washington post book reviews 2022

21 books to read this summer

Whether you’re headed to a far-flung beach or a nearby couch, these books are worthy additions to your summer reading list.

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

By Maud Newton, Random House

Nonfiction | There’s no shortage of books about shocking family revelations uncovered through research and DNA testing. But few writers can offer a tale as riveting and timely as Newton does here, detailing her discovery of racism, violence and cruelty passed down through multiple generations of her family tree. At its best, “ Ancestor Trouble ” becomes a kind of personal reconciliation project, boosted by lyrical writing and wide-ranging scholarship.

Review: When a family tree is rooted in racism

By Viola Davis, HarperOne

Nonfiction | One of the finest actors of her generation delivers a memoir that’s no breezy Hollywood tell-all. Instead, the Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner delves into growing up “po” — “That’s a level lower than poor,” she clarifies — in an abusive home, and ultimately channeling her pain and trauma into wrenching performances in “Doubt,” “Fences” and other films.

Review: Viola Davis reveals the trauma that shaped her as an actor

Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise

By Jack Parlett, Hanover Square Press

Nonfiction | Parlett offers a sweeping history of Fire Island, from its Native American settlers to its rise as a gay resort destination. Paying special attention to the literary luminaries who spent time there — Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith among them — the book explores the area’s cultural importance, as well as the tragedies that befell residents during the AIDS epidemic.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath

By Bill Browder, Simon & Schuster

Nonfiction | This sequel to Browder’s “ Red Notice ” couldn’t be more topical. It documents how Russian companies try to outmaneuver U.S. legislation designed to prevent powerful people from parking their ill-gotten assets in safe havens abroad. With prose that reads like a thriller, Browder walks us through legal strategies and developments that include enough high drama, plot twists and colorful characters for a movie.

Review: How Russia fought a U.S. rights law — and the man who championed it

French Braid

By Anne Tyler, Knopf

Fiction | Everything about Anne Tyler’s 24th novel is immediately recognizable to her fans: the kind but flinty Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods. There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But more than ever, we need Tyler’s comforting tales, documenting the mingled strains of affection and exasperation that tie a family together, the love that persists somewhere between laughing and sighing.

Review: Anne Tyler’s ‘French Braid’ is entirely familiar, and that’s just perfect

Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals

By Laurie Zaleski, St. Martin’s Press

Nonfiction | After a hardscrabble childhood that sparked her devotion to all creatures, Zaleski started a 25-acre animal sanctuary in New Jersey, where she cares for abandoned animals: dogs, cats, ducks, donkeys, even skunks. In a memoir that’s both uplifting and heartbreaking, Zaleski recounts her father’s violent outbursts, her mother’s attempts to keep her children safe and the adoption of the inaugural member of their furry brood: a German shepherd named Wolf.

Feature: She cares for 24 pigs, 20 goats, 210 cats, a skunk and 345 other rescue animals — and that’s not even her day job

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach

By Sarah Stodola, Ecco

Nonfiction | Here’s a beach read that will make you think. Stodola explores the fascinating history of how beaches became our dream destinations. The 19th-century notion that saltwater and sea air were panaceas led inexorably toward the creation of decadent resorts in Monte Carlo and beyond. Since then, beach vacation mania has led to overdevelopment, erosion and complications for communities where resorts spring up. Happy swimming!

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

By Delia Ephron, Little, Brown and Company

Nonfiction | After the deaths of her husband and beloved sister, Nora, Delia Ephron’s life seemed to be turning around with a new romance. Then she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, the same illness that killed her sister. Ephron’s memoir honors the depths of fear, sickness and sorrow, but she also celebrates with humor and awe the great fortune of small thrills.

Review: Delia Ephron writes rom-coms. Then life threw her a serious plot twist.

Lessons in Chemistry

By Bonnie Garmus, Doubleday

Fiction | Garmus, a venerable copywriter and creative director, released her debut novel just shy of her 65th birthday, and the 1960s-set comic novel arrived right on time for readers in need of a laugh. Its indelible protagonist is Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist with a popular cooking show who refuses to bow to convention, even when it gets her in trouble — and it often does.

