Recent reads, some briefly reviewed. (I published reviews with The AP, my former employer, until it discontinued them in 2025. The Washington Post later nuked its cherished book section. Who needs book reviewers when we have AI? ;-).
August 2026
LA FIESTA DEL CHIVO, by Mario Vargas Llosa
July 2026
RECOVERY FROM SCHIZOPHRENIA: EVIDENCE, HISTORY AND HOPE, by Courtenay M. Harding.
June 2026
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY, By Stefan Zweig.
May 2026
THE GREATER JOURNEY, By David McCullough
THE MESSAGE, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
April 2026
THE WHITE ALBUM, by Joan Didion
LE DEDICO MI SILENCIO, by Mario Vargas Llosa
SOTERIA: THROUGH MADNESS TO DELIVERANCE, by Loren. R. Mosher and Voyce Hendrix.
THE ZYPREXA PAPERS, by Jim Gottstein
March 2026
THE DIRECTOR, by Daniel Kehlmann
SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM, by Joan Didion
February 2026
DESERT SOLITAIRE, by Edward Abbey
THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL, By Seth Harp
CARELESS PEOPLE, by Sarah Wynn-Williams
January 2026
38 LONDRES STREET, by Philippe Sands
EMPIRE OF AI, by Karen Hao
INHERENT VICE, by Thomas Pynchon
December 2025
THE MISSION: THE CIA IN THE 21st CENTURY, by Tim Weiner
If you work for the CIA right now it’s a good bet you are being ordered to undermine U.S. national security. Do you quit? Feed us all to the wolves? Or stick around and try to limit the damage? If we survive Trump’s rapacious betrayal of our allies and the rule of law, we can only hope Tim Weiner is around to tally the damage to America’s intelligence services. I don’t believe any journalist is better sourced there. For proof, read: “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century.” Published in July, it picks up from Weiner’s seminal history of the agency’s first five decades, “Legacy of Ashes,” and is chocked with previously unreported material.
“The Mission” begins with the CIA in post-Cold War disarray, on its heels when al-Qaida attacks. Weiner, drawing from extensive on-the-record interviews with key players, leaves no doubt: 1) The George W. Bush administration’s principals idiotically ignored CIA warnings that a 9/11 was imminent and 2) Bush and Dick Cheney were hell-bent on invading Iraq using 9/11 as a pretext, ignoring CIA findings that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction programs. The duo tasked the CIA with disgraceful chores that diminished U.S. global standing: the extraordinary rendition of al-Qaida suspects to third-country black sites, torture passed off as “enhanced interrogation,” complicity in lies ginned up to justify a reckless failure — Iraq regime change. The details on White House-approved torture are revolting.
Barack Obama ends that, but the wanton drone strikes he green-lighted that killed hundreds of noncombatants, mostly in Afghanistan, are unjustifiable. Weiner doesn’t object to bold CIA direct action when warranted. His account of the op that defeated the Taliban post-9/11 and helped propel Hamid Karzai to power commends the ingenuity and bravery of the CIA team that led it. He also spares no opprobrium for dangerous rogues and for bumblers. Gen. Tommy Franks gets his due for ignoring CIA intel and letting Osama bin Laden slip away from Tora Bora.
The CIA redeems itself considerably once Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are out of the picture. It rebuilds its Russia House under John Brennan, who also oversaw the agency’s biggest reorganization since its creation, including a digital overhaul. His boss Obama fails, though, to act more decisively against Putin for the 2016 election interference to favor Donald J. Trump. “Obama agonized about whether to accuse the Russians. How was he to tell the American people that the CIA had concluded that Putin was trying to elect Trump? He didn’t find the will to do it. He was afraid of seeming to put his thumb on the scales of the election, though the Kremlin was putting its boot on it.” Obama’s reluctance was, in part, out of fear of a cyberwar with Russia. It had, after all, nearly thwarted Ukraine’s 2014 presidential elections with the pre-vote wiping of election servers. It had digital footholds in critical U.S. infrastructure.
Cyberconflict had come into its own, and Weiner doesn’t overlook how digital subterfuge and the surveillance state transformed intelligence work. China’s digital theft of the dossiers of 22 million federal employees in the Office of Personnel Management hack effectively neutered CIA’s ability to spy on China, especially when considered in tandem with the fallout from the shoddy web-based covert comms network its IT folks set up for foreign agents. China learned about it from the Iranians. Their cover blown, at least a dozen agents were reported killed.
