plays for high schoolers in 2009–2010 and 2011–2012.

READ: Tony Nominee John Cariani Speaks About the Importance of Theatre Education

Cariani earned a Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony nomination for his performance as Motel in Fiddler on the Roof. His other onstage credits include Something Rotten! and The Band's Visit. He'll play Stuart Gellman in the 2020 Broadway revival of Caroline, or Change.

Times Critics’ Top Books of 2019 - The New York Times

Posted: 05 Dec 2019 12:00 AM PST

In the literary world, it has been a year of big, bold ambition. Novelists have stretched their canvases — writing a sentence that runs for a thousand pages; charting the fate of three families in Africa across four generations. Nonfiction writers have made riveting narrative from sprawling, difficult material: The Irish Troubles, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the history of the Lakota tribe. And memoirists have confronted harrowing and profound subjects: Life in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina; decades spent in solitary confinement; psychological abuse in intimate relationships. Below, The New York Times's three daily book critics — Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai — share their thoughts about their favorites among the books they reviewed this year, each list alphabetical by author.

An annual note on methodology: The critics limit themselves in making these lists, each selecting only from those books they reviewed for The Times. For more of their thoughts about the year, including books they may not have reviewed themselves but still enjoyed, you can read their related roundtable discussion. — John Williams, Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

'NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER' By Kevin Barry (Doubleday). The Irish writer Kevin Barry's buoyant third novel is about Maurice and Charlie, former drug runners who lift from the page — they're existentialist and twinkling thugs. Throughout this short novel they linger in the dismal all-night waiting room of a ferry terminal in the Spanish port city of Algeciras. They're hoping to find Maurice's estranged adult daughter, who may be passing through on her way to (or from) Tangier. This melancholy and comic novel works because Maurice and Charlie are such vivid company on the page. They're a couple of battered and slightly sinister vaudevillians on a late-career mental walkabout. (Read the review.)

'THE YELLOW HOUSE' By Sarah M. Broom (Grove Press). This forceful, rolling and many-chambered memoir, set largely on the outer margins of New Orleans, isn't merely about Hurricane Katrina. But the storm and the way it scattered the author's large family across America give this book its grease and gravitas. Broom was the youngest of 12 children. The yellow house of the title may be this book's central character. It looked pleasant on the outside, but was in such disrepair inside that no guests were allowed in. Broom's family felt a constant sense of shame. This book moves around the world as Broom takes jobs elsewhere, including Burundi. But it always returns to Louisiana. "New Orleans is a mood," the author writes. So is this book. (Read the review.)

'TRUST EXERCISE' By Susan Choi (Henry Holt and Company). Choi's remarkable fifth novel, the winner of this year's National Book Award, is about sophomore theater students in high school, their souls in flux. It's about misplaced trust in adults, and about female friendships gone dangerously awry. In the end, it's about cruelty. Satisfyingly, it's also about revenge. At about this novel's midpoint, Choi pulls the tablecloth from under her narrative and forces you to reassess, from a different angle, all that's come before. The novel becomes a phosphorescent examination of sexual consent, especially when applied to student-teacher relationships. Late in the book there is a sense of final puzzle pieces snapping into place, of someone scooping up all the jacks before the second bounce. (Read the review.)

[ Looking for more? Here are the Book Review's 10 best books of 2019. ]

'UNDERLAND: A Deep Time Journey' By Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton & Company). Macfarlane's book recounts a series of explorations under the surface of our planet. In England, he visits caves and studies fungi; in Paris, he goes into the catacombs. He considers sinkholes in the Slovenian highlands, nuclear waste in Finland and global warming in Greenland. There's a bit of John Muir and John McPhee, patient writers and naturalists both, in Macfarlane's work. There's a bit of Geoff Dyer, of the critical wildcat, in him, too. There's the prickling sense that a library door or a manhole cover or a forest path might lead you not just to the end of a chapter but to a drugs party or a rave. (Read the review.)

'BABY, I DON'T CARE' By Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books). This persuasive and blackly funny book of poems takes its tone and subject matter from old Hollywood movies, but the intensity of the attack is all Minnis's. The speaker in "Baby, I Don't Care" is a soignée gold-digger ("Baby, why don't you give me an oil well or something?") who toys with the lunk who keeps her in diamonds. He's a side of beef into which she flicks verbal darts. "Baby, it's so sexy to think. / Why don't you try it?" she says. Across her five books of poems Minnis has marinated in the sort of feelings you don't like to admit you have. She's a bored, fierce, literate attendee at what the poet Frederick Seidel has referred to as "life's cotillion." (Read the review.)

