20 ADAM MAIDA ADAM ON PAGE ON avid Means on on Means avid ONTINUED D C ur next pick is the novel novel the is pick next ur O igratory birds, difficult fruit and and fruit difficult birds, igratory M aruki Murakami’s new stories new Murakami’s aruki ROUP TEXT ROUP LUS he dawn of constitutional politics constitutional of dawn he What Comes After,’ by JoAnne Tompkins JoAnne by After,’ Comes What ALL FICTION IS MAGIC’ MAGIC’ IS FICTION ALL H G ‘ P t ‘ This is one of many infuriating passages in This infuriating passages is one of many opi- died from have Some 500,000 Americans ing with his high school prospects. “Lives of chil- “Lives ing with his high school prospects. appar- she railed, being destroyed,” are dren entitled and tone-deaf she how ently unaware sounded. The of Pain: “Empire Keefe’s Radden Patrick sim- Put History of the Sackler Dynasty.” Secret blood boil. this book will your make ply, OF PAIN OF y Patrick Radden Keefe y Patrick ackler Dynasty MPIRE he Secret History of the E T S B Doubleday. 535 pp. Illustrated. $32.50. Jacqueline Sackler, who married into the clan, Sackler, Jacqueline tried to get Oliver to kill the segment before it to killtried to get Oliver the segment before she sent an angry work, When that didn’t aired. in the family lamenting that the email to others and complaining favorite her son’s was show interfer- was media attention that the unwanted uments that had recently become public. Under become uments that had recently expected the might have you the circumstances, But that to feel chastened and lie low. Sacklers their callous- be badly underestimating would ness.

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25, 2021 APRIL 2019, APRIL

N K I a segment of his satirical newscast on HBO to newscast a segment of his satirical that makes of the company owners the Sacklers, anger painkiller OxyContin. Public the powerful opioid the family for seeding America’s toward building, added to the epidemic was and Oliver by lampooning state- that evening opprobrium in court doc- ments made by one of its members By John Carreyrou APRIL *4PB1* 2 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 Book Review APRIL 25, 2021 “IN A LEAGUE WITH GRAHAMGREENE’S THE END OF THE AFFAIR …John Boyne is very good at portraying the destructive power of a painfully kept secret... I’m good at guessing endings, but not this one.” —JOHNIRVING, author of A Prayer for Owen Meany Fiction 18 THE AGE OF DECADENCE A History of Britain, 1880 to 1914 9 Crime By Simon Heffer Reviewed by Sarah Weinman Reviewed by Richard Aldous From the 19 BELOVED BEASTS 10 GOOD COMPANY New York Times By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction Reviewed by Meghan Daum By Michelle Nijhuis Bestselling Author of Reviewed by Ernest Freeberg THEHEART’S 12 Group Text INVISIBLEFURIES “What Comes After,” by JoAnne Tompkins 21 THE GUN, THE SHIP, AND THE PEN Reviewed by Elisabeth Egan Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World 13 GOLD DIGGERS By Linda Colley By Sanjena Sathian Reviewed by Sheri Berman Reviewed by Lauren Christensen 26 The Shortlist 14 FIRST PERSON SINGULAR Black History Stories Reviewed by Jill Watts By Haruki Murakami Reviewed by David Means Children’s Books 16 EARLY MORNING RISER By Katherine Heiny 22 THE ANTI-BOOK Reviewed by Connie Schultz By Raphael Simon Reviewed by Max Brallier 16 THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES By Willy Vlautin 22 HOUDINI AND ME Reviewed by Alanna Bennett By Dan Gutman Reviewed by Gregory Cowles 17 THE RECENT EAST By Thomas Grattan Reviewed by Patrick Nathan Features Nonfiction 7 By the Book Chris Bohjalian “A moving and deeply felt tribute 1 EMPIRE OF PAIN 27 Chapters The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty 125 Years of the Book Review to a love that dared to speak its By Patrick Radden Keefe By Tina Jordan Reviewed by John Carreyrou name once—or maybe twice—and then forever held its tongue. 8 GIRLHOOD We suffer in silence, we love in silence, and we regret Essays Etc. and learn to live our unlived lives in silence as well.” By Melissa Febos Reviewed by Betsy Bonner 4 New & Noteworthy —ANDRÉACIMAN, author of Call Me by Your Name 6 Letters 11 A WORLD ON THE WING The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds 23 Best-Seller Lists “A wonderful, sad, tender book By Scott Weidensaul 23 Editors’ Choice Reviewed by Christian Cooper [that] is going to have an enormous 24 Inside the List impact on everyone who reads it.” 13 THE BOOK OF DIFFICULT FRUIT 24 Paperback Row Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly —COLMTÓIBÍN, author of Brooklyn (With Recipes) By Kate Lebo Reviewed by Alex Beggs OTHERPRESS otherpress.com

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 3 EXPERIENCETHEWORLD New & Noteworthy / Poetry

INDEX OF WOMEN, by Amy Gerstler. (Penguin LIKEANTHONYBOURDAIN Poets, paper, $20.) Gerstler’s witty collection channels various characters — the tooth fairy, a lost doll — to celebrate “shrewd, / ingen- ious, difficult women, prodigal daugh- ters / and wisecracking wives.”

THE PERSEVERANCE, by Raymond Antrobus. (Tin House, paper, $16.95.) Intimate and searching, the poems in this lively debut probe the author’s identity as a deaf Jamaican British man; sign language illustrations ap- pear sporadically, and one poem is a scornful riposte to Ted Hughes’s “Deaf School.”

CLEAVE: POEMS, by Tiana Nobile. (Hub City, paper, $16.) Harry Harlow’s famous study, raising baby monkeys with wire or terrycloth “mothers,” runs as a motif through this col- lection about the poet’s experience as a Kore- an-American adoptee. “Call me Rhesus,” she writes, “monkey without a cloth.”

OH YOU ROBOT SAINTS!, by Rebecca Morgan Frank. (Carnegie Mellon University, paper, $15.95.) As the title suggests, Frank’s fourth book centers on the mechanical and the di- vine, especially on human efforts to bridge the gap, to create “a hawk from a handsaw.”

SKIN: POEMS, by Robert VanderMolen. (Milk- weed, paper, $16.) “How difficult to piece one observation / Into the next without hyperbole or minor lie,” VanderMolen writes early in this ANOPINIONATED, book, his 12th, a testament to watchfulness. ILLUSTRATEDGUIDETO ANTHONYBOURDAIN’S FAVORITEPLACES WHAT WE’RE READING

ESSENTIALADVICEON I’d never heard of Myriam Gurba before she went viral last year for a series of sulfurous tweets WHATTOEAT,WHERETOSTAY, about “American Dirt,” a problematic thriller about a Mexican migrant to the United States ANDWHATTOAVOID written by a white woman, Jeanine Cummins. The tweets (along with Gurba’s excellent nega- I LLUSTRATION © WESLEYALLSBROOK tive review of the book, on Tropics of Meta ) re- newed a debate about cultural appropriation. What I noticed most, though, was Gurba’s voice, both swaggeringly jestful and pain- soaked. A year later, I read Gurba’s coming-of-age memoir, MEAN. It celebrating 50 years was as wrathful and hilarious as her Twitter account. But I was sur- An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers prised by its simultaneous tenderness — for instance, in this gor- geous passage about Gurba’s childhood best friend: “We met in kin- ALSOAVAILABLEFROMHARPERAUDIOANDHARPERCOLLINSE-BOOKS dergarten, and I loved her when I was 5, I loved her when I was 6, I loved her when I was 7, I loved her when I was 8, I loved her when I was 9, I loved her when I was 10, I loved her when I was 11, I loved her when I was 12, and I loved her when I was 13. I have loved her up till now, and I have loved her in the future.”

—VAUHINI VARA, MAGAZINE STORY EDITOR 4 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 5 Letters “Yankee history is rich and deep, with players so iconic their first or last name, or their nickname, ter as a “bizarre and consuming fixation.” is identification enough.” A review is meant to convey enough of a book to assist poten- tial buyers in making up their – ALEC BALDWIN, from the introduction minds. If Ozick’s hagiographic review accurately conveys Bai- ley’s hagiographic biography, we can all safely put it on our “Must Miss” list. GEOFFREY BENT BROOKLYN

♦

TO THE EDITOR: Congratulations on the amazing piece of art you commissioned from Ian Wright. It is a perfect foil for the review. JESSICA WEBER NEW YORK

Hand to Mouth

TO THE EDITOR: Elizabeth McCracken’s damning- with-faint-praise review of Jackie Polzin’s “Brood” (April 4) is a skillful if pointless insult to a IAN WRIGHT fellow novelist — one whose work had the bad fortune to fall His Life as a Man try: “What remains on the page into the hands of a reviewer who is one writer’s life as it was lived, wished it a different book. TO THE EDITOR: and — almost — as it was felt.” McCracken confesses that bad I have been a reader of the Book Bravo Cynthia Ozick, bravo reviews of her own work by Review for more than 50 years, Blake Bailey and bravo Philip “professional critics” have meant but I have never written in. Roth. little to her, while “the mildest NOW Cynthia Ozick’s review of “Philip mixed praise from one of my EVAN CHARKES own, a fiction writer, is incised UPDATED! Roth: The Biography” (April 11) DOBBS FERRY, N.Y. changed my mind. Simply put: forever on my heart.” This is the single best written ♦ If only she had considered those book review I have ever read in incisions before taking the scalpel my entire life. TO THE EDITOR: to a colleague’s work by producing I have been a loyal reader of Next time you assign a review for exactly the kind of mixed-praise all of Philip Roth’s books, and a new biography, try not to choose review that has pained her. now Blake Bailey’s astonishing a partisan for the job. Ozick only LARRY ROTHE biography. Ozick, who is a gifted briefly mentions the author of the BERKELEY, CALIF. writer, absolutely brings to life, latest Philip Roth biography be- in her peerless prose and percep- fore devoting the bulk of her bulky Unhistoric Acts tiveness, the character of both review justifying the problematic Roth and the biography itself. Roth and his uneven oeuvre. She TO THE EDITOR: More than 350 articles, profiles and essays, Roth was one of the deans of is particularly harsh on the legion The close of A. O. Scott’s fine American literature in the 20th of women Roth dumped, dismis- essay on Tillie Olsen (March 28) and over 200 vintage and current photographs, century. Full stop. Whatever his sively stressing they were all recalled the famous words that that capture every era of the most storied franchise critics may have said — and are “ardently consensual.” end “Middlemarch”: “But the saying — his 31 books are a She rather coarsely describes effect of her being on those in baseball history. testament to a life well written. how when Roth’s first wife was around her was incalculably Ozick’s review is so beautifully killed in a car crash, “Roth is diffusive: for the growing good of written, so eloquent, so challeng- suddenly liberated.” Roth’s sec- the world is partly dependent on ing, that I wish she too had writ- ond wife, Claire Bloom, wrote a unhistoric acts; and that things ten the Roth biography. Blake surprisingly evenhanded account are not so ill with you and me as Bailey’s gift as a biographer — so of her marriage, but Ozick char- they might have been, is half evident with his book on John acterizes it as “vindictive,” even owing to the number who lived Cheever — is astonishing, and though the word more accurately faithfully a hidden life, and rest Ozick’s appreciation of that writ- describes Roth’s largely worth- in unvisited tombs.” AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND AS AN EBOOK ing is remarkably generous. Her less “I Married a Communist,” PENNY ROSE final sentence is worthy of Tol- which was meant to even the TORONTO stoy and should be taught in score. The reviewer even deni- every English class in this coun- grates Bloom’s love of her daugh- [email protected] 6 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 By the Book

winter, when the sun sets early, it’s pretty close to heaven to read there on a Sunday afternoon and watch the sun disappear over the small mountain west of where I live. I also loved to read in swimming pools, pre-Covid, when vaca- tions were a thing. I’d stand waist-deep in the water, the book open flat on the coralline lip of the pool.

Your new novel anticipates the start of the Salem witch hysteria a few decades later. What other books would you rec- Independent publishers and ommend to people interested in the authors of not-so-independent subject? means receive special Begin with poetry by Anne Bradstreet. discounted advertising rates You won’t find witches, but you will find every Sunday in The New York poems that celebrate her love for her Times Book Review. husband and the natural world, as well as one that mourns the loss of her library For more information, in a fire and another that expressed her please contact Mark Hiler desperate pain at the death of a grand- at (212) 556-8452. child. You will find spiritual doubt. They’re beautiful, and they remind us Reach an influential audience that the Puritans’ internal lives were as complex as ours. for less. There are plenty of fascinating books about witchcraft in history and about Salem in particular, but the one I like NDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2008 best is “The Devil in the Shape of a Woman,” by Carol F. Karlsen. Bonus points for the title alone.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick Chris Bohjalian with you most? I was an avid reader. I was also an avid The novelist, whose latest book is ‘Hour of the Witch,’ can read for artist with Magic Markers, and I drew the Starship Enterprise in the sky above hours in the bath: ‘I also loved to read in swimming pools, pre-Covid, the Caribbean on the dust jacket of my “The Woman Who Walked Alone” by Christine Wilson; written by Wilma Elkins. A true story about a determined and when vacations were a thing.’ mother’s first edition of Ernest Heming- strong woman in the rural South in the 1940s. Search for it on way’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” and I Barnes and Noble, Amazon or Dorrance Publishing. colored in the leaves on her first edition What books are on your night stand? Makkai’s “The Great Believers” and of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” Amor Towles’s “A Gentleman in Mos- so the cover resembled a Peter Max I’m old school and don’t read on a tablet, poster. Fun and so my night stand is a Jenga tower cow.” But I seem to reread “The Great The books that stuck with me are the of galleys and manuscripts for books ones that are heartbreaking: “Flowers and Fast. that won’t be published for months. It’s Gatsby” more than any other novel, and the ending never fails to leave me hap- for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes; “To Kill terrifying. One night, it’s going to col- a Mockingbird”; and “Johnny Tremain,” Together lapse and kill me in my sleep. There are pily melancholic. For a while I collected mass-market paperback editions of the by Esther Forbes. I can still tell you the always at least one or two books that are last line of all of them. at Last. research for whatever novel I’m writing, book from the mid-20th century, and the covers are a scream. I have one where which means in this case I have a book You’re organizing a literary dinner party. about skydiving and a book about the Gatsby looks like a 50-something vam- The New York Times pire about to welcome Daisy into the Which three writers, dead or alive, do Ottoman massacre of Armenians in you invite? Mini Crossword Books Adana, Turkey, in 1909. But three novels world of the undead. She’s in a strapless were recently published that I’d been gown — all exposed neck and shoulders Writers have lots of dinners with other looking forward to, and so amid the — and he looks, well, ravenous. The writers, and the best conversations are unstable skyscraper are Carol Ed- cover also boasts that it’s “complete and when we share litanies of humiliating garian’s “Vera”; Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara unabridged,” which always makes me moments in our careers, or the single and the Sun”; and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s smile because the novel is barely 47,000 worst things we’ve written. So, I’d want “The Committed.” words long. Can you imagine someone writers who would make me laugh. Here I’m always listening to audiobooks, with a red pen in 1955 thinking to him- are three who I think would fit the bill: too. Currently, it’s James McBride’s self, “Hmm, do we really need ‘boats Zadie Smith, Augusten Burroughs and “Deacon King Kong.” against the current’?” Gary Shteyngart. (If you all say yes, the dinner is on me.) 0 nytimes.com/solvenow What’s the last great book you read? Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). Here are two I’ve read in the last four An expanded version of this interview is years that I recommend often: Rebecca I can read for hours in the bath. In the available at nytimes.com/books.

ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7 You’ll Be a Woman Soon Essays that tell a collective story of female adolescence, fraught with unwanted attention and abuse.

