12 New Books We Recommend This Week
This content was originally published by on 25 May 2017 | 9:47 pm.
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HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty, by S. Jonathan Bass. (Liveright, $26.95.) A young black man wrongly accused of killing a policeman in Alabama in 1957 faced a 44-year legal battle, during which Gov. George Wallace stayed his execution no less than 13 times. This painstakingly documented story offers a counterpoint to the master narrative of progress that characterizes our popular memory of the civil rights movement, and connects the movement’s gains and limitations to the current crisis of race and criminal justice.
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RISING STAR: The Making of Barack Obama, by David J. Garrow. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $45.) This long, deeply reported but gratuitously snarly biography argues that the young president-to-be subordinated everything, including love, to a politically expedient journey-to-blackness narrative. The depth of detail allows the reader to see familiar parts of Obama’s story with fresh eyes.
THE GOLDEN LEGEND, by Nadeem Aslam. (Knopf, $27.95.) In Aslam’s powerful and engrossing fifth novel, set in an imaginary Pakistani city ruled by mob violence, sectarianism and intolerance, the principal characters become hunted fugitives. Their integrity and courage nevertheless provide hope, and Aslam writes with great sensitivity and depth about the ways human beings behave under almost unimaginable pressure.
THE UNRULY CITY: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution, by Mike Rapport. (Basic Books, $32.) What accounts for differing degrees of upheaval when societies are in crisis? A historian’s examination of the 18th-century revolutions in urban Britain, America and France reminds us that the democratic structures that have supported us for so long came about as a result of convulsions of the established order.
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: Stories, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this slim (seven stories) but beguilingly irresistible book, Murakami whips up a melancholy soufflé about wounded men who can’t hold on to the women they love. All signature Murakami elements are present and accounted for: a rainy Tokyo, neat single malt, stray cats, cool cars and classic jazz.
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SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE: America’s Violent Birth, by Holger Hoock. (Crown, $30.) This important and revelatory book adopts violence as its central analytical and narrative focus, forcing readers to confront the visceral realities of a conflict too often bathed in warm, nostalgic light. The Revolution in this telling is a war like any other, characterized not by dexterous verbal battles but by rape, plunder and blood-soaked battlefields.
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CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas, by Pénélope Bagieu. (First Second, $24.99.) Bagieu uses the entire range of her medium, graphite, to show — in drawings both exuberant and sad — how a Baltimore girl named Ellen Cohen grew up to became Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas, the ’60s band of “California Dreamin’” fame. Exuberance and sadness coexist in Bagieu’s drawing style, as they coexist in the character of Cass Elliot.
FIRST LOVE, by Gwendoline Riley. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) A 30-something writer falls in love with and marries a man who says he doesn’t “have a nice bone in my body.” This dark, funny novel displays its author’s mastery of scrupulous psychological detail and ear for the ways love inverts itself into cruelty.
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THE LONG DROP, by Denise Mina. (Little, Brown, $26.) In a departure from her usual series featuring sleuths Alex Morrow and Paddy Meehan, Mina’s new novel is based on a real crime spree that horrified Glasgow in the late 1950s, when the wife, sister-in-law and daughter of a bakery-shop owner were murdered.
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