Weiner leaves little doubt that without the CIA’s decade-long assistance to Ukraine in overhauling and buttressing its security apparatus, Russian troops likely would have rolled victorious into Kyiv in 2022. (Soviet-era relics loyal to Moscow had, for starters, to be purged). Of course, lesser-known U.S. intel agencies including the NSA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency also played vital roles. The so-called signals intelligence, or SIGINT, those agencies do is essential. But CIA proved in the Ukraine effort that nothing beats well-placed HUMINT, human agents. CIA recruiting inside the Kremlin gave Biden a stellar intel – the ability to inform western European allies three months earlier that Putin would mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. William Burns, the messenger, had been CIA director for less than a year when he delivered the news. As ambassador to Moscow from 2005-2008, Burns came to understand Putin well.
Weiner is good on the ascension of women to key roles in the CIA and U.S. intelligence. Avril Haines, as agency deputy director, helps to persuade Obama to dispense with the reckless drone strikes. Biden likes her enough to name her DNI. There isn’t much sheen to Gina Haspel, Trump’s CIA director in his first term. It was Haspel, after all, who oversaw the torture of al-Qaida figures then ordered a subordinate to destroy the audio and video evidence.
Weiner ends the book in anger. Signing off in March as it goes to press, he declares the decade-old debate on whether Donald Trump has been Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiot” now settled. Trump has proven himself not so much an agent as an ally of Vlad, he writes. “The President of the United States had gone over to the other side.”
REWIRING DEMOCRACY: HOW AI WILL TRANSFORM OUR GOVERNMENT, POLITICS AND DEMOCRACY, By Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders
LIBRA, by Don DeLillo
November 2025
SPIDERWEB, by Joseph Roth
JOB, by Joseph Roth
A TALE OF TWO CITIES. By Charles Dickens.
October 2025
KEROUAC. By Ann Charters
TYPHOON. By Joseph Conrad
WHAT WE CAN KNOW. By Ian McEwen
September 2025
EL PEZ EN EL AGUA. Por Mario Vargas Llosa
WHEN WE SOLD GOD’S EYE: DIAMONDS, MURDER AND A CLASH OF WORLDS IN THE AMAZON. By Alex Cuadros
A little over a decade ago more than 100 members of an Amazon tribe living in voluntary isolation suddenly appeared on a riverbank in the Peruvian Amazon. The Maschco-Piro asked for bananas, rope and machetes from the local Yine people — but were dissuaded from crossing the Las Piedras river by indigenous rangers. Yine community members feared for their lives. I was transfixated watching video of the encounter shared with me by FENAMAD, the regional indigenous authority. What happens when such a tribe makes first contact? In Brazil’s Amazon, this has been happening for decades. Ranchers, loggers and prospectors’ encroachment has taken its toll. Inevitably, what first happens is widespread death by plague; the natives have no natural defenses.
Now imagine a deep vein of diamonds is found in the protected homeland of a newly contacted tribe. As prospectors invade — most completely ignorant of the natives’ way of life — tribal leaders are determined to understand why these shiny little rocks are so coveted and then to share in their harvest, without sacrificing either sovereignty or dignity. This is the true saga masterfully told by the American journalist Alex Cuadros in “When We Sold God’s Eye,” of this culture clash. The tribe, the Cinta Larga, had tried the better part of two decades with little success to manage outsider contact. The saga’s violent denuouement isn’t inevitable. Multiple institutions with peace-enforcing powers might have but failed to prevent it.
Cuadros’ second book — his first was “Brazillionaires” (2016) — is a great achievement, exquisite in detail and often mesmerizing. Joe Kane’s “Savages” came to mind reading it but Cuadros feels better anchored. He unsentimentally sketches acts of nobility and of infamy. Cinta Larga anthropology, history and religion grace the tale, including some saucy creation myths. You don’t get this depth without earning trust. Cuadros did, learning a fair bit of the native vocabulary.