Yet Febos isn’t relentlessly grim. In “The loved girlfriend, Donika — “the kind of per- By BETSY BONNER Mirror Test,” she riffs ingeniously on the son who fast-forwards to the end of the expression “loose as a goose,” which other porn video after her orgasm to make sure NEARLY A DECADE ago Melissa Febos re- kids used to slut-shame her. The geese in that everybody comes.” At the first party, flected on her decision to publish her debut their town left droppings everywhere, she Febos role-plays saying no, then passively memoir, “Whip Smart,” under her own recalls. “Sometimes they flew in a V forma- grants permission to those who want to name and not a pseudonym: “It didn’t stop tion, their muscular wings beating in uni- touch her, an experience she finds mortify- people from thinking of me as a former sex son, their bodies’ improbable masses glid- ing and enraging. Then the narrative worker who also happened to write a book ing over us in an arrow, honking as they moves into manifesto territory: Febos re- about it, instead of a writer who happened sliced into the sky.” Then, after she mastur- counts interviews she conducted with for- The events to tell the story of her own experience in bates, these literal geese are transformed mer strippers, all of whom had “consented sex work.” Nobody disrespects Febos any- into a portrait of the writer as a young on the job to touching that they didn’t want shaping the world, more. Her 2017 autobiographical col- woman: “I felt loose as a goose alone in my or enjoy.” Their recollections lead Febos to lection, “Abandon Me,” about a toxic love bedroom, my magnificent wings beating believe that her own experiences are, un- delivered daily. affair, her birth father and the fortunately, normal. At Donika’s sea captain who raised her, was suggestion, Febos goes to an- a finalist for the Lambda Liter- other cuddle party as a “mistress Try more days of Times delivery. ary Award and on many “best of no” — intending to practice de- Find the delivery choice books of the year” lists. The for- nying anyone who wants some- that is right for you at mer professional dominatrix thing she doesn’t feel like giving nytimes.com/deliveryupgrade now teaches nonfiction at Iowa. — with great success. At the end of this piece, Febos credits her GIRLHOOD empowerment to “listening to Essays the truths of other women.” By Melissa Febos Illustrated. 320 pp. Bloomsbury. THE FINAL ESSAY, “Les Calan- $27. ques,” puts a spin on the usual “double perspective” in memoir. Melissa today is sober, and a Febos’s ambitious new col- published writer at an art colo- lection, “Girlhood,” comprises ny in the south of France, where eight essays about growing up she hasn’t been in 20 years, in a female body that reached nearly half her life ago. The ear- sexual development at the age lier Melissa had fled to France of 11. “It was a race that I had from New York to escape a boy- won without trying,” she writes, friend who, like her, was ad- “and to win it was the greatest dicted to heroin. She found a loss of all.” The book is a feminist new companion in a gay Algeri- testament to survival: years of an immigrant who had been dehumanizing sex with boys subjected to much of the same and men, harassment by wom- abuse and shaming Melissa en, being stalked, drug addiction had. They created an idyllic, and what she describes as “a dope-sharing friendship that growing certainty about the transcended gender, sexuality, ways in which I have collabo- the demands of patriarchy. Now, rated in the mistreatment of my in Cassis, Febos spends her own body.” The story she tells is Melissa Febos mornings doing physical ther- not just her own: Febos inter- apy for a back injury she’s suf- viewed many other women fered after many years of run- about their sex lives and incorporated ning. The two Melissas, however, aren’t at these testimonies into a far-reaching nar- Her classmates hated her for odds with each other, but dear friends, rative. having what they wanted — a whose “bodies curl in identical parenthe- Febos revisits her own girlhood in the ses.” The compassion Febos has discov- style of a collage, interweaving her memo- woman’s body. ered for her younger self is inspiring. ries with snippets from her omnivorous I could have done without some of the reading. She includes six pages of source other voices in this book — Lacan’s, notes, and draws from Lacan, Kimberlé the air, flapping the pages of all my books.” Wharton’s, even those of some of her in- Crenshaw, Samuel Johnson. Lily Bart’s “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” terview subjects — if only because Fe- “ruin” in Edith Wharton’s novel “The the longest and messiest — Febos might bos’s own voice is so irreverent and origi- House of Mirth” reminds Febos of how her say sluttiest — piece in this collection, is nal. The aim of this book, though, is not classmates hated her for having what they partly set between two cuddle parties, simply to tell about her own life, but to lis- wanted — a woman’s body. As a believer in where neither nudity nor touching any- ten to the pulses of many others’. In her animal rights, she identifies with a caged one’s “bikini area” is permitted. (Febos in- author’s note, Febos writes that she has orangutan named Jenny; and she’s ob- forms us that these gatherings were in- “found company in the stories of other sessed with cruel psychological experi- vented in 2004, and that Cuddle Party was women, and the revelation of all our ordi- ments on nonhumans, such as Harry Har- incorporated in 2016.) The essay’s title nariness has itself been curative.” This low’s rhesus monkeys, deprived of touch comes from what rejected people are sup- solidarity puts “Girlhood” in a feminist for a year. posed to say when another person refuses canon that includes Febos’s idol, Adrienne their touch. The cuddle party scenes read Rich, and Maggie Nelson’s theory-minded BETSY BONNER is the author of “The Book of like a short story, with memorable charac- masterpieces: smart, radical company, Atlantis Black.” ters, especially Febos’s supportive and be- and not ordinary at all. 0

8 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY BEOWULF SHEEHAN CRIME / SARAH WEINMAN How to Get Away With Murder THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

THIS COLUMN doesn’t do trend “Most people call me Hank, but that also shades the truth, for spotting, but the proliferation of my real name is Happy, Happy that tidy division blurs in the face Now in Paperback crime novels featuring true-crime Doll. My parents saddled me with of reality, as one couple is about podcasts as a plot device has not that name. They didn’t think it to discover. escaped notice. (I write and edit was a joke. They’d been hoping Jade Thompson is a social crime nonfiction; listening to for the best. Can’t say it worked media influencer, and her fiancé, such podcasts is an occupational out. Can’t say it didn’t.” Hank Greg, is an architect. Their 20- hazard.) In her propulsive debut, scrapes by working security for year age difference bothers him GIRL, 11 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Thai Miracle Spa. Inanimate more than her, but it really sets 340 pp., $25), Amy Suiter Clarke objects — his house, his avocado off whoever invaded their home, ventures further in the fusion of tree — get his open love declara- caused Jade to miscarry and left real-life and fictional crime story- tions, but people? Not so much. Greg for dead. telling, making the reader privy His deepest relationship is with Maybe it’s an obsessed fan of to excerpts and transcripts from his rescue dog, George. Jade’s. Maybe the resentments of “Justice Delayed,” the podcast the family he left not long before hosted by her protagonist, Elle meeting Jade have bubbled up to Castillo. near-fatal levels. Or maybe the Elle investigates old cases to break-in is related to financial right wrongs and center the matters, both obvious and hid- voices of victims of crime. But den. Trust erodes and tensions this new season of her show — rise, even if the conclusion is focused on an unidentified telegraphed early enough that serial culprit dubbed the Count- my interest began to wane. down Killer who, decades be- Still, Holahan’s propensity fore, had poisoned his victims toward melodrama at high pitch with deadly castor beans — is quite entertaining, even if her threatens to undo her on profes- ambitions aren’t quite met here. sional and personal levels: “She had felt pressure to solve cold FOR MEDDELIN CHAN, the wedding cases she investigated on earlier photographer protagonist of DIAL seasons of the podcast, but noth- A FOR AUNTIES (Berkley, 299 pp., ing compared to this. It felt like paper, $16), Jesse Q. Sutan- the whole world was watching to’s screwball adult debut, her.” family loyalty is especially Not only is the book difficult to PABLO AMARGO complicated. On the one hand, put down, it’s also an adroit her lifelong devotion to her exploration of the ethical quan- mother and aunts persuaded her daries of true-crime storytelling, Things go wrong as soon as to walk away from a formative particularly in podcasts. For Elle, Hank accidentally kills a meth- relationship — something she The Nobel Prize–winning whose stake in finding a resolu- crazed customer at the spa (“I still regrets — and work with tion runs deeper than she’s will- meant to shoot him in the leg to them on a full-service wedding economist’s accessible briefing ing to admit, and for her listen- slow him down, but my hand was business. On the other hand, who ers, these moral dilemmas take unsteady and I shot him through else can she turn to when a dead on today’s major policy issues. on a frightening edge. the neck and blood geysered out body turns up in her car, some- in a spray”), angering powerful thing that’s not her fault? On the JONATHAN AMES has been dancing people and setting up a cascade one wedding weekend that could “In an era when facts are too often disdained and discarded, around the edges of the crime of ever more gruesome acts. make or break their business? genre for a number of years now, There will be excised body parts, What follows is what might Paul Krugman wields them like a rapier.” as evidenced by the postmodern kidnappings, coerced surgeries, transpire from mashing up Nat- —DAVID AXELROD HBO comedy series “Bored to stolen cash, people tossed off suo Kirino’s standout novel “Out” Death” and his noirish novella- and the madcap film “Muriel’s balconies, fists rammed into “He avoids the herd mentality of most journalism. turned-film “You Were Never Adam’s apples. Wherever Hank Wedding,” inflected with the Really Here.” He has surrendered Doll goes, no matter how strange hybrid linguistics Meddelin grew Applying history, math, and humanity, fully, and pleasurably, to his fate the trip, I’ll definitely follow. up with (“My Mandarin is awful, he transforms our in A MAN NAMED DOLL (Mulholland, and my Cantonese nonexistent,” 224 pp., $26), the first in a dark BOOKS SHOULDN’T be judged by she says). It’s a high-wire act of understanding of great issues.” new private detective series their covers, but what about their comic timing, misunderstandings, that’s a tightly coiled double helix epigraphs? Cate Holahan draws romantic foibles and possibly —DAVID CAY JOHNSTON of offbeat humor and unflinching the title of her newest suspense foiled heists — not to mention, violence. novel, HER THREE LIVES (Grand what’s going to happen to that The detective’s introduction Central, 352 pp., paper, $15.99), from dead body? sums up his entire personality: a quote by Gabriel García The glue is Meddelin, endear- Márquez: “All human beings ing, capable and in full thrall to SARAH WEINMAN writes the Crime have three lives: public, private her elders, who are all absolute column for the Book Review. and secret.” It’s a telling quote hoots to keep company with. 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9 Four’s a Crowd A novel about two couples, two coasts and one big secret.

feel awful, it felt warm and liquid, and if the By MEGHAN DAUM feeling were to take a sentient shape it would be an enormous glowing question IT HAS BECOME a truism that serialized mark,” Sweeney writes. television, notably the kind found on pre- “Did she still have to accept a name she mium cable or streaming networks, has re- hated? placed the novel. When dramas like “The “Did she still love Julian? Wire” and “The Sopranos” took over the “Did she have to stay married? culture in the early aughts, the cliffhangers “Did she want to?” and capacious story arcs drew compar- If this sounds like promotional copy for a isons to Dickens and Thackeray, with audi- Netflix poster, well . . . success! Reading ences gripped in collective suspense as the “Good Company,” I found myself mentally story teased itself out in their living rooms. auditioning actors for the inevitable series. In the days before the stream and binge Tellingly, I did not find myself imagining era, when audiences were forced to wait a more than a handful of actual, real-time scenes, because the book doesn’t have all GOOD COMPANY that many. Much of the first third of the By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney novel is taken up with back story. We see 307 pp. Ecco. $27.99. Flora struggling as a stage actor before finding work as a voice actor. We see Julian struggling with lukewarm love. In a “meet week between meals, the peristaltic cute” so ridiculous that even the writers of process had a healthy rhythm. But today’s “Cedar” would probably cut it, we see Da- era of full-season dumps and limited series vid, as a young doctor, rush onstage at a that can be wrapped up in a small handful Shakespeare in the Park performance af- of airtight episodes has created something ter an actor collapses onstage. He per- of a prepared foods market for television forms chest compressions in front of a executives. Instead of original scripts and stunned audience and, upon stabilizing the ideas, it’s all about “I.P.”: pre-existing, eas- patient, is approached by Margot, ethereal ily adaptable intellectual property, often in in her fairy costume, who takes his hands the form of novels. in gratitude. The audience applauds. Writers of novels know this. Moreover, In “The Nest,” a family saga about inher- they know that the vicissitudes and chang- itance, Sweeney’s tendency toward cliché ing business model of publishing mean and Hallmark moments was undercut by that a novel’s success may depend just as the sharp edges and dark forces of at least much (and sometimes quite a bit more) on a few characters. “Good Company” occa- its potential for dramatic adaptation as it sionally gestures in that direction. The does on its ability to reach readers. As woman involved in Julian’s betrayal is self- such, the contemporary novel has become NHUNG LE contradictory, even pathetic. The idea that a kind of television treatment, a story bible such a person could wield so much sexual doing double duty as a literary experience. gates a move to Los Angeles, the family is with herself, she’d been tempted.” and emotional power is fascinating; I “Good Company,” the second novel by once again close to Flora’s best friend, The constant internal struggle between wanted more of her and a little less of Flo- Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, whose 2016 de- Margot, a famous if not A-list television ac- what the heart wants versus what it should ra’s good girl hand-wringing. but, “The Nest,” was a walloping best tress who’s long been a sort of surrogate be grateful it already has serves as the pri- Similarly, the behind-the-scenes machina- seller, is rich with such biblical qualities. A parent to their daughter, Ruby. In a famil- mary emotional engine of “Good Company.” tions of the “Cedar” set offer moments of de- marriage story set in tony but not ostenta- iar trope of female friendship, Margot is (There is also a heart leitmotif — a heart at- licious satire. When Margot learns her char- tious Los Angeles neighborhoods like everything Flora is not: effortlessly tack, a heart-shaped locket, an infant heart acter will be killed off, the show’s creator, a Larchmont and Los Feliz, its inciting inci- stylish, benignly narcissistic, an Italian- surgery patient — that is administered per- formidable but anxious doyenne in the dent happens in the opening pages, where American of the “summers in Tuscany” va- haps a bit too thickly.) Margot wants to be Shonda Rhimes vein, indulges her in a brain- a wife, going through clutter in the garage, riety as opposed to Flora’s “Sunday sauce, taken seriously as an actor rather than just storming session about what would make for discovers her husband’s supposedly long- weekly Mass” Bay Ridge-Italian. Margot paid handsomely as a TV star. Flora wants to the most vanity-appeasing demise: “I’m giv- lost wedding band. plays a pediatric oncologist on a prime- be her own person rather than an appendage ing you a kick-ass death. It’s going to be so The subsequent 26 chapters amount to a time medical drama called “Cedar” and is of the all-consuming theater company. (She good everyone will clamor to hire you.” painstaking parsing of the couple’s rela- married to David, a real-life cardiac sur- and Julian even have a cutesy couple port- Sweeney is uncommonly skilled at gently tionship trajectory. Working actors who geon whose life and career were upended manteau, Florian, which Flora resents.) lampooning Hollywood. Just as she abso- met decades earlier in New York City, by a stroke some years earlier. Most of all, Flora wants Julian to love her a lutely nails the formulaic milieu of “Cedar,” Flora and Julian were denizens of a Green- Sweeney employs shifting points of view little more ferociously than he was ever in- her description of “Griffith,” the animated wich Village bohemia in its last gasps of af- throughout the novel, but the one we’re most clined to do. In one of the novel’s most pierc- musical series on which Flora ultimately fordability, raising their small daughter in privy to is Flora’s, which is filtered through ing lines of dialogue, he tells her, early in finds a steady, reasonably satisfying gig a cramped apartment, scraping by on Flo- the slightly shaded prism of the underdog. their relationship, “I don’t know why I’m so voicing a lioness, is pitch perfect. A show ra’s voice-over work and organizing their To her, Margot’s house resembles “every ambivalent about you.” where animals at the now-defunct Griffith lives around Good Company, a downtown other renovated mansion Flora had ever Julian, for his part, seems to want the bal- Park Zoo function as metaphorical represen- theater troupe that operates on the edge of been in,” with its closets full of folded white last of family without giving up the train- tations of Hollywood actors pigeonholed by debt and mounts productions of “The Cru- sheets tied with color-coded satin ribbons wreck delights of his bachelor life. The miss- typecasting and ageism? Someone green- cible” because “it’s the perfect allegory for and a color scheme she derides as “50 ing ring, we eventually learn (the author, to light that immediately! Guantánamo Bay.” shades of café au lait.” Hosting a lavish grad- her credit, makes no pretense of surprising Meanwhile, “Good Company,” with its When a television role for Julian insti- uation party for Ruby, Margot had consid- us), is a talisman of betrayal. The remainder pre-scouted locations and fully rendered ered flying in a catering crew to simulate a of the story is taken up mostly by Flora’s in- characters looking for things to do, is a MEGHAN DAUM’S most recent book is “The New England clambake. Flora was appalled decision over what to do about it. promising piece of I.P. Sweeney may or Problem With Everything.” She is the creator by the overkill and relieved when the plan “She felt a loosening of something she’d may not have screenwriting ambitions, but and host of The Unspeakable Podcast. was scrapped, though “if she was honest tamped down for a long time, and it didn’t I’d love to see her do something with it. 0

10 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 Flight Path The splendor of birds that can travel whole continents, and all the ways they are threatened.

