Featuring 348 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXIX, NO. 10 | 15 MAY 2021 REVIEWS David Yoon The bestselling YA novelist branches out with a new adult thriller and a teen romance imprint Also in the issue: Alison Bechdel, Olivia Laing, and Camryn Garrett Plus: A new Stamped remix brings the anti-racist message to kids FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK | Tom Beer Freedom’s Just Another Word Chairman HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas # I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom. How do we achieve it? Why do Chief Executive Officer some people deny it to others? And what does it even mean to be free? MEG LABORDE KUEHN I’ve gotten into this philosophical frame of mind via two new books
[email protected] Editor-in-Chief I’ve been reading. The first is Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and TOM BEER Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 20), a sprawling
[email protected] Vice President of Marketing history of ideas and culture in the years between the end of the Second SARAH KALINA World War in 1945 and the intensification of American involvement in the
[email protected] Vietnam War around 1965. (I’m listening to the nearly 35-hour audiobook, Managing/Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU read in suitably professorial tones by David Colacci.)
[email protected] Menand, a staff writer at the New Yorker, writes that he wanted to Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK explore this period (roughly contiguous with his own youth) to under-
[email protected] stand the transformation in American society that had opened it to art Young Readers’ Editor VICKY SMITH and ideas from abroad.