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MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

 

In WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN (Back Bay, $14.99), Peter Godwin, the National Geographic journalist, has written a beautiful memoir about his parents—his father an engineer, his mother, a doctor—who immigrated to Zimbabwe after World War II.  Peter was able to report on Africa and check in with his parents as the country descended into chaos. His liberal parents, who had supported Mugabe, became another casualty when the dictator smashed the country. Yet they were reluctant to leave their adopted land, for reasons revealed to Peter in the course of his visits home. George Godwin, always seen as the epitome of a British gentleman, was actually a Polish Jew who was sent away to a British boarding school in 1939. Carla Cohen

FDR (Random House, $20), by Jean Edward Smith, has been widely praised by reviewers as the most accomplished biography yet of Franklin Roosevelt, as well as being hailed as “a joy to read.” Particularly relevant for today in the life of this magnificent, but flawed, president is Roosevelt’s mastery of the art of campaigning and use of the media to further his political goals.  On a more personal plane, Smith candidly relates Roosevelt’s extramarital affairs with two women who were absolutely essential to his emotional wellbeing. Barbara Meade

Relationships were just as complicated 100 years ago as they are today. In Katie Roiphe's UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS (Dial, $14), we follow seven famous literary couples through affairs, love triangles, and dramas of daily life. Within the social upheaval of the inter-war period, this avant-garde, which included H.G. Wells and Rebecca West; Vanessa and Clive Bell, struggled to reconcile a Victorian upbringing with the utopian visions of love and gender relations for the new world they strove to create. However, the ideals they proclaimed often contradicted the lives they actually led. Roiphe provides insight on events behind the literature, and on the relationships that influenced and even fueled some of these writers’ works. Ginnie Palm

Things to Do This Summer

 

Eat Fresh
With Farmers’ Market season in full swing, HOW TO PICK A PEACH (Mariner, $14.95) is the perfect guide to choosing beautiful fruits and vegetables.  Whether you’re planning an outdoor dinner party or just want to make dessert for Father’s Day, Russ Parsons offers tips and recipes for every occasion.  One of this book’s great innovations is its ingredient-based organization.  Cherries on the counter?   Learn how to store them before turning them into a fantastic summer cobbler.  Serving snap peas for supper?  Find out how to select the freshest and firmest before braising them with bacon and cream.  Parsons walks us through a year of produce, adding seasonal recipes, trivia, and the occasional thought-provoking essay. How to Pick a Peach is essential reading for anyone who loves good food and wants to make it at home.  Conor Moran

Write and Draw
Lynda Barry is a whiz with a brush, pen, and ink. She writes and draws the weekly Ernie Pook’s Comeek (starring Marlys), and her last book, 100 Demons, was a full-color, tragi-comic memoir of her pre-adolescence. Now she has assembled an inspiring one-of-a-kind book. WHAT IT IS (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95) is a large-format omnibus that’s three things at once: comic panels from Barry’s artistic life; full-page collages crammed with imagery and questions; and a workbook with real exercises from her workshops. Plus a sweet coda: her own sketches and jottings while she worked on the book. Lynda Barry has created this season’s most bountiful and generous book. •András Goldinger

Visit Dumbarton Oaks

Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss bequeathed their house, their garden, and their collection of art to Harvard in 1940, and made it available to scholars, and to the public. The museum is open again after a two-year hiatus, and the paperback, DUMBARTON OAKS: THE COLLECTION (Dumbarton Oaks, $24.98), celebrates this reopening. Edited by Curator and Museum Director Gudrun Bühl, the 350 pages highlight its great strengths—and the Blisses’ maverick choices: the Byzantine (including some astounding mosaics); the pre-Columbian (displayed in the Philip Johnson-designed wing); and the Music Room and House Collections (including tapestries, furniture, and choice sculpture and paintings). Study the book, but, by all means, visit this gem of a museum. •András Goldinger

 

NATURE/ENVIRONMENT

For a long time efficiency has been the gold standard for almost everything we do. But is it really the best and only way to measure the worth of an endeavor? In DEEP ECONOMY: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Holt, $14), Bill McKibben argues that there are other values to consider. A single-minded pursuit of efficiency and growth has certain costs, such as contributing to dehumanizing scales of production and consumption. Sure, the big-box store is great for some things, but we should also be able to focus on smaller, local enterprises, such as farmers’ markets, which offer not just healthful produce, grown at a sustainable level, but the chance to slow down and reinforce ties to our immediate community. Laurie Greer

With THE WILD TREES (Random House, $16) , Richard Preston leaves behind Ebola and all things microscopic to take on the towering heights of the planet’s largest organism, the coastal redwood. Part journalism, part science, and all adventure, The Wild Trees explores the unseen worlds hidden among the branches.  Preston climbs alongside the botanist-explorers who map the redwood groves as they discover deep fissures hollowed by lightning, forests of trunks growing from trunks, and a few new species concealed in the canopy.  Maneuvering above “the red line” (the 50-foot ceiling above which falls are usually fatal), Preston captures the relationship between these majestic trees and those who choose to climb them.  Conor Moran