of the electrons in their eyes, an evolution- ican birders, if only because we played a ing the clouds or ruffled by the breeze.” By CHRISTIAN COOPER ary trick that is the stuff of science fiction. critical role in it. California’s Central Valley Weidensaul is describing the Yellow Sea, Like the Swainson’s hawks he studied in had a problem: Vast agricultural sprawl a barren, seemingly lifeless expanse on “GIVEN THE STATE of migratory birds California, Weidensaul is returning to fa- had replaced wetlands crucial for winter- China’s coast that is a banquet hall for mil- around the world, I needed a little good miliar territory. His 1999 book, “Living on ing and migrating birds. Then came eBird, lions of migrating shorebirds for whom news.” the Wind,” also explored bird migration; a Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National this is the one and only possible rest stop: Coming near the end of “A World on the the difference this go-round is time and Audubon Society database of bird sight- “The flocks came from the south, dense Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory skin in the game. Since the days when he ings created from the contributions of ev- layers of small bodies that undulated and Birds” — Scott Weidensaul’s gripping jour- first wrote about the subject, Weidensaul eryday birding enthusiasts. From those folded into themselves, creating sheets, ney alongside the world’s feathered wan- by his own account has steadily been data, conservationists were able to deter- splitting into tendrils, forming separate derers and the people who study them — drawn from the role of observer to partici- mine when migrating wetland birds would tributaries that reunited into great rivers these words are necessarily grim. Any pant in the hands-on science of migration. be arriving in the region, and they paid of wings, all moving with tremendous longtime birder offers the same lament: This allows him to give us portraits of the farmers to flood their rice fields to coincide speed.” Migration just isn’t what it used to be. scientists and concerned community with those periods. These pop-up wetlands At its best, “A World on the Wing” brims The plummeting numbers of songbirds members alongside whom he has manned resulted in lower costs for conservationists with spectacle: the silhouettes of a hun- and shorebirds, raptors and waterfowl, the barricades, trying to understand the compared with outright land acquisition; dred thousand Amur falcons flying past have become painfully apparent; a the moon, ten thousand Swain- recent study collating decades of son’s hawks soaring against the data revealed that nearly a third of setting sun before roosting togeth- all birds — three billion creatures — er in eucalyptus trees, waves of have vanished from North America colorful warblers moving along the in just the last 30 years. Weidensaul St. Lawrence River in Quebec in tasks himself with communicating one of the greatest shows on Earth to both the knowing birder and the — shows that were once the norm, layman the epic scale of what’s and now are increasingly rare. happening in our skies every year, the whys and hows, while offering THE PASSION Weidensaul brings to rays of hope through the gloomy these scenes is personal. “A World storm clouds. The success of “A on the Wing” finds some of its most moving moments early on, when A WORLD ON THE WING he charts the development of his own interest in birds. As he de- The Global Odyssey of scribes watching the great move- Migratory Birds ments of raptors over Hawk Moun- By Scott Weidensaul tain in Pennsylvania, “fly-fishing Illustrated. 385 pp. W.W. Norton & in the air” to lure a golden eagle Company. $32. into his bander’s mist net, or the simple pleasure of celebrating the World on the Wing” in navigating raucous arrival of Canada geese that challenge rivals the astonish- every spring over his childhood ing feats of the birds he chronicles. home (“Big Goose Day” his family Those feats and the jaw-drop- called it; “but it’s not like we baked ping science behind them form the a cake or anything,” his sister heart of the book. A tiny ruby- adds), a birder can be forgiven for throated hummingbird crosses the nodding in recognition. And non- entirety of the Gulf of Mexico in a Trumpeter swans in the skies of Washington State, where they spend the winter. birders can feel enough of the joy single nonstop flight; inconceiv- that they too might be inspired to able, until Weidensaul describes partake of the wild. certain whimbrels — a shorebird Spring rushes up the shoots of somewhat bigger than a pigeon — that losses in bird populations and stem them. extra cash in the pockets of farmers; and, growing things, and from the towers of leave the Canadian Arctic, travel east the It’s a global cast that includes a former sec- most important, five times more birds than New York to the farms of Alabama, from width of the continent, and hurl them- retary of the Treasury, a ranchero on the in the average Central Valley farm field. the plains of Manitoba to the wet woods of selves over the North Atlantic, directly into pampas of Argentina, a journalist turned All of this ecological focus, written acces- Cascadia, we know that wings rushing up raging seasonal storms whose winds, it conservationist in a remote Baptist region sibly without sacrificing an iota of the sci- from the south are not far behind. “As the turns out, give them a boost for a nonstop of India. They have a common quest to ence, still might have made for some dry light grew around me, the woods, I real- transoceanic flight from the Canadian save birds — birds whose travels similarly reading, if not for Weidensaul’s knack for ized, were seething with birds,” Weiden- Maritime Provinces to Brazil. Suddenly bind disparate parts of the world into an saul writes. “They darted across the nar- the hummingbird seems like a slacker. unexpected, fragile whole. row trails I followed beneath the oaks, “A World on the Wing” is littered with In the time between books, the tools for Nearly a third of all birds — flickers and slashes of motion in my pe- such wonders: birds who can pack on fat understanding migration have grown ex- three billion creatures — have ripheral vision, and flushed before me like without obesity’s downsides, add muscle ponentially, and “A World on the Wing” vanished from North America. a bow wave as I walked — warblers and when and where it’s needed, and burn fuel dives into these advances. Along with the sparrows, buntings and orioles, catbirds with extraordinary efficiency, qualities conservation success stories, this consti- and thrushes, flycatchers and grosbeaks. that would make endocrinologists, body- tutes the most hopeful aspect of the book: evocative passages and immersive This was the kind of day for which my col- builders and weight loss gurus salivate. that better technology and the metadata of scenes: “The world was precisely equal leagues and I came here.” As the birds flit Migrants can even “see” the Earth’s mag- the Information Age have made new in- halves of gray, divided by the flat line of the through these pages, but with ever less fre- netic field via the quantum entanglement sights possible and created the opportuni- horizon — the smoky silver of an overcast quency through our lives, we can only hope ty for effective, targeted solutions to the ills sky, unmarked and smooth, and the darker, that birders and non-birders alike take in- CHRISTIAN COOPER is a board member of the plaguing our migratory birds. mottled granite and charcoal of a mud flat spiration and a call to action from “A World NYC Audubon and the author of the forthcom- Perhaps most heartening, Weidensaul that stretched to every side, paper-thin on the Wing.” This is the kind of book we’ve ing memoir “Better Living Through Birding.” relates a tale likely familiar to North Amer- sheets of water lying on its surface reflect- been waiting for. 0

PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT TERRELL/SKAGIT VALLEY HERALD, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11 Group Text / ‘What Comes After,’ by JoAnne Tompkins / By Elisabeth Egan A town reeling from unimaginable loss opens its doors to a stranger.

Welcome to Group Text, a monthly column for readers and A pregnant girl wanders out book clubs about the novels, memoirs and short-story col- of the woods and into the lections that make you want to talk, ask questions and dwell in another world for a little bit longer. lives of grieving neighbors. Will her circumstances drive an even bigger wedge between their households? I WAS AT MY LOCAL BOOKSTORE when I ran into an ac- quaintance who started regaling me with stories of his open and honest relationship with his 15-year-old son. “I am super lucky,” he said, as I gagged behind my mask and slowly backed into the self-help/parenting section. “There Like a Choose Your Own are no secrets in our house.” Adventure book, “What For the better part of a year, I’ve been cooped up with Comes After” provides multi- three teenagers who constantly remind me how little I ple entry points for conversa- know — not just about their areas of expertise (politics, tion about what path you’d foreign affairs, public health, education, music, the envi- take out of a nightmare. ronment, real estate and parenthood, to name a few), but also about some details of their lives. I am the mother of these teenagers and we share a not-very-big house, but their doors are frequently closed, in every sense of the word. I try to provide decent snacks and respect their pri- tour of the last day of his life and the difficult years leading vacy — to an extent. up to it. We follow his mother, Lorrie, a quiet, long-suffer- JoAnne Tompkins’s nail-biting wallop of a debut novel, ing hero, as she works at a nursing home, ferries her WHAT COMES AFTER (Riverhead, 432 pp., $28), presents a night- daughter to school and finds time to drop off healthy salads mare scenario where adolescent secrets mushroom out of for Evangeline (who says she is “practicing eating disgust- control, with devastating consequences. It’s a cautionary ing things for the baby”). tale, one that prompted me to ask a series of probing, un- Slowly, the adults in “What Comes After” piece together welcome questions at the dinner table. But it’s also a pow- the painful events that brought Evangeline into their lives. erful and inspiring reminder of how a close-knit communi- Abandoned by her drug-addicted mother, she makes her They lean into their blind spots as neighbors and as par- ty will rally around people in trouble, no matter their age. way to Isaac’s massive, half-renovated Victorian, knowing ents, facing an ugly truth about someone they trusted. The story begins with the deaths of two high school stu- he’s rattling around in there by himself. (The Balches are And, of course, all the while Isaac and Lorrie wonder who dents — Daniel Balch and Jonah Geiger, who grew up as divorced; aside from her appearance at his funeral, Dan- is the father of Evangeline’s baby. They join forces to sup- neighbors in Port Furlong, Wash., a woodsy fictional town iel’s mother only appears in flashbacks.) Isaac welcomes port her through a difficult pregnancy, but they rarely perched on the banks of Puget Sound. A week into his sen- Evangeline, offering her a plate of lasagna, a bed with a work in tandem. Will a child bring peace or divide them ior year, Daniel disappears after football practice; eight blue quilt and a box of his ex-wife’s clothes. He doesn’t ask further? Will Evangeline be able to accept their help when days later, Jonah dies by suicide, leaving behind a note a lot of questions, which might seem odd but . . . that’s she needs it the most? confessing to his friend’s murder. Isaac. Tompkins delivers a thoughtful, unexpectedly opti- “These are the facts,” observes Daniel’s father, Isaac, “His core was fixed, like a steel stake that was driven mistic tale of people doing their best. The ending of “What who is a high school biology teacher, a conflicted Quaker through him, a rigidity that both anchored and pained Comes After” may not be 100 percent happy — how could it and the most assured of Tompkins’s narrators. “All they him,” writes Tompkins, a former lawyer who displays an be? — but it has the feel of a beginning, which is exactly reveal is that the greatest mysteries lie in what we believe evenhandedness befitting her background. where most of us want to be right now. 0 we already know.” Just as we think we’re going to ally ourselves with Isaac, Then we meet Evangeline McKensey, a red-haired, we pivot to the other side of the fence, to the Geigers’ To join the conversation about “What Comes Next,” go to our pregnant 16-year-old with a connection to the dead boys. house. Jonah pipes up from beyond the grave, giving us a Facebook page, @nytbooks, or our Instagram, @NYTBooks.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS SUGGESTED READING

What did you make of Isaac’s clearness committee? Did you find MY ABSOLUTE DARLING, by Gabriel Tallent. This novel about a near-feral yourself searching “How can I become a Quaker?” or were you child surviving abuse shares Tompkins’s approach of calibrating a put off by the idea? treacherous story with flashes of natural beauty and human decency.

+ WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, by Lionel Shriver. Looking for a dark plot with zero silver lining? Start here. Through a series of (fictional) How realistic was Tompkins’s portrait of Evangeline’s experi- letters from a killer’s mother to her absent husband, Shriver shows a ence of impending motherhood? What made her willing to ac- family unraveling and the slow, unrelenting march to the event that cept such a major responsibility? will tear them apart.

ELISABETH EGAN is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”

12 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 Life Hands You Lemons Pick Your Poison This novel’s hero drinks a magical elixir to pursue success. A thorny collection of personal essays on the plant kingdom.

By LAUREN CHRISTENSEN The tension Sathian builds is one of By ALEX BEGGS teenage insecurity swelling into adult- hood, until disillusion overthrows the tyr- IN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS, it is not un- anny of American perfectionism. By Part 2, I’VE BEEN THINKING about how to murder common to see stressed-out teenagers pop Neil is a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley who a man with cherry pits. Pie, definitely. I’d an Adderall or Ritalin. Maybe they have cares less about his history dissertation pit a few pounds of cherries, then smash A.D.H.D., or got the pill from a friend, a than about the semifictional “Bombayan the pits and mix with vodka into an al- dealer, a parent. The goal often being to gold digger,” a man he conjures, obses- mondlike, but poisonous, extract. The chase not a high, but the illusion of perfec- sively, as one of the few Hindu émigrés to chemical compounds in the pits would re- tion. To live up to a parent’s expectations. the California coastline during the gold act with his stomach acid to create bootleg To perform. rush in the mid-1800s. In Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, “Gold THE BOOK OF DIFFICULT FRUIT Diggers,” the teenage protagonist’s drug of THIS INTIMATE GLIMPSE of millennials Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly choice is not quite F.D.A. approved: It is lit- who are second-generation Americans (With Recipes) eral gold, treasures lifted from neighbors (“conceptual orphans,” as Neil calls them) By Kate Lebo and vendors, smelted at home, mixed with shows how history repeats. It is a story of Illustrated. 391 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. NA KIM sugar and lemons and imbibed as “lem- immigrants reaping their futures from onade.” The elixir instills the kind of mani- property they have found, which is not cyanide. It’d take, I estimate, three whole who is both a poet and a baker. She resists GOLD DIGGERS pies for me to pull this off, but still. As Kate giving symbolism too much power, but it’s By Sanjena Sathian Lebo explores in “The Book of Difficult hard when you realize that the needy ex- 344 pp. Penguin Press. $27. Fruit,” within the plant kingdom, there lurk boyfriend is like an Italian plum tree, a nov- so many potential killers. elty to care for who soon becomes an intol- My cherry obsession aside, this darkly erable burden. acal focus — not just on a math test or funny encyclopedia-memoir-essay col- Sometimes ideas are poison, too. At the school debate, but on an entire future — lection is not a witch’s guide to killing your turn of the 20th century, the Darwinian that is needed to “make it” as the child of man. Each chapter takes on a different botanist Luther Burbank bred blackber- immigrants in America. prickly, stinky, tricky, troublesome fruit — ries to be thornless and nonthreatening. Neeraj, who goes by Neil, lives in the its history and usage in herbalism, its fla- Turns out Burbank had similar ideas about suburb of Hammond Creek, Ga., across the vor and appeal, its dangers — and ends breeding the human race. In Burbank’s street from his classmate Anita Dayal. Ani- with recipes. “In this book, fruit is not the “The Training of the Human Plant,” Lebo ta’s mother, Anjali, is the one person in smooth-skinned, bright-hued, waxed and notes, “we see how it can be dangerous to town who knows how to mix the golden edible ovary of the grocery store,” Lebo compare people to plants. How, taken to drink, a legacy of her upbringing in Bom- writes (waxed ovary!): “What nurtures their extreme logical conclusions, such bay. The year is roughly 2005, and Kanye’s and what harms are entangled.” I turned metaphors become — as they always half “Gold Digger” is playing on repeat. In this the page so fast I got a paper cut. were — inhuman.” world populated mostly by “desis” (South NISHAT AKHTAR “Deeply researched” doesn’t begin to This was the moment you, er, I, person Asians and their American-born kids), the describe how far into ancient texts and who took one Derrida class in college, real- way to succeed looks, not coincidentally, a theirs — or is it? It is also a story of west- their subtexts, obscure cookbooks and cor- ized maybe this book isn’t about fruit at all, lot like the way to succeed in the white ward migration: from India to the United ners of the internet Lebo excavated to tell but about language. That maybe encyclo- world: Go to Harvard. States, from the suburban South to the us the stories of these fruits. What she digs pedias, so neatly alphabetized, are Some kids play the game dutifully. “My tech-boom Bay Area. Always, the endpoint up for each is often fascinating, sometimes presented as complete knowledge of the sister telegraphed her ambitions in the is California, “this endlessly striving state juicy, rarely dry. She interviews experts, world, yet end up being as useful as a meta- Duke poster on her wall,” Neil says. But for at the end of America, where everyone was including LaRae Wiley, a member of the phor. You get halfway to truth, but the more him, there is no poster. He fears a future always going somewhere, and fast.” Colville Confederated Tribes, on picking you read about thimbleberries, the more limited by his “absorbed averageness” — But is this always somewhere we want huckleberries, and Dale from Poison Con- you just want to taste their “rich, rasp- which, for a brown person, means no fu- to be? In Silicon Valley, the Teslas and trol (for obvious reasons). In the standout berry-like flavor that’s more intense than ture at all. That is, until his first sip of lem- smart fridges and apps that peddle the juniper chapter, Lebo searches for evi- one would expect, as if it’s been concen- onade bonds him to generations of Indian promise of immortality are merely the lat- dence that women drank juniper tonics to trated by gentle heat.” I’d love to smell du- ancestry. est iterations of the pure gold that once terminate pregnancies and finds it in an rian, which Lebo describes as “strawber- Of the novel’s many plotlines, all are sec- lured 300,000 men out west, the latest tools herbalist’s guide from 1597 (“Gerard’s ries and old garlic,” and “sweet and trashy, ondary to the wrenching, will-they-or- this country has used to capitalize on the Herbal” claimed the plant’s “leaves, when like a cantaloupe that’s been left in the car.” won’t-they love story between Neil and outsiders’ fears that we are not, will never ‘boyled in Wine and drunke,’ can . . . ‘expel “The Book of Difficult Fruit” is brim- Anita. Part 1 bonds them in a verboten be, enough. Touring yuppie houses in Red- the dead childe, and kill the quicke’”). ming with obscure knowledge that’s going drug operation, though Anita’s eyes are too wood City, Neil has a panic attack, crouch- The back stories ease into essays on to loom over every gin martini I drink for set on college, the Miss Teen India ing on the carpeted floor in a pose that’s al- femininity and Bath & Body Works (vanil- the next decade. Blackberry shrub, red pageant, a fratty white boy named Sam, to most prayerlike. “Everyone’s ease was la), grandfathers holding onto family se- wine vinegar, yuzu marmalade, huckle- really see Neil at all. A tragedy divides galactically distant,” Sathian writes, her crets (elderberry), Kara Walker’s “Sugar berry pie and maraschino cherries are now them further, and their final childhood ex- often exquisite prose humming with conta- Baby” sculpture (sugar cane) and beauti- on my to-cook list. These recipes include changes, in person and via AIM (“anibun91: gious anxiety. “I wanted to disdain this pre- ful pointlessness (sorry, Osage oranges). some of the book’s funniest moments, like and sick of being only / anibun91: like / ani- scribed life and yet I could not help it. . . . I Along the way, we get morsels of memoir the ones for “hiker’s toilet paper” (thimble- bun91: pretty for a brown girl”), are, for all wanted what it gave everyone else.” like carefully plucked trail berries. These berry leaves are giant and fuzzy) and duri- this novel’s leaps of imagination, achingly Of course, a book can be its own manifes- glimpses reveal Lebo’s health-nut mother, an lip balm (“Some people will say this lip real reminders of what it was like to be an tation of the American dream. Neil’s imag- who shaped her reverence for the plant balm stinks. No kisses for them”). adolescent in post-9/11 America, feeling ined Bombayan at one point joins a local world; the romances that brought out Le- This is where the fruit we used as a the weight of your parents’ dreams on your newspaper, “for who would suspect a pro- bo’s own best and worst food habits — the stand-in for depression, motherhood or a shoulders, but mostly just wanting to drink fessional writer of English to be an out- kind of truth you can’t find in a library. bad ex is transformed back into its origi- and make out. sider?” Every fruit is ripe for metaphor for Lebo, nal, edible self. The ingredients, like words, “Make use of all you took,” Neil urges his get thoughtfully measured and weighed LAUREN CHRISTENSEN is an editor at the Book gold digger, as Sathian urges Neil. “Write ALEX BEGGS is the senior staff writer at Bon and mixed into something delicious and Review. yourself into America.” 0 Appétit. meaningful. Or maybe it’s just a pie. 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13 Eight Ways of Looking at Haruki Murakami A new story collection prompts questions on music, fiction and the weight of the past.

