1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
(18 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“..[a] disturbing and riveting book … If this all sounds like the plot of a detective novel, you have fallen under the spell of David Grann’s brilliance…As a reporter he is dogged and exacting, with a singular ability to uncover and incorporate obscure journals, depositions and ledgers without ever letting the plot sag. As a writer he is generous of spirit, willing to give even the most scurrilous of characters the benefit of the doubt … in these last pages, Grann takes what was already a fascinating and disciplined recording of a forgotten chapter in American history, and with the help of contemporary Osage tribe members, he illuminates a sickening conspiracy that goes far deeper than those four years of horror. It will sear your soul.”
–Dave Eggers (The New York Times Book Review)
*
2. Hunger: A Memoir of (my) Body by Roxane Gay
(13 Rave, 10 Positive, 5 Mixed)
“Hunger is a walk in Gay’s shoes, a record of the private pain of the endless and endlessly mundane inconvenience of travel through a world set up for people who move through the world differently than you do … Gay describes herself as ‘self-obsessed,’ but she has written a memoir that never slides into narcissism. On the contrary, the movement of her thought and prose is open and expansive. Gay writes of extreme obesity with such candor and energetic annoyance that her frustration with herself and with the world around her attains universality. She writes about rape and its aftermath with such wounded, intelligent anger that a crime we are used to seeing primarily in sensational form on television becomes our reality as well as hers. That is a very generous act.”
-Cathleen Schine (The New York Review of Books)
*
3. 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)
*
4. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
(12 Rave, 7 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“..full of American contradictions and dense with brilliant sentences … [her father] emerges with a vividity that will be familiar to the lapsed children of religious men given to reactionary grunting and voting for Donald Trump … Lockwood’s chronicle of her homecoming at times lacks dramatic tension, but it’s consistently charming … Moving from a place of light into darkness and then returning to light is something very rare indeed. It has the shape of salvation.”
–Christian Lorentzen (Vulture)
*
5. Grant by Ron Chernow
(13 Rave, 4 Positive, 1 Mixed)
“Grant is a stirring defense of an underrated general and unfairly maligned president. Its great contribution to the popular understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath is to expose the roots of the longstanding bias against Grant: White southerners and their allies wanted to portray Reconstruction as a tragic folly, rather than a radical and unfinished revolution … Grant’s real strength: its treatment of Reconstruction. It is portrayed as a continuation of the divisions that led to the Civil War, rather than a grace note, a national embarrassment, or a well-intentioned failure … Chernow has given us a rare kind of popular history: one that forces readers to confront hard truths, not just revel in America’s all too fleeting triumphs.”
–Alex Shephard (The New Republic)
*
6. 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)
*
7. 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 … saacson’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)
*
8. The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich
(10 Rave, 3 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“This is a tough read, both emotionally and intellectually. But it would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original. There’s a visceral anger in Alexievich’s introduction that’s rare in any history book … Tempting though it is, this is a difficult book to read in one gulp. Alexievich presents this as oral history: fragments of conversation that are not always rooted in specific events and don’t carry the dates of battles next to them. This is an incredibly powerful way of bringing history to life. These women spoke to her as friends and treated her more as confessor than journalist and historian … Her achievement is as breathtaking as the experiences of these women are awe-inspiring.”
–Viv Groskop (The Guardian)
*
9. 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)
*
10. The Future is History by Masha Gessen
(9 Rave, 4 Positive, 2 Mixed)
“…a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin … Gessen’s reconstruction of the ongoing saga of Russia’s reversion to vozhdizmmakes for thrilling and necessary reading for those who seek to understand the path to suppression of individual freedoms, and who recognize that this path can be imposed on any nation that lacks the vigilance to avert it.”
–Liesl Schillinger (The Barnes & Noble Review)
