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'Black Hearts'

By jim frederick reviewed by joshua hammer.

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert; photograph from “Black Hearts”

A riveting account of the flawed leadership, bad luck and virulent personalities that led to the 2006 murder of an entire Iraqi family by American soldiers.

'So Much for That'

By lionel shriver reviewed by leah hager cohen.

Health care and bank accounts loom large in Lionel Shriver’s multifaceted 10th novel, in which plans, relationships and families are changed by illness.

'Wisdom'

By stephen s. hall reviewed by jim holt.

A science writer addresses the question: What makes a sage?

Bundles of Funnies

By douglas wolk.

New collections of classic comics, including “Peanuts,” “Bloom County” and “Popeye.”

'The Surrendered'

By chang-rae lee reviewed by terrence rafferty.

As death draws near, Chang-rae Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan who now lives in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her wayward son.

'Reality Hunger: A Manifesto'

By david shields reviewed by luc sante.

With an assist from others’ quotations, David Shields argues that our deep need for reality is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature.

'The Man Who Ate His Boots'

By anthony brandt reviewed by sara wheeler.

The boldness and the folly of the explorers who sought the Northwest Passage.

'Holy Warriors'

By jonathan phillips reviewed by eric ormsby.

This “character driven” account of two centuries of religious combat is the best recent history of the Crusades.

'Still Life'

By melissa milgrom reviewed by max watman.

A journalist’s adventures in the world of taxidermy, where she observes the art of incising, skinning, sculpturing and reassembling.

'The Man From Saigon'

By marti leimbach reviewed by elizabeth d. samet.

Vietcong capture a female reporter in this vivid Vietnam War novel.

Fiction Chronicle

By jan stuart.

Novels by Dominick Dunne, Sadie Jones, Melanie Benjamin, Brian Hart and Elizabeth Kostova.

Children’s Books

Children’s Books About the Holocaust

Reviewed by elizabeth devereaux.

A documentary approach to Anne Frank’s life and diary; and a novel about Jewish refugee children during World War II.

'Amelia Earhart'

By sarah stewart taylor reviewed by tanya lee stone.

An entertaining, graphic-novel style account of Amelia Earhart’s stay in Newfoundland before she crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1928.

Children’s Bookshelf

By julie just.

More children’s books reviewed.

Love and Baseball

Illegitimate politics, hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback trade fiction, paperback mass-market fiction, paperback nonfiction, hardcover advice, paperback advice, children's books, graphic books, all the lists », book review features.

Take This Job and Write It

By jennifer schuessler.

Work has become central to most people’s self-conception. Why does fiction have so little to say about it?

Killing by Numbers

By marilyn stasio.

Mystery novels by Jo Nesbo, Cara Black, Simon Lelic and Robert Goddard.

• More Crime Columns

Book Review Podcast

Featuring Jim Frederick, the author of “Black Hearts,” on an Iraqi tragedy; and Luc Sante explaining David Shields’s mind-bending manifesto, “Reality Hunger.”

Up Front: Joshua Hammer

By the editors.

As Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2001 to 2004, Joshua Hammer “covered Iraq extensively, embedding with United States troops as the insurgency spiraled out of control.”

Inside the List

Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 4.

Editors’ Choice

Recently reviewed books of particular interest.

Paperback Row

By elsa dixler.

Paperback books of particular interest.

Crime Columns

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Rachel Poser Is Joining The Times as Sunday Review Editor

Rachel Poser, the deputy editor of Harper’s Magazine, is joining The Times as Sunday Review editor on July 12. Read more in this note from Meeta Agrawal.

I’m excited to announce that Rachel Poser will be our new Sunday Review editor.

The Sunday Review has long been the home of some of Times Opinion’s most ambitious journalism. Rachel will bring her sharp editorial instincts to the section, working closely with the design team to breathe new life into our Sunday section. She will commission and edit long-form pieces and curate the section, drawing from and working alongside the story editors, all with an eye to producing the weekly destination for ideas journalism.

