1. Hunger by Roxane Gay
(13 Rave, 10 Positive, 5 Mixed)
“…a bracingly vivid account of how intellect, emotion and physicality speak to each other and work in tireless tandem to not just survive unspeakable hurt, but to create a life worth living and celebrating. The critical beauty of Hunger is that Gay is so much smarter than everyone who has judged her based on her appearance, which she manages to convey without airs or ever actually stating this as fact. Her candor and self-awareness are necessary and reliable guides for the poignantly afflicted journey … Undestroyed, unruly, unfettered, Ms. Gay, live your life. We are all better for having you do so in the same ferociously honest fashion that you have written this book.”
–Rebecca Carroll (The Los Angeles Times)
*
2. An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
(13 Rave, 7 Positive)
“On one level, An Odyssey elegantly retells the story of that course, complete with all the gags, competition, and good cheer of an intragenerational bromance … Chapter by chapter, An Odyssey dives deeper and excavates a complex and moving portrait of Mendelsohn’s special student. Drawing on the concepts within Homer’s book, from the proem — the short prelude, or synopsis, to the poem — to the many-layered meaning of some translations, Mendelsohn uses Homer’s guidance for how to tell Jay’s story … a remarkable feat of narration that such a forbiddingly erudite writer can show us how necessary this education is, how provisional, how frightening, how comforting.”
–John Freeman (The Boston Globe)
*
3. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
(12 Rave, 7 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Priestdaddy is about what life is like for any pastor’s kid, but this one has a genuine gift for words … there is a jellyfish quality to Lockwood’s narration. It is easy to be distracted and delighted by her strange, phosphorescent prose, but the wisp of an idea brushes against you, and before you know it, there’s a welt … She looks back with longing at the faith she left as soon as she could, and the family she never will, telling the kind of stories that humiliate and humanize both. Priestdaddy proves over and over that Christianity isn’t as dull as you’ve been led to believe, and that religion isn’t our age’s only absurdity.”
–Casey N. Cep (The New Republic)
*
4. Afterglow (a dog memoir) by Eileen Myles
(11 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Afterglow is a wry, gorgeous, psychedelic effort to plumb the subject of dog-human partnership —which, in its generic form, is the subject of many cheesy movies and bumper stickers (‘Who Rescued Who?’) but which, with Myles and Rosie, appears as an exceptional power struggle, a thought experiment about the limits of consciousness, creativity, and love … There is a destabilizing, unrelenting directness in Myles’s writing, and Afterglow is like the Just Kids of dog books: a punk devotional, shot through with a sort of divine attention to material reality and a poet’s associative leaps.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
*
5. Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke
(9 Rave, 7 Positive, 1 Pan)
“…one of the most haunting graphic memoirs I’ve ever read … [Radtke] has forsaken and been forsaken, she is audacious and vulnerable, she takes risks and she is wounded by what the world is and how it bends back upon itself. As we turn the pages on her journey, we are ravaged and ravished … With time and its doings as her subject, rot and decay, she does not adhere to strict chronology. She renders mold and splotch and broken things as both terrifying and lovely … her work is as wonderful and heartbreaking the second time through. I’m still scooped out, but I’m still deeply grateful for the towering power of Radtke’s vision.”
–Beth Kephart (The Chicago Tribune)
*
1. Grant by Ron Chernow
(13 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Chernow rewards the reader with considerable life-and-times background, clear-eyed perspective, sympathy that stops short of sycophancy, and gritty and intimate details … Along with industrialization, continental expansion, and the rise of mass consumerism, the principal theme in this biography, as in the years of Grant’s life, is the role of the African-American in our history, culture, and economy. Here Chernow is unambiguous. Grant, who married into a slaveholding family and owned a slave for a time, regarded slavery as an irredeemable evil … All of this has fresh relevancy for our time. In this era, when the meaning, impact, and statues of the Civil War-era are undergoing fresh evaluation, Grant very likely will emerge unscathed. The Chernow biography assures his place in the American pantheon for decades to come.”
–David M. Shribman (The Boston Globe)
*
2. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
(10 Rave, 5 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“He comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography … Isaacson’s approach, true to his background, is fundamentally journalistic. No intellectual peacocking for him, and though his writing is certainly graceful, it is never needlessly ornate. But make no mistake: He knows his stuff, crowdsourcing, with extreme diligence, an array of art, historical, medical and other experts to arrive at a vigorous, insightful portrait of the world’s most famous portraitist. Da Vinci groupies won’t find startling revelations here. Isaacson’s purpose is a thorough synthesis, which he achieves with flair.”
–Alexander C. Kafka (The Washington Post)
*
3. Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
(10 Rave, 3 Positive)
“…this superb new book could not have come at a better time … Laura Dassow Walls’s exuberant biography leaves the reader in no doubt how Thoreau might react to the current administration in Washington, filled as it is with people who deny the established physical science of global warming … One of the many pleasures of Walls’s book is how it transports us back to America in the first half of the 19th century.”
–Fen Montaigne (The New York Times Book Review)
*
4. Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
(9 Rave, 4 Positive)
“There’s a lot to navigate, and Farrell does so with ease. Without dipping into melodrama or hyperbole, he lays out Nixon’s rise from a lower-middle-class kid in Yorba Linda named after King Richard the Lionheart to his swiftly acquired identity of ‘a man of destiny’ … With a mix of morbid fascination and deep empathy, Farrell humanizes Nixon, but he doesn’t let him off the hook … That dichotomy between brooding schemer and extroverted leader has long defined the Nixon dynamic. But with The Life, Farrell has etched those history-shaking contradictions into the most vivid — and the most startling — relief to date.”
–Jason Heller (NPR)
*
5. The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon
(8 Rave, 3 Positive)
“Edmund Gordon has written a terrific book — judicious, warm, confident and casually witty. The ratio of insight to literary-world gossip, of white swan to black swan, is as well calibrated as one of Sara Mearns’s impossible balletic leaps … This bio unfolds a bit like one of the fairy tales Carter shook to release its meaning. The pages turn themselves …After her death, Rushdie wrote that ‘English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch.’ This biography is witchy, in the best sense, as well.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