Review: At age 64, debut novelist Bonnie Garmus makes the case for experience

The Lioness

By Chris Bohjalian, Doubleday

Fiction | It’s 1964, and Hollywood starlet Katie Barstow decides to take her closest friends along on her honeymoon safari in the Serengeti. On this luxury excursion, there’s even a kerosene-powered ice machine to chill the gin and tonics. What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything, starting with a band of ruthless Russian mercenaries, who turn Bohjalian’s 23rd book into a bloody sprint of a read.

Review: Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, ‘The Lioness,’ takes readers on a posh African safari that turns terrifying

By Susan Straight, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Fiction | A highway patrolman struggles to keep a deadly secret; a woman becomes a single mother overnight; and a traumatized migrant discovers an abandoned baby. The disparate experiences of characters living in Southern California — far from the glitz of Hollywood — gradually interweave to create a celebration of families made all the more poignant by the constant threat of separation, exile or worse.

Review: In ‘Mecca,’ Susan Straight unearths the real Southern California

Nuclear Family

By Joseph Han, Counterpoint

Fiction | Han’s inventive novel begins from the perspective of a ghost, desperate to cross the Korean demilitarized zone in search of his long-lost family. His only option is to possess the body of his grandson, Jacob, an American teaching English in Seoul. When video of Jacob’s failed attempt to enter North Korea goes viral, things get complicated for his parents and sister back in Hawaii.

Olga Dies Dreaming

By Xochitl Gonzalez, Flatiron

Fiction | This smart debut about a celebrity wedding planner whose love life is in shambles stretches the seams of the rom-com genre. It lures us in with laughter and keeps us hooked with an engaging satire of consumer excess, an appraisal of business morality and a study of international relations. No wonder a Hulu pilot starring Aubrey Plaza is already in the works.

Review: Say ‘I do’ to Xochitl Gonzalez’s ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’

Ordinary Monsters

By J.M. Miro, Flatiron

Fiction | The first novel in a planned historical fantasy trilogy starts in Victorian England, where two castoff children with extraordinary powers are targeted by a man made of smoke. The ostensible pariahs realize they’re part of a larger community — the Talents — when they end up at a special school alongside other exceptional misfits who are the world’s only defense against an apocalyptic future.

Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original

By Howard Bryant, Mariner

Nonfiction | Bryant, the author of the Hank Aaron biography “ The Last Hero ,” turns his attention to left-fielder Rickey Henderson, who stole more bases and scored more runs during his career than any other Major League Baseball player in history. More than just a portrait of the “Man of Steel,” Bryant’s book considers how Henderson’s Oakland upbringing shaped him and how Henderson, in turn, transformed the culture.

Sea of Tranquility

By Emily St. John Mandel, Knopf

Fiction | St. John Mandel’s latest is a curious thought experiment that borrows from the plague terror she spun in “ Station Eleven ” and the perception-bending tricks she played in “ The Glass Hotel .” The interlocking stories stretch from 1912 to 2401, where a man learns that “moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another.” This is science fiction about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.

Review: Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Sea of Tranquility’ is a mind-bending novel

By Sara Nović, Random House

Fiction | A boarding school for deaf students is the setting for a novel that presents a kaleidoscope of experiences, including a girl’s meeting a deaf person for the first time and a boy’s struggle with the birth of his hearing sister. Nović is a thoughtful tour guide through her own deaf culture, providing mini history lessons and illustrations of vocabulary words in American Sign Language.

Roundup: 10 books to read in April

Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century

By Stephen Galloway, Grand Central Publishing

Nonfiction | Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s pairing was a bad idea from the start, when each abandoned a spouse and child to strike up a turbulent romance. Galloway, the former executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter, lifts himself clear of previous chronicles by weaving in more details of Leigh’s bipolar disorder, which manifested itself variously as violent mood swings, tumultuous affairs and, on occasion, psychotic breaks.

