This week: new Dana Spiotta, redeeming the "Kama Sutra," and the quest to find the true age of the universe.
If at Birth You Don’t Succeed
In this wonderful, open collection of essays, Anner, a stand-up comedian, reflects on his 30 years with cerebral palsy. Though the disease has limited Anner’s mobility, it’s done nothing to dampen his sense of humor and love of the world; he was a breakout favorite on the OWN reality competition Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star, which launched a series of travel shows, and he writes at length about the experience with some intriguing insights. A great deal of Anner’s comedy is the peppy, uplifting sort you’d expect from someone who Oprah says “makes [her] want to be a better person,” such as his elaborate Olive Garden metaphors for the nature of life, but there’s a healthy dose of sobering reality in the mix as well. Some of his most resonant work deals with the influences on his life as a person with a disability: Anner remarks wryly that being expected to act as an ambassador for the disabled “is a tightrope walk, which is hard on four wheels.” Maybe so, but with this book, he makes it look easy.
Maybe a Fox
Appelt (The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp) and McGhee (Firefly Hollow) create an intoxicating blend of realism and myth in a novel involving a grieving child, ancient legends, and a mysterious fox. When Sylvie, whose burning wish is to run faster than she has ever run, disappears into a Vermont forest and is assumed dead, Jules, her younger sister, feels a sorrow like no other. Just as anguished are Jules’s father and their neighbor Elk, a veteran who knows what it’s like to lose a loved one. Then there is the fox, who seems to beckon 11-year-old Jules into the same Vermont woods. Breaking her father’s rule to never leave their property, Jules embarks on a quest both dangerous and marvelous. Evocative third-person narration brings the wonders of the wilderness to life and underscores the mysterious connections between humans, nature, and destiny.
All Things Cease to Appear
Brundage’s (bestselling author of The Doctor’s Wife) searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. In 1978, Ella and Calvin Hale respond to their farm’s failing fortunes by committing suicide. As their sons, Eddy, Cole, and Wade, are taken in by nearby relatives, their farmhouse in upstate Chosen, N.Y., is bought by outsiders. College professor George Clare, his beautiful wife, Catherine, and their toddler, Franny, buy the house and seem picture-perfect, but appearances deceive. George, an expert in Hudson River painter George Inness (an actual figure, whose artistic theories and Swedenborg-influenced philosophy run through the novel) is a dark soul with a young mistress and a violent history; insecure Catherine takes his abuse until the women’s movement helps empower her to leave him. Then George appears at a neighbor’s door, announcing that he has found Catherine murdered in their bedroom. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, this novel is both tragic and transcendent.
Redeeming the Kamasutra
In a book that will change how some view the Kama Sutra, Doniger (The Hindus) reveals the classic Indian text as far more than a sex manual, calling it a handbook for sensuous living. Doniger places The Kama Sutra in the context of earlier Indian classics: the writings of Manu, who focused on the spiritual life, and the Arthashastra, a book about money and power that Doniger asserts makes “Machievelli look like Mother Teresa.” In emphasizing the sensual, the Kama Sutra completes the triad of religion, power, and pleasure. Doniger explains that Burton’s late 19th-century Kama Sutra translation, the most common one available, mistranslates key passages in ways that downplay women’s agency. She illustrates the Kama Sutra’s openness to sexually fluid identities, and the ways that ancient Indian sexuality may seem both strange and strangely familiar to present-day Western readers. This ancient text’s celebration of the sensual works against the puritanical Hinduism that arose in 19th-century India and that remains prevalent in India today. Doniger’s prose cuts to the chase, and her book delights and informs the lay reader.
Hour of the Bees
Eagar seamlessly blends a 12-year-old girl’s summer of change with a hefty dose of magical realism in this accomplished debut. A past family rift means that Carol first meets her grandfather Serge when her family arrives from Albuquerque to sell his sheep ranch before settling him in a nursing home. Serge’s question to Carol, who uses an Anglicized version of her name, Carolina— “Why do you spit on your roots, chiquita?”—makes her ponder her heritage. Unexpectedly drawn to her grandfather, Carol finds that her woes (an obnoxious older sister, absent friends, endless chores, stressed-out parents) pale next to the questions and fears raised in Serge’s entrancing stories, which all begin, “Once upon a time, there was a tree.” Fairytale motifs (“No rain for a hundred years”) emphasize the stark physicality of the New Mexican mesa, with its oppressive heat, spindly sheep, and numerous dangers. Through this atmospheric setting, Eagar sustains a sense of wonder and longing for small things (bees, seeds, stories) to respond to big human needs.
Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran
The story of Iran is the story of my life,” writes human rights activist and Nobel laureate Ebadi (Iran Awakening) at the start of her memoir, which paints a revealing portrait of the state of political oppression in Iran. It begins with the 1979 revolution, when the author, under Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, lost her judgeship simply for being a woman. She uses spare, spirited prose to chronicle the start of her career as a pro bono defender of human rights, working with the most vulnerable—women, children, and dissidents—as the government subjected her to an increasing amount of harassment and scrutiny. She was exiled in 2009 on the eve of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term. The Iranian government has since redirected their intimidation schemes toward her family in Iran, coercing her husband and arresting her sister. Yet she continues to fight for Iranians’ human rights, finding refuge in London, where she currently lives. Ebadi is an inspiring figure, and her suspenseful, evocative story is unforgettable.
13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything
Acclaimed science writer Gribbin (Einstein’s Masterwork), a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex, delivers a lively and accessible look at how astronomers determined the age of our universe. Popular science titles tend to cover the same ground from similar perspectives, but Gribbin takes a fresh angle by working from two different directions: the physics of the very small (quantum theory) and the physics of the very large (Einstein’s general relativity). The development of quantum theory in the early 20th century provided the tools to work out how stars produce energy, how they evolve, and how to calculate how old they are. Then, switching tracks, Gribbin shows how determining stellar distances led to the realization that our universe is expanding. Einstein’s general theory of relativity let scientists give shape to the universe and determine both how it evolved and its age. Readers who are weary of typical pop science books will find themselves highly entertained.
High Dive
"You had to remember you were at war.” This is what Dan, an IRA volunteer in Belfast, tells himself in March, 1984, not long after his 24th birthday, which was also the day he found out he would be planting a bomb intending to kill Margaret Thatcher and as many members of her cabinet as possible. In September of that same year, an actual slow-release time bomb did explode at the Grand Hotel, in Brighton, England, killing five people but missing the prime minister. That explosion is the real-life event at the heart of this brilliant, urgent, unstoppable novel, Lee’s first to be released in the U.S. Having second and even third thoughts about the mission, Dan reckons with himself: “The truth was that on an operation you felt clean of guilt and will. It was day-to-day Belfast life that made you dirty.” Interspersed with Dan’s mounting internal struggles and resolve are the lives of Freya Finch and her father, who’s called Moose, both of whom work at the Grand Hotel and are busy getting ready for the prime minister’s arrival. This is an incredible novel of rare insight, velocity, depth, and daring.
A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America
Journalist Martínez (The Beast) tenaciously reports piece by piece on the accretion of gang-related violence besetting El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. This book is based on a series of articles he wrote for the website elfaro.net, and each entry details its own escapade." A well-connected mafioso twice escapes the clutches of the state and finally ends up serving time for murder. The bleak story of the paranoid informant's untimely end constitutes its own chapter. Another details how Los Zetas, a Mexican gang, consolidated power in Guatemala, which is crucial background for understanding a police massacre and the subsequent "chess game of criminal politics" analyzed later. Martínez pulls the tarp back from the snake-pit tangle of gang affiliations, offenses, and revenge in overcrowded prisons that lead to periodic massacres. He tells of the perseverance of El Salvador's only forensic investigator in excavating a well, a tale that approaches dark farce. The book enters "strange and impenetrable worlds filled with code words and carnage, in which players function as it were just another day at work." Martínez's reporting reveals shocking failures of the state—particularly of police and courts—but he avoids tidy lessons, preferring to let the intractable issues stand in all their cold brutality.
