We dig deep into personalities in several of this week’s recommended books, and we start at the top, with the president. Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough,” about her uncle Donald and her extended family’s dysfunction, sits atop The New York Times’s best-seller list. Lacy Crawford’s “Notes on a Silencing” recounts her experience of sexual assault at an elite boarding school and the decades-long institutional cover-up that followed. The graphic novelist Adrian Tomine traces memories of neuroses and humiliations in the autobiographical “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.” And in “Desert Notebooks,” Ben Ehrenreich writes about life near Joshua Tree National Park and in Las Vegas.
Also on this week’s list: Barbara Demick’s latest deeply reported narrative, this one about Tibet; Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of Shakespeare’s family life; one day in 1970 that changed American politics; a panoramic look at Canada’s Indigenous Dene culture; an anonymous Twitter sensation writes about her journey to social media success; and a memoir about urban beekeeping.
John Williams
Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer
TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) The story Donald Trump’s niece describes in this book is presented as a cautionary tale. The president, she says, can’t help recreating a familial psychodrama that destroyed everyone it touched. Mary puts her training as a clinical psychologist to use (sometimes strenuously) to tell the story of her extended family’s dysfunction. “This is a book that’s been written from pain and is designed to hurt,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. Its details — “memorably specific, fundamentally human and decidedly weird” — give it “an undeniable power.”
EAT THE BUDDHA: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, by Barbara Demick. (Random House, $28.) Like the oral histories of the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, Barbara Demick’s deeply reported narratives offer a prismatic picture of history as experienced and understood by individuals in their full amplitude and idiosyncrasy. Her latest, “Eat the Buddha,” is the profile of a group of Tibetans with roots in Ngaba County, in the Chinese province of Sichuan, which bears the gory distinction of being the “undisputed world capital of self-immolations.” Parul Sehgal calls the book “masterly,” and says that it “covers an awe-inspiring breadth of history,” from the heyday of the Tibetan empire to the present day.
HAMNET: A Novel of the Plague, by Maggie O’Farrell. (Knopf, $26.95.) Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at 11, a few years before the playwright wrote “Hamlet.” O’Farrell’s wondrous new novel is at once an unsparingly eloquent record of love and grief and a vivid imagining of how a child’s death was transfigured into art. “O’Farrell, Irish-born, schooled in Scotland and Wales, and shaped by a childhood steeped in story and school days that always began with song, has a melodic relationship to language,” our reviewer Geraldine Brooks writes. “There is a poetic cadence to her writing and a lushness in her descriptions of the natural world.”
DESERT NOTEBOOKS: A Road Map for the End of Time, by Ben Ehrenreich. (Counterpoint, $26.) The author, a columnist for The Nation, divides his book into two strands: a journal-like description of his life in desert America, in a cabin near Joshua Tree National Park, and after a move to Las Vegas, where his world shrinks. “That ‘Desert Notebooks’ was written before the coming of Covid-19 only makes it feel more, rather than less, timely,” our reviewer William Atkins writes. “Read two months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all living in the desert now.”
THE HARDHAT RIOT: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, by David Paul Kuhn. (Oxford University, $29.95.) Kuhn highlights one day, May 8, 1970, when blue-collar workers went on a rampage against antiwar protesters, arguing that the country’s politics have never been the same. The book “vividly evokes an especially ugly moment half a century ago, when the misbegotten Vietnam War and a malformed notion of patriotism combined volatilely,” our reviewer Clyde Haberman writes. “They produced a blue-collar rampage whose effects still ripple, not the least of them being Donald Trump’s improbable ascension to the presidency.”
NOTES ON A SILENCING: A Memoir, by Lacy Crawford. (Little, Brown, $27.) This memoir chronicles the author’s experience of sexual assault while she was a student at St. Paul’s, an elite boarding school in Concord, N.H. — followed by a decades-long cover-up at the hands of an esteemed institution with money, power and connections, and her own complicated journey of recovery. It’s an “erudite and devastating” memoir, our reviewer Jessica Knoll writes. “The story is crafted with the precision of a thriller, with revelations that sent me reeling.”
THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE CARTOONIST, by Adrian Tomine. (Drawn + Quarterly, $29.95.) Tomine, now considered a master of the graphic novel form, returns in an autobiographical mode, in a book that lets vent the rage and fragility that are always just beneath the surface of his pristine drawings. “Constructed in a loose, appealingly humble style on a Moleskine-like grid,” our reviewer Ed Park writes, “the 26 vignettes here trace a lifetime of neuroses and humiliations, from Fresno, 1982, to Brooklyn, 2018, blurring the line between character trait and occupational hazard.”
PAYING THE LAND, by Joe Sacco. (Metropolitan/Holt, $29.99.) Using his panoramic graphic novel style, Sacco immerses himself in the Indigenous Dene culture. What begins as an exploration of the effects of fracking on Native lands sprawls into a haunted history of an entire civilization. Sacco “believes that more is more,” our reviewer Ed Park writes. “His large-scale panels teem with detail, visual and verbal.”
BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT, by Anonymous. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) The beloved Twitter persona Duchess Goldblatt is celebrated for her pithy wit and occasionally scathing observations, but this memoir from her anonymous creator is surprisingly poignant. Our reviewer Julie Klam found it “deeply satisfying, unexpectedly moving and not spoilery in the least. And as lovable as the duchess herself.”
A HONEYBEE HEART HAS FIVE OPENINGS: A Year of Keeping Bees, by Helen Jukes. (Pantheon, $26.95.) In this memoir, Jukes, rootless and itinerant, tries to settle down by keeping bees in her backyard in Oxford. But what does it really mean to “keep” bees? Is it about owning or about tending, and is it possible to truly tame other beings? “While you will undoubtedly learn something new about bees, this is, first and foremost, a successful and eloquent piece of modern nature writing,” our reviewer Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson writes.
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10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times
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