Before coming to the Times, Rachel was the deputy editor of Harper’s Magazine, where she edited reported features, investigations, essays and memoirs. She has been responsible for some of the most-read and celebrated stories in the magazine’s recent history. Over the past year, she has edited a feature about five days in a TikTok collab house , essays about the roles of art and history in our politics, and an unnerving report about the psychological risks of meditation , among many others. Rachel’s own writing has appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. Her profile of classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta for The New York Times Magazine made waves well beyond the walls of academia.

As we were getting to know Rachel, a former colleague shared, “she is one of the sharpest editors I’ve ever worked with; I remember one issue where she absolutely saved an almost irredeemable draft, and is equally comfortable wielding a red pen on big names and no names.”

Rachel is a Brooklyn native. She holds degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard.

Rachel will start with us on July 12. Please join me in welcoming her to the team.

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Inside the Ordinary

Inside the Ordinary | Reviews

NYT Sunday Book Reviews

The New York Times Sunday Book Review section appears in the weekend edition of the “paper.”  It’s the literary high point of some weekends;  most reviewers are quite capable authors themselves.  At times they are able to focus their talent in ways that crystallize some aspects of the books they review.  While not necessarily better than the books themselves, the reviews are bite-size morsels that the busy (or lazy) can readily digest.

• Liesl Schillinger on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

David Gates on Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer

Tom mccarthy on clancy martin’s how to sell, tom barbash on howard jacobson’s the act of love.

• Chris Hedges on Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier’s (tr. by Alexis Siegel) The Photographer

Laura Miller on Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy

Jess row on anne michael’s winter vault, jack pendarvis on frederick barthelme’s waveland.

• Robert Sullivan on Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta

David Orr on Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009

******************************

Liesl Schillinger on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table ( 14 October 2011 )

“Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image. . . ”

“. . it looks ahead to Mary Gaitskill’s sense of a vivid inner ferocity: ‘When Grace studied Philip’s eyes she could feel at the back of her mind the movement of sliding door opening to let out small furry evil-smelling animals with sharp claws and teeth.'”

“. . . she’s overwhelmed by the metastasizing of ordinary comportment.”

“At one point Martin deploys the rhetoric of full-blown Heidegerian phenomenology, having an avuncular figure say to Bobby: “Time, Grandson. . . . A watch puts you in the middle of the stuff of ordinary being.” Quentin’s section of “The Sound and the Fury,” perhaps the greatest of all American novels (or, for that matter, of all novels), begins with an almost identical passage. But there’s a vital difference: reading Faulkner, I’m struck with the exhilarating awareness that immense questions are working themselves out right before my eyes; reading Martin, it’s all too evident that commonplaces, worked out already and elsewhere, are being drafted in, or soldered on, to lend philosophical gravitas to what is, at base, a quite straight-up, noirish moral potboiler.”

“The novel succeeds because, for all his insanity, ­Felix knows both too much and not enough about his own and Marisa’s emotions.”

Chris Hedges on Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier’s (tr. by Alexis Siegel) The Photographer “All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants cry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself . . . The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefevre, are often rendered speechless . . . How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd?”

“Like many memoirs [it] combines penetrating shrewdness with remarkable blind spots. . . . He has the satirist’s cruel knack for conjuring and dispatching an individual in a single line, like the ‘computer whiz’ described as having ‘all the characteristics of a bad stutterer without the stutter itself.’ . . . [The memoir] betrays the roots of this skill in a wobbly notion of the self as a void encased in a posture.”

“Their [Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje] fiction might be described as an attempt to bring together the practice of the lyric poem — density of language, intense sensory observation, a skilled suspension of time — with the novelist’s brick-by-brick construction of drama in time, and, more important, in history. [They] . . . are not novelists of contemporary life but archivists and re-enactors who use poetic immediacy to make the past present — not as an orderly narrative but as a series of fragments or snapshots linked by a kind of dream logic, a hallucination that is neither entirely past nor present. . . Occasionally, in the midst of all this careful composition, these lovingly burnished surfaces, the howl of a very different kind of novel comes through. . . It shatters its own dreamlike stillness.”