Review: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier: A tale of love and madness

By Hernan Diaz, Riverhead

Fiction | Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has created an irresistible puzzle of a novel . Each of the four parts offers a different perspective on the life of an enigmatic Wall Street tycoon who rose to fame and fortune in the early 20th century. Diaz is interested not only in the way wealthy men burnish their image, but also in the way such memorialization involves the diminishment, even the erasure of others.

Review: In Hernan Diaz’s ‘Trust,’ the rich are not like you and me

Watergate: A New History

By Garrett Graff, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

Nonfiction | Nearly half a century has passed since five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. During that time, scores of books have been published about the scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Do we need another? Yes: This one is a remarkably rich narrative with compelling characters, who range from criminal and flawed to tragic and heroic.

Review: Among Watergate’s heroes and villains, finding ‘a more human story’

Yerba Buena

By Nina LaCour, Flatiron

Fiction | Teenagers Sara and Emilie are immediately drawn to each other when they meet by chance at a Los Angeles restaurant. Their connection might have something to do with their shared histories: Both have weathered tragedies born of drug addiction. But circumstances keep driving them apart over the course of years as each narrates her own coming-of-age story.

The Best Books of 2022, According to The Washington Post

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The Washington Post throws its hat into the ring of early released end-of-year book lists with a roundup of 10 of the best books according to its editors and reviewers.

The list includes a mix of fiction and nonfiction titles, with topics that range from colonialism to memoirs centering friendships. Among the authors are a Nobel Prize winner and a Kirkus Prize winner .

Here are The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2022:

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Mecca by Susan Straight

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson

G-Man: J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change by Geoff Dembicki

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind by Robert Draper

Compared to Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s lists, The Washington Post’s best books of 2022 list varies entirely except for one book it has in common with Amazon’s ( Demon Copperhead ).

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

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Watch CBS News

The Book Report: Ron Charles' favorite novels of 2022

By Ron Charles

January 1, 2023 / 10:24 AM EST / CBS News

By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles

Before we say good-bye to 2022, I want to look back and tell you about five of my favorite novels of this year.

Barbara Kingsolver has taken Charles Dickens' classic novel, "David Copperfield," and transformed it into her own modern-day masterpiece. 

"Demon Copperhead" is about a boy in Appalachia trying to find his way in the world while struggling with foster care and opioid addiction. 

It's as funny as it is heartbreaking, and it's got a voice that leaps right off the page.

READ AN EXCERPT: "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

"Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Indiebound

barbarakingsolver.net

"Young Mungo," by Scottish writer Douglas Stuart, is a gripping story about a sweet young man falling in love for the first time in a violently homophobic community.

To toughen him up, his alcoholic mother sends him on a camping trip with a couple of guys from her AA meeting. Unfortunately, they're not at all what they seem, and you'll wish you could protect Young Mungo from what's ahead.

READ AN EXCERPT: "Young Mungo" by Douglas Stuart

"Young Mungo" by Douglas Stuart (Grove), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon and Indiebound

douglasdstuart.com

For some sharp cultural satire, turn to "The Latecomer," by Jean Hanff Korelitz. This is the story about wealthy triplets who hate each other, and then discover a secret about their father that reorders their lives.

Korelitz uses this witty family epic to explore modern art, liberal education, political correctness, and American spirituality, while delivering one surprise after another. 

READ AN EXCERPT: "The Latecomer" by Jean Hanff Korelitz

"The Latecomer" by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Indiebound

jeanhanffkorelitz.com

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize, and this year he released a new novel in the United States called "Afterlives."  

Set in the early 20th century, it turns the old story of colonization on its head by pushing the Europeans into the background, and letting us follow the intersecting lives of villagers in East Africa as they struggle to survive and thrive.

READ AN EXCERPT: "Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead), in Hardcover, Large Print Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Indiebound           

"Olga Dies Dreaming," by Xochitl Gonzalez, is a romantic comedy about a very successful wedding planner who can't find a partner herself. 