It all takes place on and near what was known as the River of Doubt when Teddy Roosevelt surveyed it in 1913-14 with Candido Rondon, the founder of Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency. That treachorous expedition nearly cost the former U.S. president his life (It’s now the Roosevelt River). At the book’s heart is how Rondon’s agents have fared in incorporating Brazil’s natives into a rapscallion society without damning them spiritually or materially. Is the mission quixotic? Like neighboring tribes, the Cinta Larga is no noble savage stereotype. It’s got its heroes and scoundrels and lots in between. Cuadros mostly lets the reader pass judgment, but does display a fondness for Pio, the Cinta Larga leader whose honesty gets invites legal complications but whose devotion to tribal welfare is refreshing.
August 2025
UNSHRUNK: A STORY OF PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT RESISTANCE by Laura Delano
AHORA Y EN LA HORA por Héctor Abad Faciolince.
Héctor Abad is the author of modern Colombia’s most heartrending memoir, “El Olvido Que Seremos.” He was raised in Medellin surrounded by women and a most remarkable father, a public health expert and human rights activist gunned down in 1987 by right-wing paramilitaries. It’s an iconic book, and Abad has long been one of his country’s most respected public intellectuals, his weekly newspaper columns prized for their perception, acuity and humanity.
In June 2023, Abad traveled to Kyiv for a book fair. His memoir, adapted for the screen as “Memories of My Father” two years earlier, had been translated into Ukrainian. He was a guest of honor. There is a certain kinship between citizens of countries ravaged by conflict, linguistics and geography notwithstanding. Abad’s wife, back in Colombia, had had some trepidation about this journey. He had just recovered from open-heart surgery, but assured her he’d be far from the front. Abad’s traveling companion, former Colombian Peace Commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, came to have other ideas. He persuaded Abad to travel east to Donetsk with him, a Colombian war reporter and a 37-year-old Ukrainian writer, Viktoria Amelina.
Jaramillo felt it important to stand in solidarity against Putin’s merciless land-grabbing war of conquest and its heavy toll on civilians. Amelina, taking a break from writing to investigate war crimes, took the Colombians to where a celebrated Ukrainian writer was cut down by Russian bullets in the invasion’s early days.
The four – Catalina Gomez is the war correspondent – then went to dinner that summer evening at a popular, packed pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, 24 kilometers from the front line. His hearing poor in one ear, Abad asked Amelina to switch seats so he could be nearer Jaramillo. Minutes later, as they joked about the local wartime ban on alcohol and Jaramillo poured whisky under the table, a Russian Iskander missile slammed into the bustling eatery. Abad recalled a lightning-bolt flash. A shard of aluminum sliced into Amelina’s upper back. She did not survive.
Of the three Colombians, only Jaramillo suffered physical injuries; they were not serious. But, oh, the trauma. Abad took it hard. He’d barely met Amelina. Their discussions had for him been awkward. He felt the need to make amends, read her work, learn her life.
Abad also began second-guessing his judgment, questioning his weakness for letting Jaramillo persuade him, against better judgment, to journey toward danger. How selfish and foolish to risk robbing his wife, son and daughter – and future twin grandchildren, his first – of his company.
The book Abad wrote about the life-altering Ukraine incident is a rumination on mortality, on our deteriorating bodies (I’m a year older so I can relate), on our slowly vanishing powers of recollection; Abad is forever taking notes to fight off memory loss. Because he is so honest the reader can’t help but feel compassion, kinship and his depth of hurt. The Spanish writer Edu Galán, interviewing Abad after “Ahora y en la Hora” – which is not yet available in English – was published, asked if writing the book was therapy.
“The opposite,” the author said. “That’s why my wife said that the trip to Ukraine had screwed up our lives forever. During the year and a half I spent writing this book, I was involved in something horrible, something hellish. I didn’t want to be there, having to relive and write that. I had to take antidepressants, I had to go to the psychiatrist, I was down, I complained to friends, I became a person who thought only of death.”
When Abad delivered the book and it was being readied for publication – not as polished as he’d have liked, the work he turned in reflected his distress – Abad got a life-transforming gift, a “half-happy ending.”
His first grandchildren, the twins, were born.
Abad knew the thought mad, but it was for him as if the 14-year-old twin sisters among the 13 people killed in the Kramatorsk missile strike had, somehow, been reincarnated.