Wet Cement: A Mix of Concrete Poems
Raczka (Lemonade) returns to the subject of concrete poetry with a virtuoso gathering of 21 poems, in which he plays with the layout and form of both the poems and their titles. (Not to be left out, the table of contents is shaped into a T, and the copyright information forms a copyright symbol.) Raczka sets a high bar with the first poem, “Takeoff,” in which the airborne T in the title becomes the Wright brothers’ airplane, with the playful accompanying poem (“Wright on course, headed for heaven./ One two three four five six seven”) a small hill below. Elsewhere, mazes, dominoes, pencil erasers, and the subway (“a citified-just-slide-inside-and-take-a-ride electric mole”) provide ample fodder for Raczka’s inspired typographical experiments: in a recipe-style tribute to icicles, “Mother Nature’s freeze pops,” the spacing between letters makes some of the vertically oriented lines appear to drip. This is arguably Raczka’s best poetry work to date.
The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
When acclaimed writer Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives) was 12, she contracted pneumonia. This book, she declares, had its origin in the hazy, fever-filled days she spent hovering between life and death. Roiphe explores, through mesmerizing storytelling, how six writers—Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter—confronted mortality. Drawing on her subjects’ writing and on interviews with their friends and loved ones, she relates how they “embraced or evaded, made peace with or raged against death.” When Sontag receives her breast cancer diagnosis, she steels herself to continue her work. Returning home after deciding on chemotherapy, Updike rests his head on his typewriter, as if resigned to never writing again, until his wife, Martha, says to him, “Just one more book.” Freud faces his final days calmly, refusing painkillers, as if collecting notes for an essay about his own death. Thomas seems almost to long for death, while Sendak expresses pure terror in his stories and drawings.
Innocents and Others
Spiotta (Stone Arabia) tackles the slippery nature of identity and the destructive pull of desire in her fourth novel—this time through the lens of film. Having lived in Los Angeles since the 1980s, best friends Meadow and Carrie are both successful filmmakers, but their approach to art and life couldn’t be more different. Married and strapped with a family, Carrie’s films are breezy crowd-pleasers, while solo Meadow’s searing documentaries pick at the scabs of their subjects’ shortcomings. One of Meadow’s early films tracks an outcast boy’s disastrous experimentation with sex. Another of her “heavy, invisible, unremarkable” subjects is 41-year-old Jelly, aka Nicole—whose sad but captivating backstory Spiotta explores over the course of sporadic chapters—seduces Hollywood men over the phone but self-consciously vanishes when they ask to meet in person. As the book progresses, both women’s lives spiral downward—Carrie’s home life is hollow, Meadow’s self-destructive narcissism ends her career—leaving neither fulfilled. Eschewing linear storytelling in favor of chapters interspersed with scene and interview transcripts and paragraphs of film theory, Spiotta delivers a patchwork portrait of two women on the verge of two very different nervous breakdowns.
In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
Greek science writer Zarkadakis, armed with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and an eclectic tech industry background, rigorously and richly weaves together narrative threads on technology, philosophy, and literature to provide a fascinating history of AI. While many published studies of the human/machine analytic have tended to focus on one development or invention, specialists will recognize that Zarkadakis has left no cybernetic stone unturned—Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, René Descartes, George Boole, Norbert Weiner, and Jacques de Vaucanson all play significant roles in this history. In doing so, Zarkadakis provides the most comprehensive history of AI for our digital age. With a rare combination of literary know-how and scientific knowledge, he demonstrates a keen ability to convey scientific, philosophical, and technical expertise. Zarkadakis passionately, yet carefully, leads readers chronologically through the development of key concepts in the understanding of mind and intelligence.
The Serpent King
Forrestville, Tenn., named after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, isn’t exactly a welcome place for slightly ouside-the-mainstream folks like friends Dillard, Lydia, and Travis. Dill is a high school senior whose snake-handling preacher father is currently incarcerated; Lydia, a successful fashion blogger, plans on attending NYU after graduation; and Travis, large of body and gentle of soul, loses himself (and the pain of his father’s physical and emotional abuse) in a fantasy series called Bloodfall. While Dill finds comfort and beauty in music, Travis’s innate kindness belies his circumstances, and Lydia’s incandescent, gleefully offbeat personality draws them together. As the novel, Zentner’s debut, builds to a shocking act of violence that shatters the friends’ world, this sepia-toned portrait of small-town life serves as a moving testament to love, loyalty, faith, and reaching through the darkness to find light and hope.
