{"id":1550,"date":"2007-11-22T08:19:41","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T15:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=1550"},"modified":"2007-12-05T17:12:03","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T00:00:03","slug":"100-notable-books-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=1550","title":{"rendered":"100 Notable Books Of The Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Fiction & Poetry<\/span><\/p>\n

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER<\/a>. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.)<\/span> In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay.”<\/p>\n

AFTER DARK<\/a>. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. (Knopf, $22.95.)<\/span> A tale of two sisters, one awake all night, one asleep for months.<\/p>\n

THE BAD GIRL<\/a>. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)<\/span> This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.<\/p>\n

BEARING THE BODY<\/a>. By Ehud Havazelet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.)<\/span> In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction.<\/p>\n

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS<\/a>. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $22.95.)<\/span> A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship.<\/p>\n

BRIDGE OF SIGHS<\/a>. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.)<\/span> In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo writes of a small town in New York riven by class differences and racial hatred.<\/p>\n

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO<\/a>. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.)<\/span> A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.<\/p>\n

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME<\/a>. By André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.)<\/span> Aciman’s novel of love, desire, time and memory describes a passionate affair between two young men in Italy.<\/p>\n

CHEATING AT CANASTA<\/a>. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.)<\/span> Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they’re finished.<\/p>\n

THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998<\/a>. By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. (Ecco\/HarperCollins, $34.95.)<\/span> Herbert’s poetry echoes the quiet insubordination of his public life.<\/p>\n

DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.”<\/a> By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)<\/span> Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.<\/p>\n

EXIT GHOST<\/a>. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.)<\/span> In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth and who now must face his inevitable decline.<\/p>\n

FALLING MAN<\/a>. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $26.)<\/span> Through the story of a lawyer and his estranged wife, DeLillo resurrects the world as it was on 9\/11, in all its mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion.<\/p>\n

FELLOW TRAVELERS<\/a>. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $25.)<\/span> In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era.<\/p>\n

A FREE LIFE.<\/span> By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $26.)<\/span> The Chinese-born author spins a tale of bravery and nobility in an American system built on risk and mutual exploitation. (Review will be available Friday evening, Nov. 23.)<\/p>\n

THE GATHERING<\/a>. By Anne Enright. (Black Cat\/Grove\/Atlantic, paper, $14.)<\/span> An Irishwoman searches for clues to what set her brother on the path to suicide.<\/p>\n

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS<\/a>. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine\/Scholastic, $34.99.)<\/span> Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.<\/p>\n

HOUSE LIGHTS<\/a>. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Norton, $24.95.)<\/span> The heroine of Cohen’s third novel abandons her tarnished parents for the seductions of her grand-mother’s life in theater.<\/p>\n

HOUSE OF MEETINGS<\/a>. By Martin Amis. (Knopf, $23.)<\/span> A Russian World War II veteran posthumously acquaints his stepdaughter with his grim past of rape and violence.<\/p>\n

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN<\/a>. By Hisham Matar. (Dial, $22.)<\/span> The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society.<\/p>\n

THE INDIAN CLERK<\/a>. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.)<\/span> Leavitt explores the intricate relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.<\/p>\n

KNOTS<\/a>. By Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $25.95.)<\/span> After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord.<\/p>\n

LATER, AT THE BAR: A Novel in Stories<\/a>. By Rebecca Barry. (Simon & Schuster, $22.)<\/span> The small-town regulars at Lucy’s Tavern carry their loneliness in “rough and beautiful” ways.<\/p>\n

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME<\/a>. By Vendela Veda. (Ecco\/HarperCollins, $23.95.)<\/span> A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.<\/p>\n

LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories<\/a>. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.)<\/span> Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.<\/p>\n

MAN GONE DOWN<\/a>. By Michael Thomas. (Black Cat\/Grove\/Atlantic, paper, $14.)<\/span> This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.<\/p>\n

MATRIMONY<\/a>. By Joshua Henkin. (Pantheon, $23.95.)<\/span> Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality.<\/p>\n

THE MAYTREES<\/a>. By Annie Dillard. (HarperCollins, $24.95.)<\/span> A married couple find their way back to each other under unusual circumstances.<\/p>\n

THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES<\/a>. By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $25.)<\/span> A Jewish family is caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”<\/p>\n

MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories<\/a>. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.)<\/span> In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.<\/p>\n

NEXT LIFE<\/a>. By Rae Armantrout. (Wesleyan University, $22.95.)<\/span> Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of mind that contests all assumptions.<\/p>\n

ON CHESIL BEACH<\/a>. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese\/Doubleday, $22.)<\/span> Consisting largely of a single sex scene played out on a couple’s wedding night, this seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.<\/p>\n

OUT STEALING HORSES<\/a>. By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press, $22.)<\/span> In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.<\/p>\n

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST<\/a>. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.)<\/span> Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9\/11.<\/p>\n

REMAINDER<\/a>. By Tom McCarthy. (Vintage, paper, $13.95.)<\/span> In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence.<\/p>\n

