The approach of Memorial Day means that a lot of people are nearing the end of a very weird school year — one that started with learning via computer screen and is concluding with a fitful return to something like normal, with proms and in-person graduation ceremonies, masked or not. But the end of school doesn’t need to mean the end of learning. We have a full curriculum of books on offer this week, from geometry (“Shape,” by Jordan Ellenberg) to U.S. history (“King Richard,” by Michael Dobbs) to science (“The Premonition,” by Michael Lewis) to psychology (“Think Again,” by Adam Grant). There’s a music memoir by Brandi Carlile and, in fiction, a collection of updated folk tales as well as novels set in Brazil, Japan, London and New York City.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
SHAPE: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else, by Jordan Ellenberg. (Penguin Press, $28.) In fine-grained detail, “Shape” reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning. It offers a critique of how math is taught, an appreciation of its peculiar place in the human imagination and biographical sections about beautiful minds and splendid eccentrics. Ellenberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is “rather spectacular at this sort of thing,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. His “preference for deploying all possible teaching strategies gives ‘Shape’ its hectic appeal; it’s stuffed with history, games, arguments, exercises.”
KING RICHARD: Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, by Michael Dobbs. (Knopf, $32.50.) There hasn’t been a shortage of books about the 37th president. “King Richard” distinguishes itself in part by limiting its narrative mostly to the first hundred days after Nixon’s second inauguration, when he looked poised to coast through another four years before the wagons of the Watergate scandal started to circle closer and closer. This circumscribed frame allows Dobbs to deploy his observational gifts to full effect. Our critic Jennifer Szalai writes: “Dobbs has carved out something intimate and extraordinary, skillfully chiseling out the details to bring the story to lurid life.”
BROKEN HORSES: A Memoir, by Brandi Carlile. (Crown, $28.) In her revealing and personable memoir, related in a warmly colloquial tone and supplemented by photos, handwritten captions and lyrics, the Grammy-winning singer evokes listening to stories, possibly in a bar, told by a friend whose life is far more interesting than your own. “If you’re already a Brandi Carlile fan,” Curtis Sittenfeld writes in her review, “there’s an excellent chance you’ll find ‘Broken Horses’ charming, funny, illuminating and poignant. If you’re not a fan, ‘Broken Horses’ might well make you into one, especially now, because the book feels like the antithesis of social distancing.”
THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS, by Yukito Ayatsuji. Translated by Ho-Ling Won. (Pushkin, paper, $16.) Ayatsuji’s landmark 1987 mystery takes its cues from Agatha Christie’s locked-room classics. The members of a university detective-fiction club spend a week on a remote island, drawn there because of a spate of murders the year before. Their curiosity will, of course, be their undoing. “Ayatsuji’s skillful, furious pacing propels the narrative,” Sarah Weinman writes in her latest crime column. “This is a homage to Golden Age detective fiction, but it’s also unabashed entertainment.”
GHOSTS OF NEW YORK, by Jim Lewis. (West Virginia University, paper, $22.99.) Lewis’s haunting novel is built of vignettes whose links become gradually clear, involving a dealer in Indigenous artifacts, the Ivy-educated scion of a West African family, an East Village street kid with a pure singing voice and a photographer just back from a decade abroad. “The pulsing metropolis at the heart of ‘Ghosts of New York’ is so overwhelming in scope and impervious to circumstance it’s a wonder the citizens that populate it stand any chance of attaining happiness or fulfillment,” David Goodwillie writes in his review. “And still they try. … A kind of ethos emerges from the urban cacophony: We are all connected in our disconnection, our solitude, our heartache, our longing. We are united by the city.”
LOVE IN COLOR: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold, by Bolu Babalola. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99.) In most of its 13 stories, Babalola’s debut recasts traditional folk tales and myths. The golden thread woven throughout is the power — the necessity — of being seen: Here, the monster is less likely to be a dragon than a withholding partner. “In telling these stories, Babalola herself becomes the seer and the seen, subversively providing a corrective to both the Western idea of who gets to indulge in love for love’s sake and whose myths are worthy of retelling,” Alyssa Cole writes in her review.
THE PREMONITION: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis. (Norton, $30.) Lewis, whose book is among the first to take account of the coronavirus pandemic, is interested in its early days, and especially in those people who saw the warning signs before anyone else. The central lesson of his book is that beating a pandemic means acting before the danger is clear. “Lewis brings a welcome gimlet eye to the Trump era, when government officials abused by Trump were instinctively deified by liberal Twitter and cable TV,” Nicholas Confessore writes in his review. “But the lessons of ‘ The Premonition’ apply to more than just the C.D.C. — they tell us why government bureaucracies fail. The problem wasn’t just in Washington, or with Trump. The bureaucratic disease of under-reaction, Lewis argues, runs deep in America’s fragmented, underfunded health system.”
HOT STEW, by Fiona Mozley. (Algonquin, $26.95.) Mozley’s second novel features a group of London sex workers fighting an eviction order, but pans out to include local bums, pious liberal protesters and greedy TV executives — virtually the entire city — in its gently satirical gaze. “Mozley’s interest is in agency — specifically, how it cuts across class, a vibrant reboot of that ancient British hang-up,” Emma Brockes writes in her review. “The novel is so precise and granular in its evocation of London that it made me thoroughly homesick while reading it. And Mozley is very good on the degree to which circumstance shapes interior life.”
AN APPRENTICESHIP: Or The Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector. Translated by Stefan Tobler. (New Directions, $22.95.) An acute romance featuring a despondent schoolteacher and a philosophy professor, this novel by a Brazilian master is also a spiritual treatise on the peculiarities of connection. “Between despair, yearning and bliss, Lispector unravels existential knots within the daily tangles of femininity,” Audrey Wollen writes in her review. “Here’s Simone Weil — if she had to pick out the perfect dress to meet a cold man at a bar, sit by the edge of a pool with him and say the right thing.”
THINK AGAIN: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant. (Viking, $28.) Grant urges us to constantly rethink our beliefs about politics, science, work and relationships. He believes we can be confident in our ability to uncover the truth while acknowledging we may be wrong at present — a state he calls “confident humility.” Tali Sharot, reviewing the book alongside others about how the brain works, applauds Grant’s ecumenical approach: “No single tool is guaranteed to always help us rethink our views, habits and preferences,” she writes. “This is why we need a diverse set of strategies, which is what Grant offers.”
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