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9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Every week, editors at the Book Review pick our favorites of the books reviewed in the previous issue and call them “Editors’ Choice.” It’s our chance to heap extra praise on books that got stellar reviews and to give books that didn’t get a great review an endorsement of our own. One book that famously got a negative review — “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr — went on to be an Editors’ Choice, a massive best seller (125 weeks on the hardcover fiction list and counting) and one of our 10 Best Books of 2014.
This week, the two books I’m especially interested in are “Avid Reader,” by the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, subject of a recent profile in The Times, and “The Face of Britain,” the new book by Simon Schama, produced in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery of London. Schama’s latest is a delightful object, beautifully produced — a bit heavy, I have to admit — but one of those books you just want to have around to flip through, even if it takes a while to get from cover to cover.
Pamela Paul
Editor of The New York Times Book Review
BORN TO RUN, by Bruce Springsteen. (Simon & Schuster, $32.50.) Bruce Springsteen wrote a memoir — and he really wrote it, and wrote it well. Here, in the Boss’s own words, is how he rose from Freehold, N.J., his “crap heap of a hometown,” to international fame. Springsteen’s autobiography is both plain-spoken and eloquent.
HIS FINAL BATTLE: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, by Joseph Lelyveld. (Knopf, $30.) There are many excellent books on F.D.R., but Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The Times, makes the interesting choice in this one to concentrate on his last 16 months in office, when the president fought to create lasting global peace — despite having received a diagnosis of acute congestive heart failure. A gripping, deeply human account of an endlessly fascinating leader.
RAZOR GIRL, by Carl Hiaasen. (Knopf, $27.95.) There have been a number of “weird Florida” books out this year, but Carl Hiaasen is probably the master of the form. This entertaining farce, packed with comic characters, displays his usual darkly funny style and appreciation for Florida’s endless idiosyncrasies.
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. (New Press, $27.95.) Arlie Russell Hochschild specializes in books that explain the way we live now. (Think “The Second Shift,” “The Time Bind,” “The Outsourced Self.”) In this new book, the Berkeley sociologist takes a generous but disconcerting look at Tea Party backers in Louisiana to explain the way many people in this country live now, often to the astonishment of everyone else.
AVID READER: A Life, by Robert Gottlieb. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) The editor (Knopf, The New Yorker) and writer Robert Gottlieb has worked with everyone from John le Carré to Robert Caro to Joseph Heller to Toni Morrison. And many, many others. In this thoroughly enjoyable and exuberant memoir, he offers publishing history and high-level gossip about all of them, and more.
THE FACE OF BRITAIN: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits, by Simon Schama. (Oxford University, $39.95.) This splendid book is the print companion to a BBC series hosted by the eminently readable historian and art critic. Even if you miss the TV show, you’ll enjoy having this handsome treasure of a book around.
SLEEPING ON JUPITER, by Anuradha Roy. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) This book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year, and is finally out in the States now. Anuradha Roy’s compulsively readable novel presents interlocking stories that reveal an India characterized by both oppression and beauty.
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, by Amor Towles. (Viking, $27.) This is the second novel from Amor Towles, investment banker turned novelist. In this sly story, an aristocrat spends 30 years under house arrest in a Moscow hotel while the Soviet empire rises around him.
WE EAT OUR OWN, by Kea Wilson. (Scribner, $26.) An Italian exploitation film from 1980, called “Cannibal Holocaust” no less, is the template for Kea Wilson’s funny, canny first novel. The action takes place in the jungles of South America, where very real late-20th-century horrors lurk.
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