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From Sarajevo to New York to Damascus to
San Francisco, cities are prominent among this week’s recommended
titles: their architecture, their landmarks, their roiling energy and
occasional descents into chaos or lawlessness. The real estate
journalist Julie Satow delivers a portrait of New York’s iconic Plaza
Hotel, once owned by Donald Trump and forever ruled by the fictional
Eloise. In twin memoirs, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon (now a Chicagoan)
looks back on his childhood in 1970s Sarajevo, before that city was
irrevocably altered by war. In “The White Devil’s Daughters,” Julia
Flynn Siler offers a history of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the heroic
struggle to banish sexual slavery there. And in “Assad or We Burn the
Country,” the foreign correspondent Sam Dagher writes about his time in
Damascus and the damage the Assad regime has unleashed on Syria.
We
also suggest a couple of newly translated novels by the Italian writer
Natalia Ginzburg, along with a surreal story collection by Karen Russell
and comic novels by Leah Hager Cohen (about a wedding in upstate New
York) and Randy Boyagoda (about a college professor turned suicide
bomber). Fans of Kate Atkinson’s crime novels probably know that she has
a new Jackson Brodie mystery out, but the rest of you should check it
out too. Finally, Nigel Hamilton completes his trilogy of biographies
about Franklin Roosevelt as a wartime president, and Douglas Brinkley
retraces the path to Apollo 11 just in time for the 50th anniversary of
the moon landing.
Source: New York Times
