The Best Reviewed Books of the Month

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age, Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Téa Obreht’s Sunrise, and Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian all feature among August’s best reviewed books.

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Fiction

1. A Tender Age by Chang Rae-Lee
(Riverhead)

11 Rave • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“Luminous … In his masterful almost-ending, Lee shrouds what exactly happened on that life-altering precipice, brilliantly inviting room for interrogation and interpretation.”

–Terry Hong (Shelf Awareness)

2. Sunrise by Téa Obreht
(Random House)

10 Rave • 1 Pan
Read an interview with Téa Obreht here

“Obreht is riveting in each time frame as she exults in emulating and subverting tales of the Old West while exposing the poisonous complexities of gender, taboo love, myth, history, and our desecration of the wild in a breathtaking, shocking, and reverberating survival story.”

–Donna Seaman (Booklist)

3. Etna by Paul Yoon
(Scribner)

8 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Etna here

“For all its compactness, Etna has the shape of an epic … Stands out among Yoon’s work … This is, at times, a wrenching novel, strewn with broken bodies, but its atrocities never overwhelm its faith in creaturely communion, and in grief and longing that clarify, rather than obscure, one’s desires and selfhood.”

–Rachel Vorona Cote (The Atlantic)

4. Triage by Claudia Rankine
(Graywolf)

4 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Colorfully, referentially, and intellectually dynamic … A glossy-paged, art exhibition catalog-worthy book … Though the narrative’s ending verges on negative abstraction, Rankine clearly demands that we confront our failure to prioritize Gazans and reckon the massive resultant losses, personal, ethical, and human alike.”

–Walton Muyumba (The Boston Globe)

5. The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
(Doubleday)

7 Rave
Read an essay by Chris Bohjalian here

“Bohjalian’s wonderful book is a morality tale, a snapshot of a strange, careless time in a particular slice of America, a psychological exploration of guilt and its repercussions, a portrait of a girl going off the rails—and then, because of an exciting plot twist, a courtroom drama.”

–Sarah Lyall (The New York Times Book Review)

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Nonfiction

1. Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech by Claire Stapleton
(William Morrow and Company)

4 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A blunt account of one woman’s transformation from eager-to-please corporate striver to clear-eyed activist. It well earns its place alongside other recent accounts of the misdeeds of Big Tech like Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley … Books like Stapleton’s will at least arm people determined to reform them with information they’ll need to make that effort.”

–Harvey Freedenberg (BookPage)

2. The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence by Kimon de Greef
(Doubleday)

4 Rave • 1 Positive

“A marvelous trip, exploring centuries of the Seris’ tribulations, the growth of commercial toad milking in a region dominated by narco gangsters, quarrels among rival gurus and competition between the sons of an English countess and a German baroness to develop 5-MeO-DMT into a pharmaceutical.”

–Annie Bartlett (BookPage)

3. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore
(Liveright)

3 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Staggering, sobering, yet essential reading for all who want to understand the arc of this increasingly digital, online, corporate, and out-of-control world.”

–Carol Haggas (Booklist)

4. Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland by Ahley Kahn
(Atria)

4 Rave • 1 Mixed

“What a welcome surprise … Has only made me appreciate the album’s intricacies and paradoxes all the more … Kahn lets his historical actors speak for themselves as often as possible, collecting a remarkably wide array of voices for so short a book.”

–Mark Braude (The New York Times Book Review)

5. The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn by Dave Zirin
(Dutton)

2 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Rousing … It’s a wonderful portrait of a historian who reshaped America’s understanding of its potential for change.”

–Publishers Weekly