10 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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Big lives cast long shadows on this week’s list of recommended books. In “Famous Father Girl,” Leonard Bernstein’s elder daughter, Jamie, describes what it was like having the renowned conductor/composer for a dad. “Empress” explains how Nur Jahan came to amass power and influence in a patriarchal dynasty that ruled much of what is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. And Claire Tomalin, whose acclaimed biographies have told the stories of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and other literary giants, gets around to sharing her own accomplished and incident-filled life in a new memoir. It’s not all biography this week: Other subjects include evolution, financial crises and satires of millennial culture.

John WilliamsDaily Books Editor and Staff Writer

A LIFE OF MY OWN, by Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $27.) Claire Tomalin, the esteemed biographer of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, among others, tells her own story in this memoir. In addition to her professional life, Tomalin recounts the often challenging moments in her personal life — “one shock after another,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “There is genuine appeal in watching this indomitable woman continue to chase the next draft of herself. After a while, the pages turn themselves. Tomalin has a biographer’s gift for carefully husbanding her resources, of consistently playing out just enough string. When she needs to, she pulls that string tight.”

THE TANGLED TREE: A Radical New History of Life, by David Quammen. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) In his latest book, David Quammen — our critic Parul Sehgal calls him “our greatest living chronicler of the natural world” — surveys the field of molecular phylogenetics, plunging into how various findings have upended our conception of stately Darwinian inheritance, represented in the notion of the tree of life — of species branching out, evolving separately from each other. “There are few writers so firmly on the side of the reader,” Sehgal writes, “who so solicitously request your patience and delightedly hack away at jargon. He keeps the chapters short, the sentences spring-loaded. There are vivacious descriptions on almost every page.”

CRASHED: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze. (Viking, $35.) The crash of 2008, Tooze argues, was caused in both Europe and America, and its impact, he says, has been more political than economic, leading to a continuing wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism throughout most of the West. “Brexit, Trump, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and China’s ever-escalating role in the financial system: Tooze covers them all and much more, in a volume that’s as lively as it is long — which is to say very, on both counts,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes, calling “Crashed” a “bravura work of economic history.”

HITS AND MISSES: Stories, by Simon Rich. (Little, Brown, $25.) This collection of 18 satirical stories — by an author who makes the difficult look so easy you could think of him as the Serena Williams of humor writing — pokes fun at the foibles of millennial culture. Rich is at the height of his craft when his work “treats the absurd completely seriously as it darts seamlessly between humor and gravity,” Nate Dern says in his review. “Rich has sharpened his satire over the years, and he now wields it with skill — but he does not cut a wide swath. His tool is a scalpel, not a broadsword.”

THE MIDDLEMAN, by Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $27.99.) In this fast-moving thriller from the creator of “Berlin Station,” a revolutionary anticapitalist movement seeks to unite the disaffected of America’s red and blue states. Scott Turow, our reviewer, says that “The Middleman” is “smart and entertaining and consistently intriguing, clipping along in brief chapters, somewhat reminiscent of the novels of James Patterson, and often animated by lovely, spare descriptive writing.”

FIGHT NO MORE, by Lydia Millet. (Norton, $24.95.) In this shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection — united by a recurring character, a jaded young California real estate agent — Millet explores the complicated definition of home, a place which represents solace and love for some but sorrow and pain for others. “Millet’s boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy,” Marisa Silver writes in her review, “along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns.”

FAMOUS FATHER GIRL: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, by Jamie Bernstein. (HarperCollins, $28.99.) What was it really like having the charismatic, larger-than-life conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein as a father? It wasn’t easy, as this memoir from his elder daughter reveals; Bernstein could be remote or uncomfortably close, with no boundaries. “Jamie is in print a warm but unsparing eyewitness,” according to Alexandra Jacobs’s review: “peeking poignantly from the wings as her progenitor glories, sifting through the jumbo pillbox when he starts to fall apart.”

EMPRESS: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, by Ruby Lal. (Norton, $27.95.) The daughter of Persian immigrants, Nur Jahan became the favorite wife and co-ruler of Jahangir, lord of the Mughal Empire, a patriarchy that dominated much of what is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. “Despite the spare record she has to work with, Lal paints richly detailed scenes from Nur’s life,” Vikas Bajaj writes in his review. “She has helped shine a little light on an enigmatic character many think they know but few actually understand.”

NO ASHES IN THE FIRE: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, by Darnell L. Moore. (Nation Books, $26.) This searing memoir, by the son of teenage parents in Camden, N.J., tells the story of a childhood in the cross hairs of racism and homophobia. “Despite the shocking cruelty depicted in this book, Moore also infuses the pages with great humanity — humanity capable of great horror and even greater beauty,” our reviewer, Ijeoma Oluo, writes. “The reader will arrive at the end of this book with a respect for Moore and the many levels of self-realization he has reached, excited to see his already admirable career as a writer, advocate and activist continue to grow.”

THE REMOVES, by Tatjana Soli. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A historical novel that intertwines the story of George Armstrong Custer with those of his wife, Libbie, and Anne Cummins, a teenage settler captured by the Cheyenne. Jean Zimmerman, who includes the book in her shortlist of recent historical fiction, says that “Soli plumbs the contradictions of a man who could massacre Native Americans while conducting an affair with an Indian woman,” and describes Cummins’s experiences “with grit and grace.”