wall street journal book reviews november 2022

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A rural polling location is seen in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in November 2022.

American Ramble review: a riveting tale of the divided United States

Neil King Jr, once of the Wall Street Journal, walked from Washington to New York. His account of the journey is essential

I n spring 2021, Neil King trekked 330 miles from his Washington DC home to New York City. He passed through countryside, highways, towns and churchyards. His 25-day walk was also a journey through time. He looked at the US as it was and is and how it wishes to be seen. His resultant book is a beautifully written travelog, memoir, chronicle and history text. His prose is mellifluous, yet measured.

In his college days, King drove a New York cab. At the Wall Street Journal , his remit included politics, terror and foreign affairs. He did a stint as global economics editor. One might expect him to be jaded. Fortunately, he is not. American Ramble helps make the past come alive.

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania , King stops at the home of James Buchanan, the bachelor president from 1857 to 1861, who sympathized with the south and loathed abolition. Ending slavery could wait. Of the supreme court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, Buchanan highly approved.

Also in Lancaster, King visits a townhouse once owned by Thaddeus Stevens, the 19th-century Republican congressman and radical abolitionist. At the start of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, viewed the conflict as the vehicle for preserving the Union. He opposed slavery but opposed secession more. For Stevens, slavery was an evil that demanded eradication.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania , King describes how the ancestors of one town greeted Confederate troops as heroes while another just 20 miles away viewed them as a scourge. Forks in the road are everywhere.

King pays homage to the underground railroad, describing how the Mason-Dixon Line, the demarcation between north and south, free state and slave, came into being. Astronomy and borders had a lot to do with it. All of this emerges from the scenery and places King passes on his way.

Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West.

Yet joy and wonder suffuse King’s tale. He smiles on the maker’s handiwork, uneven as it is. American Ramble depicts a stirring sunset and nightfall through the roof-window of a Quaker meeting house. Quiet stands at the heart of the experience. The here and now is loud and messy, but King ably conveys the silent majesty of the moment. The Bible recounts the Deity’s meeting with the prophet Elijah. He was not in the wind, a fire or an earthquake. Rather, He resided in a whisper.

The confluence of the Delaware River and Neshaminy Creek, in Croydon, Pennsylvania.

King recalls an earlier time in a Buddhist monastery. Warned that surrounding scenery would detract from solitude and commitment, he nevertheless succumbed. King is nothing if not curious.

The quotidian counts too. He pops cold beers, downs pizzas and snarfs chicken parmesan. A wanderer needs sustenance. He is grateful for the day following the night. Predictability is miraculous, at times invaluable.

King is a cancer survivor and a pilgrim. He is a husband and father, son and brother. Life’s fragility and randomness have left their mark. His malady is in remission but he moves like a man unknowing how long good fortune will last. His voice is a croak, a casualty of Lyme disease. He is restless. Life’s clock runs. He writes of how his brother Kevin lost his battle with a brain tumor.

King puts his head and heart on the page. His life story helps drive the narrative, a mixture of the personal, political and pastoral. But it is not only about him. He meets strangers who become friends, of a sort. At times, people treat him as an oddity – or simply an unwanted presence. More frequently, they are open if not welcoming. As his walk continues, word gets out. Minor celebrity results.

The author is awed by generosity, deprivation and the world. He is moved by a homeless woman and her daughter. Traversing the New Jersey Turnpike presents a near-insurmountable challenge. A mother and son offer him a kayak to paddle beneath the traffic. He accepts.

The near-impassable New Jersey Turnpike, in Elizabeth, New Jersey with the towers of New York City behind.

A Colorado native, King is at home in the outdoors. Nature is wondrous and sometimes disturbing. Rough waters complicate his passages. He studies heaps on a landfill. He meets a New Jerseyan with pickup truck adorned by Maga flags. The gentleman bestows beer, snacks and jokes. King divides the universe into “anywheres” and “somewheres”. He puts himself in the first camp and finds placed-ness all around.

American Ramble captures the religious and demographic topography that marks the mid-Atlantic and north-eastern US. Here, dissenters, Anabaptists, German pietists, Presbyterians and Catholics first landed. King pays homage to their pieces of turf. His reductionism is gentle. He appreciates the legacy of what came before him. Landscapes change, human nature less so, even as it remains unpredictable.

“When I crossed the Delaware two days before,” he writes, “I had entered what I later came to call Presbyteriana, a genteel and horsey patch settled by Presbyterians and Quakers.” Princeton University stands at its heart.

E pluribus unum was tough to pull off when the settlers came. It may even be tougher now. King quotes Nick Rizzo, a denizen of Staten Island, New York City’s Trumpy outer borough: “We are losing our ability to forge any unity at all from these United States.”