or a larger contemporary world in which By DAVID MEANS has supposedly drawn too much from the one,” and you could imagine Murakami’s West, some Japanese critics have labeled it process as an extension of this, catching cultures now destabilize one another, col- Magic batakusai, which translates roughly to stories via musical thinking, whether it’s lapsing time and distance, creating won- “stinking of butter.” His reputation, by his jazz in “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” derful new art — a Bad Bunny song, sung All fiction is magic. That’s the thought that own admission, is better internationally pop in “With the Beatles” or classical in in Spanish, pulsing on a trap beat crafted in occurred to me often as I read “First Per- than it is in Japan. “Carnaval,” all included in this collection. Los Angeles, drifting atop a roar of digital son Singular,” the brilliant new book of His novels — the astonishing “Wind-Up There’s a constant interplay in the book be- current.) stories by Haruki Murakami, author of in- Bird Chronicle,” the sprawling “1Q84” — tween the way music works and the way ternational best sellers. spiral like galaxies from central cores, but narrative unfolds. (If you want to get a Reality The freezing man in Kafka’s “Bucket his stories are quasars, exploding with sense of Murakami’s physical relationship Rider” floats above icy streets in a bucket, light as they reveal his themes. I’ve begun to music, read his wonderful, intimate dis- Sometimes I think we forget, or refuse to asks a couple for coal and then flies away to think of Murakami’s works as teaching cussions with the conductor Seiji Ozawa, in admit, that as soon as a story exists in print when he is refused. In Langston Hughes’s stories, like “Tales of the Dervishes,” by “Absolutely on Music.”) and is read, it becomes real. Maybe it’s neglected “On the Road,” a homeless Black Idries Shah, or even the Parables. His In a recent radio interview he claimed time we simply retire the term “magic real- great subject is ultimately the enigma of that music was his writing teacher — just ism,” because all fictions are both realistic FIRST PERSON SINGULAR time as it relates to the inner self, to the mu- as he has said that his writing is informed and magical. Stories sical mystery underneath everything. by his distance running. (But that’s too There are two opposite tendencies in lit- By Haruki Murakami In what feels like a classic example of the simple. All writers attempt to find some erature, according to Italo Calvino: “One Translated by Philip Gabriel anxiety of influence, Murakami has long hook to explain the unexplainable.) tries to make language into a weightless el- 243 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28. pushed back against the weight of Kenz- “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” is a ement that hovers above things like a aburo Oe, whose 1964 book “A Personal fanfic love song, powered by a compas- cloud. . . . The other tries to give language man who is denied help by a white pastor Matter” exemplified the Japanese I-novel, sionate desire to resurrect. It starts with a the weight, density and concreteness of grabs the stone pillars of a church and pulls it a form of autofiction before autofiction was review of an imaginary Parker album, things, bodies and sensations.” Murakami down — and we accept it. As long as we’ve even a word, and took the literary world by written as a lighthearted prank by the nar- has found his own path — as light as a run- been properly grounded by a careful set of storm. But recently, in an introduction to rator when he was a college student. But ner between strides, floating for a few sec- instructions, we readers will have visions. “The Penguin Book of Japanese Short years later, to his bewilderment, he spots onds in the zero gravity of movement, and Whatever you want to call Murakami’s Stories,” he admitted that his I-novel al- this nonexistent record in a store on East as heavy as the footfalls on the soles of his work — magic realism, supernatural real- lergy had become less intense. One can feel 14th Street. Mizuno running shoes. Like Raymond ism — he writes like a mystery tramp, ex- him easing up in the eight stories collected Murakami gives himself a chance to talk Carver’s work, Murakami’s stories — his posing his global readership to the essen- in “First Person Singular,” allowing his to Parker, through a dream his narrator early ones in particular — are guided by tial and cosmic (yes, cosmic!) questions own voice — or what sounds like his own has at the end of the piece. Bird speaks to clear, strong voices that are deceptively that only art can provoke: What does it voice, wonderfully translated by Philip Ga- us; he’s real. The story becomes a tender easy to read, digestible but always leading mean to carry the baggage of identity? briel — to enter the narratives, creating a reclamation of the past, written with devo- to a precise pivot, from that seemingly Who is this inside my head in relation to confessional tone that reminded me of Al- tion and love, powered by a beautiful truth: smooth gloss of realism, toward a deeper the external, so-called real world? Is the ice Munro’s late work. that the artists we love are constantly res- musical wisdom. person I was years ago the person I am Murakami is not popular throughout the urrected by our experience of their work. now? Can a name be stolen by a monkey? world because he consciously integrates (Reading it, I got the same feeling I got Western ideas and language into his fiction, watching the late Chadwick Boseman in The Beatles The Bridge but because his work — fueled by a tension “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and when I “With the Beatles” opens with a young with his forebears — fuses cultures, or per- searched Spotify later, it made sense that woman walking down a school hallway, Murakami is wildly popular around the haps leaps over them, defying time, beating someone had already created a playlist, an clutching a Beatles album, and becoming world, which makes him somewhat sus- like pop songs, touching universal nerves. imagined album from the story, which an image the narrator will never forget (he pect in literary circles. Because his style made me think about the destabilizing never sees her again). The narrator — as Charlie Parker forces that feed our visions: the shaky observed by his older self — then remem- DAVID MEANS is the author of five story col- world of postwar Japan, perhaps, for Mu- bers his first girlfriend and an autumn day lections, including “Instructions for a Fu- Tom Waits once said that “if you want to rakami, who was born in 1949 amid wreck- in 1965, when he went to her house for a neral,” and the novel “Hystopia.” catch songs you gotta start thinking like age and a sudden infusion of new cultures, date, found her gone and instead spent

14 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JIM STOTEN time with her brother, who suffered from them in that garden, and we have learned perhaps Murakami’s most devoted fan — en the criticism sometimes leveled at the acute memory loss. again what it means to seek mystery. singing “Dancing Barefoot.”) male gaze in Murakami’s work, it can be To kill time, waiting for the young wom- That’s how Murakami’s stories often roll, The story, “The Stone Pillow,” flows to a tempting to read the follow-up, “Confes- an to arrive, he read aloud the final section luring us into strange moments, making us moment years later, when the narrator sions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” as an of the 1927 story “Spinning Gears,” by ask the questions we once chewed on finds a tattered book, the young woman’s, overearnest attempt at atonement, an as- Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Later, when we about life, about what it means to bear the and reads a few of the poems, opening up surance that the impulse was driven by leap forward several years to a chance en- burden of selfhood, about how time seems one of Murakami’s profoundly beautiful sincere admiration — love — not lechery. counter with the brother, up in the moun- to bend around us like the wind around the arias: “I make the name of the woman I love a tains of Kobe, and learn of a tragedy that trees — invisible but clearly active. “If we’re blessed, though, a few words part of me,” the monkey tells the narrator, recalls the fate of Akutagawa, who killed As a short story writer myself, I feel my might remain by our side. They climb to over cold beers in a hotel in Gunma Prefec- himself shortly after writing his astonish- own acute inability to urge the reader to the top of the hill during the night, crawl ture. It is “a completely pure, platonic act. I ingly contemporary story, we see Mu- spend time with this collection, to pur- into small holes dug to fit the shape of their simply possess a great love for that name rakami bowing to one of his literary ances- chase a sequence of brief experiences that bodies, stay quiet still, and let the stormy inside of me, secretly. Like a gentle breeze tors. An indelible imprint, the narrative will not, as a novel might, immerse them in winds of time blow past. The dawn finally wafting over a meadow.” Still, he says, he power of the past. the hours of a steadily unfurling narrative. breaks, the wild wind subsides, and the has made up his mind to stop. (Describing how these stories succeed is But these are flickering, quick times, and surviving words quietly peek out from the One senses a greater task for the author: like trying to describe exactly why, more what a story can do that a novel can’t is pull surface. For the most part they have small probing earlier creative impulses, examin- than 50 years later, a Beatles song still us into the intricate motions of a single in- voices — they are shy and only have am- ing the relationship between his own life sounds fresh — the songwriting energies stant, expansive on both ends — the before biguous ways of expressing themselves. and the act of conjuring lives out of noth- from the psychedelic John Lennon com- of everything before the narrative begins, Even so, they are ready to serve as wit- ing. This is the current that runs through bined with the hard-core realism of Paul and the infinite future beyond the terminal nesses. As honest, fair witnesses. But in or- all fiction — the musical frisson between McCartney forming a singular vision. I’m sentences — and, like a song, or a poem, der to create those enduring, long-suffer- the real and the imagined. What better way tempted to say here that Murakami’s vast leave us wanting to reread, to rehear the ing words, or else to find them and leave to remake, without wholly rejecting, your popularity comes from the fact that he’s a voice, to relocate the pinpoint in the map of them behind, you must sacrifice, uncondi- past self than to re-evaluate your cre- fusion of Lennon and McCartney [and per- our lives. tionally, your own body, your very own ations, your fictive ghosts? haps Glenn Gould].) heart. You have to lay down your neck on a This story isn’t an excusing of the past cold stone pillow illuminated by the winter but a kind of reconciliation, and when, at The Stone Pillow moon.” the end, we realize that it’s highly possible Cream Let’s turn now to a one-time hookup (the that the monkey is still out there stealing Murakami forces us into our past, when we translator’s word) and explore the nature The Monkey names, unable to control himself, we feel were young enough to believe in the old, of erotic bliss — the distance between that Murakami — older, wiser, faults ac- hippie word “cosmic,” when we could all touch and memory. The tone, as in all of the Perhaps the most revelatory story in the knowledged — is also out there, making up get high just by trying to imagine a circle stories in this book, is autumnal, and fail- book is a sequel to an earlier, widely anthol- stories, imagining the other, making that with no circumference. ures of memory are openly admitted. A ogized piece, “A Shinagawa Monkey,” first leap over the chasm between real and un- A teenager ends up on a mountaintop in young woman writes tanka poems, and published in The New Yorker in 2006. In it, real, thickening, with each tale he creates, Kobe, sitting in a garden, listening to an old when she and her lover end up naked in a monkey sneaks around Tokyo stealing the perplexity of his own art. man talk. “Your brain is made to think each other’s arms, she warns him that names — literally stealing them, so that What does it mean to carry the name of about difficult things,” the man explains. when she orgasms, she will yell the name the victims can’t remember their own a beloved inside you, the narrator won- “To help you get to a point where you un- of someone else. He’s fine with this but he names. “It’s a sickness I suffer from,” the ders, after his encounter with the mon- derstand something that you didn’t under- asks her to bite a towel because the walls monkey says, when he’s finally captured key. Indeed, what does it mean to carry stand at first. You can’t be lazy or neglect- are thin. and interrogated. “Once I fix on a name, I my beloved wife’s name, Genève, inside ful. Right now is a critical time. Because “Loving someone is like having a mental can’t help myself. Not just any name, mind me? The question amplifies the glory of this is the period when your brain and your illness that’s not covered by health insur- you. I’ll see a name that attracts me, and life — the loneliness and joy of hauling heart form and solidify.” ance,” she explains. (Again, we’re back to then I have to have it. I know it’s wrong, but around the baggage of my own identity, Was the plot of this story, “Cream,” just a some place we’ve forgotten, young enough I can’t control myself.” which I’m able to escape only when I’m MacGuffin to get us to this scene? Maybe, to seek, to feel the wildness of reality, just All of the victims are young women bearing someone else’s story, dreaming but who cares? We’re right there with as we might feel listening to Patti Smith — whom the monkey finds desirable, and giv- my way in. 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15 Seize the Day In this novel, characters approach the world with hubris and humor.

fat snowflakes tumble from the sky. really means to love another person. Is By CONNIE SCHULTZ Early in “Early Morning Riser,” Jane there a limit to how much the heart can falls hard for Duncan, and it doesn’t take hold? JANE LOVES DUNCAN. But should she? long for her to observe that he is “good with Heiny writes about small-town life with- Duncan is a handsome and friendly women the way other people are good with out ridicule or slapstick, and never resorts woodworker who moonlights as a lock- cars or numbers.” Every woman of repro- to idyllic depictions of a long-ago day that smith in small-town Boyne City, Mich. He’s ductive age, it seems, knows him by name. never existed. Gossip can be the trigger for the guy everybody knows, wink-wink. After they start dating, he gives Jane a neighbors’ concern, but kindness will get Jane is new in town. She’s a second- necklace for Christmas, and she recog- them to your front door. grade teacher who operates according to nizes it as identical to the one worn by one Jane is self-deprecatory, but generous in the rhythm of a child’s world. She under- of his former girlfriends, a waitress at a lo- her assessment of most everyone else, in- stands that her students return to school in cal restaurant. Does he buy them in bulk? cluding the girl at the video store who “car- she wonders. ried her breasts in front of her as though EARLY MORNING RISER Does it matter? She’s not sure. they were a couple of large cupcakes.” She By Katherine Heiny Years into their relationship, after their will not be jealous of this girl, who is yet Katherine Heiny 336 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. friend Jimmy moves in with them (you’ll another ex of Duncan’s. agree that he should), she buys a new mat- Jane picks up on things quickly. She tress for Duncan’s old bed. How ironic, she senses old grudges that make the air “elec- narrow lines at his chin. “It looked like the fall on a “summer rock-star schedule notes silently, that “a bed that had tric with jealousy.” A man’s stiff stride re- someone had circled an area on his face and arrive at school still half-asleep.” She’s launched a thousand women’s orgasms — minds her of “how some of her shyer stu- with a marker and said, ‘This here is where sympathetic to a little girl whose father, at possibly tens of thousands — had come to dents crossed the room to use the pencil your mustache and beard should go.’” If a parent conference, exclaims, “Wow, rest in the room of a man who’d never had a sharpener.” The first time she meets Dun- only all of us women could distract our- Crystal’s in second already?” On a wintry girlfriend.” can’s ex-wife, Aggie, their conversation selves this way before a pelvic exam. day, she surrenders to her students’ col- Fortunately, Duncan is more compli- makes her feel “like a dog drinking from a And then there’s Jimmy, a kind man in lective longing and gives them a two- cated than that, as is everyone else in Kath- water bowl while her owners talked over his late 30s whom many describe as “slow minute break to stare out the windows as erine Heiny’s quiet whirlwind of a novel, her head.” learning” — but is he? Jimmy is as full a which covers a single decade in Jane’s life. At its heart, this is a serious story full of human being as anyone claiming residen- CONNIE SCHULTZ is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Just as things start to settle down, a tragic lightness. When Jane is sitting in her doc- cy in Boyne City. He is also the one person columnist and the author, most recently, of the accident upends the community and Jane tor’s waiting room, she notices a man who can help Jane discover who she is novel “The Daughters of Erietown.” begins the hard work of figuring out what it whose dental-floss-thin mustache meets in meant to be. 0

Down and Out in Portland A young protagonist is determined to hold her impoverished family together.

