Hisham Matar’s My Friends, Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires, and Rachel Slade’s Making it in America all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. My Friends by Hisham Matar
(Random House)
10 Rave
“Amid this refined climate of melancholy acceptance arrives the unexpected revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, whose tensions and excitements My Friends captures as well as any novel I have read … Matar weighs these complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and My Friends is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
2. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
(Riverhead)
7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from You Dreamed of Empires here
“Enrigue presents us with two societies that feel far removed from our modern sensibilities, one of which—the Aztec empire—has often been shoddily reproduced, its complexity buffed away … The intricacy of this series of events might have daunted many writers; it’s difficult enough just to portray it accurately and make it comprehensible. Even when someone has done their research—and Enrigue has done it admirably well—the story could easily become ponderous and overblown, a mothballed costume drama. Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor.”
–Silvia Morena-Garcia (The Los Angeles Times)
3. The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell
(W. W. Norton & Company)
5 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Waters here
“Sounds grim, but there’s an indomitable spirit pushing back against despair in Campbell’s work … A light touch of fantasy runs through this story … She immediately peoples her pages with a large cast of eccentric characters and a thick backstory so casually laced with shocking violence that it’s tempting to think you must have misheard. But don’t be quick to drive by Whiteheart. You must succumb to the pace of The Waters… It subtracts nothing from Campbell’s originality to suggest that she’s taken up the mantle of John Irving … Astonishing.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
**
1. Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins by William Viney
(Princeton University Press)
3 Rave • 2 Positive
“Viney captures the full range of nontwin response, among much else … Viney acknowledges the dangers of reading too much into twinhood … Perhaps our fascination with twins is the result of that enduring, mysterious fact: As singletons, we can never really understand what it means to be multiple.”
–Christine Rosen (The Wall Street Journal)
2. Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way) by Rachel Slade
(Pantheon)
1 Rave • 4 Positive
“Her book benefits from extraordinary access, providing an up-close look at the challenges of manufacturing … Slade’s key insight, and possibly the strongest argument for reviving domestic manufacturing, is that it is how we innovate.”
–Jenna Sauers (The New York Times Book Review)
3. Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov
(Penguin Press)
2 Rave • 2 Positive
“The author does an excellent job placing the unprovoked attack within the historical context of Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Russia’s equal insistence on dominating Ukraine. Trofimov also demonstrates the power of words in war as he examines the slogans, memes, and speeches that Ukrainians rally behind, contrasted with the empty and often ridiculous Russian propaganda used to justify and rationalize Putin’s invasion. This tour de force covers the first year of war in Ukraine and a solid second draft of history, as the author intended. We can hope for a second volume that will be the last, chronicling a truly independent Ukraine.”
–James Pekoll (Booklist)
