Plenty of evidence this week that we’re living in a boom time for thoughtful, powerful nature writing. “Vesper Flights” collects essays by Helen Macdonald, whom you likely know from her internationally best-selling memoir, “H Is for Hawk.” In “The Bird Way,” Jennifer Ackerman takes a detailed look at the lives of birds — including their parenting strategies — like the bowerbird, the cuckoo and the kea. From the sky to the sea, with another international best seller: Patrik Svensson’s “The Book of Eels,” which combines elements of memoir with an examination of the slithery creatures.
As this strange summer (already, unbelievably) nears its end, Ali Smith reaches the end of her seasonal quartet of novels with her own “Summer.” Smith has conspicuously kept her eye on current events in these books, and has remarkably included the arrival of Covid-19 in this series-capper.
Also on this week’s list, a great diversity of genres and subjects: Kurt Andersen’s indictment of American politics over the past several decades; Jeffrey Toobin’s narrative treatment of the Mueller investigation; a group portrait of four European philosophers who navigated the tumultuous 1920s in very different ways; the latest novel by the great Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua; the biography of a scientist who was once as famous as Einstein; a deeply disturbing and brilliantly conceived novel about cannibalism; and a devastating novel about tragedy in a Nigerian family.
John Williams
Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer
SUMMER, by Ali Smith. (Pantheon, $27.95.) Ali Smith’s new novel is the concluding volume in her immersive, prickly and politically ardent seasonal quartet. Some characters reappear from the earlier books in the series, but “you don’t have to read the previous novels to gain entrance here,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. Two of the central characters are siblings, Sacha and Robert, teenagers who respond very differently to the world they’ve been brought into. “Summer,” Garner writes, “is a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment.”
VESPER FLIGHTS: New and Collected Essays, by Helen Macdonald. (Grove, $27.) This collection of essays by Macdonald, the author of the internationally best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk” (2015), muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and examines how we bring our prejudices, politics and desires to our notions of the animal world. The essays are “short, varied and highly edible,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. Macdonald’s work “is an antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as pristine, secret, uninhabited — as a convenient blank canvas for the hero’s journey of self-discovery.”
TIME OF THE MAGICIANS: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, by Wolfram Eilenberger. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Penguin Press, $30.) Eilenberger’s book begins in 1919 and ends in 1929, elegantly tracing the life and work of four figures who transformed philosophy in ways that were disparate and not infrequently at odds. The subjects of this vibrant group portrait are Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Cassirer. “Eilenberger is a terrific storyteller,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, “unearthing vivid details that show how the philosophies of these men weren’t the arid products of abstract speculation but vitally connected to their temperaments and experiences.”
EVIL GENIUSES: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, by Kurt Andersen. (Random House, $30.) America reached a grim turning point in the 1970s, Andersen argues, and today risks being “the first large modern society to go from fully developed to failing.” Its political economy, he says, was hijacked by capital supremacists, who preached and enacted, a return to a pre-New Deal order. “Evil Geniuses” is an “essential, absorbing, infuriating, full-of-facts-you-didn’t-know, saxophonely written” book, our reviewer Anand Giridharadas writes. “The book is an intellectual double take, a rereporting of the great neoliberal conquest, by a writer who kicks himself for missing it at the time.”
THE TUNNEL, by A. B. Yehoshua. Translated by Stuart Schoffman. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) In this novel, Zvi Luria, a retired engineer in Tel Aviv, is in the early stages of dementia and takes a job in the desert to keep his mind sharp. The project involves building a road through an area where a Palestinian family lives, hiding out amid ancient ruins. Yehoshua masterfully entwines social commentary with a portrait of a mind in decline. “I found great beauty, not answers, in Zvi’s essential human decency,” our reviewer Peter Orner writes. “Rather than retreat inward and hide, he chooses — yes — to live.”
TRUE CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $30.) In a narrative that unfolds like a tragedy, Toobin argues that Trump came away from the Mueller investigation basically unscathed because Mueller proceeded with an excess of caution. It’s an “absorbing, fast-paced narrative” that is “anchored by detailed scenes of chaos inside the Trump administration and meetings between Trump’s and Mueller’s lawyers,” our reviewer Katie Benner writes. But even after Toobin’s analysis, “ultimately Mueller’s caution and restraint remain an enigma.”
A DOMINANT CHARACTER: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane, by Samanth Subramanian. (Norton, $40.) Haldane, the British biologist and ardent communist who helped synthesize Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, was once as famous as Einstein. Subramanian’s elegant and fascinating book is the best biography of Haldane yet, our reviewer Jonathan Weiner writes. And it doubles as a timely look at the fraught relationship between science and politics. “With science so politicized in this country and abroad, the book could be an allegory for every scientist who wants to take a stand.”
TENDER IS THE FLESH, by Agustina Bazterrica. Translated by Sarah Moses. (Scribner, paper, $16.) From the first words of this Argentine writer’s second novel, the reader is already the livestock in the line, primordially aware that this book is a butcher’s block. The story imagines a world in which animals have become toxic for human consumption and industrialized cannibalism is created to satisfy our cravings. Though the novel is more than just a metaphorical critique of our treatment of animals, our reviewer Daniel Kraus writes, Bazterrica has “crafted one of the most potent indictments since ‘Blood of the Beasts,’ Georges Franju’s palate-killing 1949 documentary about Paris slaughterhouses.”
THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI, by Akwaeke Emezi. (Riverhead, $27.) This steamroller of a story, about coming of age and coming out in Nigeria, centers on what a family doesn’t see — or doesn’t want to see — and whether that blindness contributes to a son’s death. It’s a “dazzling, devastating story,” our reviewer Elisabeth Egan writes. “Vivek’s life unfurls in a series of flashbacks — boys on bikes, SAT prep classes, military school — punctuated by occasional interjections from beyond the grave. This storytelling tool might feel like a cudgel in the hands of a less skillful writer but Emezi employs it like a dainty paintbrush, gently and sparingly.”
THE BIRD WAY: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, by Jennifer Ackerman. (Penguin Press, $28.) Ackerman focuses on the entirety of birds’ worlds — their sensory experience, communication styles, parenting strategies. The huge cast includes storm petrels, Australia’s “fire hawks” and the kea, a cheeky New Zealand parrot. “‘The Bird Way’ is more than a litany of trivia for your next ornithology-themed cocktail party,” our reviewer Ben Goldfarb writes. “Ackerman takes a sledgehammer to the walls we’ve erected between ourselves and our fellow creatures.”
THE BOOK OF EELS: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, by Patrik Svensson. (Ecco, $28.99.) Svensson follows those slithery beings in every direction they take him, producing a book that moves from Aristotle to Freud to the fishing trips of his youth. “Svensson seems, at times, as interested in preserving the eel’s mystique as the eel itself,” our reviewer Ben Goldfarb writes. “‘A world where everything’s explained,’ he laments, ‘is a world that has come to an end.’”
August 28, 2020 at 02:58AM
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11 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times
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