“A book-length fascination and loathing culminates in Vaughn’s rapt litany of all the television he could spend the rest of his life watching in bed: ‘news and sports and those incredible game shows and ‘Lost,’ which seems to have a lot of sex in it, and HGTV, all those house-buying shows, . . . a blown-up building one night and a mother killing her children the next.’  To which Greta, the unlikely voice of reason and the heart of this bittersweet, conciliatory comedy says, ‘Uh, no.'”

Robert Sullivan on Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta

The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating, and even kind of sexy. And at the very middle of the book, the two-page spread of Mannahatta in all its primevil glory — the visual denouement of a decade’s research — feels a little like a centerfold.

“. . . he’s an exhilarating and unsettling writer who is very good at saying things that can seem rather bad. When a Seidel poem begins, ‘ The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks ,’ it’s hard to know whether to applaud or shake your head.”  . . . ‘This combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel’s most remarkable technical achievements; he’s like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall. [Quoting Siedel’s The Cosmos Trilogy] :

It is time to lose your life, even if it isn’t over. It is time to say goodbye and try to die. It is October .

Starwhisperer

• Many Voices of Marian McPartland Now Silenced A musical voice can refer to a singer like Tony Bennett. Or it can refer to a voice in an orchestra of voices -- like Arturo Sandoval's trumpet. In the case of the late Marian McPartland, several voices that have sung together in perfect harmony have been silenced.  It is a big loss in our […]
• Nadeem Aslam: "The Opposite of War is Not Peace" The Blind Man's Garden The full quotation from Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden (@AAKnopf):  "The opposite of war is not peace but civilization, and civilization is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war." The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviewer judges the writing to be "visceral but exquisite, emotionally affecting yet unsentimental." An excerpt: "Rohan […]
• Ex-Situ: The Violin Promo for "The Violin" by Anna Clyne and Josh Dorman As part of New York City's River to River Festival, the Original Music Workshop presented "The Violin." The Original Music Workshop describes such events as those that: . . .take place in unexpected spaces, away from the Williamsburg site where OMW is constructing its heralded […]
• Violinist as Orchestra Symbol The 10 June 2013 issue of the New Yorker featured a photograph by Gabriele Stabile of musician Erykah Badu and a violinist. In the periodical's "Goings on About Town," the violinist is unnamed, anonymous, but represents the Brooklyn Philharmonic with whom Badu was to play later in the month.
• Very Short Fiction as Poetry? So suggests the New Yorker's James Wood in a review (pay wall) of Jamie Quatro’s book of short stories (New Yorker 3/11/13). He writes: Short fiction is closer to poetry than to the novel, and very short fiction is even closer. Quatro has a poet’s compound eye for small forms, passing phrases, useful repetitions, fleeting images. […]

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• Fearful Asymmetry: Melancholies of Knowledge Melancholies of Knowledge is a collection that brings together a snapshot of perspectives near the end of the last century on the role of "literature in the age of science." The post Fearful Asymmetry: Melancholies of Knowledge appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Chapter IX: The Functions and Future of Poetry A chapter by FSC Northrop published in 1947 sensed a moral imperative for poetry to embrace the reality uncovered by science. The post Chapter IX: The Functions and Future of Poetry appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• The Subjugated Meaning of “Diversity” Jonathan Cole offers a more powerful sense of "diversity" in university education - and what should be done about it. Interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC 2016-01 The post The Subjugated Meaning of “Diversity” appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Glenmorangie and the New Makers Glenmorangie campaign in 2016-04: An exciting new generation of makers is merging creative ambition with the disciplined rationale of hard science. The post Glenmorangie and the New Makers appeared first on Poetry and Science.
• Science Gallery International SNIP from the Science Gallery International portal: Science Gallery International is a non-profit company headquartered in Dublin and charged with supporting the development of the Global Science Gallery Network. Our misison […] The post Science Gallery International appeared first on Poetry and Science.

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Anne Lamott got a scathing review. A tweet from her son turned it around

Even ‘national treasures’ can get bad reviews, but family matters more, it turns out.

By Jennifer Graham

The New York Times once called her the “ lefty guru of optimism, ” but Anne Lamott was anything but after the newspaper published a negative review of her new book on Sunday.

The author, known for her Christian faith and her progressive politics, took to social media to express her unhappiness with the review of “ Somehow: Thoughts on Love ,” sharing several posts about how it affected her.

