… a profound and very funny book about growth and promise, and how not to kill them off; about women reading and writing and how they survive. Read more
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Category: New Books
How a Death-Row Inmate’s Embrace of Conservatism Led to His Release
In 1957, Edgar Smith, a 23-year-old former Marine who was both a husband and a new father, confessed to the bludgeoning murder of 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski in New Jersey. After deliberating for two hours, a jury convicted him. The judge sentenced him to death and he was sent to Trenton State Prison. What interests Weinman, who writes the Crime column for The New York Times Book Review, is not the murder but what transpired in its wake. Through a confluence of events, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and one of the architects of the 20th-century conservative movement, learned that Smith was a fan of his publication. Flattered, Buckley began to mail the inmate the latest issues. These communications initiated a relationship that would add up to nine years and 1,500 pages of correspondence — and, ultimately, Smith’s release from prison. Read more
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Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
This book’s playful title announces both its subject and its tone … This may sound like dry stuff, but the narrative both sparkles with geeky wit…and shines with an infectious enthusiasm … Duncan brings his chronicle into the digital present before closing with not one, but two indexes: a machine-generated one and a human-compiled one, by Paula Clarke Bain, member of the Society of Indexers, whose wit matches the author’s and underscores his passionate appreciation of the art … Always erudite, frequently funny, and often surprising—a treat for lovers of the book qua book. Read more
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“Jawbone” by Mónica Ojeda
Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear. Read more
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He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?
Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.” But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today. Read more
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Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of Jacob’ is finally here. Now we know why the Nobel judges were so awestruck.
The challenges here — for author and reader — are considerable. After all, Tokarczuk isn’t revising our understanding of Mozart or presenting a fresh take on Catherine the Great. She’s excavating a shadowy figure who’s almost entirely unknown today … As daunting as it sounds, The Books of Jacob is miraculously entertaining and consistently fascinating. Despite his best efforts, Frank never mastered alchemy, but Tokarczuk certainly has. Her light irony, delightfully conveyed by Croft’s translation, infuses many of the sections. What’s more, it turns out that the story of an 18th-century grifter inflated by Messianic delusions is surprisingly relevant to our own era. The quality that makes The Books of Jacob so striking is its remarkable form. Tokarczuk has constructed her narrative as a collage of legends, letters, diary entries, rumors, hagiographies, political attacks and historical records … This is a story that grows simultaneously more detailed and more mysterious … Haunting and irresistible. Read more
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American Injustice: Inside Stories from the Underbelly of the Criminal Justice System
Defense attorney Rudolf debuts with a searing look at systemic failures in the U.S. justice system. He notes that over the past three decades, nearly 3,000 people were exonerated and released from prison for crimes they had not committed, and delves into the factors behind these false convictions, including racial bias; the so-called trial penalty, which incentivizes defendants to plead guilty in order to avoid the likelihood of a harsher sentence should they be convicted at trial; and a reliance on suspect testimony. Rudolf also documents shortcomings in forensic science… Read more
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Sex writing as literary parlor game? Why 27 writers decided to bare (almost) all
A bold and playful collection of erotic stories written by some of the world’s finest writers. The twist? Each story is “anonymous,” allowing for tales as subtle or explicit, strange or familiar, tender or fierce as each writer wishes–leaving readers to guess who wrote what. Read more
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Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
In this thoughtful, engaging, and moving work, Slate writer Stevens posits that Buster Keaton’s life is an entry point to understanding the 20th century—and vice versa … Stevens’s acumen and analysis further elevate this book, offering insights and entertaining extrapolations on the myriad films and entertainment figures discussed within … More than a biography of Buster Keaton, this is a stunning, extensively researched, and eminently readable cultural history. Read more
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Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
Journalist Katz (The Big Truck That Went By) delivers a searing and well-documented portrait of early 20th-century U.S. imperialism focused on the career of U.S. Marine Corps major general Smedley D. Butler (1881–1940). Contending that American military actions served the interests of U.S. business and financial institutions, often with dire effects on local people, Katz provides the geopolitical context behind interventions in China, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and visits each location to document the legacy of U.S. interference. Read more
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