The political calendar is a bit like the liturgical calendar: People pay more attention when a big event is on the horizon (Election Day, Christmas), but the most meaningful experiences often occur on their own schedule, in reaction to private or unplanned happenstance. A death, a disaster — that’s when you see protests, or conversions, start to take hold.
David Frum’s new book is both protest and conversion. Frum is the former neoconservative who came out early against Donald Trump’s 2016 run for the presidency, and in “Trumpocalypse” he tries to figure out where Republicans and conservatism in general went wrong. It’s one of the more overtly political books we recommend this week, but politics unites a lot of these titles, from history (“The Black Cabinet”) to analysis (“Away From Chaos”) to Masha Gessen’s cleareyed guide for surviving autocracy (“Surviving Autocracy”). There’s a novel about terrorism in India, and a filmmaker’s prison memoir, and a journalist’s account of homelessness and hope by way of the Girl Scouts. We also recommend David Kamp’s look back at the golden age of children’s television in the 1970s, André Leon Talley’s memoir of life in the upper echelons of high fashion, and works of fiction by Ivy Pochoda, Naoise Dolan and Richard Ford.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
A BIT OF A STRETCH: The Diaries of a Prisoner, by Chris Atkins. (Atlantic Books, $20.97.) Chris Atkins, a successful English filmmaker, got involved in a tax-dodging scheme to finance a documentary. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and spent nine months at Wandsworth — one of the largest, oldest and unruliest prisons in Britain. This memoir recounts his time there and builds a case against the ineptitude of England’s prison system. Atkins is “a sensitive observer, sober but alert to wincing varieties of humor,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “He’s not one of those people who, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘had the experience but missed the meaning.’”
A BURNING, by Megha Majumdar. (Knopf, $25.95.) Megha Majumdar’s propulsive debut novel, set in modern-day India, begins with a terrorist attack and then follows the lives of three characters. The narration swivels from the perspective of one character to the next, each of whom, by dint of status or sensibility, knows something the others cannot. “This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer’s gaze against the world,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The interplay of choice and circumstance has always been the playing field of great fiction, and on this terrain, a powerful new writer stakes her claim.”
SURVIVING AUTOCRACY, by Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $26.) “Surviving Autocracy” stems from an essay Masha Gessen wrote in November 2016 that offered a set of numbered rules for “salvaging your sanity and self-respect” during a time of political upheaval. “Gessen’s writing style is methodical and direct, relying on pointed observations instead of baroque hyperbole,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “To combat nonsense, Gessen counsels making sense, deliberately and with precision, including the reclamation of ‘politics’ and ‘political’ — words that have come to denote empty bombast and wily maneuvering when they should call to mind something more substantive.”
SUNNY DAYS: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America, by David Kamp. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) Tracing the origin of a handful of shows (“Mister Rogers,” “Sesame Street,” “The Magic Garden”), Kamp provides a lively recounting of a particularly ripe period in television and cultural history, when our notion of how to communicate with young children was upended, forever. “Kamp fluidly proves that the Children’s Television Workshop — whose shows (“Sesame Street,” then “The Electric Company”) set the standard for educational programming — was as much a part of the golden era of ’70s TV as Norman Lear and Mary Tyler Moore,” Melena Ryzik writes in her review.
TRUMPOCALYPSE: Restoring American Democracy, by David Frum. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) A longtime pillar of the Republican Party’s intellectual elite looks back on where he thinks his party and American conservatism have gone wrong. Frum recognizes that a new national conversation is coming and provides a thoughtful way to start it. “Donald Trump’s victory was devastating for people like Frum; they were suddenly politically homeless,” Joe Klein writes in his review. “Frum’s intellectual journey is what makes this book so fascinating. He can look at our current condition with fresh eyes, earned through humiliating experience. It is a humility to which the rest of us should aspire.”
