Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life, and John Edgar Wideman’s Slaveroad all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
(Random House)
9 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Languorous, elegant … No page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures … That rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language.”
–Hamilton Cain (The New York Times Book Review)
2. The Book of George by Kate Greathead
(Henry Holt & Company)
3 Rave • 3 Positive
“A novel of many finely crafted, often funny moments that arrive episodically as the title character grows older … The novel’s author, Kate Greathead, is a gifted storyteller who reels off dialogue filled with wit and humor so well it makes page-turning a pleasure and The Book of George an easy read … George may be a doom-and-gloom sort, but that’s not the case for Greathead’s novel. Page after page, her writing is full of humor built around prickly sarcasm and woebegone twists in George’s life.”
–Kendal Weaver (Associated Press)
3. Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
(Coffee House Press)
1 Rave • 2 Positive
“Haber’s novel is at once a remedy for and an instance of its narrator’s true obsession: not Montaigne, but distraction itself. The length and intricacy of its sentences force the reader to concentrate, but what we are compelled to concentrate on is nothing but a tapestry of digressions … What emerges in the end is an ode to distraction, an entire book composed of distractions that are, paradoxically, absorbing … It is a glorious distraction, and there is no higher compliment.”
–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)
**
1. John Lewis: A Biography by David Greenberg
(Simon & Schuster)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Panoramic and richly insightful … This biography sets a new standard by giving Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves”
–Brent Staples (The New York Times Book Review)
2. Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman
(Scribner)
3 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
“A searing rumination … Defies categorization. It’s neither a novel nor a memoir nor an essay collection, though elements of all those forms are present … Wideman is not a straightforward writer. In the midst of exchanges with Sheppard and Protten, he will suddenly grow introspective, as if jotting down journal entries … This author revels in the shattering and the reconfiguring of language, in tinkering with the English lexicon, bending it to his authorial will. He’s not going gently into any good night.”
–Leigh Haber (The Los Angeles Times)
3. The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
(Riverhead)
3 Rave • 1 Mixed
“A season of unrest looms ahead, and The Hidden Globe lays out the unvarnished truth in a luminous feat of reportage.”
–Hamilton Cain (The Star Tribune)
