10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times

Posted: 30 Jan 2020 09:48 AM PST

Ask any reading group: People disagree about books all the time. But it's rare for a novel to be quite as polarizing, or as controversial in the wider culture, as Jeanine Cummins's new book, "American Dirt," has turned out to be.

Essentially a narcothriller — it's about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing to the border to escape a murderous drug lord — the book is already a huge hit. Oprah Winfrey recently picked it for her book club, and it enters this week's best-seller list at No. 1. But it has also been widely condemned, on political grounds by readers who say it resorts to stereotypes and exploits current events to make a fetish out of trauma, and on aesthetic grounds by readers who say it's just badly written. (That's where The Times's critic Parul Sehgal landed in her review.) In the wake of the outcry, the book's publishers announced on Wednesday that they were canceling a planned author tour.

So why are we recommending it?

For one thing, "American Dirt" is clearly the book of the moment. It has spawned a galvanizing conversation — if not the one that Cummins might have been hoping for — and anybody who wants to follow along would probably do well to read the book at the center of the discourse. For another thing, both Lauren Groff (in the Book Review) and the editor who assigned it to her were genuinely impressed by the book's propulsive momentum and topical concerns. You might be, too — or you might hate it! Either way, you'll have something to talk about at your next book group.

If you'd rather fight about nonfiction, we can help with that too. This week we recommend a book about Donald Trump's presidency, a study of economic conditions in some of the world's most troubled environments, the history of a racist coup in Reconstruction-era North Carolina and a look back at the speculative and largely fraudulent Florida land boom of the 1920s, along with a cultural critic's take on the enduring appeal of minimalism. In fiction, we offer a collection of Zora Neale Hurston's short stories, a novel about body image among the girls at a British boarding school, and a debut novel about a Chinese physicist who immigrates to America intent on hiding her past. Finally, poetry: The venerable Robert Hass returns with his first new collection in almost a decade.

Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles

A VERY STABLE GENIUS: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. (Penguin Press, $30.) The Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig composed this book, they write, out of a desire to step out of the churning news cycle and "assess the reverberations" of Donald Trump's presidency. The result is a chronological account of the past three years in Washington, based on interviews with more than 200 sources. "They're meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump's shambolic tenure in office to date," our critic Dwight Garner writes. "It reads like a horror story, an almost comic immorality tale. It's as if the president, as patient zero, had bitten an aide and slowly, bite by bite, an entire nation had lost its wits and its compass."

THE LONGING FOR LESS: Living With Minimalism, by Kyle Chayka. (Bloomsbury, $27.) The cultural critic Kyle Chayka admits to being a minimalist, but only "by default," a consequence of living as an underpaid writer in New York. When he began writing "The Longing for Less," he was put off by how minimalism had become commodified — a smug cure-all that countered late-capitalist malaise with self-help books by Marie Kondo and seasonal pilgrimages to The Container Store. "But those two kinds of minimalism — enforced austerity and sleek lifestyle branding — don't quite convey the enormousness of the subject Chayka explores in this slender book," our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. "Delving into art, architecture, music and philosophy, he wants to learn why the idea of 'less is more' keeps resurfacing."

WILMINGTON'S LIE: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, by David Zucchino. (Atlantic Monthly, $28.) This account of the violent overthrow of a multiracial government in a North Carolina city at the end of the 19th century recovers a forgotten episode in American history that is both deeply disturbing and terribly sad. "With economy and a cinematic touch, Zucchino recounts the brutal assault on black Wilmington," Eddie S. Glaude Jr. writes in his review. "A town that once boasted the largest percentage of black residents of any large Southern city found itself in the midst of a systematic purge. Successful black men were targeted for banishment from the city, while black workers left all their possessions behind as they rushed to the swamps for safety. Over 60 people died. No one seemed to care."

EXTREME ECONOMIES: What Life at the World's Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future, by Richard Davies. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Davies, a British economist and journalist, toured nine places where humans live in extremis, including Aceh province after the 2004 tsunami, a Jordan refugee camp and a Louisiana prison — all of which, he argues, hold valuable lessons for the future. Matthew Yglesias reviews the book, favorably: "All nine studies are engagingly written and genuinely interesting, each a dive into a corner of the world you don't hear much about that conveys, briefly and clearly, a sense of how this far-off place works," Yglesias writes. "The book is simultaneously entertaining, informative and balanced."

OLIGARCHY, by Scarlett Thomas. (Counterpoint, $26.) The privileged teenage girls in this dark comedy, attending a dysfunctional, third-string boarding school in the countryside north of London, get caught up in a mass-psychogenic, contagious version of anorexia nervosa. "Thomas's humor has a sharp, rhythmic perfection," Lydia Millet writes in her review. "Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic without sinking into the tedium of real-life conversation." Millet calls the novel "a study in obsessiveness" and adds that "intriguing, fluid and frequently funny interior monologues are what Thomas does best."