 

TRAVEL/HISTORY

DISAPPEARING DESTINATIONS (Vintage, $15.95), by Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen, combines the captivating escapism of travel writing with the compelling urgency of environmental advocacy.  In a series of short essays, the authors embed themselves with the people who live and work near 37 different natural wonders.  The result is an around-the-world tour of places that stand as emblems of our unique and threatened habitat. From the near and familiar beauties of North Carolina’s Inner and Outer Banks to the far-flung exotic locales of The Boreal Forest of Lapland, Tuvalu, and the Maldives, Disappearing Destinations raises awareness of imperiled places and offers suggestions for ecologically responsible travel and lists of regional advocacy organizations. Conor Moran  

Readers of Imperium, Emperor, and Shah of Shahs may not have suspected that their author, Ryszard Kapuscinski, had Herodotus as a constant companion on his trips. In his last book, TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS (Vintage, $14.95), the late Polish journalist revisits his foreign destinations and reveals that wherever he went, he took a copy of Herodotus’s Histories with him. Calling Herodotus the “first globalist,” Kapuscinski makes him his model and mentor. Travels includes generous quotations from the Histories, and Kapuscinski is as fascinated with the old stories of Solon, Croesus, and ancient Scythians as he is with the revolutions and civil wars unfolding around him in Iran or Ethiopia. This globe-trotting, time-traveling album of a book is full of unforgettable moments. Laurie Greer

The TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15) were Tory back benchers in the late-1930s who saw clearly what Hitler was about, and began to organize opposition to Prime Minister Chamberlain. Far from being the milk toast leader the American press portrayed, Chamberlain was ruthless in stamping out all opposition, even to the point of trying to censor the press. The young men, some now forgotten, risked their political careers to counter Chamberlain. They all belonged to the same clubs and had gone to the same prep schools. Journalist Lynne Olson does an outstanding job of recreating the men and the times. Carla Cohen

 

AUDIO BOOKS

There is nothing like audio books to shorten the trip to Cape Cod or Canada. We recommend:

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (Penguin, $39.95) by Junot Díaz
This stunningly imaginative and hilarious novel will brighten any trip. Díaz’s brilliant use of language, a breezy Spanglish, will make listening to the book memorable.

MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS (Recorded Books, $29.99) by Alexander McCall Smith
Those of you who attended the talk by Smith will remember the testimony by the audience about listening to the #1 Ladies Detective series. The narrator is perfect and the books become humorous African soap operas.

 

CATCHING UP

Summer is a great time to catch up on the books you meant to read all year, but haven’t had the uninterrupted time for. Here are a few that merit consideration:

In THE LOOMING TOWER (Vintage, $15.95), Lawrence Wright traces the beginning of anti-Western Islamic puritanism from Egypt in the time of Nasser (1950s and ‘60s), when a well-educated civil servant was imprisoned because of his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. The book he wrote became the underpinning of the movement kept alive by Ayman Al Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who was imprisoned and tortured. “The theme of humiliation as the essence of torture is important to understand the radical Islamist’s rage.” Another step on the ladder to 9/11 was Bin Laden’s expulsion from Saudi Arabia and his battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan; his wealth fueled the movement to oppose the west.

The second half of the book shifts to efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to track the rise of  Muslim extremists. Here Wright talks about FBI agent John O’Neill and his dogged efforts to pull the intelligence agencies together. The FBI “was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious or fought conventional wisdom.” When the American agent “realized that the people in the bureau had known for more than a year and a half that two of the hijackers were in the country,” he vomited.  Wright makes us realize what we are up against in the Middle East, yes, but also at home!

 

Jeffrey Goldberg’s brutally honest book about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, PRISONERS (Vintage, $14.95), is personal as well as political. Goldberg’s summer camp was in the Zionist tradition and his enthusiastic support for Israel led him to serve in the Israeli army. He was posted as a guard in Ketziot, a prison for Palestinians who have taken part in uprisings against Israel. His disgust with the Israeli policies and personnel at Ketziot left him disillusioned. He sees the prison as a college for Palestinian nationalism, furthering the gap between Palestinians and Israelis.

 

This is the year to start Rick Atkinson’s magisterial history of the European Theatre in WW II, The Liberation Trilogy. It’s got narrative drive and fantastic figures, both political and military. ARMY AT DAWN (Owl, $17) takes the reader through the battles in Northern Africa while the Allied forces prepared to enter Europe. There is a great deal about the interaction between the uniformed service and elected officials.  DAY OF BATTLE (Holt, $35) is a detailed history of the Allied campaign in Italy from mid-1943 to mid-1944. There are many major and secondary players of interest: Churchill, of course, and Marc Clark, but also Polish general Wtadustaw. One of the reasons that I love these books—I have never before read “military history”—is the strong thread running through them about the relationship of politics to the military.

Section by Carla Cohen