- Books: “Curfewed Night.”
Peer’s memoir of Kashmir chronicles a “fairy-tale childhood of the eighties”—samovars of kahwa tea drunk in paddy fields beneath the Himalayas—that gives way to “the horror of the nineties”: India’s rigging of the 1987 state elections and . . ....
- Books: “Late for Tea at the Deer Palace.”
8220;Everybody asks me about my father,” the author writes, on the first page of this family memoir. But the story of the sprawling and wealthy Chalabi clan began long before Ahmad achieved infamy as the source of the “supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->BOOKCOURT
Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Cod,” “Salt,” and “The Big Oyster,” among many other books, discusses his latest release, “World Without Fish,” an illustrated assessment of the future of the oceans. (163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. April 20 at . . ....
- Books: “Townie.”
This charged memoir by the author of “House of Sand and Fog” begins as his parents’ marriage unravels, and his father, an acclaimed writer, leaves his mother struggling to support four kids. Living in poor towns in northern Massachusetts, Dubus and his siblings “roamed the neighborhoods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Sly Company of People Who Care.”
Though billed as a novel, this wonderfully uncategorizable book moves freely between travel guide, cultural history, and picaresque adventure tale. The narrator (like the author) is a young Indian cricket reporter, and he spends a year in Guyana as “a slow ramblin’ stranger” after an earlier visit . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” review.
Winterson’s memoir relays the lesson, learned early, that a mother is “labyrinth-like and vengeful.” Her birth mother abandoned her; her adoptive mother chided, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” A harrowing childhood followed: nights locked out of the house, a three . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” review.
Schappell’s second collection is framed by two stories about a woman named Heather. She first appears as a high-school student, “a good girl with a bad reputation,” who dreams of becoming a marine biologist. In the later story, she tries to discourage her teen-age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “In the Company of Angels.”
This wide-ranging and assured novel features a middle-aged Chilean man named Nardo, who has found refuge in Copenhagen after being tortured and losing his wife and son during the Pinochet regime. Into his sad days swoops a Danish beauty, “the woman with eyes of blue light,” . . ....
- Books: “Hitch-22.”
As contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author’s incessant output, this memoir is an effective coming-of-age story, regardless of what one may think of the resulting adult. The picture is highly selective: key areas (Hitchens’s two marriages; the nineteen . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->LOWER EAST SIDE TENEMENT MUSEUM
Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History,” discusses her latest book, “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.” (108 Orchard St., at Delancey St. 212-982-8420. Feb. 3 at 6:30 . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->LOWER EAST SIDE TENEMENT MUSEUM
Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History,” discusses her latest book, “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.” (108 Orchard St., at Delancey St. 212-982-8420. Feb. 3 at 6:30 . . ....
- Books: “Destiny and Desire.”
The acclaimed Mexican author’s latest novel is narrated by the severed head of Josué Nadal, a young attorney employed by a powerful industrialist. His boss is an enigmatic figure who “anticipates reality” and appears to hold more power than Mexico’s President. The country . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Lives Other Than My Own” review.
Travelling in Sri Lanka in 2004, Carrère becomes close to a couple whose daughter dies in the tsunami. Upon his return to Paris, he learns that his girlfriend’s sister Juliette is dying of cancer. In this moving memoir, Carrère writes as “a witness . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “What I Don’t Know About Animals” review.
Neither fish nor fowl, Diski’s book is a compassionate, appealing crossbreed of history, philosophy, and memoir—“a kind of travel book but with animals instead of travel,” as she explains in a letter to a sheep farmer, whom she visits during lambing season. She studies . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lanchester: Tony Blair defends his record.
It would be naïve to pick up the memoir of a recently retired politician expecting total candor. This may not be a law of nature—a lasting contribution to the American literary canon is Ulysses S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs,” written when the author . . ....
- Adam Gopnik: Chilean miner madness grips New York.
8220;And they’ll have to be all drawn in, like this,” the woman said, wide-eyed, and then she demonstrated, tucking in her arms and legs to indicate how little space you would have if you were a Chilean miner being pulled from the dark depths— . . ....
- Books: “The Music Room”
This sublimely evocative memoir details the author’s experience of growing up in a fourteenth-century moated castle in Oxfordshire. The medieval structure turned Tudor stately home once employed fourteen gardeners, and has a “groined passage” and rooms that were slept in by kings and queens, but . . ....
- Books: “In Red” review.
This latest book by a celebrated Polish novelist is set in an imaginary town, a poor, remote place where winter lasts all year and there is “a darkness that softens contrasts and smooths the sharpness of edges.” Against this bleak backdrop, episodes play out as elusive parables or . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Life Upon These Shores,” review.
Beginning with the twenty or so Angolan slaves brought to Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the election of Barack Obama, this copiously illustrated history sets out, as Gates puts it, “to find a new way of looking” at the “full sweep” of African-American history . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Beg, Borrow, Steal”
Though he has lately found success with “Hurry Down Sunshine,” a memoir of his daughter’s mental breakdown, for decades Greenberg treated writing as a strictly part-time business. Binding together this episodic autobiography is the series of marginal jobs—mover, Bronx street vender, author of . . ....
- Books: “Jealousy.”
Millet’s previous memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” was a graphic résumé of her history in libertinism, including trysts with, by her own count, at least forty-nine partners. This follow-up is a chronicle of the “irreversible unravelling of my . . ....
- Books: “Believing Is Seeing” review.
Morris frames these conversational essays as “a collection of mystery stories,” casting himself as a detective charged with investigating the contested reality behind a photograph or set of photographs. He is drawn to documentary images—for example, of the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Depression . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Hari Kunzru’s “Gods Without Men” review.
The most compelling character in this densely populated novel is Jaz, the mutinous, vacillating American-born son of Sikh immigrants, who is unable to shake a sense of his “peasant” ancestry despite marriage to a Jewish intellectual and a job on Wall Street. At work, he toils on . . . (Subscription required.)...