Rizzo joined King along the way. In the Canterbury Tales, April stands as the height of spring. It was prime time for religious pilgrimages, “what with Chaucer and all, and it being April”, Rizzo explains.

“Strangers rose to the occasion to provide invaluable moments,” King writes. Amen.

American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is published in the US by HarperCollins

Travel writing
History books
Politics books
US politics
Washington DC
Pennsylvania

The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2023

Featuring anne enright, lorrie moore, zadie smith, anne patchett, colson whitehead, and more.

The points are tallied, the math is done, and the results are in.

Yes, all year long the diligent and endearingly disgruntled Book Marks elves have been mining reviews from every corner of the literary internet. Brows furrowed, stomachs growling, they’ve worked from break of dawn to blink of dusk, seven days a week, scouring the book review sections of over 150 publications—from the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald , the Toronto Star to the London Review of Books —all so that we can now say with certainty that these are the best reviewed fiction titles of 2023.

Happy reading!

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

1. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (W.W. Norton & Company)

18 Rave • 2 Positive Read an interview with Anne Enright here

“So convincingly has Ms. Enright conjured the archetype of the wandering Irish bard who leaves behind him a legacy of abandoned women and melodious, honey-tongued verse … Is it possible for poems to be fictitious? In fact, these nostalgic odes to love and Ireland are limpid, lilting, wholly credible stand-alone works … One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity. The fullness of Ms. Enright’s talent is reflected as well in her treatment of what has come to be known, a bit glibly, as the ‘art monster.’”

–Sam Sacks ( The Wall Street Journal )

2. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper)

19 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an interview with Ann Patchett here

“Not that a heart is not broken at some point, but it breaks without affecting the remarkable warmth of the book, set in summer’s fullest bloom … This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel … Knowing Patchett’s personal history with motherhood makes the fullness of the maternal feelings she imagines for Lara Kenison particularly poignant.”

–Marion Winik ( The Washington Post )

3. After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Knopf)

15 Rave • 6 Positive Read an interview with Tessa Hadley here

“This new collection is a great introduction to her work and for those of us already familiar with Hadley, it’s a great addition. Throughout the collection, Hadley spins out character studies of (mostly) women at odds with themselves, their partners, their families, or life in general … Hadley does a wonderful job of weaving past and present together as the sisters are forced to confront their memories and relationships. And, of course, there are those moments of shining prose … Rife with deft and often beautiful prose, and astute but compassionate characterization, this is a wonderful collection.”

–Yvonne C. Garrett ( The Brooklyn Rail )

4. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore ( Knopf)

20 Rave • 9 Positive • 6 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Lorrie Moore here

“Moore excels in…[the] neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done … Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story … A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.”

–Abhrajyoti Chakraborty ( The Guardian )

5. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions)

15 Rave • 9 Positive Read an excerpt from Kairos here

“A cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early … If Kairos were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have. Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory … She is writing more closely to her own unconscious … I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did … Profound and moving.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

6. August Blue by Deborah Levy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

13 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections … August Blue, which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.”

–Heller McAlpin ( The Wall Street Journal )

7. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

18 Rave • 5 Positive • 5 Mixed Read an excerpt from The Bee Sting here

“ The Bee Sting …ought to cement Murray’s already high standing. Another changeup, it’s a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom . The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful—there’s just no other way to put it: The Bee Sting is a masterpiece.”

–Jonathan Russell Clark ( The Los Angeles Times )

8. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 7 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from Birnam Wood here

“Bold, ambitious … A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns … Birnam Wood moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose … Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands … Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters … I’ll unabashedly state that Birnam Wood is a brash, unforgettable novel.”

–Lauren LeBlanc ( The Boston Globe )

9. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

15 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an interview with Colson Whitehead here

“Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked … Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture … Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory … A…reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.”

–Chris Vognar ( The Los Angeles Times )

10. The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

20 Rave • 6 Positive • 9 Mixed • 1 Pan

“It offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters … Touchet is the most morally intelligent character Smith has written … The book’s structure is uneven. One wishes, for instance, that the chapters would signal their time jumps more consistently … But these infelicities stop mattering when we are deep into the trial and the book turns into a portrait of people with thwarted ambitions, of people who, like Ainsworth, become frauds without knowing … As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.”

–Karan Mahajan ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points The ten books with the highest points totals are then ranked by weighted average

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wall street journal book reviews november 2022

Lit Hub Weekly: December 4-8, 2023

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The 'Wall Street Journal' Drops Its Bestseller Lists

The Wall Street Journal has stopped running its weekly bestseller lists. The final lists were carried in the past weekend's editions. The paper ran a total of six fiction and nonfiction lists, as well as a hardcover business list. All were powered by Circana BookScan.

