All articles tagged with #book review
Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, 'Partita,' explores the tension between rural conservatism and urban idealism through a pianist’s past. Critics are divided: some praise its emotional depth, while others criticize its lack of political nuance.
Michael Lewis’s new book, 'Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State,' chronicles the destruction of the U.S. civil service by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The book profiles six federal employees who resisted Musk’s cuts, highlighting the contrast between competent public servants and inexperienced DOGE operatives. It reveals how figures like Francis Collins and IRS officials were forced out or coerced, arguing that this purge will harm the government for decades.
Robert Kolker’s new book, 'The Vanishing Family,' chronicles a Pittsburgh family’s struggle with early-onset frontotemporal dementia (FTD) caused by a specific genetic mutation. The narrative highlights how rare, hereditary forms of dementia can drive broader scientific breakthroughs, including tau-targeting drugs and gene therapies, while illustrating the profound personal toll on carriers who face a 50% risk of inheriting the condition.
Emily St. John Mandel's Exit Party imagines a post-coup United States where states secede and civil conflict looms, juxtaposing two possible futures—one of civil war, the other of creeping authoritarianism—in a near-future Los Angeles; the review calls the novel ambitious, captivating, and a sharp meditation on national fracture.
Ariel Lawhon’s The Pirate Queen resurrects Grace O'Malley, a 16th‑century Irish pirate queen, offering a richly researched, adventurous novel that shines a light on a woman long pushed to history's margins.
An exclusive Jerusalem Post review of In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis reveals how senior leaders—Netanyahu, Gallant, and Gantz—grappled with timing and strategy days after Oct. 7, including a proposed strike on Hezbollah and a high-stakes beeper/pager campaign. Based on two years of interviews and access to top officials, the book provides an insider’s look at the war room’s debates, hostage dynamics, and the push to deter Iran's axis, though it is written from an Israeli perspective and carries a Zionist framing.
Marlon James’s 600-page The Disappearers is his most personal, unflinching novel yet, confronting horrific violence, queer trauma, and desire. He says the work is personal and not safe, insisting he writes to titillate, frighten, educate, and confront a story he once felt he could not live.
Vulture’s Emma Alpern argues Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is largely plotless and overlithe in its sheen, centering on a Natalie Portman–like celebrity whose fame distorts reality. The narration alternates between M’s inner drift and a vaguely ‘we’ observer, producing a tone that’s entertainingly acerbic but ultimately tedious, with occasional flashes of the sharpness that distinguished Cusk’s Outline trilogy. The piece notes that the most compelling moment comes when the author finally confronts the actress in a tense late scene, briefly injecting heat and suggesting what makes Cusk’s work provocative even as the novel otherwise lingers in abstraction.
Wesley Liu reviews the rediscovered memoir Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir, which shifts the focus from the bombing itself to Hiroshima’s weeks and months of rebuilding and the broader work of memory that followed, offering a nuanced view of postwar Japan beyond simple surrender narratives.
Vulture critic Niela Orr argues that Colson Whitehead keeps subverting expectations by retooling noir, horror, and adventure tropes to spotlight Black experiences, shifting from playful humor to sincere tenderness and using familiar forms to reveal emotional resonance—from The Intuitionist (1999) to his later work—showing there are no hard rules to storytelling, only fearless reinvention.
Nature’s summer book round-up gathers ten contributors’ obsessions, pairing science, ecology, and cultural history across a diverse slate of titles—from Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and Jessica Riskin’s Living Medicine to Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water and Simon Marginson’s Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval—with brisk, personal reflections that explore rivers’ aliveness, conservation ethics, medical science, AI, education, and the human stories that thread through them.
Geoffrey Cain’s Steve Jobs in Exile offers a detailed, textured profile of Jobs’ years at NeXT, showing how NeXTSTEP and related innovations seeded today’s macOS and iOS—and highlighting moments like NeXT hiring Adamation, the first web server on a NeXT machine, and a pivotal voicemail that brought Jobs back to Apple.
Vulture’s Emma Alpern reviews Ann Patchett’s Whistler, praising its warmth and compassionate look at a fractured family as a beloved stepfather re-enters a middle-aged woman’s life; a tense reunion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art triggers memories of a 1972 car crash that ended a marriage, and while Patchett’s maudlin tendencies can feel indulgent, the review argues she handles that tenderness with humane grace.
A Bulwark review of Isabel Vincent's RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise argues Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a uniquely self-centered figure, tracing his path from prankish youth and drug use to a lifelong quest for a distinct identity, then detailing his pivot to anti-vaccine activism and controversial leadership at HHS under Trump. Vincent leverages Kennedy’s diaries (1999–2001) to show a man hungry for more and prone to dishonesty, whose public-health stances have contributed to the measles resurgence and faced pushback from scientists and courts; the piece closes pessimistic that his fortunes will rebound, even as he launches a podcast to push greater transparency in government.
The Irish Times profile argues Tana French’s Cal Hooper mysteries, including The Keeper (the third in the series), use an American retiree-detective in rural Ireland to critique Irish society from an outsider’s perspective, emphasizing how Ireland’s coded culture shapes place and crime.