'NORMAL PEOPLE' By Sally Rooney (Hogarth). Rooney's taut and psychologically intense second novel is about Marianne and Connell, teenagers when we first meet them, not yet flowers but small tight buds. At school, he's popular and an athlete. She is offbeat and withdrawn and friendless. "Normal People" tracks them across four years. They are both gifted students and wind up at Trinity College in Dublin. They are never quite boyfriend and girlfriend in the conventional sense. They merely break each other's hearts over and over again. There's no sawdust, no filler in Rooney's novel. Her intimate style can be reminiscent of Rachel Cusk's. There aren't dueling narrators or cat's cradles of plotlines. You buy Rooney's ticket, you take her ride. (Read the review.)

'THE OLD DRIFT' By Namwali Serpell (Hogarth). "The Old Drift" is an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia, the landlocked country in southern Africa. It closely tracks the fortunes of three families (black, white, brown) across four generations. The plot pivots gracefully from accounts of the region's early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. It pushes into the near future, proposing a world in which flocking bug-size microdrones are a) fantastically cool and b) put to chilling totalitarian purposes. Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale. It is filled with love stories, greedy sex ("my heart twerks for you," one character comments), pot smoke, comedy, inopportune menstruation, car crashes, tennis, and the scorching pleasure and pain of long hours in hair salons. (Read the review.)

'LOT: Stories' By Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books). Washington's subtle, dynamic and flexible short stories crack open a vibrant, polyglot side of Houston about which few outsiders are aware. His characters move through streets that he names so often — Richmond and Waugh, Rusk and Fairview — that they come to have talismanic power, like the street names in Springsteen songs. These stories take place amid dismal laundromats and broken-down pharmacies. There are turf wars and shootouts. Things happen near Dollar Tree stores or in Whataburger parking lots. The men and women here are extended hope only in homeopathic amounts. But there is a fair amount of joy in Washington's stories, too. An underthrob of emotion beats inside them. He's confident enough not to force the action. The stories feel loose, their cellular juices free to flow. (Read the review.)

'SOLITARY: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope' By Albert Woodfox with Leslie George (Grove Press). For a crime he did not commit, Woodfox spent more than four decades in solitary confinement at Angola, the notorious maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana: 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell. This powerful, closely observed memoir is the story of how he survived. He'd grown up poor in New Orleans's Treme neighborhood. He didn't know his father. His mother, who could not read or write, sometimes prostituted herself to keep food on the table. He turned to crime young. What life did not give him, he was determined to take. The heart of "Solitary" is Woodfox's decision to "take my pain and turn it into compassion, and not hate." He read legal books and began to win lawsuits over cruel and unusual punishment. His memoir is strewn with words from others he read while in prison — Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Frederick Douglass. He taught men to read. He organized umpteen hunger strikes. He made a difference in many men's lives. This memoir could make a difference in yours. (Read the review.)

'DOXOLOGY' By Nell Zink (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers). In terms of its author's ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, this is the novel of the year. It's a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It's bliss. "Doxology" displays two generations of an American family. Pamela and Daniel, musicians and hipsters, are semi-clueless young people who move individually to New York City in the late 1980s. They might have dropped sideways, like bookmarks, out of a Jonathan Lethem novel. Later we also follow the life of their daughter. Zink writes as if the political madness of the last four decades had been laid on for her benefit as a novelist. Like a mosquito, she vectors in on the neck of our contemporary paranoia. She has got a feral appetite for news of our species, good and ill. (Read the review.)

'DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT' By Lucy Ellmann (Biblioasis). Ellman's novel — told mostly in one 426,000-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages — seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn't. Timid, lazy readers to the front! We are locked in the mind of an Ohio woman, a mother of four with a cutting power of observation, as her attention drifts from Jared Kushner's investments in China to an earring she lost years ago, the death of her mother to the wet towels on the floor to news of ecological collapse. The book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now, toggling between tabs and terrors. (Read the review.)

'LAKOTA AMERICA: A New History of Indigenous Power' By Pekka Hamalainen (Yale University Press). Hamalainen's is the first complete account of the Lakotas, the tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse that long dominated the American interior and thwarted Western expansion with charm, shrewd diplomacy and sheer might. It is a story of America with the Lakotas as the protagonists, the first study to draw so comprehensively on their archives and a sharp critique of how the history of indigenous Americans has been told and sold. (Read the review.)

'WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval' By Saidiya Hartman (W.W. Norton & Company). Hartman's book is a rich resurrection of a forgotten history: the revolution in intimate life at the cusp of the 20th century, led by young black women, two or three generations removed from slavery. They discovered city life in New York and Philadelphia and tossed out the narrow scripts they had been given. We meet communists and chorines, anonymous women gazing into shop windows, the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells as a young woman. Hartman pushes past the social workers, psychologists and scandalized moralists standing in our way to reveal the women for the first time, individual and daring. (Read the review.)

'ANNIVERSARIES: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, Volumes 1 and 2' By Uwe Johnson. Translated by Damion Searls. (New York Review Books). Johnson's novel was first published in Germany, in four volumes between 1970 and 1983, and has now been translated into English in full, for the first time, by Damion Searls. The story takes the form of a yearlong diary by enigmatic Gesine Cresspahl, who was born in Germany the year Hitler came to power and has escaped to New York along with her young daughter. Gesine is a news obsessive; everything interests her, and the book seeks to be a comprehensive account of the '60s, commenting on media coverage of Vietnam, housing segregation in Manhattan, the Prague Spring. At nearly 1,700 pages long, it is oceanic, and it is a masterpiece. (Read the review.)

'THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING' By Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury). Levy's noirish novels have long examined the wages of traditional femininity — "the exhausted phantom," she has called it. Her latest, a brilliantly twisty story, looks at masculinity and its constraints through the character of Saul, a dandyish young scholar who travels to East Berlin in 1988 and begins to experience strange premonitions. As we begin to understand their source, and as Saul, a student of history, begins to fully understand his own, Levy explores the relationship between power, perception and self-delusion. (Read the review.)

'WHERE REASONS END' By Yiyun Li (Random House). Li's 16-year-old son killed himself in 2017, and her devastating new book imagines a dialogue between a mother and her teenager lost to suicide. The narrator searches for the language to understand her son's actions without condemnation or cliché; she wants only to keep their conversation going, she wants only to stay with him a moment more. "We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words," she writes. "Where else can we meet but in stories now?" (Read the review.)

[ Read the critics discussing more about the year in books. ]

'LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE' By Valeria Luiselli (Alfred A. Knopf). Luiselli's novel follows a narrator who travels to the southern border with her family to search for the missing undocumented daughters of a friend. The book revisits questions that have long preoccupied Luiselli — how can language be an agent of both violence and repair? — but this time, they are nested into a story with a heart-stopping climax. The novel truly becomes novel again in her hands: electric, elastic, alluring, new. And the story of the migrant, she believes, insists upon a new form: How else to tell a story that has no end? (Read the review.)

'IN THE DREAM HOUSE: A Memoir' By Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press). In a form-shattering memoir, Machado recounts her abusive relationship with another woman by borrowing from dozens of genres. Each chapter is told in a different style: road trip, romance novel, stoner comedy. She recollects the terror she experienced and the painful silence that attended it, the societal silences surrounding emotional and psychological abuse, and violence in queer relationships. Able to find only a few histories that might explain her own, she creates a library in miniature with this book, which explores a long-invisible story in every conceivable genre, a living archive of her own design. (Read the review.)

'NO VISIBLE BRUISES: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us' By Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury). Domestic violence cuts across lines of class, race and religion. A United Nations report in 2018 put it starkly: The most dangerous place for a woman is her own home. Snyder takes apart the myths that surround domestic violence, many of which she herself once believed, embedding analysis and actionable steps in deeply reported case studies. She is a virtuosic writer who brings life and fullness to each woman and each family she depicts. I read her book as if possessed, stopping for nothing, feeling the pulse beat in my brain. (Read the review.)

'WOMEN TALKING' By Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury). In 2005, Mennonite women living in a colony in Bolivia reported waking up bleeding with frayed rope around their wrists. The elders dismissed their complaints until it was discovered that men from the community had been creeping through windows at night, sedating and raping the women. Toews sets her philosophical, innovative novel over the course of two days as women gather in a hayloft and debate what to do. Forgive? Fight back? Flee? They begin to question the nature of knowledge and of community, memory and rehabilitation as they discuss how to form a new society, salvage their religion and live with their pasts. (Read the review.)

'AMERICAN CARNAGE: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump' By Tim Alberta (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers). Alberta, a political correspondent for the conservative magazine National Review before moving to Politico, brings more than a decade of reporting on the Republican Party and a real understanding of the conservative movement to his first book. This isn't just another drop in the deluge of Trump books; in fact, it isn't really a Trump book at all. Instead it's a fascinating look at a Republican Party that initially scoffed at the incursion of a philandering reality-TV star with zero political experience and now readily accommodates him. (Read the review.)

