10 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

Version 0 of 1.

There are a few days left to celebrate National Poetry Month (of course it’s worth celebrating verse year-round), and our recommendations this week start with books by two of America’s leading young poets: Kevin Young and Tracy K. Smith. A slightly older poet (and playwright), William Shakespeare, has his “Macbeth” updated by the Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbo. Also this week, Lawrence Wright takes us on a tour of his complicated home state, Texas; David Reich takes us on a tour of the even more complicated science of population genetics; Aliette de Bodard reimagines Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in a science-fiction universe; and much more.

John WilliamsDaily Books Editor and Staff Writer

BROWN: Poems, by Kevin Young. Photographs by Melanie Dunea. (Knopf, $27.) “Brown” is the latest book by the prolific Kevin Young, who in addition to his steady output as an author is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Young is a maximalist, a putter-inner, an evoker of roiling appetites,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “As a poet of music and food, his only rival is Charles Simic. His love poems are beautiful and sexy and ecstatic. He mostly wears his politics lightly but regularly sinks hooks into you that cannot easily be removed.”

WADE IN THE WATER: Poems, by Tracy K. Smith. (Graywolf, $24.) Tracy K. Smith, America’s poet laureate, returns with her first collection since “Life on Mars” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The book includes a suite of found poems that employ, nearly verbatim, the letters and statements of African-American Civil War veterans and their families. Our critic Dwight Garner writes: “Smith’s new book is scorching in both its steady cognizance of America’s original racial sins — open wounds that have had insectlike eggs repeatedly laid in them — and apprehension about history’s direction.”

GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) Lawrence Wright, whose books include investigations of Scientology (“Going Clear”) and Al Qaeda (the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Looming Tower”), turns his attention to the state he has long called home. “God Save Texas” “is both an apologia and an indictment: an illuminating primer for outsiders who may not live there but have a surfeit of opinions about those who do,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “The book rambles far and wide, and it’s a testament to Wright’s formidable storytelling skills that a reader will encounter plenty of information without ever feeling lost.”

MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth, $27.) Jo Nesbo, the celebrated Norwegian writer of thrillers, is the latest contributor to Hogarth Shakespeare, a series in which best-selling novelists turn Shakespeare’s works into contemporary fiction. Nesbo sets his “Macbeth” in the early 1970s, in an unnamed city that strongly resembles Glasgow. “By making addiction so central to his plot,” our reviewer, James Shapiro, writes, “Nesbo also makes Macbeth’s paranoia and hallucinatory visions, so crucial to Shakespeare’s play, not just believable but meaningful in a contemporary way.”

WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, by David Reich. (Pantheon, $28.95.) David Reich has pioneered new methods for revealing the DNA of ancient remains and using these clues to tell us new and shocking things about the migration of our ancestors — from how Europe was populated to what happened to the Neanderthals. Our reviewer, Jared Diamond, writes: “Population genetics is a complicated, fast-moving field with many uncertainties of interpretation. To tell that story to the broad public, and not just to scientists reading specialty journals, is a big challenge. Reich explains these complications as well as any geneticist could; others rarely even try.”

ON GRAND STRATEGY, by John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin, $26.) Ten lively essays by a pre-eminent historian warn that the neglect of strategic thinking has often led to disaster, and he urges leaders to understand the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of civilization. In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.

HAPPINESS, by Aminatta Forna. (Atlantic Monthly, $26.) On London’s Waterloo Bridge, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of “post-traumatic stress disorder in noncombatant populations” collides with an American wildlife biologist studying the city’s foxes. These central characters in “Happiness” have come to middle age — and London — as worldly, self-sufficient individuals, albeit grieving private losses. Our reviewer, Melanie Finn, says that this finely structured novel powerfully succeeds on an intimate scale as its humane characters try to navigate everyday cruelties.

PARIS METRO, by Wendell Steavenson. (Norton, $25.95.) Wendell Steavenson is a respected American journalist; here, in her first novel, she writes about Kit, a war correspondent who returns from the Middle East to Europe with a child in tow, only to discover that violence has followed her. Steavenson is “excellent on a war reporter’s difficulty with confronting her own vulnerability, her loss of perspective,” our reviewer, Louise Doughty, writes. “Kit’s listing of the horrors around her can occasionally make her sound callous, but the cynicism induced by repeated exposure to danger is entirely convincing.”

THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE, by Aliette de Bodard. (Subterranean, signed limited edition, $40.) A delicate, gender-bent recasting of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson set in the far future of the author’s Xuya universe. Unlike much space opera, this story centers on Chinese and Vietnamese customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it.

ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE: The True Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace, by Jonathan Miles. (Hogarth, $27.) A tagline on the cover allows that this funny, bighearted book is indeed a novel, but everything that follows is designed to mimic a work of New Journalism reportage. The miracle occurs in the book’s opening pages, when an Army veteran paralyzed from the waist down suddenly walks again. Is he healed, or is it a hoax? “Because the genre that Miles is aping applies fiction’s methods to real-life stories, ‘Anatomy of a Miracle’ offers the Victor-Victoria frisson of watching a novel impersonate a work of journalism impersonating a novel,” our reviewer, Christopher Beha, writes. “It’s a difficult balancing act that Miles for the most part pulls off, and his book is best appreciated as a highly entertaining literary performance.”