Meanwhile, her brother is a popular Congressman, a champion for Puerto Rico, who may be slipping into a compromising position. 

This is a novel about family secrets, national schemes, racial politics, and - of course – love!

READ AN EXCERPT: "Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl Gonzalez

"Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon and Indiebound

xochitlgonzalez.com

There are a bunch of great new books coming up in 2023. Here are just a few I'm looking forward to:

"Victory City" by Salman Rushdie"

"Black Ball" by Theresa Runstedtler "The White Lady" by Jacqueline Winspear

"Romantic Comedy" by Curtis Sittenfeld "The Wager" by David Grann

"The Covenant of Water" by Abraham Verghese

"Be Mine" by Richard Ford

        For more info: 

• Ron Charles, The Washington Post
• Subscribe to the free  Washington Post Book World Newsletter
• Ron Charles' Totally Hip Video Book Review
• indiebound.org  (for ordering from independent booksellers)
• Photos courtesy of Sarah Blesener, Mayra Castillo

       For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles: 

• The Book Report (Nov. 13)
• The Book Report (Sept. 18)
• The Book Report (July 10)
• The Book Report (April 17)
• The Book Report (March 13)
• The Book Report (February 6)
• The Book Report (November 28)
• The Book Report (September 26)
• The Book Report (August 1)
• The Book Report (June 6)
• The Book Report (May 9)
• The Book Report (March 28)
• The Book Report (February 28)
• The Book Report (January 31)

      Produced by Aria Shavelson. Editor: Ed Givnish. 

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• Entertainment

Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in April

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

T he best books coming in April include historian Erik Larson ’s latest nonfiction thriller, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey ’s meditation on writing, and Salman Rushdie ’s agonizing account of the brutal knife attack he suffered two years ago. Other notable releases include a pair of career-spanning anthologies that celebrate the works of cultural critic Maggie Nelson and historian Nell Irvin Painter , as well as Amor Towles ’ first collection of short stories. Alyssa Cole ’s new mystery features a protagonist struggling with dissociative identity disorder, while former therapist Patric Gagne hopes to recontextualize the term “sociopath” with her debut memoir of the same name. 

Here, the 12 best books to read this month.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories , Julia Alvarez (April 2)

In Julia Alvarez ’s seventh adult novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, acclaimed writer Alma Cruz inherits a piece of her homeland, the Dominican Republic. After the death of her close friend and fellow author, Alma decides to retire and turn her plot of land into a graveyard for the unpublished tales she’d like to finally put to rest. But just because Alma is ready to abandon her characters, some of whom are based on real historical figures, it doesn’t mean they are ready to go peacefully. Mystical and moving, The Cemetery of Untold Stories shows why some stories must be told no matter how hard you try to bury them.

Buy Now : The Cemetery of Untold Stories on Bookshop | Amazon

Village Weavers , Myriam J. A. Chancy (April 2)

For fans of Elena Ferrante : Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is a wistful look at a complicated female friendship that spans decades and continents. Growing up in1940s Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Gertie and Sisi are the best of friends until a devastating secret that bonds their families tears them apart. The book follows the two women as they fall in and out of one another’s lives amid a violent dictatorship, and struggle with infertility and terminal illness. When Sisi gets an unexpected call from Gertie in 2002, decades after they last spoke, she must decide whether she is ready to forgive—or forget—all that they have shared.

Buy Now : Village Weavers on Bookshop | Amazon

Sociopath , Patric Gagne (April 2)

Writer and former therapist Patric Gagne first discovered she was a sociopath in college. But, in her provocative debut memoir, Sociopath , she admits that there were signs long before she was diagnosed. With incredible candor, she details the violent outbursts she exhibited as a child that would lead to near run-ins with the law in her teens and 20s. “Most of the time I felt nothing,” she writes, “so I did bad things to make the nothingness go away.” Despite her lifelong lack of empathy, shame, and guilt, she has become a loving wife and mother, something she knows doesn’t fit with pop culture’s portrayal of sociopaths as murderers, villains, and monsters. In her memoir, Gagne looks to destigmatize the often misunderstood mental disorder, now more commonly known as antisocial personality disorder , while offering compassion to those, like her, who are trying to change what it means to be a sociopath.