July 2025
BEST MINDS: HOW ALLEN GINSBERG MADE POETRY FROM MADNESS. By Stevan Weine
BLEAK HOUSE. By Charles Dickens
If you consider human society mostly a disappointment rigged to favor an upperclass laden with scoundrels, Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” will resonante for you. But don’t think this Victorian-era masterpiece lacks redemption. Dickens does morality tales. Not didactic, but lived in. I picked up “Bleak House” precisely as these times call for ethical clarity. Stephen Fry mentioned the novel in a recent NYT by-the-book interview. I recommend listening to Fry discuss it in this BBC interview.
Dickens doesn’t disappoint in his chiseling down to size the good, bad and ridiculous. He’s wicked funny. The novel might be considered a bit long-winded for today’s tastes (My audiobook was 39 hours). But it never flags. It’s laced with intrigue and secrets revealed, a detective story at its core. The rich assortment of characters is deftly choreographed by Dickens. Recall that he wrote this as a serial.
“Bleak House” if you’re unfamiliar, is a satire/indictment of the legal vultures at London’s Chancery court who feast on the carrion of unsettled wills. The stew of subthreads is rich and tasty. There are conniving n’er-do-wells, hapless well-intentioned, slithering souls and upstanding, generous folk. Characters like Jo, the homeless street-sweeping orphan, are unforgettable and iconic in their way. If anyone can take credit for encouraging the modern welfare state into being, it’s Dickens.
I inherited a wonderfully illustrated mid-20th century edition of the novel but didn’t dare open it so I could imagine Dickens’ cast of characters as drawn by the voice of Miriam Margolyes. Never have I heard a voice actor so skillfully bring a book to life. Every single voice transmuted by Margolyes into the very persona the author intended.
June 2025
THE CONTRARIAN. By Max Chafkin.
THE SECRET PILGRIM. By John Le Carré.
May 2025
THE FATE OF THE DAY. By Rick Atkinson.
DSM III: THE BOOK OF WOE. By Gary Greenberg.
April 2025
OFFSHORE. By Brooke Harrington
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE. By Bessel van der Kolk
SMILEY’S PEOPLE. By John Le Carré.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY. By John Le Carré.
March 2025
THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. By John Le Carré.
THE HONORABLY SCHOOLBOY. By John Le Carré.
CAPITAL WITHOUT BORDERS. By Brooke Harrington.
February 2025
SOLDIERS AND KINGS: SURVIVAL AND HOPE IN THE WORLD OF HUMAN SMUGGLING. By Jason De Leon.
Jason de Leon, a tattooed UCLA anthropologist, immersed himself into the subculture of low-level smugglers who help migrants get through Mexico to the United States. He worked on this book for seven years and it shows. It is a remarkable study of the precarious lives of people who fall into the occupation mostly because life offers so few choices.It won the 2024 National Book Award for nonfiction. De Leon’s focus is on Hondurans because gang violence is so terrifyingly overwhelming — and inescapable — on the streets of San Pedro de Sula and others cities. For its young men, risking one’s neck in human smuggling has become a viable survival strategy.Many would like nothing more than honest work in the U.S., but have burned bridges. They world easily turns deadly. The perils are plentiful — corrupt, violent Mexican law enforcement and migration officials; criminal gangs that “tax” smugglers. That violent extortion increasingly smothered the low-level smugglers. Life is cheap, drug use rampant (cocaine, canabis and alcohol). The author latches on to a few of the more successful and colorful smugglers, mostly based in Chiapas (Palenque and Pakal Na’) and including some Garifuna (Blacks) whose subculture fascinates. He wins their trust, agonizes with them, hands them cash to get them out of trouble. His generosity sometimes backfires, though. Bad things happen in the book to people whom the reader feels they’ve been intimate thanks to De Leon’s immersion. In its way, De Leon’s immersion can be favorably compared to what Katherine Boo did in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” her National Book Award winner from 2014 about slum life in Mumbai, India. Indelible portraits of the people in the lowest strata of global society — the slum-dwellers, the migrants, people forcibly displaced by violence and war. These are the people so easily overlooked — and trampled —- by the cruel, callous and corrupt who buy up political elites.
