Allegra Goodman’s This Is Not About Us, Richard Holmes’ The Boundless Deep, and Helle Helle’s they all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman
(Dial Press)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“Goodman has written many wonderful novels, but her 11th, This Is Not About Us, is her crowning glory. So far, anyway … No one does this shtick better than Goodman, always funny and moving, but sharp rather than sentimental, willing to leave matters as messy as they are in real life rather than tying heart-warming fictional bows … She’s the real thing.”
–Marion Winik (The Boston Globe)
2. they by Helle Helle
(New Directions)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Helle captures with uncanny grace the relationship between an unnamed mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter following the former’s cancer diagnosis … Helle’s capacity to make compelling fiction out of the most ordinary objects and events is partly a matter of tense … Helle is masterful at giving us a laconic description of something that might well be darker … A world of loss and lyricism.”
–Brian Dillon (4Columns)
3. Eradication: A Fable by Jonathan Miles
(Doubleday)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“An instant classic of that svelte form: no longer than a rattlesnake’s body and just as explosive … The great genius of Eradication is how deftly Miles reveals the dimensions of Adi’s pain … Miles has an uncanny ability to create a terrifying kind of momentum, a swelling of alarm that propels the story from bumbling comedy to moral terror … Give yourself a day to take in the full effect of Eradication. By the time you realize what could happen, there’s no getting off this island or escaping the reckoning at its very last page.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
**
1. The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
(Pantheon)
6 Rave • 1 Mixed
“Holmes, master biographer that he is, vividly conjures up this awkward, compelling figure. What gives his book its exceptional energy, though, is not what is happening on the surface of Tennyson’s life and Holmes’s narrative. It is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down … This biography is a compelling story of an odd, brilliant, charismatic character, and a reappraisal of a man who had become so very established we could no longer see him.”
–Lucy Hughes-Hallett (The Guardian)
2. The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—And the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer
(Celadon Books)
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“With the enthusiasm of an avid fan, the even hand of a journalist, and the narrative skills of a screenwriter, Fischer interleaves the biographies of three Hollywood titans. [An] in-depth, behind-the-scenes book … Rich in glitterati name-dropping and insight into the minutiae of movie creation, Fischer’s tell-all will cause film history buffs to swoon and will assuredly entertain any nostalgic moviegoer.”
–Joelle Egan (Booklist)
3. End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America by Chris Jennings
(Little Brown and Company)
5 Rave
“Stirring … Meticulous … Sharply observed and chillingly relevant, this real-life page-turner reveals how economic desperation, isolationist faith, and conspiracy thinking can form a combustible blend.”
–Publishers Weekly