A bit of a set back here: just got the single worst review of my life prominently featured in the New York Times, brightly illustrated for maximum visibility. Alexandra Jacob’s had a LOT of fun writing it. Feel doomed. Am going to sulk, and overeat. — ANNE LAMOTT (@ANNELAMOTT) April 21, 2024

Despite an immediate influx of love and support from her fans, Lamott initially seemed unable to shrug off Alexandra Jacobs’ opinions, writing that she needed prayers, radical self-love and “retail therapy.” A manicure was also part of recovery. Lamott is currently on a book tour (she’s in Chicago Tuesday night) and so could not run into the arms of her husband, son or grandchild.

Say this is true, even when we get a savage review in The NY Times, 3000 miles away from husband, child, grandchild and dog. How will love save the day? Easy! Will not pick up a drink or a drug, no matter what. Radical self care. Prayers: Help! Thanks (eventually) Retail therapy. https://t.co/oQhs7vbLdI — ANNE LAMOTT (@ANNELAMOTT) April 21, 2024

But even 3,000 miles away, it turns out that family matters more than a reviewer’s opinion.

Lamott’s attitude completely changed after her son, Sam Lamott, posted a message of defense and support, saying, in part, “One of the greatest takeaways I’ve learned watching my mother’s career over the years is that winning over the hip coastal literary-scene snobs is not the high water mark of a writer’s career.”

He went on to say, “Congratulations to my uncool California Hippie Sunday-school teacher single mother who gets to celebrate the accomplishment of her lifetime, being #1 on the NYT’s list, when everyone said her success should be slowly dwindling away because she isn’t ‘relevant’ anymore.” Sam Lamott also encouraged people to buy the book.

His mother, in a word, melted. She shared her son’s post multiple times on X.

My son referring to me in this tweet of congrats and pride as “my uncool California hippie Sunday School teacher single mom” makes up for ANYthing the world might throw at me. I tell you, God is such a showoff. https://t.co/BbZiXLX1uH — ANNE LAMOTT (@ANNELAMOTT) April 22, 2024

Lamott needn’t have been too concerned about The New York Times review. Her book, published by Riverhead on April 9, has been favorably reviewed elsewhere, including The Washington Post, where Meredith Maran wrote:

“In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux. ‘Love is compassion,’ she writes, ‘which Neal (Lamott’s husband) defines as the love that arises in the presence of suffering. Are love and compassion up to the stark realities we face at the dinner table, and down the street, and at the melting ice caps, or within Iranian nuclear plants and our own Congress? Maybe, I think so. Somehow’.”

As for the review that caused all the angst — which was entitled “Anne Lamott has written classics. This is not one of them” — it wasn’t completely negative, even though the writer called the book “flabby and sometimes cringey.”

Jacobs also called Lamott a “national treasure,” identified two of her books (”Operating Instructions” and “Bird by Bird”) as instant classics, and at one point wrote, “To be clear, I love Anne Lamott.”

What is most clear about the saga, however, are the two lessons that stand out for all of us, national treasures or not. They are: Harsh words can sting even when wrapped up in praise. And the antidote is the love of your family.

The New York Times is reimagining Sunday Review

As of July 17, there is a brand-new section in The New York Times: Sunday Opinion.

Though the name is new, Sunday Opinion has a long history. It was born in 1935 as The News of the Week in Review, a place where Times staffers could offer their analysis of the week’s news. In 2011, the section was given over to the Opinion editors and renamed Sunday Review. Since then, it has been the print home of our finest and most ambitious opinion journalism, where you can find the Sunday columnists Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat and Jamelle Bouie; the Times editorial board; and incisive guest essays from a wide range of viewpoints.

This redesign completes that transformation. By renaming the section Sunday Opinion, we’re recognizing the role it plays and making that clearer to readers.

Click here to read more.