By ALANNA BENNETT every day. She works two jobs while at- ing its many long monologues spelling out tending community college and caring for exactly what each character is thinking in a brother with developmental disabilities clunky detail. Vlautin’s etchings of the CRAFTSMAN AND SMALL clapboard houses (Vlautin never specifies his condition). city’s poor, white population are at times still dot the streets of Portland, Ore., as She does all this with a single goal in mind: overwrought, especially around the topic they have for over a century, but next to to raise enough money to put a down pay- of weight, as are the inner lives of anyone them now you will find walls of steel and ment on the house her family has lived in who’s not the main character. That tenden- glass stretching up into the city’s gray for Lynette’s whole life. That down pay- cy is extra egregious when it comes to skies. If you’re familiar with the area, the ment, in combination with a loan to be tak- Lynette’s mother, a dreary antagonist sight may be chilling. These condos stand en out by her mother, is the only way for whose motives no number of monologues in the place of old churches and Boys & the three to stay together. After years of de- manage to three-dimensionalize. pression and rage she’s worked hard to The novel regains its footing, though, in THE NIGHT ALWAYS COMES control, Lynette is bent on controlling this the moments where we get to live in By Willy Vlautin as well. Her dream is simply to chart a fu- Lynette’s inner world. “The whole city is 208 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. ture for her family that would allow them starting to haunt me,” Lynette says in the $26.99. to live without the looming specter of dis- novel’s most potent scene. “All the new AGATA NOWICKA placement. places, all the big new buildings, just re- But when Lynette’s mother reneges on mind me that I’m nothing, that I’m no- Girls Clubs, on lots purchased by develop- one who can’t keep up. the deal, that dream disappears in an in- body.” The central question of her night ers and sold by families who often had little Lynette, the protagonist of Willy stant. Lynette spirals, and most of the nov- resonates beyond this one family: Can one choice. You may get a sense, looking at Vlautin’s determined new novel, “The el takes place over a single night as she person be built to sink, or is she set up to half-built 12-unit condominiums with rents Night Always Comes,” feels the dread of tears feverishly through Portland, chasing fail by an entire system designed to keep twice as high as those families’ mortgages, Portland’s transformation down to her down any lead that might result in some the poor not just working, but hurting? that they’re not just replacing the old ways bones. This is a novel that lives firmly in extra cash that could right the situation. Anyone who’s scrambled within the con- of Portland. They may be replacing every- the melancholia of the city’s gentrification, Most of the people Lynette meets on this fines of poverty may relate to Lynette’s hurtling readers through one woman’s tragic, desperate night do not react kindly, quest for agency over her own fate. With ALANNA BENNETT is a screenwriter for desperation to keep her life afloat in a city and as the evening turns violent the ex- “The Night Always Comes,” Vlautin chron- “Roswell, New Mexico.” Her culture writing that’s pushing its working class out, one haustion and isolation of her poverty ring icles the downfall of a city. As Lynette’s has appeared in BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Eater razed lot at a time. clear as day. story illustrates, it’s an undoing that is and more. For years Lynette has been up at 4 a.m. The novel, Vlautin’s sixth, stalls out dur- deeply personal, too. 0

16 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY LEXEY SWALL Deep Breath A novel that gives readers the space to wander through, and bask in, life.

By PATRICK NATHAN

IT’S A UNIQUE, if common, cruelty to trans- plant a child who is just putting down roots. For those pulled and relocated, there’s a thirstiness — and a little guarded ring of bark — that those with stable child- hoods lack. In “The Recent East,” a won- derful, immersive debut novel from the writer and teacher Thomas Grattan, we’re given an intimate look at these wood cut- tings, as seen through three generations of one family, each moved across an ocean just before blooming.

THE RECENT EAST By Thomas Grattan 357 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

In 1968, Beate is 12. Germany is divided by the Berlin Wall and she lives in the East with her family, but her parents have ac- quired fake passports and intend to defect — first to West Germany, then England, then the United States. At the border, they tell the soldiers they are “returning” after visiting an ill cousin. Upset at leaving LEONARDO SANTAMARIA home, Beate is tempted to tell the truth, just to spite her parents. Yet she stays qui- sale. In what may be this young person’s Even among the absolute, unequivocal Times Style. et and becomes a defector — a new kernel first telescopic image of time, he notices horrors of Eastern Europe in the 1990s — Presenting the of identity her English and American her presence: “She was here, as the great- neo-Nazis, xenophobic violence, police of- contemporary collection teachers, classmates and friends want her several-times-over grandfather had once ficers who sit “in their cruisers a block of apparel from to lean into: “There was nothing like been. Also Oma’s parents, whom she away, waiting for something to happen,” The New York Times Store. trauma survived to let others remember talked about sometimes and got sad, displaced refugees, homeless encamp- for a while that their boredom was a lux- though she said she was happy remember- ments, “the fascist who worked at the gro- ury.” Having escaped communism makes ing them. Perhaps one day he would think cery store” and hate crimes, all of them Beate “interesting” — and lonely. of her in the same way. Perhaps he’d have mournfully recognizable in 2021 — there is Jump to 1990. Beate, now in upstate New someone who’d want to hear stories of room for life. Room, even, for beauty, York, receives a letter. The Berlin Wall has Oma in this house and in Cologne.” which Grattan delivers with graceful econ- fallen. The childhood home she left behind, “The Recent East” is, in so many ways, a omy. Watching Michael’s gay vocabulary the government explains, is now hers. novel of life — at least in James Salter’s of gestures is “like seeing a heron swoop to Here is where the novel’s heft earns its sense: “Life is weather. Life is meals.” As a landing, a spider spin a corner into sil- great, beautiful weight. Beate decides to in many great novels, time is perhaps its ver.” At a seething, teenage party, “smoke move back to Germany, returning with most magnetic character. Our lives are hovered above the crowd like cartoon children of her own. Her son, Michael, who time spent, and it’s a deep, expansive thinking.” An abandoned bathroom has is 13, relishes his snipped roots and enjoys pleasure to spend a little of ours as these had “toilets pulled from it like rotten unsupervised nights of parties, vandalism, characters spend their own. teeth.” Like all beauties, these are dilations drugs and gay sex. Her daughter, Adela, Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not of time. Where our present era of decimat- who is 12, reads about the Stasi, about only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in ed attention demands contraction and di- Mengele, about anything that might “ex- fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame. minishment, “The Recent East” offers ex- plain how people’s meanness could metas- Is happiness really so uninteresting? Is con- pansion; it artfully holds open a needed tasize.” She spends her days with her cous- tentment? Both seem to have developed space — to wander, to contemplate, to no- in, Udo, whose inability to accept Ger- that reputation, but in Grattan’s hands, life’s tice. Even just to breathe. Like the house in many’s history ultimately (and dramati- joys are magnetic. Michael, enjoying his the novel, life is so much larger than we re- cally) results in Adela being sent back to newfound gay freedom, thinks of his new member. America to live with her father. Later, city as “a shelter dog ready to roll over and Nervously crossing the border, a young Adela marries, splits and returns to Ger- follow you forever if you approached with a Beate hides her ears under her hair. She many. It’s 2009. Her child, Peter, bonds soft voice and gentle hand.” When he meets imagines them “like the leaves of a house- with her family. Beate has thrived. Michael another gay boy his age, his afternoon feels plant, thin and large and loath to hide from owns a gay bar. All are deeply aggrieved, “like a giant soap bubble. Pop, he thought, the sun.” Perhaps this is what made me terribly lonely. All love one another. but it kept going.” Beate, as a teenager, asks think of roots, of plants asked to bloom Another jump: In 2016, a teenage Peter her boyfriend “to move into her and stay for without soil they trust. But bloom Beate is distraught as Beate (his “Oma”) puts the a while. He is inside of me, she’d thought, does, and so do her children, and so do old, baggy, fiercely lived-in house up for and it felt like they were breaking an impos- theirs. Grattan’s true talent is patience. I sible barrier.” After a great deal of loss, grief, think it’s only now that I’ve realized where PATRICK NATHAN is the author of “Some Hell.” frustration and loneliness dealt to these it is these characters grow. One name for it His second book, “Image Control: Art, Fas- characters, their joys arrive as they would in is family. The other, no matter who offers it, store.nytimes.com cism, and the Right to Resist,” is forthcoming real life: like gifts we can scarcely believe is love. I’m grateful this novel could take 800.671.4332 in August. are happening. me there. 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17 The Weary Titan Britain in decline may have a lot in common with modern America.

elites who ran the show in these four dec- By RICHARD ALDOUS ades. From 1880 “until the apocalypse came in 1914,” he writes reprovingly, “there “WHAT FOOLS WE were,” King George V was among the upper and upper-middle told his prime minister, Ramsay MacDon- classes a resting on laurels; a decision, lit- ald, in 1930, looking back to the era before eral and metaphorical, to live off dividends World War I. In the context of the wartime rather than work that little bit harder and catastrophe his generation had delivered, improve more.” The end result: “Britain the king may have had a point. That was was diminished” and “British power was in the time of Rudyard Kipling’s “long reces- decline.” sional” and A. E. Housman’s “land of lost Heffer warns us against “the pornogra- content.” Arthur Balfour, prime minister phy of nostalgia,” but still, there are other from 1902 to 1905, lamented “some process ways to see the Edwardians. Perhaps this of social degeneration” that “may conven- period was not one of Thomas Hardy’s iently be distinguished by the name of ‘dec- times “when all went well,” but the Ed- wardians certainly meet Arnold Bennett’s THE AGE OF DECADENCE criterion of being “identified with the great A History of Britain, 1880 to 1914 cause of cheering us all up.” Everything By Simon Heffer was brighter, faster, more fashionable. Illustrated. 912 pp. Pegasus Books. $39.95. With the growth of cinemas, gramophones, telephones and the first 100-miles-per- hour trains for trips to the seaside, Ed- adence.’” Joseph Chamberlain, the most wardians for the most part had more fun charismatic politician of the late-Victorian than those stern Victorians. Thanks to ad- age, put it more pithily. “The Weary Titan,” vances in medicine and nutrition, people in he said in 1902, “staggers under the too Britain lived longer (unless they found vast orb of its fate.” themselves in the wartime trenches). And For many Americans today, perhaps everyday life also improved. If this was an fearing late-stage decadence and their era of revolt, it was also one of radical re- own Weary Titan, this story may strike form, with a long reach into all areas of so- close to home. For in Simon Heffer’s ciety from cradle to grave. The daily exist- telling, the history of Britain from 1880 to ence of the working classes on whose 1914 is one in which “a nation so recently backs much of the wealth of the previous not just great, but the greatest power the century had been built was enhanced im- world had ever known, sustained in its measurably by a battery of social, industri- greatness by a rule of law and parliamen- al and educational legislation. Liberal re- tary democracy, had begun its decay.” form culminated in the comprehensive “The Age of Decadence” is a successor 1911 National Insurance Act — one of the volume to the same author’s well-regarded most important pieces of legislation of the “High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth 20th century and one that remains a foun- of Modern Britain” (2013), which charted dation of the British welfare state and Na- Britain’s rise to “greatness” in the earlier King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in their coronation robes. tional Health Service. part of the 19th century. Heffer picks up Regarding decline as a world power, ev- here with Gladstone taking over the pre- erything is relative. Twentieth-century miership from his great rival, Disraeli, in an, he writes elegantly but punchily, com- was reduced to ashes.” In Heffer’s telling it Britain overcame rival empires, fought 1880, then guides us through the high-Vic- bining seriousness with welcome flashes is perhaps less ashes to ashes than an and won two cataclysmic wars and twice torian era into the 20th century with the of waspishness that stop things from get- overripe piece of fruit rotting and putrefy- reconstructed the world order in its own accession of King Edward VII in 1901. He ting stuffy. Pointing, for example, to the so- ing in front of our eyes. image. The British retreated from empire ends in 1914 with Britain facing an unhap- cially entitled Virginia Woolf’s sneering at ”The Age of Decadence” is a master- once its corrupting decadence became py choice between a European war with a fellow novelist, the shopkeeper’s son Ar- piece of pacing. After an amiable perambu- manifest. Historians of other empires Germany and a civil war in Ireland. He nold Bennett, Heffer notes that her put- lation with the last of the Victorians, we might ask whether the Edwardians were wisely does not include the origins of the downs “had him written off for much of the build to a frantic cliff-top scramble as the any more degenerate than the French of world war substantively in this volume 20th century by generations of university Edwardians lose their grip on events and the Third Republic, or imperial Germans, (his book on this topic has just been pub- lecturers and critics, who confused snob- themselves. The book culminates in three Russians, Ottomans, Iranians and Chi- lished in Britain). In such a way he avoids bery with literary criticism.” That, as they powerful chapters on the suffragists, in- nese. Certainly Britain was eclipsed by the the teleological danger of making every- say, is a twofer. dustrial unrest and the threat of civil war in United States but arguably there was not thing in Britain about the war as the coun- Heffer has little interest in debates Ireland. By the final pages, Heffer has skill- much the Edwardians could have done try hurtles toward some kind of inevitable among historians on the period, but unlike fully conjured a country in chaos and head- about the rise of a vast, resource-rich conti- abyss. In fact, until the last moment, even many general surveys of this kind, he does ing over the edge. The prime minister, Her- nental power that unlike its other rivals after the assassination of Archduke Franz not rely just on secondary literature and bert Henry Asquith, had “rarely felt more was reasonably well governed. Today Brit- Ferdinand, Ireland seemed the more im- makes excellent use of wide-ranging archi- hopeless” and by July 1914 believed the ain remains one of the half-dozen richest portant priority for Britain. val research. That approach gives the book United Kingdom had reached “an impasse, countries in the world with a cultural and There are many pleasures to be had in a fresh perspective, although not necessar- with unspeakable consequences.” The political impact that far exceeds its size. this fine book, not the least of which is the ily a new one. What is striking about “The Lord Mayor of Liverpool told the Earl of Much of its good fortune is rooted in the vivacity of Heffer’s prose. A columnist for Age of Decadence” is that it brings us full Derby he feared “a revolution is in legacy of those Edwardians who, as H. G. The Sunday Telegraph as well as a histori- circle to the view the late Victorians and progress.” In the circumstances, a war Wells put it, saw “The Shape of Things to Edwardians so often had of themselves with Germany looked to many like the Come.” RICHARD ALDOUS is the Eugene Meyer profes- and it echoes George Dangerfield’s semi- easy option. So perhaps in the end the dutiful King sor of British history and literature at Bard nal 1935 book “The Strange Death of Liber- Heffer has no hesitation in pointing the George V only had it half right. For while College. His books include “The Lion and the al England,” which evocatively depicted finger of blame at the complacent, “swag- they were often foolish, the Edwardians Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli.” how “by the end of 1913 Liberal England gering” late-Victorian and Edwardian were no fools. 0

18 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 Endangered A history of the men and women who fought over the past century to save animals from extinction.