LITTLE GODS, by Meng Jin. (Custom House, $27.99.) At the heart of this ambitious debut is a brilliant but difficult Chinese physicist bent on erasing her past, and the daughter trying to uncover the truth after her mother's death. Gish Jen, reviewing the book, praises the protagonist's "larger-than-life talent, drive and perversity. In her intelligence, vulnerability, volatility, desperation, narcissism and self-destructiveness, Su Lan — despite her voicelessness — is a compellingly complex protagonist, portrayed with exquisite irony. … 'Little Gods' expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past."

BUBBLE IN THE SUN: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought On the Great Depression, by Christopher Knowlton. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The story of the 1920s real estate bubble in Florida has been told before, but Knowlton brings to it a vivid, spirited style and a colorful cast of schemers who made quick fortunes and lost them just as quickly. "His characters are a writer's dream," Daniel Okrent writes in his review. "At one point, as national magazines began to expose the worst of the fraudulent real estate rackets, the industry fought back with an event called 'The Truth About Florida,' which was exactly the opposite. The luminaries who traveled to New York to make the case that Florida's real estate market wasn't speculative at all included its governor, its leading newspaper publishers and a phalanx of at-risk developers and overextended bankers — 'the very men,' Knowlton writes, 'who were most culpable in creating the speculative boom in the first place, a boom that they now insisted didn't exist.'"

SUMMER SNOW: New Poems, by Robert Hass. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Rife with elegies and far-reaching digressions, Hass's first gathering of new poems since 2010 is a book that looks meaningfully back on the long life it took to write it. "Over almost 200 pages of new poems, Hass checks in with himself and his readers, as though he's providing a public update on his private thoughts in sequences of linked poems," Craig Morgan Teicher writes in his review. "Some may find that Hass has grown too comfy in his effusive style and his old lefty politics, but to me it all sounds like mastery, like singular virtuosity attained on a very popular instrument — common American speech."

AMERICAN DIRT, by Jeanine Cummins. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Cummins plunges readers into the Mexican migrant experience in this dazzling and deeply empathetic page-turner, which follows a mother and son fleeing the cartel assassins who have targeted their family. "The narrative is so swift, I don't think I could have stopped reading," Lauren Groff writes in her review. "The book's simple language immerses the reader immediately and breathlessly in the terror and difficulty of Lydia and Luca's flight. The uncomplicated moral universe allows us to read it as a thriller with real-life stakes. The novel's polemical architecture gives a single very forceful and efficient drive to the narrative. And the greatest animating spirit of the novel is the love between Lydia and Luca: It shines its blazing light on all the desperate migrants and feels true and lived."

HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK: Stories From the Harlem Renaissance, by Zora Neale Hurston. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $25.99.) A collection of 21 stories that span the career of Zora Neale Hurston, including eight that show the effects of the Great Migration north. "Against the backdrop of Harlem Renaissance bigwigs calling for positive depictions of high-achieving Negroes, Hurston unpacked the lives of everyday black people doing everyday things," Jabari Asim writes in his review. "Add her matchless powers of observation, exemplary fidelity to idiomatic speech and irresistible engagement with folklore, and the outcome is a collection of value to more than Hurston completists. Any addition to her awe-inspiring oeuvre should be met with open arms."

Captain Comics: An amazing year ahead for Wonder Woman - telegraphherald.com

Posted: 29 Jan 2020 10:30 PM PST

With "Wonder Woman 1984" arriving June 5, the Amazing Amazon should have a good year. Heck, she's already having a really impressive month.

January saw the release of three important books starring Hippolyta's favorite daughter. That's really unusual for Wonder Woman. While technically part of DC Comics' "trinity" of important and long-running characters, it's Superman and Batman who have traditionally grabbed the headlines for the past 70-plus years.

But not in "Wonder January," a term I just made up. Two graphic novels arrived on Jan. 7, "Wonder Woman: Warbringer" and "Diana: Princess of the Amazons." The 750th issue of "Wonder Woman" shipped Jan. 22, an extra-large issue with multiple stories, variant covers, pin-ups and more.

Let's start with arguably the best, "Wonder Woman: Warbringer" (DC Comics, $16.99) Given Diana's original assignment — to bring peace to "man's world" — issues of war and peace always have been part of her portfolio. But "Warbringer" brings a new slant not only to that mission, but also to world history and, surprisingly, Amazon history as well.

