Our recommended books this week are evenly balanced between questions of race and space. First, the cosmos: In “The Sirens of Mars,” the planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson evokes the wonders of her work looking for life on other worlds; in “The End of Everything,” the theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack asks what science can teach us about the likely end of the universe; and in “The Smallest Lights in the Universe,” the astrophysicist Sara Seager balances an account of her scientific career with a memoir of grief and young widowhood. On the subject of race, Seyward Darby (“Sisters in Hate”) and Edward Ball (“Life of a Klansman”) both probe America’s troubled legacy of white supremacy, while Martha S. Jones (“Vanguard”) celebrates the Black women who have persevered in the cause of equal justice.
We also recommend a playful poetry collection, “Muddy Matterhorn,” by the quicksilver Heather McHugh, and a couple of new novels: “Fifty Words for Rain,” by Asha Lemmie, and “What Are You Going Through,” by Sigrid Nunez (which Dwight Garner liked at least as much as her prizewinning last novel, “The Friend”).
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH, by Sigrid Nunez. (Riverhead, $26.) Nunez’s follow-up to “The Friend,” which won a National Book Award in 2018, asks a primal question: If a terminally ill friend asked you to be there, in another room, while she took the pills that would end her life, would you say yes or no? Its unnamed narrator is a writer in late middle age who, like one of Rachel Cusk’s detached narrators, is attuned to the stories of others. “It’s as good as ‘The Friend,’ if not better,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “This novel has sorrow in it. It’s also quite funny. We bumble our way toward death as we bumble toward everything.”
VANGUARD: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha S. Jones. (Basic Books, $30.) Jones, an assiduous scholar and an absorbing writer, tells the story of Black women in America who have fought over the centuries for the cause of voting rights. Our critic Jennifer Szalai calls it an “elegant and expansive history” that covers some women who did things “first” but isn’t overly fixated on initial milestones. “Jones is just as interested in everything these women made possible — not just the trails they blazed, but the journeys they took, and what came after.”
LIFE OF A KLANSMAN: A Family History in White Supremacy, by Edward Ball. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Ball, who for a previous book tracked down descendants of slaves owned by his father’s side of the family, here investigates a militantly racist ancestor on his mother’s side, reminding us that this ugly family history is also that of our country. “The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today,” Walter Isaacson writes in his review.
SISTERS IN HATE: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, by Seyward Darby. (Little, Brown, $28.) Darby, a journalist, spent several years among women drawn to white supremacy. Her book, a closely observed portrait of three such women, avoids reductive theories to show the movement in its disturbing diversity. Susan Neiman, reviewing it, calls it a “superbly written” book that “undermines many common assumptions about the far right.”
THE SIRENS OF MARS: Searching for Life on Another World, by Sarah Stewart Johnson. (Crown, $28.99.) Johnson, a Georgetown planetary scientist, oscillates between a history of Mars science and an account of her own journey seeking sparks of life in the immensity. In prose that swirls with lyrical wonder, she recalls formative moments in her life and career. “Along the way,” Anthony Doerr writes in his review, “you come to appreciate the astonishing ingenuity required to safely send rovers the size of Mini Coopers several hundred million kilometers through a frozen vacuum, land them on another planet and drive them around by remote control.”
THE SMALLEST LIGHTS IN THE UNIVERSE: A Memoir, by Sara Seager. (Crown, $28.) Is there life on other planets? Is there life after the death of a spouse? In a memoir that manages to be as informative as it is moving, an astrophysicist who was widowed young, and whose career has centered on the search for another Earth, tackles big questions. Anthony Doerr, reviewing it alongside “The Sirens of Mars,” calls Seager’s book a “stark, bewitching new memoir”: “The merciless seesaw of her grief makes for harrowing reading,” Doerr writes.
THE END OF EVERYTHING: (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack. (Scribner, $26.) Many books have been written about the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. But Mack, a theoretical cosmologist, is interested in how it all ends, since the equations of physics run forward as well as back. “The End of Everything” is “a pleasure,” James Gleick writes in his review. “Mack’s style is personal and often funny as she guides us along a cosmic timeline studded with scientific esoterica and mystery.”
FIFTY WORDS FOR RAIN, by Asha Lemmie. (Dutton, $26.) In Kyoto in 1948, a mother makes her daughter promise to be obedient and then abandons her with grandparents she doesn’t know. Lemmie’s sweeping novel tells the story of how this resourceful survivor spends the next 20 years breaking her promise to her mother again and again. “Nori lives many lives in this riveting, occasionally melodramatic, always entertaining novel,” Elisabeth Egan writes in her latest Group Text column. “Lemmie never allows you to look her straight in the eye; that’s part of the allure here. The other part is the satisfaction of watching a determined person make her way to the top of a mountain alone.”
MUDDY MATTERHORN: Poems 2009-2019, by Heather McHugh. (Copper Canyon, paper, $17.) In creating a kind of word turbulence and refusing any fixed certainties (“my calling’s / doubt”), McHugh invites us to question what we think we know. “What I admire most about this collection,” Sandra Simonds writes in her review, “is that McHugh demonstrates her genius with language in a non-elitist way. She is relatable, never writing from the lofty heights of the mountain, but walking alongside us, inviting us to play, to puzzle out the strangeness of language with her.”
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