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES<\/a>. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)<\/span> A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.<\/p>\n

SELECTED POEMS<\/a>. By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)<\/span> The Nobel Prize winner Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia, is a long-serving poet of exile, caught between two races and two worlds.<\/p>\n

THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ<\/a>. By Dalia Sofer. (Ecco\/HarperCollins, $24.95.)<\/span> In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.<\/p>\n

SHORTCOMINGS<\/a>. By Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.)<\/span> The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority.<\/p>\n

SUNSTROKE: And Other Stories<\/a>. By Tessa Hadley. (Picador, paper, $13.)<\/span> These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.<\/p>\n

THEN WE CAME TO THE END<\/a>. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $23.99.)<\/span> Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.<\/p>\n

THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories<\/a>. By Jean Thompson. (Simon & Schuster, paper, $13.)<\/span> The women here are smart and strong but drawn to losers.<\/p>\n

TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005<\/a>. By Robert Hass. (Ecco\/Harper-Collins, $22.95.)<\/span> What Hass, a former poet laureate, has lost in Californian ease he has gained in stern self-restraint.<\/p>\n

TREE OF SMOKE<\/a>. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.)<\/span> The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

TWENTY GRAND: And Other Tales of Love and Money<\/a>. By Rebecca Curtis. (Harper Perennial, paper, $13.95.)<\/span> In this debut collection, a crisp, blunt tone propels stories both surreal and realistic.<\/p>\n

VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories.<\/a> By Lydia Davis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.)<\/span> Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.<\/p>\n

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories<\/a>. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.95.)<\/span> This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.<\/p>\n

WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel<\/a>. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $26.)<\/span> The horrors, injustices and follies in this novel are based on the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.<\/p>\n

WINTERTON BLUE<\/a>. By Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.)<\/span> An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.<\/p>\n

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION<\/a>. By Michael Chabon. (HarperCollins, $26.95.)<\/span> Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska.<\/p>\n

\nNonfiction<\/span><\/p>\n

AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal<\/a>. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.95.)<\/span> The exploits of Eddie Chapman, a British criminal who became a double agent in World War II.<\/p>\n

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life<\/a>. By Hugh Brogan. (Yale University, $35.)<\/span> Brogan’s combative biography takes issue with Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy.<\/p>\n

ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker<\/a>. By Stacy A. Cordery. (Viking, $32.95.)<\/span> A biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s shrewd, tart-tongued older daughter.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic<\/a>. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.95.)<\/span> This history explores an underappreciated point: that this country was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.<\/p>\n

THE ARGUMENT: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics<\/a>. By Matt Bai. (Penguin Press, $25.95.)<\/span> An exhaustive account of the Democrats’ transformative efforts, by a political reporter for The New York Times Magazine.<\/p>\n

ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.<\/span> By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $28.95.)<\/span> This artful history focuses on the events leading up to the pivotal 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev. (Review will be available Friday evening, Nov. 23.)<\/p>\n

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed the Bishop?<\/a> By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $25.)<\/span> The novelist returns to Guatemala, a major inspiration for his fiction, to try to solve the real-life killing of a Roman Catholic bishop.<\/p>\n

BROTHER, I’M DYING<\/a>. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.)<\/span> Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.<\/p>\n

CIRCLING MY MOTHER<\/a>. By Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.)<\/span> Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio.<\/p>\n

CLEOPATRA’S NOSE: 39 Varieties of Desire<\/a>. By Judith Thurman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.)<\/span> These surgically analytic essays of cultural criticism showcase themes of loss, hunger and motherhood.<\/p>\n

CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts<\/a>. By Clive James. (Norton, $35.)<\/span> Essays on 20th-century luminaries by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.<\/p>\n

THE DAY OF BATTLE: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy<\/a>. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $35.)<\/span> A celebration of the American experience in these campaigns.<\/p>\n

THE DIANA CHRONICLES<\/a>. By Tina Brown. (Doubleday, $27.50.)<\/span> The former New Yorker editor details the sordid domestic drama that pitted the Princess of Wales against Britain’s royal family.<\/p>\n

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War<\/a>. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $27.95.)<\/span> Robb presents France as a group of diverse regions, each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.<\/p>\n

DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff<\/a>. By Rosemary Mahoney. (Little, Brown, $23.99.)<\/span> Mahoney juxtaposes her solo rowing journey with encounters with the Egyptians she met.<\/p>\n

DRIVEN OUT: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans<\/a>. By Jean Pfaelzer. (Random House, $27.95.)<\/span> How the Chinese were brutalized and demonized in the 19th-century American West — and how they fought back.<\/p>\n

DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism<\/a>. By John Updike. (Knopf, $40.)<\/span> Updike’s first nonfiction collection in eight years displays breathtaking scope as well as the author’s seeming inability to write badly.<\/p>\n

EASTER EVERYWHERE: A Memoir<\/a>. By Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.)<\/span> A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.<\/p>\n

