A Season in the Sun Review Ny Times
Editors' Option
ten New Books Nosotros Recommend This Week
"The American experiment" is a slippery piddling phrase, summoning the country's noblest ideals while leaving generous room to forgive our failures to reach them. Merely the term endures precisely because it is then imprecise — it's broad enough to utilize to a wide range of the titles on this week's list, for instance, whether they business the gritty details of forming a centralized ramble government (in new histories by the venerable Joseph J. Ellis and Gordon Due south. Wood) or the hopes of a high schoolhouse basketball team during an epidemic of suicides on a Native American reservation (in "Brothers on Three," by Abe Streep). Fiona Hill'south memoir of an upwards-from-the-bootstraps British immigrant who becomes an expert analyst on the National Security Quango, just to testify in the impeachment trial of an American president? That'southward part of the experiment. So is Andrea Elliott'south "Invisible Child," her minutely observed profile of a New York schoolgirl struggling against the scourge of homelessness. So in its way is the story of Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and prolific supporter of right-wing causes, whose dislike of small-d commonwealth is weirdly evocative of arguments going back to the country'due south founding.
Rounding out our recommended books this week, nosotros offer a look at the future of cities afterwards Covid and, in fiction, a novel past L. Alison Heller and story collections past Jonas Elka and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. As it happens, Sayrafiezadeh's book fits correct in on the American experiment syllabus. Its championship: "American Estrangement."
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
There IS Nil FOR Y'all Hither: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century , by Fiona Hill. (Mariner/HarperCollins, $30.) The absorbing title of Colina's new volume is what her begetter told her when she was growing upwards in a decomposable coal-mining town in N East England. He loved her, and then he insisted that she had to go out. Hill took his advice to heart — studying at St. Andrews in Scotland, getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and eventually serving in the administrations of iii American presidents. In Nov 2019, she delivered plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (get-go) impeachment of President Trump. "When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a bright and wry way," our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. "Equally much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Colina the skilful, I began to sense that giving vox to both was the only way she could experience comfortable writing a book about herself."
INVISIBLE Kid: Poverty, Survival and Promise in an American Metropolis, by Andrea Elliott. (Random Firm, $thirty.) Expanding on a 2013 serial for The Times almost a homeless New York schoolgirl and her family, Elliott delivers a searing account of the family's struggles with poverty and addiction in a urban center and country that accept repeatedly failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion. "The result of this unflinching, tenacious reporting is a rare and powerful piece of work whose stories volition live within you long after you've read them," Matthew Desmond writes in his review. "Nosotros cannot sympathise that which nosotros refuse to meet, and Elliott forces united states of america to look, to reckon."
THE Crusade: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783, by Joseph J. Ellis. (Liveright, $xxx.) In his latest book, Ellis demonstrates that the Usa didn't come up together equally a country automatically, but required hard piece of work by the founders against the forces of localism and decentralization. "As Ellis writes in 'The Crusade,' there was ever far more emphasis on pluribus than unum, on the many rather than the 1," Richard Stengel writes in a joint review of Ellis's book and Gordon S. Wood'south "Power and Liberty." "It was only the creation of the Constitution in 1787 that fabricated these disparate citizens into Americans."
POWER AND Freedom: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood. (Oxford University, $24.95.) In a summing upwardly of his life'south work, Wood sees the era from the 1760s to the early on 1800s equally "the almost creative period of constitutionalism in American history and one of the most creative in mod Western history." Richard Stengel, in his dual review of Wood's book and Ellis'due south (above), notes that "Ability and Liberty" is "based on a series of lectures that Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown and a Pulitzer Prize winner, gave at Northwestern University in 2019," and says that "the volume has an elegiac quality forth with his customary clarity."
THE CONTRARIAN: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley'due south Pursuit of Ability , by Max Chafkin. (Penguin Press, $28.) In this energetically reported book, Chafkin paints a deeply disturbing portrait of the billionaire entrepreneur turned Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel, tracing his ascent through the ranks of Silicon Valley moguls forth with his embrace of far-right causes and beliefs. "'The Contrarian' is spooky," Virginia Heffernan writes in her review. "Chafkin's masterly evocation of his subject field'south galactic fear — of liberals, of the U.South. government, of expiry — turns Thiel himself into a threat."
AMERICAN ESTRANGEMENT: Stories, by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. (Norton, $25.95.) Sayrafiezadeh's 2nd story drove both exceeds and expands upon the promise of his first, rendering a Usa that's foreign and sometimes macabre, but still recognizable. The characters observe their style through loss, violence or fractured relationships in tales salted with shrewd sense of humour. "He writes with a veteran'south swagger and field of study," Andrew Martin writes in his review. "Nothing here feels obligatory or tossed off; … confirming the author every bit a major, committed practitioner of a difficult grade."
THE Neighbour'S SECRET, by L. Alison Heller. (Flatiron, $27.99.) In Heller'due south hyperlocal mystery, iii women have skeletons in their closets that can no longer be contained or ignored. How their stories merge and eventually collide is the crux of this witty smash-biter. "Yous could read 'The Neighbour'south Undercover' equally a lighthearted romp through Anyplace Affluent, U.S.A.," Elisabeth Egan writes in her latest Group Text column, "merely if you're in the mood to get serious, this novel will take you down a unlike, more thoughtful avenue. With a light, Liane Moriarty-esque impact, Heller asks readers to consider the thin line between privacy and secrecy."
BROTHERS ON Three: A True Story of Family unit, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana, by Abe Streep. (Celadon, $28.99.) Streep follows a Montana loftier school basketball game team, the Arlee Warriors, as they play through a historic season while also facing a suicide epidemic on the Native American reservation that most players call dwelling. "The heart of the book lies with the boys — 'juvenile constellations of promise,' equally Streep tenderly calls them," Sam Dolnick writes in his review. Streep draws out the adolescent players — no minor feat — and writes evocatively about their community, their dreams beyond their tiny town and the pull that keeps them close. "By the end of the book, you'll want to shout it from the rafters: Ar-LEE War-RIORS, Ar-LEE War-RIORS."
SURVIVAL OF THE CITY: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler. (Penguin Printing, $30.) Covid utterly transformed urban life: Wealthy residents fled, neighbors became strangers and commercial buildings stood empty. Glaeser and Cutler analyze the crisis to imagine what time to come cities might expect like. Our reviewer, Kate Ascher, calls it a "fast-paced and highly readable journey through the challenges facing America's cities. … The book serves as a useful tool in the effort to redefine the function of the metropolis in an age of increasingly polarized politics, and reminds united states of america that urban health is — as Fiorello La Guardia one time remarked well-nigh cleaning the streets — not a Democratic or Republican issue."
Afterward THE Lord's day, by Jonas Eika. Translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. (Riverhead, $26.) Whether in Copenhagen or Cancún, chasing profits or U.F.O.s, the characters in this Danish writer's debut story collection reveal the baroque rites of gimmicky life. "The sentences in these stories stretch past the limits of the ordinary to the luridly extraordinary, and some moments feel as if they are breaking through to the sublime," Justin Torres writes in his review. "The consequence of the prose is similar to what one character feels while standing in front of a wall of images: 'every bit if they had been nerveless in a parallel universe, where every production was slightly dissimilar from the corresponding one in our earth.'"
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html
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