ODESSA: GENIUS AND DEATH IN A CITY OF DREAMS. By Charles King
What kind of city is Odessa? It’s not really Russian, yet even when it began to identify itself as Ukrainian most inhabitants’ preferred language was Russian. That’s still an issue today. Greeks, Italians, Brits, even Americans (John Paul Jones, the U.S. Revolutionary War hero) Spaniards and Frenchmen all figure in its evolution. And indeed, Russia’s Catherine the Great thrust it to importance with a flurry of public works. But they marked the end of the Black Sea trading hub’s Golden Age.
Odessa became one-third Jewish, until the Nazis’ Romanian allies and WWII occupiers drove them off, machine-gunning and hanging them from posts. For years, the city’s Jews suffered the indignity of being limited in guild membership. Only a token population remains. Odessa became a thriving port due to the granary upstream. Its fortunes soared and ebbed with geopolitical alliance-shifting and wars. When naval blockades choked it off, Odessans suffered. In peacetime, Odessa burst with commerce, culture — complemented by bevies of whores, cheats and thieves. Famous native sons included Leon Trotsky, the writer Isaac Babel and Vladimir Jabotinsky, a father of Zionism. Russia’s beloved poet Alexander Pushkin won fame in Odessa but was forced to abandon the city after an affair with the governor’s wife. King, a Georgetown University professor, packs in meaty anecdotes from original research. The book was published in 2011. Three years later, Putin’s “little green men” would seize Sevastopol and the rest of Crimea as well as parts of eastern Ukraine. King struggles in the last chapter to sum up Odessa’s character. It can’t stake a claim to being among the world’s greatest cites. But its cosmopolitan legacy, terrible travails and colorful denizens fascinate. My wife and I have been wanting to visit for years but that’s on ice. Her paternal grandfather, a Polish aristocrat named Ryszard Jaxa Malachowski, b. 1887, was raised in nearby in Prochowo. The region was scarred in 1905-6 by pogroms and worker revolts, with czarist Russia collapsing. Malachowski soon left, studied in Paris, and made his name as an architect in Peru. There was no returning. The Bolsheviks had seized the family estate.
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS. By Sasha Viertel
January 2025
QUESTION 7. By Richard Flanagan
PLAYGROUND. By Richard Powers
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. By John Le Carré
December 2024
GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR. By Paul Theroux.
A 2006 sequel published a little more than three decades later to the “Great Railway Bazaar,” which made Theroux famous. Theroux retraces the journey with a few detours (Iran won’t give him a visa and Afghanistan is, like Iraq, at war). I never read the first book. I decided on the sequel because Theroux was my age, 66, when he embarked on this journey. He traverses Europe and Asia by rail and is marvelous company. He’s not a sightseer. He’s a traveler. Theroux’s journeys are about knowing a place through its people. A devoted reader, as anyone who dare label themself a writer must be, he’s able to unroll a steady diet of insights and ruminate on lived lessons. He meets the most interesting people in purely serendipitous encounters. A 50-year-old Korean Buddhist monk, encountered in Burma on a train to Mandalay, has been on the road for 29 years and carries his world in a small bag. A Cambodian hotel desk clerk explains the Khmer Rouge’s brutality in terms that make Pol Pot seem a lot less important historically than the aggrieved peasants who kill for him. There are visits to Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka, Haruki Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan. Theroux made me want to jump aboard and cross forbidding borders with him. The book is 495 pages and I didn’t want it to end, Theroux is such fine company.
November 2024
THE FRACTURE ZONE. By Simon Winchester.
CREATION LAKE. By Rachel Kushner.
MY PARENTS: AN INTRODUCTION. By Aleksander Hemon.
THE SERBS. By Tim Judah.
October 2024
A FEZ OF THE HEART. By Jeremy Seal.
JOURNEY TO POLAND AND YUGOSLAVIA. By John Kenneth Galbraith
September 2024
NAPLES ’44. By Norman Lewis.
August 2024
SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE. By Clarie Keegan
TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE. By Jan Morris.