EDITH WHARTON<\/a>. By Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.)<\/span> This meticulous biography shows Wharton’s significance as a designer, decorator, gardener and traveler, as well as a writer.<\/p>\n

THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam<\/a>. By Tom Bissell. (Pantheon, $25.)<\/span> Bissell mixes rigorous narrative accounts of the war and emotionally powerful scenes of the distress it brought his own family.<\/p>\n

THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER<\/a>. By Patricia Hampl. (Harcourt, $24.)<\/span> In her fifth and most powerful memoir, Hampl looks hard at her relationship to her Midwestern roots as her mother lies dying in the hospital.<\/p>\n

FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A Memoir<\/a>. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.)<\/span> With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.<\/p>\n

GOMORRAH: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System.<\/span> By Roberto Saviano. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)<\/span> This powerful work of reportage started a national conversation in Italy when it was published there last year. (Review will be available Friday evening, Nov. 23.)<\/p>\n

THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty<\/a>. By Wilfrid Sheed. (Random House, $29.95.)<\/span> A rich homage to Gershwin, Berlin and other masters of the swinging jazz song.<\/p>\n

HOW DOCTORS THINK.<\/a> By Jerome Groopman. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.)<\/span> Groopman takes a tough-minded look at the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and at the profound problems facing modern medicine.<\/p>\n

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now<\/a>. By James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.)<\/span> In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.<\/p>\n

HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ<\/a>. By Pierre Bayard.Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. (Bloomsbury, $19.95.)<\/span> A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.<\/p>\n

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone<\/a>. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $25.95.)<\/span> The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.<\/p>\n

THE INVISIBLE CURE: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS<\/a>. By Helen Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)<\/span> Rigorous reporting unearths new findings among the old issues.<\/p>\n

LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA<\/a>. By Tim Weiner. (Doubleday, $27.95.)<\/span> A comprehensive chronicle of the American intelligence agency, from the days of the Iron Curtain to Iraq, by a reporter for The New York Times.<\/p>\n

LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl<\/a>. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $30.)<\/span> How Hitler’s favorite director made “Triumph of the Will” and convinced posterity that she didn’t know what the Nazis were up to.<\/p>\n

LEONARD WOOLF: A Biography<\/a>. By Victoria Glendinning. (Free Press, $30.)<\/span> Glendinning shows Virginia Woolf’s accomplished husband as passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.<\/p>\n

A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932<\/a>. By John Richardson. (Knopf, $40.)<\/span> The third, penultimate installment in Richardson’s biography spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso’s life and in European history.<\/p>\n

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression<\/a>. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam, $22.)<\/span> Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.<\/p>\n

LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier<\/a>. By Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton\/-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.)<\/span> A former child warrior gives literary voice to the violence and killings he both witnessed and perpetrated during the Sierra Leone civil war.<\/p>\n

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court<\/a>. By Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $27.95.)<\/span> An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.<\/p>\n

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History<\/a>. By Linda Colley. (Pantheon, $27.50.)<\/span> Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.<\/p>\n

PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece<\/a>. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.)<\/span> A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.<\/p>\n

RALPH ELLISON: A Biography<\/a>. By Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $35.)<\/span> Ellison was seemingly cursed by his failure to follow up “Invisible Man.”<\/p>\n

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century<\/a>. By Alex Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)<\/span> In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.<\/p>\n

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography<\/a>. By David Michaelis. (Harper\/ Harper-Collins, $34.95.)<\/span> Actual “Peanuts” cartoons movingly illustrate this portrait of the strip’s creator, presented here as a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.<\/p>\n

SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter<\/a>. By Phoebe Damrosch. (Morrow, $24.95.)<\/span> A memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.<\/p>\n

SOLDIER’S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point.<\/a> By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.)<\/span> A civilian teacher at the Military Academy offers a significant perspective on a crucial social and political force: honor.<\/p>\n

STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer<\/a>. By Tim Jeal. (Yale University, $38.)<\/span> Of the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Jeal’s, which profits from his access to an immense new trove of material, is the most complete and readable.<\/p>\n

THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West<\/a>. By Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.)<\/span> With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.<\/p>\n

THOMAS HARDY<\/a>. By Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $35.)<\/span> Tomalin presents Hardy as a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology.<\/p>\n

TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton<\/a>. By Sara Wheeler. (Random House, $27.95.)<\/span> The story of the man immortalized in “Out of Africa.”<\/p>\n

TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice<\/a>. By Janet Malcolm. (Yale University, $25.)<\/span> Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas.<\/p>\n

THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia.<\/span> By Orlando Figes. (Metropolitan, $35.)<\/span> An extraordinary look at the gulag’s impact on desperate individuals and families struggling to survive. (Review will be available Friday evening, Nov. 23.)<\/p>\n

THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945<\/a>. By Saul Friedländer. (HarperCollins, $39.95.)<\/span> Individual testimony and broader events are skillfully interwoven.<\/p>\n

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From the New York Times: Fiction & Poetry THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}