AWAY FROM CHAOS: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West, by Gilles Kepel. Translated by Henry Randolph. (Columbia University, $35.) Kepel, a French expert on the Middle East, surveys the region’s past four decades and concludes, hopefully but guardedly, that a new era may have begun in the Islamic world. “It’s an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region,” Michael J. Totten writes in his review, “and it’s devoid of the crippling ideological blinders that sometimes disfigure books about a part of the world so rife with ideology.”
THE BLACK CABINET: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt, by Jill Watts. (Grove, $30.) A revealing history of African-Americans, many of them little known, who worked in government during the New Deal and their struggles to bring about social justice. “Watts highlights the gains those efforts secured,” Kevin Boyle writes in his review. “But she’s at her best when she gives a frank accounting of the barriers the Black Cabinet encountered. Again and again its members pushed for a desperately needed reform, only to have it rejected — or simply ignored — by an administration much more interested in appeasing the segregationist South.”
THE CHIFFON TRENCHES: A Memoir, by André Leon Talley. (Ballantine, $28.) A former Vogue editor sums up his decades-long career in the fashion world, from his first apprenticeship to the front row at couture shows to his fraught relationship with Anna Wintour. “For all its name-dropping, backstabbing, outsize egos, vivid description and use of words like ‘bespoke’ and ‘sang-froid,’” Rebecca Carroll writes in her review, the book is “less about the fashion elite than it is about a black boy from the rural South who got swallowed whole by the white gaze and was spit out as a too-large black man when he no longer fit the narrative.”
TROOP 6000: The Girl Scout Troop That Began in a Shelter and Inspired the World, by Nikita Stewart. (Ballantine, $27.) A Times reporter explores what happened after her article about homeless Girl Scouts went viral, complete with celebrity shampoo donations and a star turn on “The View.” Stewart steadfastly shows that behind the myth lies the continued debilitating chaos of homelessness. “She dutifully describes the Cinderella episodes the girls and parents of Troop 6000 enjoy, but she refuses to avert her eyes from their precarious lives,” Samuel G. Freedman writes in his review. The scouts’ leader “faces exasperating obstacles in forming a troop with the rules regulating life in homeless shelters.”
EXCITING TIMES, by Naoise Dolan. (Ecco/HarperColilns, $27.99.) In Dolan’s debut novel — about an intelligent 22-year-old Dubliner named Ava and her wealthy Hong Kong milieu — jealousy and obsession, love and late capitalism, sex and the internet all come whirling together in a wry and bracing tale of class and privilege. “Ava is hyper-verbal and exacting, and Dolan’s writing excels when Ava turns her analytical eye on the intersections between English syntax, zeitgeist technology and interpersonal relationships,” Xuan Juliana Wang writes in her review. “Ava’s written correspondences — social media posts and emails she labors over, analyzes, doesn’t send or sends by accident — become increasingly vulnerable in their disclosures as the book moves along. They form a digital counterbalance to Ava’s aloof and guarded in-person presence, and through this duality Dolan captures perfectly the nauseating insecurity of growing up today.”
SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE: Stories, by Richard Ford. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) This sparkling collection is drenched in retrospection; characters mull regrets and rancors that have lost their bitterness with time. Ford’s mastery of fiction extends to his gift for interior monologue and human speech. “There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the ‘well-crafted, writing-class story,’ that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward,” our reviewer, Rand Richards Cooper, writes. “Some readers may no longer admire this kind of story. But I still love it.”
THESE WOMEN, by Ivy Pochoda. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Someone is murdering women, many of them sex workers, on gritty Los Angeles streets. “If women are the victims in this intricate, deeply felt, beautifully written novel, they are also its heroes,” Sarah Lyall writes, reviewing the book in a roundup of recent thrillers. “The story unfolds through the perspectives of five characters, all women, with overlapping and interweaving histories. Their voices sizzle and sparkle; each of them helps advance the plot, and each brings to it her own particular pain and her own particular tragedy.”
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