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The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind Hardcover – October 26, 2010

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A handy, smaller, and more focused version of our popular New York Times knowledge books―organized by weekends and topic Fell asleep during history class in high school when World War II was covered? Learned the table of elements at one time but have forgotten it since ? Always wondered who really invented the World Wide Web? Here is the book for you, with all the answers you've been looking for: The New York Times Presents Smarter by Sunday is based on the premise that there is a recognizable group of topics in history, literature, science, art, religion, philosophy, politics, and music that educated people should be familiar with today. Over 100 of these have been identified and arranged in a way that they can be studied over a year's time by spending two hours on a topic every weekend.

• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication date October 26, 2010
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.75 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0312571348
• ISBN-13 978-0312571344
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First Edition (October 26, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312571348
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312571344
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.75 x 8.25 inches
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Book excerpt: "The Covenant of Water" by Abraham Verghese

Updated on: April 21, 2024 / 9:23 AM EDT / CBS News

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.

Dr. Abraham Verghese teaches medical students at Stanford University's School of Medicine.  But he has another calling: author. His novel "The Covenant of Water"  (Grove/Atlantic), a multi-generational tale of a family in India experiencing love and tragedy, was a New York Times bestseller, and an Oprah's Book Club pick.

Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Tracy Smith's interview with Abraham Verghese on "CBS Sunday Morning" April 21!

"The Covenant of Water" by Abraham Verghese

Prefer to listen?  Audible  has a 30-day free trial available right now.

1900, Travancore, South India

She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.

"The saddest day of a girl's life is the day of her wedding," her mother says. "After that, God willing, it gets better."

Soon she hears her mother's sniffles change to steady breathing, then to the softest of snores, which in the girl's mind seem to impose order on the scattered sounds of the night, from the wooden walls exhaling the day's heat to the scuffing sound of the dog in the sandy courtyard outside.

A brainfever bird calls out: Kezhekketha? Kezhekketha? Which way is east? Which way is east? She imagines the bird looking down at the clearing where the rectangular thatched roof squats over their house. It sees the lagoon in front and the creek and the paddy field behind. The bird's cry can go on for hours, depriving them of sleep ... but just then it is cut off abruptly, as though a cobra has snuck up on it. In the silence that follows, the creek sings no lullaby, only grumbling over the polished pebbles.

She awakes before dawn while her mother still sleeps. Through the window, the water in the paddy field shimmers like beaten silver. On the front verandah, her father's ornate charu kasera, or lounging chair, sits forlorn and empty. She lifts the writing pallet that straddles the long wooden arms and seats herself. She feels her father's ghostly impression preserved in the cane weave.

On the banks of the lagoon four coconut trees grow sideways, skimming the water as if to preen at their reflections before straightening to the heavens. Goodbye, lagoon. Goodbye, creek.

" Molay ?" her father's only brother had said the previous day, to her surprise. Of late he wasn't in the habit of using the endearment molay—daughter—with her. "We found a good match for you!" His tone was oily, as though she were four, not twelve. "Your groom values the fact that you're from a good family, a priest's daughter." She knew her uncle had been looking to get her married off for a while, but she still felt he was rushing to arrange this match. What could she say? Such matters were decided by adults. The helplessness on her mother's face embarrassed her. She felt pity for her mother, when she so wanted to feel respect. Later, when they were alone, her mother said, " Molay , this is no longer our house. Your uncle ..." She was pleading, as if her daughter had protested. Her words had trailed off, her eyes darting around nervously. The lizards on the walls carried tales. "How different from here can life be there? You'll feast at Christmas, fast for Lent ... church on Sundays. The same Eucharist, the same coconut palms and coffee bushes. It's a fine matc ... He's of good means."

Why would a man of good means marry a girl of little means, a girl without a dowry? What are they keeping secret from her? What does he lack? Youth, for one—he's forty. He already has a child. A few days before, after the marriage broker had come and gone, she overheard her uncle chastise her mother, saying, "So what if his aunt drowned? Is that the same as a family history of lunacy? Whoever heard of a family with a history of drownings? Others are always jealous of a good match and they'll find one thing to exaggerate."

Excerpted from "The Covenant of Water" © 2023 by Abraham Verghese. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• "The Covenant of Water"  by Abraham Verghese (Grove/Atlantic), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats
• abrahamverghese.org
• Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, Stanford University School of Medicine
• A reader's guide for "The Covenant of Water," Oprah's Book Club pick

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