"Warbringer" is written by Louise Simonson, a familiar name to comics fans for epic runs on "Power Pack," "New Mutants" and many more. Her presence guarantees a solid story and action/adventure brio, which she delivers.

Compounding the story's cred is that it started out as a prose novel by Leigh Bardugo. If that name is familiar, it's because Bardugo is the author of the Grishaverse series of novels and short stories, which has been optioned for a prestige TV show on Netflix (possibly appearing this year).

Fantasy is her meat and potatoes, so Wonder Woman — a princess of a hidden island populated by Amazons, mythological creatures and Greco-Roman gods — falls squarely in her wheelhouse.

Neither of these two women have lengthy resumes in young-adult fiction, which is what "Warbringer" is supposed to be. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that, in addition to being a rich and cohesive story, it avoids the usual coy crushes, "Dear Diary" entries and high school high jinks of that genre for something that virtually all ages can enjoy.

And yes, there probably are life lessons buried in "Warbringer," but they are not beaten into our foreheads, nor even obvious.

Instead, we meet a teen Diana who is desperate to prove herself to her fellow Amazons, but nevertheless sacrifices her personal goals in an impulsive act to save someone else. In a scene that mirrors but doesn't duplicate her later rescue of Steve Trevor, young Diana pulls a teenage girl named Alia Keralis out of a shipwreck, which could get the young Amazon exiled.

Only later do both discover that Alia is a descendant of Helen of Troy, whose power, we learn, was not in her beauty, but in her blood. She was a Haptranda, the "hand of war," whose very existence drives people to conflict, and so is Alia. Throughout history, the Haptranda have been the catalyst for ever catastrophic war.

And if Alia lives, the final conflict will begin.

The artwork, by Kit Seaton, is in the quasi-manga style so popular today. It's not my favorite, but these kids today love it. Plus, Seaton's work is crisp and clear, and her storytelling choices insightful.

Meanwhile, I promised an Amazon rewrite, and it is this: "Warbringer" establishes that Amazons are created from ordinary, mortal women who die with a prayer on their lips, whereupon their spirits are snatched up by those to whom they pray and re-created from clay on Themyscira as Amazons.

There have been a number of origins for the Amazons before, most of which are unpalatable for one reason or another, or simply don't explain where new Amazons come from. This one is the most compelling so far.

For one thing, it means that the first origin of Wonder Woman — where she is made from clay and given life by the gods — doesn't owe quite so much to "Pygmalion," as it is a commonplace on Themyscira. Secondly it amplifies Diana's isolation on the island, not only as the only child in a society of immortal adults, but as the only person who hasn't died to get there, and therefore hasn't earned her passage.

It's a fascinating premise, and I hope DC Comics picks up on it, at least in part.

And when I said "first origin of Wonder Woman" in the previous paragraph, it's a reference to the fact that Diana has had a bunch of origins, the latest of which dispenses with the clay statue bit altogether. But "Warbringer" ignores that, which is true to current comics canon, in that Wonder Woman doesn't discover her true parentage (she's an illegitimate daughter of Zeus) until she's an adult.

And speaking of rewrites, "Wonder Woman" #750 ($9.99) dips a toe into that pond as well.

First, let's address the numbering, which is likely baloney. DC Comics says it's the 750th issue of the book, and it could be — depending on how you count. Because there are options. For one thing, the Amazing Amazon began her print career in a book called "Sensation Comics," only to get an eponymous title later, and that title has been canceled and relaunched at No. 1 multiple times.

And, through the decades, there have been a handful of miniseries and one-shots with some variation of "Wonder Woman" in the title, which might or might not count.

Meanwhile, the publisher went all out to make this anniversary issue worthy of the name. Speaking of numbers, I count 96 pages, nine separate stories, 10 variant covers, six pin-ups and six major Wonder Woman foes (Cheetah, Aries, Circe, a hydra, Silver Swan and the Nazis).

Not all of the stories have a villain (one just introduces a new Wonder Girl, although she's not called that), and not all of them feature "our" Wonder Woman (one takes place on a parallel world, where all the superheroes are female, collectively called "Bombshells").

Each story has a different creative team, and while not all are to my taste, that's the fun of a buffet.

Oh, and the rewrite? The last story, "Brave New World," is set in 1939, and purports to be Diana's first appearance in "man's world," in which she saves FDR from an assassination attempt.

The conceit of this story is that it establishes that this is the first appearance of any superhero, supplanting all the other superheroes in DC's stable who appeared before the Amazing Amazon, who didn't come along until "All-Star Comics" #8 in late 1941.

One of those supplanted characters is Superman, who appeared in the real world in 1938, and is usually assigned the role of "first superhero" in DC's cosmology.

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10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times

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