Buy Now : Sociopath on Bookshop | Amazon

We Loved It All , Lydia Millet (April 2)

Lydia Millet ’s first foray into nonfiction, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, questions what humans lose when they ignore their connection to the animal kingdom. With great passion and indignation, the acclaimed novelist behind 2022’s Dinosaurs takes aim at corporations whose greed has endangered the world’s wildlife. She looks at how the “ Crying Indian” anti-litter campaign from the 1970s allowed big business to place the onus on consumers to clean up the environmental mess they played the largest role in causing. By sharing personal anecdotes about her own childhood, as well as the experiences of raising her son and daughter, Millet shows how caring about the smallest creatures that live among us is tied to the fight for economic justice around the globe. With her mournful yet often hopeful rumination on our current state of existence, Millet reminds us that we are not alone in this world.

Buy Now : We Loved It All on Bookshop | Amazon

Like Love , Maggie Nelson (April 2)

Like Love draws on two decades of Maggie Nelson’s career as a critic of art in all its forms. The collection of previously published work, arranged in chronological order, includes essays on, tributes to, and conversations with creatives the author deeply admires: musician Björk, poet Eileen Myles, fine artist Kara Walker , the late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , novelist Ben Lerner , philosopher Judith Butler , and writer and theater critic Hilton Als, whose words inspired the book’s title. When examining the art she loves, Nelson uses incisive and analytical prose, but her scholarly style doesn’t take away from the joy she feels for the work. “Words aren’t just what’s left,” she writes of why we need criticism. “They’re what we have to offer.”

Buy Now : Like Love on Bookshop | Amazon

Table for Two , Amor Towles (April 2)

Amor Towles ’ Table For Two is an intimate collection of six short stories that take place in early 2000s New York, and a 1930s Hollywood-set novella that picks up where his 2011 debut, Rules of Civility , left off. The book, which was written while he was meant to be working on his fourth novel , focuses on brief but fateful encounters between strangers, would-be business partners, and estranged relatives. Most of these conversations take place at a table set for two, the perfect place to share a tête-à-tête about forgery or bootlegging or even the blackmailing of screen legend Olivia de Havilland . Table For Two is a smorgasbord of deliciously mischievous tales imbued with Towles’ signature wit and worldliness.

Buy Now : Table for Two on Bookshop | Amazon

The House of Being , Natasha Trethewey (April 9)

In The House of Being, which was originally delivered as a 2022 prize lecture at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey takes readers back to her grandmother’s home outside of Gulfport, Miss., where the author learned to read and write. It was there that her neighbors flew Confederate flags with pride, and her late mother—whose death at the hands of her ex-husband was the focus of Trethewey’s best-selling 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive — took to singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” any time she passed one. It was also where, Trethewey would later learn, formerly enslaved men and women were educated after the Civil War, their stories lost to time because they had not been written down. With The House of Being, Trethewey doesn’t just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories.

Buy Now : The House of Being on Bookshop | Amazon

One of Us Knows , Alyssa Cole (April 16)

Best-selling author Alyssa Cole ’s latest novel, One of Us Knows, is a paranoia-filled murder mystery full of twists and turns. Preservationist Kenetria “Ken” Nash has taken a job as the caretaker of a gothic castle on a remote island on the Hudson River in the hopes of getting back on her feet. For the last six years, Ken has struggled with dissociative identity disorder, which causes her to, without much warning, “switch” between multiple identities. Lately, Ken has found it harder to keep her “headmates”—precocious toddler Keke, judgy perfectionist Della, and the sophisticated Solomon, to name a few—in check. When a man from Ken’s past is found dead in the historic home, she must enlist her headmates’ help in hopes of clearing her name, all the while knowing she could be the killer she is looking for.