The fiction and nonfiction categories were both divided into hardcover, e-book, and combined lists. In something of a unique feature, the lists combined adult and children’s titles on one list. Thus, last week’s top-selling hardcover fiction book was Jeff Kinney’s No Brainer, while The Woman in Me by Britney Spears was number one in all three nonfiction categories, including the e-book/print combined list.

Paul Gigot, editorial page editor at the WSJ, said that the company’s contract with Circana expired, “and we are not renewing it.” He added that all other aspects of the paper’s book coverage will “continue as usual.”

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Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device., best books of the month | november 2022 starred reviews.

Starred titles reviewed in our November 2022 print issue, spanning audio, mystery and suspense, SF/fantasy, romance, and more.

Backman, Fredrik. The Winners . S. & S. Audio.

Rinella, Steven & others. MeatEater’s Campfire Stories: Narrow Escapes & More Close Calls . Books on Tape.

Wellesley, Mary. The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts . Blackstone Audio.

MYSTERY & SUSPENSE

Brannigan, Ellie. Murder at an Irish Castle . Crooked Lane.

Connelly, Michael. Desert Star . Little, Brown.

George, Emily. A Half-Baked Murder . Kensington.

Mackintosh, Clare. The Last Party . Sourcebooks Landmark.

McKinlay, Jenn. Fatal Fascinator . Berkley.

Penny, Louise. A World of Curiosities . Minotaur: St. Martin’s.

Clark, C. L. The Faithless . Orbit.

O’Keefe, Megan E. The Blighted Stars . Orbit.

Pardo, Paz. The Shamshine Blind . Atria.

Parry, H. G. The Magician’s Daughter . Redhook: Orbit.

Bailey, Tessa. Secretly Yours . Avon.

Peckham, Scarlett. The Portrait of a Duchess . Avon.

Shupe, Joanna. The Duke Gets Even . Avon.

Brooks-Dalton, Lily. The Light Pirate . Grand Central.

Cullhed, Elin. Euphoria . Canongate.

Decos, Lissette. Ana Takes Manhattan . Forever: Grand Central.

Everett, Percival. Dr. No . Graywolf.

Marshall, Heather. Looking for Jane . Atria.

Hendrix, Grady. How To Sell a Haunted House . Berkley.

CHRISTIAN FICTION

Jennings, Regina. Engaging Deception . Bethany House.

CLASSIC RETURNS

Clair, Maxine. Rattlebone . McNally Editions.

Haushofer, Marlen. The Wall . New Directions.

Tonks, Rosemary. The Bloater . New Directions.

ARTS & HUMANITIES

Bonneville, Hugh. Playing Under the Piano: From Downton to Darkest Peru . Other Pr.

Bono. Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story . Knopf.

Cho, Su. The Symmetry of Fish . Penguin Bks.

Choi, Franny. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On . Ecco: HarperCollins.

Feil, Ken. Fearless Vulgarity: Jacqueline Susann’s Queer Comedy and Camp Authorship . Wayne State Univ.

Gervitz, Gloria. Migrations: Poem, 1976–2020 . NYRB.

Guralnick, Peter & Colin Escott. The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll: The Illustrated Story of Sun Records and the 70 Recordings That Changed the World . Weldon Owen. p

Klawans, Stuart. Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges . Columbia Univ.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Dunlap, Tori. Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy’s Bullsh*t To Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love . Dey Street.

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life . Penguin Pr.

Schlesinger, Jill. The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life . St. Martin’s.

Taylor, Goldie. The Love You Save: A Memoir . Hanover Square: Harlequin.

Thompson, Lisa. Finding Elevation: Fear and Courage on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain . Girl Friday Bks.

Dato, Lara. Raising Adventurous Eaters: Practical Ways To Overcome Picky Eating and Food Sensory Sensitivities . New Harbinger.

Rajan, Rekha S. The Read Aloud Factor: How To Create the Habit That Boosts Your Baby’s Brain . Parenting Pr.: Chicago Review.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Chace, Daniella. Home Detox: Make Your Home a Healthier Place for Everyone Who Lives There . Storey.

Hollenstein, Jenna. Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice . New Harbinger.

Saffitz, Claire. What’s for Dessert: Simple Recipes for Dessert People . Clarkson Potter.

Woolfson, Esther. Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species . Pegasus.

Digital Literacy: Skills & Strategies . Salem Pr.

PROFESSIONAL MEDIA

Weber, Mary Beth & Melissa De Fino. Virtual Technical Services: A Handbook . Rowman & Littlefield.

Get Print. Get Digital. Get Both!

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