Hornaday’s skill as a taxidermist meant ridiculed all conservationists as effemi- There she found evidence of a precipitous By ERNEST FREEBERG he spent “much of his professional life up to nate sentimentalists. decline in the annual eagle migration, one his elbows in animal innards.” Back in That charge was hard to sustain against clue in a puzzle she assembled in her A RECENT STUDY warns that 500 species of Washington, he mounted these sacrificial Rosalie Edge, the conservation move- groundbreaking 1962 book, “Silent land animals face extinction over the next victims in a diorama that evoked the ment’s “hellcat.” Edge came to the cause in Spring.” Carson showed that pesticides two decades, while another predicts that bison’s life on the prairies. The display fas- middle age, an affluent and well-connected were doing more damage than an army of climate change may wipe out a third of the cinated the public and rallied support for amateur bird-watcher who had developed hunters, not only driving eagles toward ex- world’s variety of freshwater fish. As Mi- his fresh determination to save what re- political skills fighting for woman’s suf- tinction but poisoning creatures up and chelle Nijhuis writes in “Beloved Beasts,” mained of the wild herds. Thanks to a suc- frage. Though a loyal Audubon member, down the food chain, humans included. news of this existential threat reaches cessful breeding program he created at the she ambushed the society’s annual board Her work inspired Stewart Udall, interior most of us as “a jumble of tragedies and Bronx Zoo, a small herd of bison produced meeting in 1929, denouncing its leading secretary in the Johnson administration, emergencies.” Through a series of richly enough offspring to repopulate Western men for failing to protest the open season to push for legal protections that culmi- drawn biographical portraits, she intro- reserves, a saving remnant that would ex- against eagles, owls and other raptors. To nated in the landmark 1973 Endangered duces us to the men and women who have pand over time and is still thriving today. many sportsmen and poultry farmers, ea- Species Act, an imperfect but “indispens- been working for more than a century to Hornaday’s success gave hope that ex- gles were undesirable vermin, and Alaska able bulwark against extinction.” rescue endangered species from extinc- Tracing key turning points in the devel- tion. They are a sometimes flawed but fas- opment of conservation biology, Nijhuis cinating group — sportsmen, bird lovers, shows that the growing threat of extinction zoologists and activists. Without their ef- provoked an intellectual revolution in the forts, our bad situation would be so much way scientists think about the very mean- worse. ing of species. Each animal came to be un- While some early naturalists found evi- derstood as an essential piece of a dynam- dence in the fossil record of animals becom- ic, interconnected web. While public sym- ing extinct, until the 19th century most ob- pathy is easily stirred to rescue “char- ismatic” animals, conservationists came to BELOVED BEASTS focus as much on the preservation of hab- Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction itat. No longer just protecting animals By Michelle Nijhuis from bullets, they expanded their mission Illustrated. 342 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. to save “shrubbery and wetlands from $27.95. bulldozers.” As the conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold put it, the only way to stop extinction is to first save the organism he servers considered extinction a physical and called “land.” even theological impossibility. Overhunting Leopold preached the essential value and extermination campaigns had clearly that apex predators play in keeping caused micro-extinctions, and there were ecosystems healthy, while others joined animal populations that scattered before the his pioneering efforts to preserve wilder- advance of human settlement. But the de- ness. In the 1980s, E. O. Wilson captured struction of an entire species was unthink- the evolving insights of ecological science able, a smashed window in the mansion of by framing extinction as an assault on God’s perfect design. “biodiversity,” a loss of genetic possibility By the mid-19th century, however, human- that threatens all life, humans included. ity’s power to vandalize creation could no Others worked to overcome the conserva- longer be denied, nowhere more clearly than tion movement’s origin in white suprema- in the decimation of America’s vast bison cy and European colonialism. Africa’s first herds. In 1874, Congress tried to curb this William Temple Hornaday, the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist, with a baby bison. game-protection measures were imposed slaughter, but President Grant vetoed the by colonial masters determined to protect bill, supporting the military strategy of paci- their sport of trophy hunting. More re- fying the Plains tribes by destroying this tinction was not inevitable for those even offered a bounty on them. cently, transnational organizations have foundation of their economy and culture. species being ground under the wheels of In partnership with a respected zoolo- defended wildlife by supporting African A decade later, when the Smithsonian progress. He devoted decades more to the gist who shared her views but not her free- communities as stewards of their own en- zoologist and chief taxidermist William cause, adding his prestige to the “feather dom to agitate, Edge founded the Emer- vironmental inheritance, a strategy both Temple Hornaday surveyed the museum’s wars.” In 1886, an ornithologist walking on gency Conservation Committee. “Mrs. more just and more successful. collection he found no good examples of New York City’s sidewalks found fastened Edge takes the view that all conservation Nijhuis is an engaging storyteller as well the American bison. While he was plan- on ladies’ hats the brilliant fragments of 40 movements except her own are limited as a self-described “lapsed biologist,” ning an expedition to harvest specimens, different species. From hummingbirds to and discriminatory,” The New Yorker weaving this history with firsthand ac- his Western correspondents informed him herons, millions died serving this market, quipped years later, “and she puts in her counts of those on the front lines of species there were only a few hundred left, and pushing many species down the passenger best licks for creatures that many natu- preservation today — from the Blackfeet they were disappearing fast. After weeks pigeon’s road to extinction. ralists wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.” tribe’s restoration of a bison herd in the of searching in the Montana Territory, Hor- The National Audubon Society, incorpo- A passionate pamphleteer and an incorri- Northern Rockies (descendants of Horna- naday found and shot 20 of them. “I am re- rated in 1905, won federal protections that gible lobbyist, her protests helped change day’s rescue operation), to park rangers in ally ashamed to confess it,” he later admit- ended the plume trade and provided sanc- Audubon’s leadership and its policy on Namibia who defend rhinos and elephants ted. By his estimation, he had just killed a tuary for songbirds. But along the way, the birds of prey. In 1934, Edge learned of a from poachers. She acknowledges that her tenth of all the bison remaining from the campaign exposed a gendered double mountain in Pennsylvania that was a fa- story offers no reason for great optimism herds that had once numbered from 20 mil- standard. Though many of conservation’s vorite spot for hunters to shoot raptors. concerning the fate of so many species now lion to 30 million. most loyal supporters were women, bird Horrified, she bought the mountain, hired facing extinction, but she reminds us of the advocates blamed the female of our a caretaker, and transformed Hawk Moun- very real accomplishments of these “pas- ERNEST FREEBERG is a professor at the Univer- species for their heedless vanity, even tain into a preserve that continues her leg- sionate experts and passionate amateurs” sity of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the author of though the trade’s profits went to male acy today. who devoted their lives, and too often gave “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and hunters and milliners. In turn, those de- Among the visitors to this sanctuary their lives, to protecting our fellow species the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.” fending the free market in feathers was the wildlife biologist Rachel Carson. from ourselves. 0

PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19 Kingpins

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 oid-related overdoses since 1999, and mil- lions more have become hopelessly ad- dicted. Not all of this wreckage can be laid at the feet of the Sacklers, but a lot of it can. By aggressively promoting OxyContin, their company, Purdue Pharma, ushered in a new paradigm under which doctors be- gan routinely prescribing the potent and dangerously addictive narcotics. In the process, the Sacklers became fabulously rich, reaping, according to one expert’s court testimony, some $13 billion. The broad contours of this story are well known. Hundreds of news articles and sev- eral books have been written about it, most notably “Pain Killer,” by the former New York Times reporter Barry Meier. Keefe comes late to the party and he’s careful to credit Meier and others for their trailblaz- Richard Sackler, of Purdue Pharma, in an image from a 2015 deposition video.

drug, it became a controlled substance. was their cash cow and they milked every While Arthur’s life makes for fascinating last dollar from it despite knowing what it reading — he had three wives and became was doing to the country. an avid collector of Asian art, negotiating a Keefe came to his subject in a round- secret deal with the Met to store his cov- about way: He’d been reporting on Mexi- eted collection in one of the museum’s can drug cartels when he noticed their in- wings free of charge — he played no role in creasing reliance on heroin sales — a de- the OxyContin saga, which made me ques- velopment closely linked to the exponen- tion Keefe’s decision to devote fully one- tial rise in prescription opioid use. When third of the book to him. Arthur’s heirs, addicts couldn’t get their hands on Oxy- who after his death sold their stake in Pur- Contin, or when a new formulation made it due to his brothers, Raymond and Morti- harder to crush the pills and extract their mer, will surely bemoan this choice. They payload, they graduated to heroin. blame the other two branches of the family for soiling the Sackler name, one heir refer- THE NARCO TRAFFICKING analogy, it turns ring to them as the “OxySacklers.” out, is apt. There are some obvious paral- It’s hard not to agree with them. Arthur lels between El Chapo and the Sinaloa car- Pill bottles symbolizing deaths caused by opioid overdoses; Jacqueline and Mortimer Sackler in may have been the first to blur the lines be- tel and the Sacklers and Purdue. Like the 2013; Jonathan Sackler (far right) at a gala for the American Federation for Children in 2014. tween medicine and commerce, and he pio- Mexican drug lord, the Sacklers used their neered modern drug marketing, but his money to persuade people to do their bid- ing journalism (Meier even appears as a devastating portrait of a family consumed sins pale compared with those of the Oxy- ding — from the F.D.A. reviewer who character in several chapters). But what by greed and unwilling to take the slightest Sacklers. Especially with those of his neph- landed a $400,000-a-year job at Purdue would normally be a weakness becomes a responsibility or show the least sympathy ew Richard Sackler, who was president of barely a year after approving OxyContin to strength because Keefe, a New Yorker for what it wrought. Purdue Pharma from 1999 to 2003 and con- the former U.S. attorney who went from staff writer and the author of, among other While other accounts of the opioid crisis tinued to exert a strong influence on the being one of the first to raise alarm bells books, the prizewinning “Say Nothing” have tended to focus on the victims, “Em- business for years afterward from his about the drug to becoming a company (2019), a history of the Troubles in North- pire of Pain” stays tightly focused on the perch on the board. It was Richard who consultant after he left office. And like El ern Ireland, is blessed with great timing. In perpetrators. The first part of the book pushed to develop OxyContin in the 1990s Chapo, the Sacklers threatened and intimi- the past few years, numerous lawsuits chronicles the life of the family’s patriarch, and who led the charge to market it for rou- dated those they couldn’t put on the pay- filed against Purdue by state attorneys Arthur Sackler, the eldest of three brothers tine pain when the F.D.A. approved it in roll. That may have included Keefe himself, general, cities and counties have finally born in the early 1900s to Jewish immi- 1995, urging Purdue’s army of sales reps to who noticed a man watching his house cracked open the Sacklers’ dome of se- grant parents in working-class Brooklyn. unleash a “blizzard of prescriptions.” from a parked S.U.V. last summer, in all crecy. Thousands of court documents have Arthur has little, if any, connection to the For a long time, Richard’s and his cous- likelihood, he thought, a private investiga- become public through discovery, includ- modern-day Purdue Pharma other than ins’ involvement was obscured by the fam- tor hired by one of the law or crisis man- ing internal company emails and memos the fact that he owned a third of the compa- ily’s secrecy and by loyal employees’ will- agement firms advising the family. (When that give new insight into the family’s ac- ny’s first incarnation, Purdue Frederick, ingness to fall on their swords, such as Keefe asked the Sacklers about the surveil- tions and thinking. Keefe combines this until his death in 1987. But Keefe makes the when three Purdue executives pleaded lance, a representative of the family de- wealth of new material with his own exten- case, mostly convincingly, that Arthur in- guilty to a misdemeanor count of mis- clined to comment.) sive reporting — he spoke to more than 200 vented the drug-promotion playbook Pur- branding in a 2006 settlement with the Jus- If there’s one difference between El people (though the Sacklers themselves due later took a page from when it started tice Department. But the trove of docu- Chapo and the Sacklers, it’s that El Chapo declined to be interviewed) — to paint a selling OxyContin. In an eerie parallel, we ments that has since come to light through is paying for his crimes with a life sentence learn that Arthur made much of his nine- the multidistrict litigation, which Keefe in a supermax prison in Colorado while the JOHN CARREYROU, a former reporter for The figure fortune as the adman who marketed weaves into a highly readable and disturb- Sacklers get to hold onto their freedom and Wall Street Journal, is the author of “Bad the tranquilizer Valium and turned it into ing narrative, shatters any illusion that the most of their money. But with the help of Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley the pharmaceutical industry’s first block- Sacklers were in the dark about what was this damning book, there’s one thing they’ll Startup.” He is currently host and senior buster. Of course, Valium too was addictive going on at the company. The fingerprints never recover despite their penchant for editor at Three Uncanny Four, a podcasting and, in 1973, after its maker, Roche, had of the Raymond and Mortimer branches putting their name on museums: their rep- company. sold hundreds of millions of dollars of the are all over Purdue’s misdeeds. OxyContin utation. 0

20 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: JESSICA HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS; DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES; KENTUCKY ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE; SYLVAIN GABOURY/PATRICK MCMULLAN, VIA GETTY IMAGES Safeguards of Freedom How constitutions came to be written — and why they sometimes fail.

The first force Colley points to is war ideas with one another and with mass au- er to borrow than invent, the ability of po- By SHERI BERMAN (the gun). Modern constitutions, she says, diences. As Colley puts it, the growing ease litical elites and intellectuals in South began emerging in Europe in the 18th cen- of communication “made it possible for America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East OVER THE LAST several years, citizens of tury — a time when wars were expanding men and women — and not just in the West to learn about constitutions in Europe, the the West have learned that they can no in frequency, scale and geographical — to become better and more regularly in- United States and elsewhere as well as to longer take democracy for granted, and scope. Although Colley’s discussion of pre- formed about political personalities and travel to these places contributed to a “con- the result has been an explosion of studies cisely how warfare precipitated constitu- projects in different parts of the world. It tagion” of constitution-making beginning re-examining democracy’s foundations. tional development is somewhat unsys- became easier for people to compare and in the mid-19th century. Linda Colley’s new book, “The Gun, the tematic, she does lay out some important contrast conditions, including political “The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen” Ship, and the Pen,” is a helpful contribution connections between warfare and consti- conditions, in different countries and conti- stresses that constitution-makers in non- to this growing field. An eminent historian tutional development. nents.” Western places did not merely copy exist- of Britain, Colley focuses on one critical Wars sometimes led to the breakdown of Interestingly, Colley shows that early ing constitutions but rather adapted them component of democracy — constitutions. political regimes, creating opportunities constitutions were not simply the result of to their own region’s particular needs. As Democracy, Colley points out, requires for innovators to reshape governance and demands from below. Rather, increasingly Colley says, the growing ease of communi- defining and demarcating the rules and authority. This effect was particularly pro- aware of and influenced by Enlightenment cation and travel meant that constitution- principles of governing authority. As nounced when wars caused empires to col- ideas, rulers like Catherine II of Russia, makers across the globe “could study and Thomas Paine put it, “A Constitution is not lapse, triggering the formation of new Frederick of Prussia and Gustaf III of Swe- select between ideas, institutions and laws the act of a Government, but of a set out in an expanding print array people constituting a government, of different countries’ constitu- and a government without a consti- tions. They could then meld and tution is a power without right.” combine the borrowings of their choice with their own ideas, aspira- THE GUN, THE SHIP, AND THE PEN tions and legal and political con- Warfare, Constitutions, and the ventions.” Unfortunately, despite Making of the Modern World the geographical breadth of “The By Linda Colley Gun, the Ship, and the Pen,” Colley Illustrated. 512 pp. Liveright. $35. fails to explain how constitutions changed across time and space. At one point, for example, she states that between 1776 and 1850 the Throughout most of history, the most oft-mentioned constitutional idea that rulers’ power should be rights were freedom of the press defined and demarcated did not ex- and religion. Was this still the case ist. Yet by the 20th century, consti- in the late 19th and 20th centuries? tutions had come to be regarded, Did countries or regions differ sys- Colley writes, “as a trademark of a tematically in the type of rights in- modern state and of the state of be- cluded in their constitutions? Such ing modern.” The question she sets questions are left unanswered. out to answer is how and why this shift occurred. NONETHELESS, “The Gun, the Ship, One way to do this is by examin- and the Pen” has important lessons ing the constitution-makers them- for anyone interested in political selves, and much of “The Gun, the development today. One is the val- Ship, and the Pen” is devoted to an- ue of taking a long-term perspec- alyzing the ideas, motivations and tive when trying to understand activities of the pioneering men The signing of the Constitution of the United States, 1787. contemporary events. Colley dem- (and few women) involved in de- onstrates that even failed attempts signing and championing constitu- at implanting constitutions often tions. The book discusses not only well- countries and the need to design political den wrote constitutions in order to signal had important consequences. For in- known figures from Western history like institutions from scratch. But even when their “modern” status to their people and stance, she shows that in many cases of James Madison and Jeremy Bentham, but war didn’t cause regime breakdown, it of- to one another. And in another reflection of successful constitution-making, reformers also constitutional champions from places ten generated deep societal divisions and the influence of the new communication built upon previous efforts and learned as varied as Japan, Tunisia, Pitcairn Is- intense debates about the political future, technologies, these rulers often custom- from the mistakes their predecessors land, Tahiti, Russia and India. leading rulers to turn to constitutions as made their proclamations for print repro- made. Of course, individuals cannot make his- ways to re-establish unity and legitimacy. duction and had them translated into dif- Colley also reminds us of how revolu- tory as they please: They must work within Finally, as the frequency and scale of war- tionary and inspirational constitutions the circumstances given to them. Therefore, fare grew, it became more expensive, forc- Throughout most of history, the were — and still are. Constitutions let peo- understanding the emergence of constitu- ing rulers to tax their populations more ple define and delineate power, to shape tions requires examining the circumstances heavily. As any American schoolchild idea that rulers’ power should the way governance occurs and authority in which the constitutional champions found knows, taxation is likely to bring demands be restricted did not exist. is exercised in their countries. At a time themselves. More precisely, it requires in- for representation. when many are questioning the future of vestigating the forces that undermined ex- Another force Colley identifies was the democracy, it is worth remembering how isting authorities, creating opportunities for spread of new communication technolo- ferent languages so they could be easily important and precious these things are. constitutional champions to define and de- gies (the pen). (Here Colley’s work echoes disseminated at home and abroad. At the end of “The Gun, the Ship, and the marcate new ones. that of the great scholar of nationalism, Which brings us to the final, interlocking Pen” Colley recounts some words of Thom- Benedict Anderson.) During the early force identified by Colley: globalization as Jefferson’s that are particularly apt to- SHERI BERMAN is a professor of political science modern period in Europe, literacy ex- (the ship). Accompanying new communi- day: “Tho written constitutions may be vi- at Barnard College, Columbia University, and panded while the cost of publication de- cation technologies was the growing ease olated in moments of passion or delusion, the author of “Democracy and Dictatorship in creased, leading to an explosion of news- of travel. As is the case today, these forces yet they furnish a text to which those who Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the papers, pamphlets and books. These made combined to facilitate the spread of new are watchful may again rally & recall the Present Day.” it much easier for reformers to exchange ideas. And since, as Colley notes, it is easi- people.” 0

IMAGE FROM GRAPHICAARTIS/GETTY IMAGES THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 21 Children’s Books / Hocus-Pocus Poof! What if a prize in a pack of bubble gum could make everything you hate disappear?