July 2024
DAYBREAK. By Matt Gallagher
Matt Gallagher’s “Youngblood” was one of the finest novels to emerge from the forever wars that indelibly stained the U.S. military at the turn of the 21st century. It’s great because Gallagher is interested, like fellow combat veteran and author Elliot Ackerman, in not just the U.S. soldiers but also the locals forever altered by those confusing wars. A forever-wars veteran haunted by an error made in the heat of combat a decade earlier volunteers to fight for Ukraine. How much of his motivation derives from a hope to reconnect with a former lover he can’t get out of his mind. Maybe Luke Paxton is trying to prove something to himself. Maybe he’s trying to prove himself to the woman, Svitlana. Gallagher personally spent time in Ukraine training civilians to defend themselves. That familiarity helps make this terrific short novel jarringly authentic. A troubled young man, who happens to be a crack mechanic, makes some sense out of a splintered life and, perhaps, attains some hoped-for redemption.
BEWILDERMENT. By Richard Powers
June 2024
THE COMING WAVE. By Mustafa Suleyman
May 2024
HEART OF A DOG. By Mikhail Bulgakov.
A great, short comic novel that the master of Soviet satire completed in 1925, and rejected for publication. The plot; A bourgeois doctor fed up Bolshevism and its crass leveling of society to imbecility and proletariat-fawning vulgarity implants human organs in a stray dog and creates an uncouth monster: A man with a dog’s intelligence who is the ultimate collectivist lout. The book wasn’t officially published until 1987, having circulated years in samizdat. After initial censoring, Bulgakov tried to get the story produced as a play in 1926 at the Moscow Art Theater. But the secret police confiscated the manuscript. The depiction of the vindictive “proletarian vanguard” is merciless.
April 2024
MASTER AND MARGARITA, By Mikhail Bulgakov (Michail Karpelson translation)
Satan lives! I wish I’d read the novel sooner. Although written between 1928 and 1940, it didn’t get published until Stalin’s corpse was worm-eaten (1967). To read it is to understand why. It is one of the great satires of totalitarian cultural vapidity, as unflattering a portrait of bumbling Soviet literary establishment stiff shirts (and their ilk everywhere they exist) as you’ll find. I didn’t immediately warm to the fallen archangel’s henchmen, particularly the talking cat, but was soon enough entranced. The Faustian parable of Margarita’s fall from grace — and lustful absorption in Luciferian debauchery — was a bit overdone. But there genius at work on multiple levels here. Bulgakov’s overwrought literary sensibility is out of fashion today. But it couldn’t have been more appropriate when he penned M&M. Life under Stalinism will do that. The Pontius Pilate story weaved into this otherwise phantasmagorical romp stands alone as a masterwork. My late father, a Yale Drama School grad, was so taken with Bulgakov that he translated a Polish stage adaptation and invited the Polish theater director, Maciej Englert, to help him stage it in the U.S. in the early 1990s. (Englert was the longtime director of Warsaw’s Teatr Wspolczesny, which means “contemporary.”) I’d cut my teeth in journalism a decade earlier in Poland during Solidarity’s mostly peaceful revolution.
HOW TO LIVE: OR A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS AT AN ANSWER, By Sarah Bakewell
Steven Soderbergh raved about this biography of the 16th-century Frenchman universally heralded as the first true modern essayist and philosopher of, well, how to live. I was less impressed. The book is neither a replacement nor even a great synthesis of what Montaigne actually wrote in his “Essays” though it a rich enough portrait of a rather brutish time and place in history marked by a succession of rather ridiculous religious wars. Montaigne was fortunate and clever enough to avoid getting embroiled into those cruel, petty conflicts, fortunate to be born into wealth and able to resign public office in Bordeaux at an early age and devote himself chiefly to reading and reflection. He didn’t seem to care much for most people. And I’m not sure his observations — at least as conveyed in this volume — offer us any great insight about how to live today and how we should be obliged to loved ones, society or posterity, for that matter.
March 2024:
FROM SCARSDALE, By Dan O’Brien
“Why does everything you write have to be depressing?” O’Brien’s mother asks as he proves very good at writing growing up in Scarsdale. It’s O’Brien’s way of clawing out of the wreckage of his family life. O’Brien is an accomplished playwright now. This memoir is bracketed around an older brother’s odd attempt at suicide by upper-story window plunge. It’s a tale of gross parental inadequacy. Cheever also plied these suburbs. So did I. I grew up on the same street, just up the hill, a bit over a decade earlier. Childhoods like O’Brien’s can be cancer-inducing, it seems. And O’Brien writes piercingly about that trauma, too. He writes with such unforgiving honesty it’s no wonder his parents don’t talk to him anymore.