Buy Now : One of Us Knows on Bookshop | Amazon

Knife , Salman Rushdie (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly 10 times while at a speaking engagement in western New York. With his new memoir, Knife, Rushdie writes about the violent attack that left him with PTSD , limited mobility in his left hand, and the loss of sight in his right eye, offering an intimate and often harrowing account of what happened that day and what life has been like for him since. (The trial for Rushdie’s alleged attacker , who has been charged with attempted murder, has been postponed due to the release of this book, since it can serve as potential evidence.) Rushdie has said that writing Knife was an important step in the healing process. “This was a necessary book for me to write,” he said in a statement . “A way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.”

Buy Now : Knife on Bookshop | Amazon

I Just Keep Talking , Nell Irvin Painter (April 23)

For the past five decades, acclaimed writer, artist, historian, and critic Nell Irvin Painter’s work has felt ahead of its time. I Just Keep Talking, a decades-spanning collection of more than 40 of her previously published essays, shows just how prescient her work really was. The anthology includes a 1982 essay on the effect white educators’ reluctance to teach Black resistance would have on how the history of slavery is taught in America . In other pieces, she examines how Spike Lee ’s film Malcolm X reinvented the activist and breaks down the gender and racial stereotypes that hurt Anita Hill ’s case against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing. A more recent essay from 2022 offers a strong warning to Democrats: If you “jettison voting rights in order to court white voters without college degrees,” she writes, you’ll risk repeating the mistakes of Reconstruction . This insightful anthology shows why Painter, now 81 years old, is still one of the most important voices in America.

Buy Now : I Just Keep Talking on Bookshop | Amazon

Lucky , Jane Smiley (April 23)

As the title of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley ’s coming-of-age novel Lucky implies, protagonist Jodie Rattler has always been more fortunate than most. While attending college at Penn State in the 1960s, Jodie decides she’d like to become a folk singer, so she records a song that becomes a surprise hit. She soon finds herself living like a true bohemian, recording an album in New York, touring the country, and earning comparisons to musical luminaries like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell . But as the pressure builds for her to leave school and focus on her music career full time, she finds herself questioning her future. Lucky offers a tender look at one young woman’s journey to understand who she has become and who she’d like to be when she finally grows up.

Buy Now : Lucky on Bookshop | Amazon

The Demon of Unrest , Erik Larson (April 30)

After tackling World War II by focusing on Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz with The Splendid and the Vile , one of TIME’s best books of 2020 , Erik Larson returns with a historical nonfiction thriller set before the start of the U.S. Civil War . The Demon of Unrest looks at the chaotic five-month period between the November 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln and the April 1861 surrender of Fort Sumter , which marked the official beginning of the war. Using journals, slave ledgers, plantation records, and secret correspondence, Larson offers an intriguing look at a young country on the brink of collapse. He reexamines the lead-up to the four-year conflict by putting the focus not only on the rebellion’s major players, but also on those on the periphery: Maj. Robert Anderson, the Union commander at Fort Sumter, Edmund Ruffin, an agricultural reformer and ardent secessionist, James H. Hammond, a senator and wealthy plantation owner from South Carolina, and Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wealthy wife of a lawyer and senator whose diary became an invaluable resource for the author.

Buy Now : The Demon of Unrest on Bookshop | Amazon

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News, Notes, Talk

Good news for books: The Washington Post’s book section is back!

Sometime around 2006, everyone in publishing began to lament the death of the book section. In the face of declining readership, budget cuts, and mergers, newspapers began to realize that book review sections did not bring in enough ad revenue to cover their costs and so cut and culled until there were only a handful of standalone sections in the country. (Should publishers have done more to support these section—you bet!)

But here’s some good news: Ron Charles announced in his newsletter that The Washington Post ‘s book section, Book World, is coming back:

Starting Sept. 25, the Sunday paper will contain a separate broadsheet section devoted entirely to book reviews and literary features. The move coincides with the addition of new staff members, including Book World’s new editor in chief, John Williams, who starts Sept. 6.