By MAX BRALLIER This time the prize is a coupon for a mys- I read “The Anti-Book” with a pit-in-my- terious “Anti-Book.” The ad reads: stomach feeling. I mean, the kid wished DO YOU EVER WISH EVERYONE WOULD GO away his life and his world, and the wish RAPHAEL SIMON IS best known as Pseu- AWAY? came true. Worse, he seems to have donymous Bosch, the author of the popu- ARE YOU ANTI-EVERYTHING? doomed his sister, parents, dog, every- lar, and wonderful, Secret Series. “The THE ANTI-BOOK IS THE ANSWER! thing. Anti-Book” is his first book under his real The book arrives. And inside it’s blank, Can this situation be reversed or cor- name. Its protagonist is the very angry 12- except for the words “To erase it, write it.” rected? Has Mickey’s anger taken him far year-old Mickey. He’s angry at his sister. Mickey does exactly that. He writes a beyond anything he ever intended? list of the people and things he’d like to Mickey is an unexpected and refreshing THE ANTI-BOOK erase from his life. Sister, mom, dad, protagonist — truly angry, truly grouchy, By Raphael Simon school, tight underwear, loose underwear, truly sour. Simon doesn’t pull his punches 320 pp. Dial. $17.99. things that don’t come with batteries: It’s a with Mickey, which is why the character (Ages 8 to 12) long list. works. Because Mickey’s anger and confu- Anyone who’s made a seemingly life- sion come from a real place — the mystery Chapters are short and fast. Sentences ending mistake will shiver when Mickey and frustration around family and self — are punchy. The writing is packed with dia- He’s angry at his sister’s boyfriend. He’s discovers it worked. Soon, though, the they speak to the ignored and over- logue. To read “The Anti-Book” is to jump angry at his just-divorced parents. He’s an- things on his list are replaced by weird, whelmed and just so furious at the world on — and hold on. gry at his new stepmoms (both named twisted, mind-bending versions of them- kid in all of us. There’s discovery around relationships Charlie). He’s angry at the world. It’s an selves. Unlike Norton Juster’s “The Phan- And as it becomes clear that the thing with siblings, parents, stepparents and anger that is real and hard. tom Tollbooth,” in which the protagonist is Mickey dislikes and fears most is himself, boy/girlfriends. There’s insight into de- But there’s “at least one thing” Mickey launched into a bizarre fantasy world full we feel guilty and complicit for not being spair and denial and confusion. likes: Bubble Gum King bubble gum. of awe and wonder, “The Anti-Book”’s anti- more sympathetic from the start. “The Anti-Book” is a surprisingly pow- There’s a little prize in every pack. world is scary from the get-go. There are “The Anti-Book” is filled with clever erful, formula-breaking coming-of-age no early wish-fulfillment adventures, as in wordplay and puns come-to-life. Its world story. It’s captivating to watch Mickey gain MAX BRALLIER is the author, most recently, of Michael Ende’s “The Neverending Story” crackles with imagination. Talking cook- a sense of self and awareness as he moves “The Last Kids on Earth: Thrilling Tales or movies like “Labyrinth” or “Home ies, disappearing bridges, reverse gravity, beyond anger and develops an apprecia- From the Tree House,” the first graphic novel Alone.” “The Anti-Book” is darker — and a housefly turned flying house, a car with tion for and understanding of increasingly in the best-selling series. closer to tween truth. arms, a nightmarish screaming mime. mature emotions. 0 When Harry Met Harry A boy named Harry who lives in Houdini’s old house is getting text messages from the long-dead magician’s ghost.

the heart of Dan Gutman’s new middle and not much else will get a good sense of By GREGORY COWLES grade novel, “Houdini and Me.” the basic biography (including the fact that In the opening chapters, young Harry his name wasn’t really Houdini). THE BEST MAGICIANS are a little like the suffers a bad bump on the head while he Gutman writes with a strong sense of best priests, or novelists. They may be and a friend are playing near the train place, and includes pictures of Morning- skeptical about the trade they ply — noth- tracks. When he comes to in the hospital, side Heights along with the Houdini pho- ing tests your faith quite like knowing how he spies a mysterious cellphone among the tos, so even non-New Yorkers will come the tricks are done — but they’re never boxes of candy by his bed, and before long away with a feel for the neighborhood and cynical. At some level, some piece of them he’s having a lively text exchange with its charms: Riverside Park, Morningside still wants to believe in the mystery. what appears to be Houdini’s ghost. Park, the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. Gutman (“The Homework Machine,” John the Divine. He also slips in some moti- HOUDINI AND ME “The Genius Files”) is an old hand at this vational patter (“You cannot get past fear By Dan Gutman sort of thing. He used a similar time-travel unless you confront it,” Houdini texts 212 pp. Holiday House. $16.99. approach in his Baseball Card Adventure Harry. “If you can do that, you can accom- (Ages 8 to 12) series for biographical stories like “Babe & the nonfiction, it seems. Like Mary Pope plish what appears to be impossible”) and Me,” “Jackie & Me” and “Honus & Me.” Osborne and her Magic Tree House series, muses interestingly on the changing na- “Houdini and Me” fits right in. As with he uses the rudiments of plot to introduce ture of fame: “In the 21st century, it oc- Harry Mancini is a fifth-grade boy who the baseball books, the text here is sprin- children to the wonders of the past. curred to me, people can become famous lives with his widowed mother in uptown kled with old photos and memorabilia to Here’s where I cop to being a total magic overnight by simply putting on some silly Manhattan. Specifically, he lives at 278 add a sense of verisimilitude. And as with geek. When I was Harry’s age I subscribed costume or by posting an outrageous tweet West 113th Street — in the very house those books, the story feels like a fairly to Hocus Pocus magazine and attended that goes viral. In Houdini’s day, you had to where a century ago Harry Houdini spent slipshod scaffolding thrown up around a sleepaway magic camp on Long Island, actually do something amazing to get fa- the last two decades of his life. That fact, handful of historical tidbits. There’s a and one of my last pre-pandemic cultural mous. And after you did it, there was no in- plus the similarity of their names, means spooky supernatural mystery — is Hou- outings was a trip to the Houdini Museum ternet to spread the word.” that one Harry is obsessed with the other. dini trying to switch places with Harry and in Midtown Manhattan. Gutman clearly The novel ends with a cheap trick, such And maybe vice versa, since magic is at escape the shackles of death? — and a nod isn’t writing for people like me: Readers that some may feel Gutman has crossed to the usual grade-school angst: a threat- who already know a lot about Houdini the line to cynicism. Oh, well. The story is GREGORY COWLES is the senior editor of the ening bully, an argument between best won’t be surprised by anything in “Houdini diverting enough — and if a book about Books desk. friends. But Gutman’s heart is mostly in and Me.” But those who know the name Houdini can’t be escapist, what can? 0

22 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 For the complete best-seller lists, visit Best Sellers nytimes.com/books/best-sellers

COMBINED PRINT AND E-BOOK BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF APRIL 4-10

THIS LAST WEEKS THIS LAST WEEKS WEEK WEEK Fiction ON LIST WEEK WEEK Nonfiction ON LIST 1 1 THE HILL WE CLIMB, by Amanda Gorman. (Viking) The poem read on President Joe 2 1 BROKEN HORSES, by Brandi Carlile. (Crown) The Grammy Award-winning singer 1 Biden’s Inauguration Day, by the youngest poet to write and perform an inaugural poem. and songwriter recounts difficulties during her formative years and her hard-won successes. 2 3 THE FOUR WINDS, by Kristin Hannah. (St. Martin’s) As dust storms roll during the 10 Great Depression, Elsa must choose between saving the family and farm or heading 2 FINDING FREEDOM, by Erin French. (Celadon) A memoir by the chef and owner of the 1 West. Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine.

3 5 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, by Delia Owens. (Putnam) A young woman who survived 125 3 BROKEN, by Jenny Lawson. (Holt) The humorist maps out her mental and physical health 1 alone in the marsh becomes a murder suspect. journey.

4 4 THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, by Matt Haig. (Viking) Nora Seed finds a library beyond the 19 4 BEAUTIFUL THINGS, by Hunter Biden. (Gallery) The lawyer and artist, who is the son 1 edge of the universe that contains books with multiple possibilities of the lives one could of the current president, details tragedies within his family and his path to have lived. sobriety.

5 GOOD COMPANY, by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. (Ecco) The foundation of a marriage 1 5 THE LIGHT OF DAYS, by Judy Batalion. (Morrow) How Jewish women in Poland turned 1 between actors is shaken when they reunite with an old friend who is now a TV star. Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis and helped build systems of underground bunkers. 6 2 THE RED BOOK, by James Patterson and David Ellis. (Little, Brown) The second book 2 in the Black Book thriller series. Chicago detective Billy Harney investigates his own 6 THE GOD EQUATION, by Michio Kaku. (Doubleday) The theoretical physicist explains the 1 past. controversy around the synthesis of the theory of relativity and quantum theory.

7 6 WIN, by Harlan Coben. (Grand Central) Windsor Horne Lockwood III might rectify cold 4 7 1 THE CODE BREAKER, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster) How the Nobel Prize 5 cases connected to his family that have eluded the F.B.I. for decades. winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues invented CRISPR, a tool that can edit DNA.

8 NORTHERN SPY, by Flynn Berry. (Viking) The sister of a BBC producer may have joined 1 8 THE BODY, by Bill Bryson. (Doubleday) An owner’s manual of the human body covering 16 the Irish Republican Army. various parts, functions and what happens when things go wrong.

9 8 THE SONG OF ACHILLES, by Madeline Miller. (Ecco) A reimagining of Homer’s “Iliad” that 4 9 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, by David Grann. (Doubleday) The story of a murder 69 is narrated by Achilles’ companion Patroclus. spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians, whose lands contained oil.

10 7 LATER, by Stephen King. (Hard Case Crime) An N.Y.P.D. detective asks the son of a 6 10 4 THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE, by Bessel van der Kolk. (Penguin) How trauma affects 33 struggling single mother to use his unnatural ability to track a killer. the body and mind, and innovative treatments for recovery. 22 The New York Times best sellers are compiled and archived by the best-sellers-lists desk of the New York Times news department, and are separate from the editorial, culture, advertising and business sides of The New York Times Company. Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles published in the United States. ONLINE: For complete lists and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers.

Editors’ Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review

FESTIVAL DAYS, by Jo Ann Beard. (Little, Brown, $27.) A WHOLE WORLD: Letters From James Merrill, HORIZONTAL VERTIGO: A City Called Mexico, by Juan Featuring characters mostly drawn from life con- edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser. Villoro. Translated by Alfred MacAdam. (Pantheon, fronting illness, loss, violence and death, this exqui- (Knopf, $45.) The poet’s letters cast light on a gener- $35.) Villoro, an accomplished novelist, recounts his site collection of pieces defies classification, blend- ous soul with an active social life and a quicksilver remarkable engagement with Mexico City with a ing intuition and observation into something unac- wit. Artifice was Merrill’s way of being natural. He mix of irony and empathy. He is exquisitely attuned countably yet undeniably real. lavished his correspondents with parody and apho- to the capital’s contradictions, nuances and people. rism, as well as assessments of his poetic peers. ROCK ME ON THE WATER: 1974 — The Year Los THE TWILIGHT ZONE, by Nona Fernández. Translated by Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, DO NOT DISTURB: The Story of a Political Murder Natasha Wimmer. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) The narrator and Politics, by Ronald Brownstein. (Harper/Harper- and an African Regime Gone Bad, by Michela of this Chilean novel is haunted by a dark episode in Collins, $29.99.) Brownstein paints Los Angeles in Wrong. (PublicAffairs, $32.) In the years since the her country’s past: In 1984, a torturer for the secret 1974 as a kind of patchouli-scented version of Flor- 1994 genocide, Rwanda has become a favorite of police exposed the sordid workings of the Pinochet ence during the Renaissance, bursting with creative Western donors. Yet in this authoritative account, regime. Shifting between genres, Fernández imag- energy in television, movies and music. From Joni Wrong, an Africa specialist, exposes the country’s ines the lives both of victims and of perpetrators. Mitchell to Archie Bunker, a year of cultural ferment long history of corruption and human rights abuses EVERY DAY IS A GIFT: A Memoir, by Tammy Duck- is presented here in all its richness. under the leadership of President Paul Kagame. worth. (Twelve, $30.) Duckworth recalls being her LIBERTIE, by Kaitlyn Greenidge. (Algonquin, $26.95.) PLACES OF MIND: A Life of Edward Said, by Timothy family’s main breadwinner as a teenager, surviving Based on the lives of Susan Smith McKinney Stew- Brennan. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) In the first the rocket-propelled grenade that almost killed her ard, the first Black female doctor in New York State, comprehensive biography of Said, Brennan, a for- and becoming a U.S. senator from Illinois. She and her daughter, Greenidge’s second novel centers mer student, highlights the Palestinian scholar’s spares no detail in recounting her courageous life. its post-Civil War New York story on an enduring complexity, delivering a portrait of a thinker, activist quest for freedom. A feat of monumental thematic and musician endowed with an unusually restless The full reviews of these and other recent books imagination. and protean intellect. are online: nytimes.com/books

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 23 Inside the List PRINT | HARDCOVER BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF APRIL 4-10 ELISABETH EGAN

...... THIS LAST WEEKS THIS LAST WEEKS WEEK WEEK Fiction ON LIST WEEK WEEK Nonfiction ON LIST

