Posts
 |
| Follow on Twitter as @GregoryCowles |
What is going on in America? Some
mornings you look at the news and immediately have to look away again,
as if current events were the sun, so incendiary they could melt your
eyeballs. A friend at work jokes that we on the Books desk have two
basic coping strategies: (1) Things are terrible. Read all about it! (2)
Things are terrible. Escape!
This
week our recommended titles draw from both playbooks, along with a sense
of historical perspective. On the “read all about it” side, there’s Tim
Alberta’s “American Carnage,” an eyes-wide-open analysis of right-wing
populism and its tactics, and Michael Bennet’s “The Land of Flickering
Lights,” a campaign manifesto by the Colorado senator and Democratic
presidential candidate. On the escape side, there’s the biography of an
elite running coach (written by The Times’s Matthew Futterman) and the
graphic novel “Clyde Fans,” Seth’s multigenerational epic about a family
of Toronto salespeople. For history, there’s a family memoir of the Red
scare; a study of Turkey’s attacks on its Christian populations; and an
autobiography by the former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens,
who died this week
at the age of 99. Those books join fiction and poetry from Jennifer
Weiner, Nicole Dennis-Benn and Ilya Kaminsky, along with Colson
Whitehead’s much-anticipated new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” about a
brutal reform school based on a true-life institution. Is that escapism?
History? Cold, hard reality? It’s complicated — which is to say, it’s
literature — and it’s well worth your time.