IN WARTIME, STORIES FROM UKRAINE, By Tim Judah
A lot of this was published in the The New York Review of Books and its blog, the NYR Daily, in 2013 and 2014 after the ouster of Kremlin lackey Viktor Yanukovych for scuttling Ukrainians’ bid to join the EU. Judah has a knack for finding precisely the right people to tell the story of this very complicated, troubled piece of Europe that’s been a hornet’s nest of competing political and ethnic loyalties for generations. The war has mostly drowned out discussion of Ukraine’s recent past, making this book especially valuable. The chapter “Lemberg to Lviv” should be required reading for anyone who desires a quick toe dip into Ukraine’s past in order to better understand its present.
MEANS OF CONTROL, By Byron Tau
The author, while a Wall Street Journal reporter in Washington, D.C., had a bunch of important scoops while endeavoring to trace and expose the lucrative, privacy-stealing marriage of surveillance capitalism and military and intelligence agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden’s been at this for years and has had great synergy with Tau and other reporters. Wyden’s tech advisor, Chris Soghoian, helped me years ago when I was researching Colombia-related privacy abuses involving U.S. supplied equipment. He was at the ACLU at the time. My review of the Tau book for the AP.
February 2024:
ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY, By Orhan Pamuk
This Nobel Literature Prize laureate takes a lot of heat for his constant references to his city’s melancholy, or “hüzün” in Turkish, in this meandering memoir published in 2006. But melancholy isn’t gloomy for Pamuk. I wouldn’t recommend this book as either a history or contemporary portrait of this remarkable maritime intersection of East and West. It does give one a remarkable feel, though, for a world gone by and packs in some terrific texture on the artists and writers who nourished the author as a young man. If you’re a Pamuk fan — I’ve only read “Snow” of his novels — you’ll likely love it. I found it atmospheric and endearing even if it is a rather Pamuk family-centric bildungsroman at essence.
THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE, By James McBride
Chona Ludlow, the compassionate heart of this novel, is partly fashioned after the author’s maternal grandmother, a Polish Jew whose joyless marriage to an imperious, money-grubbing failed rabbi left McBride’s mother, Ruth, emotionally scarred. They ran a grocery in rural Virginia. In this rollicking tale of race relations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 30s, McBride gets to rewrite history a bit. Chona’s marriage is good. What’s more, the community’s Jews and the Blacks, sharing outcast status, come to get along thanks in large part to her. She runs the grocery story — at a big-hearted loss. McBride imagines unforgettable characters, pickles the novel with sly humor and delivers poetic justice.
January 2024:
THE COLOR OF WATER, By James McBride
My second McBride read after THE GOOD LORD BIRD. A love letter to the writer’s remarkable mother — a Polish-born Jew who fell in love with a Black man (a preacher) in Harlem, lost him early to cancer (after James was conceived but before he was born) then remarried only to become twice a widower. The testament to Ruth McBride Jordan’s character, fearlessness and fortitude are her 12 children. All are immensely accomplished. I love how James coaxed Ruth’s life story out of her. It took more than a decade. Also incredible: James’ description of food’s nonexistent shelf life in the McBride-Jordan home.
NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY, AN AMERICAN ABROAD IN A POST-AMERICAN WORLD
By Suzy Hansen
I discovered Hansen after reading her New York Review meditation on American imperial adventure in the age of outsourced war the new U.S. Spartan class shoulders — ostensibly a review of Phil Klay’s “Uncommon Ground” but like all the best writing in this genre much deeper. She finds the superpower of her youth drained of purpose, kicking off hatred-inducing sparks like a flywheel. I missed the book when it was published in 2017 probably because I, too, had just returned to the homeland after years abroad. Hansen’s soul-wrenching, bitter Obama-era awakening — from apostle of American exceptionalism raised in white privilege New Jersey to world-weary foreign correspondent — seems a cliche. But Hansen’s telling is electric and honest. She also made me want to visit Istanbul. Which I will (it was the first stop on a six-week journey that Ceci and I took in Sept-Oct 2026). Hansen is a perceptive journalist, making this so much more than a story cultural awakening. There’s a great James Baldwin component.