Mujer Power Gabriela Garcia dedi- 1 2 1 1 THE HILL WE CLIMB, by Amanda Gorman. (Viking) The 1 BROKEN HORSES, by Brandi Carlile. (Crown) The Grammy cated her debut novel, “Of Women and poem read on President Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, by the Award-winning singer and songwriter recounts difficulties Salt,” to Iraida Rosa López, her 101-year- youngest poet to write and perform an inaugural poem. during her formative years and her hard-won successes. old grandmother who emigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1968. In a 2 2 THE FOUR WINDS, by Kristin Hannah. (St. Martin’s) As dust 10 2 FINDING FREEDOM, by Erin French. (Celadon) A memoir 1 photograph pinned at storms roll during the Great Depression, Elsa must choose by the chef and owner of the Lost Kitchen in Freedom, the top of Garcia’s between saving the family and farm or heading West. Maine. Twitter feed, López is wearing jazzy sneak- 3 4 THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, by Matt Haig. (Viking) Nora Seed 19 3 BROKEN, by Jenny Lawson. (Holt) The humorist maps out 1 ers and holding a finds a library beyond the edge of the universe that contains her mental and physical health journey. Black Lives Matter books with multiple possibilities of the lives one could have sign; even without a lived. 4 BEAUTIFUL THINGS, by Hunter Biden. (Gallery) The lawyer 1 neatly printed Spanish and artist, who is the son of the current president, details ‘I won’t ro- expletive, it would be 4 GOOD COMPANY, by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. (Ecco) The 1 tragedies within his family and his path to sobriety. manticize the clear that this is a foundation of a marriage between actors is shaken when act of writing. woman with strong they reunite with an old friend who is now a TV star. 5 THE LIGHT OF DAYS, by Judy Batalion. (Morrow) How 1 It can be convictions. Jewish women in Poland turned Jewish youth groups into incredibly “I grew up in a 5 3 THE RED BOOK, by James Patterson and David Ellis. 2 resistance cells to fight the Nazis and helped build systems difficult.’ matrilineal family,” (Little, Brown) The second book in the Black Book thriller of underground bunkers. said Garcia in a phone series. Chicago detective Billy Harney investigates his interview. “I had all sisters, my mother own past. 6 1 THE CODE BREAKER, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & 5 had all sisters, my grandmother had all Schuster) How the Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and sisters. I was raised by a single mother 6 FIRST PERSON SINGULAR, by Haruki Murakami. (Knopf) 1 her colleagues invented CRISPR, a tool that can edit DNA. and I never felt a lack in that. My grand- A collection of eight short stories on love, childhood and mother was an important figure for me memory. 7 THE GOD EQUATION, by Michio Kaku. (Doubleday) 1 growing up; she helped raise me my The theoretical physicist explains the controversy around entire life, so I wanted to dedicate the 7 NORTHERN SPY, by Flynn Berry. (Viking) The sister of a BBC 1 the synthesis of the theory of relativity and quantum book to her.” producer may have joined the Irish Republican Army. theory. “Of Women and Salt” mines the lives of mothers and daughters across five 8 6 THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE, by V. E. Schwab. 24 8 2 GREENLIGHTS, by Matthew McConaughey. (Crown) The 25 generations and four countries, from (Tor/Forge) A Faustian bargain comes with a curse Academy Award-winning actor shares snippets from the 19th-century Cuba to present-day Miami that affects the adventure Addie LaRue has across diaries he kept over the last 35 years. and Mexico. Garcia worked on the book centuries. while earning her M.F.A. at Purdue 9 3 CASTE, by Isabel Wilkerson. (Random House) The Pulitzer 36 University, where Roxane Gay was an 9 7 WIN, by Harlan Coben. (Grand Central) Windsor Horne 4 Prize-winning journalist examines aspects of caste systems early champion of her work. “I won’t Lockwood III might rectify cold cases connected to his family across civilizations and reveals a rigid hierarchy in America romanticize the act of writing. It can be that have eluded the F.B.I. for decades. today. excruciatingly difficult,” Garcia said. The hardest part was coming up with the 10 5 KLARA AND THE SUN, by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf) An 6 10 9 THIS IS THE FIRE, by Don Lemon. (Little, Brown) The CNN 4 structure of the story, which is told from “Artificial Friend” named Klara is purchased to serve as a host looks at the impact of racism on his life and prescribes alternating perspectives: “When I first companion to an ailing 14-year-old girl. ways to address systemic flaws in America. started I thought it would be a linked story collection. Then I brought in all An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. these pieces that don’t really work as stand-alone stories, so it just started becoming this hard-to-define novel.” Readers have embraced the chal- Paperback Row / BY JENNIFER KRAUSS lenge. “Of Women and Salt” debuted last week at No. 13 on the hardcover fiction list, an occasion Garcia described as THE EQUIVALENTS: A Story of Art, THE END OF OCTOBER, by Lawrence MBS: The Rise to Power of Mo- “beyond my wildest dreams.” Female Friendship, and Liberation Wright. (Vintage, 400 pp., $17.) The hammed Bin Salman, by Ben Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction Hubbard. (Crown, 384 pp., $18.) Our Unlike many authors who evangelize in the 1960s, by Maggie Doherty. author applies “the magisterial reviewer, Christopher Dickey, about the practice of pounding out a (Vintage, 400 pp., $16.95.) The poets Anne Sexton and Maxine force of his reporting skills” to this called this portrait of Saudi Ara- certain number of words before break- Kumin, the artist Barbara Swan, “chilling” novel about an epidemiol- bia’s crown prince and de facto fast, this Miamian turned Bay Area the sculptor Marianna Pineda and ogist’s “Odysseus-like return ruler, which was a 2021 PEN Amer- resident takes a fluid approach to her the writer Tillie Olsen “knit them- home” from a “biological battle- ica finalist, “detailed and disturb- schedule. Garcia said, “I’m always jeal- selves together into a friend group” ground.” While written before the ing.” Hubbard, The Times’s Beirut ous of people who have a specific ritual in 1962, when they were all recipi- current pandemic, our reviewer, bureau chief, interviewed individu- because I feel like I’m very undisci- ents of a Radcliffe Institute fellow- Douglas Preston, observed, it cuts als inside the kingdom, until the plined.” She doesn’t write every day; she ship, and called themselves “the “exceedingly close to the bone.” Saudis stopped giving him visas. wrestled with the novel when the spirit Equivalents” (since fellowship ON VANISHING: Mortality, Demen- THESE WOMEN, by Ivy Pochoda. moved her, often in the coffee shops applicants were required to have a doctorate or equivalent). tia, and What It Means to Disap- (Ecco, 352 pp., $16.99.) The most where the hubbub of conversation and pear, by Lynn Casteel Harper. (Cata- memorable of this “intricate, stoneware became white noise. WHY WE SWIM, by Bonnie Tsui. pult, 240 pp., $16.95.) What gives deeply felt, beautifully written” “Sometimes I would get in the zone (Algonquin, 288 pp., $16.95.) Mixing this “poetic inquiry” by a chaplain thriller’s five female narrators, our and work until 3 o’clock in the morning,” history, journalism and memoir, its “energy,” according to the Times reviewer, Sarah Lyall, noted, is a Garcia said. “I think it helped that dur- Tsui mulls the appeal of this “most critic Parul Sehgal, is its focus on “diminutive, damaged, brilliant” ing that time I didn’t have an early- commonplace and relaxing way of literary models of compassion. detective. Her male colleagues morning job to go to. I find sometimes putting yourself in total peril,” as Emerson’s friends referred to him refuse to listen when she says a when the rest of the world is asleep, our reviewer, Mary Pols, phrased as “dreaming” rather than “deterio- serial killer is to blame for the rating.” And Lear’s Fool possessed deaths of 17 women — sex workers, there’s a safe quiet. It makes it easier for it. Tsui’s evocation of swimming’s state of flow made Pols “long to be ideal caregiver qualities: “loyalty, street people, marginalized citizens me to access the writing.” 0 in the pool or the ocean.” steadfastness, wit.” of color — in Los Angeles.

24 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 MONTHLY BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF FEBRUARY 28-APRIL 3

THIS MONTHS THIS MONTHS MONTH Graphic Books and Manga ON LIST MONTH Mass Market ON LIST

MOTHERING HEIGHTS, by Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) 1 THE VISCOUNT WHO LOVED ME, by Julia Quinn. 3 1 The 10th book in the Dog Man series. Can the 1 (Avon) The second book in the Bridgerton series. power of love overcome the darkness and despair Taste the World, created by new villains? CAMINO WINDS, by John Grisham. (Dell) The line 1 2 between fact and fiction becomes blurred when an CAT KID COMIC CLUB, by Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) 4 author of thrillers is found dead after a hurricane From Home. 2 Stories within a story come to life as Li’l Petey, hits Camino Island. Flippy and Molly show baby frogs how to create A selection of high-quality wines comics. 3 AN OFFER FROM A GENTLEMAN, by Julia Quinn. 2 (Avon) The third book in the Bridgerton series. are delivered right to your door. GRIME AND PUNISHMENT, by Dav Pilkey. 2 3 (Scholastic) The ninth book in the Dog Man THE DUKE AND I, by Julia Quinn. (Avon) Daphne 4 series. After turning in his badge, the canine cop is 4 Bridgerton’s reputation soars when she colludes determined not to just roll over. with the Duke of Hastings. The basis of the Netflix series “Bridgerton.” CLAUDIA AND THE NEW GIRL, by Ann M. Martin. 2 4 Illustrated by Gabriela Epstein. (Scholastic) The THE NUMBERS GAME, by Danielle Steel. (Dell) An 2 ninth book in the Baby-sitters Club series. Claudia 5 affair wrecks a marriage and a daughter seeks to must choose between spending time with the very get out from her family’s shadow while old dreams artistic Ashley or the Baby-sitters Club. and new love are pursued.

FOR WHOM THE BALL ROLLS, by Dav Pilkey. 2 HUSH, by James Patterson and Candice Fox. (Grand 1 5 (Scholastic) The seventh book in the Dog Man 6 Central) The fourth book in the Detective Harriet series. A new villain has a bone to pick with Dog Blue series. The man who put her in prison asks Man while Petey the Cat starts a new life. Harriet Blue to find missing members of his family.

THE DARK SECRET, by Tui T. Sutherland. Illustrated 2 JOURNEY OF THE PHARAOHS, by Clive Cussler 1 6 by Mike Holmes. (Scholastic) The fourth book 7 and Graham Brown. (Putnam) The 17th book of in the Wings of Fire series. Starflight discovers the NUMA Files series. The NUMA squad teams NightWings have imprisoned several innocent with British MI5 to stop arms dealers from stealing RainWings. ancient relics. Member Benefits 7 FETCH-22, by Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) The eighth 2 8 ROMANCING MISTER BRIDGERTON, by Julia 2 book in the Dog Man series. Petey the Cat feels Quinn. (Avon) The fourth book in the Bridgerton Taste wines from across the world’s premier regions better after getting out of jail but Li’l Petey struggles series. to find good in the world. Expert wine education with our Times Tasting Notes 9 WHEN HE WAS WICKED, by Julia Quinn. (Avon) 2 CHAINSAW MAN, VOL. 1, by Tatsuki Fujimoto. 1 The sixth book in the Bridgerton series. Will things 10% off all Wine Store purchases 8 (VIZ Media) A poor young man who was betrayed between Francesca Bridgerton and Michael Stirling by someone he once trusted discovers he has the grow into something more or will she marry his Satisfaction guaranteed — cancel anytime power of a devil inside him. cousin?

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 25 The Shortlist / Black History / By Jill Watts

UNTIL JUSTICE BE DONE THE MOVEMENT JULIAN BOND’S TIME TO TEACH America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the The African American Struggle for Civil Rights A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement Revolution to Reconstruction By Thomas C. Holt Edited by Pamela Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis By Kate Masur 176 pp. Oxford University. $18.95. 400 pp. Beacon. $29.95. 480 pp. Norton. $32. For those seeking to historically contextu- Few were better situated to teach the his- Assertions that the modern struggle for civil alize Black Lives Matter, Holt, a professor at tory of the mid-20th-century civil rights rights was a “long movement” that com- the University of Chicago, provides an es- movement than the late Julian Bond, who, menced well before Brown v. Board of Edu- sential and readable primer on the along with John Lewis and others, founded cation (1954) have been a subject of recent mid-20th-century civil rights movement. the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com- and ardent debate. While most of these Holt movingly introduces this concise his- mittee (SNCC) in 1960. This series of inspir- discussions center on the 20th century, tory with the story of his grandmother’s ing lectures, which Bond delivered in his Masur, an associate professor at Northwest- brave refusal to take a seat in the back of a bus in 1944. popular college courses, is an indispensable master class ern, skillfully establishes that “America’s first civil rights He acknowledges that such activism had antecedents as that resonates with the current times. Within a broad movement” started as far back as the late 18th century. far back as the 19th century. However, and importantly, synthesis of the freedom movement, Bond reflects stir- The free states of the North and Midwest, she insight- he views the post-World War II freedom movement as a ringly on his own experiences, making this deep dive fully argues, constituted a “post-slavery” society where unique departure, defining this “classical” phase of the into civil rights history an engaging memoir as well as a resistance to anti-Black laws formed a foundation for civil rights struggle as “the mass mobilization of Black guide for 21st-century crusades for equal rights. The later federal legislation and constitutional reform. communities to challenge their racially subordinated dynamic narrative is made even more so by Danny Masur’s careful study begins with free states and civil status.” Holt rejects, to a degree, the “long move- Lyon’s photographs of the era. localities passing laws that restricted Black mobility, ment” narrative and instead focuses on mid-20th-cen- Bond grounds the freedom movement in the nascent property rights and access to the justice system. Black tury local activism. activism and longer historical transformations of the late communities were subjected to white terrorism and The modern push for civil rights, Holt convincingly 19th and early 20th centuries. As Bond notes, World War violent treatment by white authorities. Black Americans demonstrates, was first incubated in the rapidly chang- II sped up the struggle, then Brown v. Board of Educa- protested, leading an early push for civil rights. What ing cities of the postwar South. Widespread demographic tion set a legal precedent for desegregation and the started out as individual and isolated efforts eventually shifts increased Black resistance to Jim Crow. The Montgomery bus boycott became the springboard for consolidated into organized resistance with the African growth of integrated military bases brought Black sol- protest. Like other recent scholars and writers, Bond Methodist Episcopal Church emerging at the forefront. diers, many who had fought abroad for democracy, into agrees that successful campaigns for integration and White abolitionists, along with a few white businessmen Southern cities, while the empowerment of Black college voting rights were rooted in local leadership, activism and politicians, joined in, sometimes working with Black and high school students fueled nonviolent protest cam- and agendas. leaders and at other times driving ahead separately. All paigns throughout the urban South. The early agenda of Significant progress didn’t come until the 1960s — and activists agreed that Black Americans deserved liberty these actions centered on integrating public transporta- Bond, drawing heavily from his own experiences, and property. Still, a significant proportion of whites tion and public spaces. Later, it shifted to embrace a presents SNCC as the main catalyst. Successful student opposed the Black vote and denied Black humanity. push for votes and jobs. sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the Some may object to such a broad definition of what Holt adroitly traces the evolution of activism through- South were the first genuine deployment of nonviolent constitutes a civil rights movement. But Masur deftly out time and across regions. From the cities, the move- direct action. These also “democratized the movement,” reveals how the loose nature of unlikely antebellum ment spread into rural areas where circumstances were which increased the mobilization and empowerment of coalitions propelled justice’s fight. A milestone came different and, with the intense isolation and grip of white the masses. In Southern urban and rural areas, people with the case of Gilbert Horton, a free Black man jailed terrorism, more deadly. There, voter registration took risked their lives to win the rights legislation of the as a fugitive slave in the District of Columbia. His sup- priority. Even though the Civil Rights and Voting Rights 1960s. SNCC’s turn toward Black nationalism, which porters secured his release, arguing that his detention Acts were passed in the mid-60s, the escalation of white Bond views as a tactical mistake (an assertion some will was unconstitutional under the “privileges and immuni- violence induced some activists to question Gandhian disagree with), combined with Martin Luther King Jr.’s ties clause.” This victory, and others like it, eventually tactics and even integration. As the movement expanded assassination, marked the end of the civil rights move- influenced key policies during Reconstruction, specifi- into Northern and Western cities, it adopted separatism ment. Yet Bond’s message to his students and to us is cally the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amend- and concentrated on education, employment and hous- one of hope: While the quest for equal rights remains ment. Masur’s account speaks across time, revealing ing. Its victories over all were limited, but Holt’s study unfulfilled, the promise remains. how this federal legislation became the foundation for a illuminates the movement’s successful legacy. new vision.

JILL WATTS, a professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, is the author of “The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt.”

26 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL Chapters / 125 YEARS OF THE BOOK REVIEW / By Tina Jordan

JUST AS IT DOES TODAY, in its earliest years, the Book Re- Despite the fact that it ran on Halloween — and was view occasionally commissioned poetry — from John filled with terrifying imagery that compared Dreiser to a A REALLY, REALLY BAD Masefield, Percy MacKaye (who delivered “The Heart in jack-o’-lantern, with “eyes [that] burn like a flame at the the Jar: A Meditation on the Nobel Prize Award for Medi- end of a funnel” and “powerful teeth” — the poem doesn’t cal Research, 1912”) and even Edgar Lee Masters of seem to have been written as a holiday spoof. Like “Theo- POEM FROM 1915 “Spoon River Anthology” fame, whose verse about Theo- dore: A Poet,” a homage to Dreiser that appeared in dore Dreiser, his contemporary in the Chicago Renais- “Spoon River Anthology,” this piece was later reprinted in sance literary movement, graced the Oct. 31, 1915, issue. several books about the “Sister Carrie” novelist. 0

TINA JORDAN is the deputy editor of the Book Review and co-author of “The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History,” which will be published in the fall.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 27 28 SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 2021