The Best Reviewed Books of the Week
1. Munich by Robert Harris
(5 Rave, 3 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Defying hindsight, Harris generates a galloping sense of excitement and doom as the betrayal of the Czechs — their delegates forbidden even to witness their nation’s dismemberment — emerges as the price tag for Europe’s stay of execution … With moral subtlety as well as storytelling skill, Harris makes us regret the better past that never happened — while mournfully accepting the bitter one that did.”
–Boyd Tonkin (The Financial Times)
*
2. Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
(4 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“What follows, in this assured and hallucinatory story, is funny and horrifying in a near-perfect admixture … Saadawi blends the unearthly, the horrific and the mundane to terrific effect … You get the sense, throughout Frankenstein in Baghdad, that Saadawi’s creature, alive with malevolent intelligence, is feeding off its own destructive energy. The reader feeds off it as well. What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
Read an excerpt from Frankenstein in Baghdad here
*
3. Woman at 1,000 Degrees by Hallgrimur Helgason, Trans by Brian Fitzgibbon
(5 Rave)
“She is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, but her perspective might be just what we need in these uncertain times: She survives and shares her story on her terms. And what a story it is, one worth reading to further understand the complexity of World War II — and to enjoy the quick wit of a woman you won’t forget.”
–Bethanne Patrick (The Washington Post)
Read an excerpt from Woman at 1,000 Degrees here
*
3. The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
(5 Rave)
“The story of the three widows and their children, who lead such an isolated existence in a bungalow on Malabar Hill Road, is parcelled out in tandem with Perveen’s own story about a disastrous past she very nearly did not escape. Her tale is one that is just as absorbing as the murder mystery and has a quiet power all its own. Each thread is carefully paced; Massey clearly knows just what she’s doing, which is giving readers both a captivating whodunit and a lasting base for more books featuring this same cast of characters.”
–Marissa Stapley (The Toronto Globe and Mail)
*
5. This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff
(3 Rave, 3 Positive)
“There’s an air of The Office TV show in its darkly comic tone, but it delves more deeply and seriously into the dynamics of a workplace … Medoff mines the phenomenon of the ‘office wife,’ generational values, gender politics, racial nervousness, networking and more, all set against the irrevocable reality of meeting the bottom line … The narrative cracks along, without an indulgent passage in the book. The characters change in credible ways, and Medoff has us, at various times, both rooting for them and wanting to dump coffee over their heads.”
–Kim Ode (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Read an essay by Jillian Medoff here
**
1. The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
(4 Rave, 5 Positive, 4 Mixed)
“Readers will never take coffee for granted or overlook the struggles of Yemen after ingesting Egger’s phenomenally well-written, juggernaut of a tale of an intrepid and irresistible entrepreneur on a complex and meaningful mission. This highly caffeinated adventure story is ready-made for the big screen.”
–Donna Seaman (Booklist)
*
2. Trumpocracy by David Frum
(5 Rave, 2 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“…a persuasive and detailed account of how Trump is undermining American institutions, including the presidency itself … a must-read for Americans who are in denial about the threat to democracy posed by a president absorbed in narcissism and recklessly indifferent to the institutions and norms of ethics and propriety that have sustained the great American experiment for 2½ centuries.”
–John Diaz (The San Francisco Chronicle)
*
3. The Rub of Time by Martin Amis
(1 Rave, 5 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid. You can sit and be like Martin Amis all day, wondering how he could be so right about the Republican party in 2011, so prescient about Trump as early as May 2016. The hierarchy thing, that need to revere older writers, may be a little bit male for some, but male is the way that Amis rolls, which makes him one of the best people on the planet to write about the porn industry … this collection is full of treasures. And, if you want a good scrap, if you want to feel like Martin Amis while fighting with Martin Amis (which is possibly how he also spends his day), a couple of these pieces will keep you going for a long time.”
–Anne Enright (The Guardian)
*
4. Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard
(2 Rave, 2 Positive, 3 Mixed)
“Yet even in the small space of these works, Knausgaard is able to ask intelligent ‘naive’ questions in the midst of discoveries, observations, and contemplations. It’s not agreeing or disagreeing with his opinions or being intimately connected to his experiences that is so gripping; it’s the seemingly endless stirring of his thoughts about the wide world out there that helps to stir ours.”
–Bob Blaisdell (The Christian Science Monitor)
Watch Karl Over Knausgaard’s lecture ‘Why I Write’ here
*
5. The Last Man Who Knew Everything by David H. Schwartz
(4 Rave, 1 Positive, 1 Pan)
“Fortunately, Schwartz doesn’t hang his estimation of Fermi on any such kind of exoneration. Rather, he gives readers a rounded picture of the man. Fermi comes across in these pages as a mercurial figure, toweringly brilliant in his field and often curiously magnetic with friends and colleagues … The Last Man Who Knew Everything manages the neat double trick of making both Fermi and his abstruse work accessible to readers living in the world he did so much to create, for good and ill.”
–Steve Donoghue (The Christian Science Monitor)
***
