FICTION
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.
By turns
tender and trenchant, Adichie’s third novel takes on the comedy and tragedy of
American race relations from the perspective of a young Nigerian immigrant.
From the office politics of a hair-braiding salon to the burden of memory,
there’s nothing too humble or daunting for this fearless writer, who is so
attuned to the various worlds and shifting selves we inhabit — in life and
online, in love, as agents and victims of history and the heroes of our own
stories.
Radical
politics, avant-garde art and motorcycle racing all spring to life in Kushner’s
radiant novel of the 1970s, in which a young woman moves to New York to become
an artist, only to wind up involved in the revolutionary protest movement that
shook Italy in those years. The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant
observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along
by implacable social forces.
THE GOLDFINCH
By Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown & Company, $30.
By Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown & Company, $30.
Tartt’s
intoxicating third novel, after “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,”
follows the travails of Theo Decker, who emerges from a terrorist bombing
motherless but in possession of a prized Dutch painting. Like the best of
Dickens, the novel is packed with incident and populated with vivid characters.
At its heart is the unwavering belief that come what may, art can save us by
lifting us above ourselves.
Demonstrating
the agile style and theatrical bravado of her much-admired Jackson Brodie
mystery novels, Atkinson takes on nothing less than the evils of
mid-20th-century history and the nature of death as she moves back and forth in
time, fitting together versions of a life story for a heroine who keeps dying,
then being resurrected — and sent off in different, but entirely plausible,
directions.
Saunders’s
wickedly entertaining stories veer from the deadpan to the flat-out demented:
Prisoners are force-fed mood-altering drugs; ordinary saps cling to delusions
of grandeur; third-world women, held aloft on surgical wire, become the latest
in bourgeois lawn ornaments. Beneath the comedy, though, Saunders writes with
profound empathy, and this impressive collection advances his abiding interest
in questions of class, power and justice.
NONFICTION
AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED
The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
By Alan S. Blinder.
The Penguin Press, $29.95.
The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
By Alan S. Blinder.
The Penguin Press, $29.95.
Blinder’s
terrific book on the financial meltdown of 2008 argues that it happened because
of a “perfect storm,” in which many unfortunate events occurred simultaneously,
producing a far worse outcome than would have resulted from just a single
cause. Blinder criticizes both the Bush and Obama administrations, especially
for letting Lehman Brothers fail, but he also praises them for taking steps to
save the country from falling into a serious depression. Their response to the
near disaster, Blinder says, was far better than the public realizes.
Baker
succeeds in telling the story of the several crises of the Bush administration
with fairness and balance, which is to say that he is sympathetic to his
subjects, acknowledging their accomplishments but excusing none of their
errors. Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, is fascinated
by the mystery of the Bush-Cheney relationship, and even more so by the
mystery of George W. Bush himself. Did Bush lead, or was he led by others? In the
end, Baker concludes, the “decider” really did decide.
In harrowing
detail, Fink describes the hellish days at a hospital during and after
Hurricane Katrina, when desperate medical professionals were suspected of
administering lethal injections to critically ill patients. Masterfully and
compassionately reported and as gripping as a thriller, the book poses
reverberating questions about end-of-life care, race discrimination in medicine
and how individuals and institutions break down during disasters.
Clark
manages in a single volume to provide a comprehensive, highly readable survey
of the events leading up to World War I. He avoids singling out any one nation
or leader as the guilty party. “The outbreak of war,” he writes, “is not an
Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing
over a corpse.” The participants were, in his term, “sleepwalkers,” not
fanatics or murderers, and the war itself was a tragedy, not a crime.
On the day
after Christmas in 2004, Deraniyagala called her husband to the window of their
hotel room in Sri Lanka. “I want to show you something odd,” she said. The
ocean looked foamy and closer than usual. Within moments, it was upon them.
Deraniyagala lost her husband, her parents and two young sons to the Indian
Ocean tsunami. Her survival was miraculous, and so too is this memoir —
unsentimental, raggedly intimate, full of fury.
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