Along with reviews, readers will find Q&As, publishing stories, author profiles and anything else we might dream up for this luxurious new space. As a print junky, I’m also excited to have weekly cover art again, along with a centerspread where we can do more visual presentations related to books.

Please join me in being delighted for this small bit of book-print-media success (and a bit envious of those readers who get to have their Sunday morning coffee and get their fingers smudgy with bookish-newsprint).

h/t Ron Charles

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April 1, 2024.

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The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians review – unpicking the lexicon of America’s leaders

New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada examines the speeches, writing and linguistic tics of presidents and members of Congress to expose ‘inveterate deceivers’

P oliticians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times , specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.

Lozada has a literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.

Tiny linguistic tics mark the clash between two versions of America’s fabled past and its prophetic future. Lozada subtly tracks the recurrence of the word “still” in Biden’s speeches – for instance his assertion that the country “still believes in honesty and decency” and is “still a democracy” – and contrasts it with Trump’s reliance on “again”, the capstone of his vow to Make America Great Again. Biden’s “still” defensively fastens on “something good that may be slipping away”, whereas Trump’s “again” blathers about restoring a lost greatness that is never defined. Biden’s evokes “an ideal worth preserving”; Trump’s equivalent summons up an illusion.

At their boldest, Lozada’s politicians trade in inflated tales about origins and predestined outcomes, grandiose narratives that “transcend belief and become a fully formed worldview”. Hence the title of Hillary Clinton’s manifesto It Takes a Village , which borrows an African proverb about child-rearing and uses it to prompt nostalgia for a bygone America. Lozada watches Obama devising and revising a personal myth. Addressed as Barry by his youthful friends, he later insisted on being called Barack and relaunched himself as the embodiment of America’s ethnic inclusivity; his “personalised presidency” treated the office as an extension of “the Obama brand”. In this respect Trump was Obama’s logical successor, extending a personal brand in a bonanza of self-enrichment. The “big lie” about the supposedly stolen 2020 election is another mythological whopper. Trump admitted its falsity on one occasion when he remarked “We lost”, after which he immediately backtracked, adding: “We didn’t lose. We lost in the Democrats’ imagination.”

All this amuses Lozada but also makes him anxious. As an adoptive American – born in Peru, he became a citizen a decade ago – he has a convert’s faith in the country’s ideals, yet he worries about contradictions that the national creed strains to reconcile. A border wall now debars the impoverished masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty; the sense of community is fractured by “sophisticated engines of division and misinformation”. Surveying dire fictional scenarios about American decline, Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a narrative advantage”: peace is boring, but predictions of a clash with China or an attack by homegrown terrorists excite the electorate by promising shock, awe and an apocalyptic barrage of special effects. Rather than recoiling from Trump, do Americans share his eagerness for desecration and destruction?

Changing only the names of the performers, The Washington Book has a shadowy local replica. Here in Britain, too, ideological posturing has replaced reasoned argument, and buzzwords are squeezed to death by repetition. Whenever Sunak drones on about “delivering for the British people”, I think of him as a Deliveroo gig worker with a cooling takeaway in his backpack, or a weary postman pushing a trolley full of mortgage bills.

Though such verbal vices are international, a difference of scale separates Washington from Westminster. In America, heroic ambition is brought low by errors of judgment or moral flaws that for Lozada recall “the great themes of literature and the great struggles of life”: Kennedy’s risky confrontations with Cuba, Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam, Nixon overcome by paranoia. To set against these tragic falls, we have only the comic spectacle of Boris Johnson gurning on a zip wire or Liz Truss vaingloriously granting an interview atop the Empire State Building; neither of them had the good grace to jump off. American politics is dangerously thrilling because it is so consequential for the rest of the world. In Britain we are doomed to sit through a more trivial show, an unfunny farce played out in a theatre that is crumbling around us.

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• The Observer
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