'THE UNDYING: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care' By Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Boyer's extraordinary and furious book is partly a memoir of her illness, diagnosed five years ago; she was 41 when she learned that the lump in her breast was triple-negative cancer, one of the deadliest kinds. But her story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility — or necessity — of finding common cause in individual suffering. (Read the review.)

'WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance' By Carolyn Forché (Penguin Press). In 1977, a mysterious stranger showed up on Forché's doorstep in Southern California; he introduced himself as a coffee farmer from El Salvador, and within a few days he had persuaded her to make her first trip to his country, just as it was on the verge of civil war. Until the publication of this memoir, Forché's experiences in El Salvador — seven "extended stays" between 1978 and 1980 — had mostly stayed distilled in her poetry. She alludes to the political context in this new book, but the shape of her stunning memoir hews closely to what she herself saw and heard. (Read the review.)

'BLACK RADICAL: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter' By Kerri K. Greenidge (Liveright). William Monroe Trotter, who edited the Boston-based black weekly newspaper The Guardian in the first three decades of the 20th century, shows up in the biographies of contemporaries like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as a gadfly: radical, outspoken and indefatigable. Greenidge's account of Trotter's life is ardent and mostly approving but nevertheless conveys the more vexing elements of his personality. She opens up a rich seam of inquiry that persists to this day, about the tug-of-war between reformers and radicals, and whether victories that seem purely symbolic at first can ripple out into real-world effects later on. (Read the review.)

'MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster' By Adam Higginbotham (Simon & Schuster). In his chilling book about Chernobyl, Higginbotham shows how an almost fanatical compulsion for secrecy among the Soviet Union's governing elite was part of what made the reactor explosion of 1986 not just cataclysmic but so likely in the first place. He reconstructs the disaster from the ground up, recounting the prelude to it as well as its aftermath. The result is superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying. (Read the review.)

'HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE: A History of the Greater United States' By Daniel Immerwahr (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Critics of American foreign policy have long accused the country of imperialism in a general sense — of meddling and bullying, starting wars and inciting coups — but Immerwahr wants to draw attention to actual territory, to those islands and archipelagos, like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, too often sidelined in the mainland imagination. He shows that "territorial empire" hasn't been just an aberration but an inextricable part of the country's fabric, woven throughout. To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing. (Read the review.)

'SAY NOTHING: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland' By Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday). Keefe's narrative account of the Troubles is an architectural feat, expertly constructed out of complex and contentious material, arranged and balanced just so. His sensitive and judicious book raises some unsettling, and perhaps unanswerable, questions. Does moving forward from an anguished past require some sort of revisitation and reckoning? Or are certain memories so perilous that they're better left buried and ignored? (Read the review.)

'ANTISOCIAL: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation' By Andrew Marantz (Viking). Marantz writes about "web-savvy bigots," "soft-brained conspiracists" and "mere grifters or opportunists," but this book is also about his searching attempt to understand people he describes as truly deplorable without letting his moral compass get wrecked. He himself is an essential part of this narrative, as he tries to understand how a Darwinian information environment has degraded to the point where it now selects for people who can command the most attention with the fewest scruples. This is a book that's trenchant and intelligent; wry but not glib; humane but never indulgent. (Read the review.)

'THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF BURMA: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century' By Thant Myint-U (W.W. Norton & Company). Writing about Burma, Thant Myint-U's focus is on convulsions of the last 15 years, from a seemingly unshakable military dictatorship to the beginnings of democratic rule. But examining the legacy of the country's colonial past is crucial to grasping what's happened more recently — including a brutal military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority and consequent accusations of genocide, all under the watch of the former human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi. Thant Myint-U writes clearly about such vexing subjects as ethnicity, capitalism and ecological disaster; this is a book with a humane sensibility and a delicate yet pointed touch. (Read the review.)

'THE IMPEACHERS: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation' By Brenda Wineapple (Random House). Wineapple's depiction of President Andrew Johnson is so vivid and perceptive that his standoff with Congress arrives with a doomed inevitability. He had been goading legislators with his accelerating attempts to rule by decree, daring them to "go ahead" and impeach him — which the House voted to do in 1868 by an overwhelming majority. The relevance of this riveting book is clear enough. (Read the review.)

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