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9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Day,” is a tender family story that uses an ingenious approach to scrutinize the free-floating anxiety and trauma of the Covid era: It opens on the morning of April 5, 2019, with the family in question (mom, dad, uncle, two kids) going about their business, then jumps a year later to the afternoon of April 5, 2020, with lockdown inflicting its weird mix of panic and boredom, then jumps again to the evening of April 5, 2021, when the costs of the pandemic are clear and the psychological toll is still unfolding. It’s a sad, quiet book, and one full of affection for its flawed characters; whether your own experience of Covid-19 tracks theirs or not, they make a companionable bunch to spend some time with.

Also recommended this week: an archaeologist’s look back at her discipline’s undisciplined origins, a journalist’s investigation of Facebook’s messy secrets, a cultural history of eyeliner and a study of America’s parole system. The Times’s own David Leonhardt offers a history of American economic policies and their effects, a deaf and blind essayist writes about touch and communication, a historian traces the impact of populist sentiment on the French Revolution, and, finally, another family story, in which the reporter Nathan Thrall recounts a Palestinian father’s frantic search for news about his son after his school bus crashed near Jerusalem.

Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

DAY Michael Cunningham

Cunningham’s latest novel visits a family on one specific April date before, during and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. As their world is turned upside down because of the virus and other challenges, we see how they try to make peace with the twists life throws at them.

“It occurred to me that the book may also be haunted by the early years of the AIDS crisis, some of the worst elements of which were reprised during the Covid pandemic.”

From Caleb Crain’s review

Random House | $28

SINS OF THE SHOVEL: Looting, Murder, and the Evolution of American Archaeology Rachel Morgan

Morgan, an archaeologist, illuminates the discipline’s rough-and-ready early days in America, when few laws restricted plundering and thousands of Indigenous relics were looted with impunity — and, often, the connivance of venerable institutions.

“A colorful cast of archaeologists, anthropologists, crackpot scientists and hustlers. ... Morgan tells the story with passion, indignation and a dash of suspense.”

From Joshua Hammer’s review

University of Chicago Press | $30

EYELINER: A Cultural History Zahra Hankir

For Hankir, eyeliner is so much more than cosmetic: In a whirlwind tour, the beauty and culture writer takes us from Petra, Jordan, to Southern California to the London home of the singer Amy Winehouse, exploring the history and cultural iconography of this dramatic signifier.

“Engrossing and appealingly monomaniacal. ... Hankir doesn’t take her subject too seriously; her history lessons are peppered with cultural references and good humor.”

From Cat Marnell’s review

Penguin Books | $26

CORRECTION: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change Ben Austen

Tracking two prisoners’ decades-long efforts to win parole, Austen trenchantly examines how a process intended to reward good behavior and evidence of rehabilitation became a casualty of the victims’ rights movement and mass incarceration.

“Austen sees plenty wrong with our system of corrections, but he doesn’t whine with advocacy. His style is informative with little sap, and he manages to make sympathetic characters out of violent men.”

From John J. Lennon’s review

Flatiron | $29.99

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABED SALAMA: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy Nathan Thrall

After his son’s school bus crashes outside of Jerusalem, a Palestinian father is frantic for news — only to face bureaucratic hurdles and a scattered emergency response. Thrall, who has covered the region for years, avoids grandstanding while combining vivid storytelling and in-depth analysis.

“One starts to question whether the tragic accident is a failure of bureaucracy or, instead, whether it is the bureaucracy. ... How much do individual choices matter under a system that determines the daily routines, the course of one’s life and even one’s death?”

From Rozina Ali’s review

Metropolitan | $29.99

OURS WAS THE SHINING FUTURE: The Story of the American Dream David Leonhardt

In this authoritative and nimble tour through American economic history, Leonhardt, a senior writer at The New York Times, argues that progressive policies have the best track record for promoting prosperity and combating inequality.

“Leonhardt maintains that over the past 50 years the United States has gone off the rails by moving from a more regulated capitalism to a rough-and-tumble version. ... An interesting book, with many provocative points.”

From Roger Lowenstein’s review

Random House | $32

THE REVOLUTIONARY TEMPER: Paris, 1748-1789 Robert Darnton

The author of major works on 18th-century French culture, Darnton here examines the media’s role in galvanizing populist sentiment as the absolutist monarchy of Louis XVI and his predecessors slid ever closer to its doom.

“Illuminating. ... Darnton examines this development with not only erudition but writerly flair.”

From Caroline Weber’s review

Norton | $45

BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets Jeff Horwitz

Horwitz, expanding on his reporting in The Wall Street Journal, uses internal Facebook documents to fillet, with admirable journalistic detail, the company’s part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide.

“Draws on reams of evidence to prove that, as a matter of consistent policy, Facebook would rather clean up after even the gravest of disasters than prevent them.”

From Alexandria Symonds’s review

Doubleday | $32.50

TOUCH THE FUTURE: A Manifesto in Essays John Lee Clark

This collection conveys the lives of DeafBlind people and their interactions with the world. Clark, who was born deaf but could see as a child, speaks fluently to readers who take for granted the full use of their eyes and ears.

“Traditional interpreters of audio and visual language try to act as neutral mediums. Clark encourages something different: a roughshod form of subjectivity. ... Some of the most affecting moments in the book are those that provide a window into Clark’s family life.”

From Anna Heyward’s review

Norton | $25

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Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife,” addresses the attack that maimed him  in 2022, and pays tribute to his wife who saw him through .

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At 28, the poet Tayi Tibble has been hailed as the funny, fresh and immensely skilled voice of a generation in Māori writing .

Amid a surge in book bans, the most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Book Reviews

Reclaiming family and memory in 'sparks like stars'.

Marcela Davison Avilés

Sparks Like Stars , by Nadia Hashimi William Morrow hide caption

Sparks Like Stars , by Nadia Hashimi

Walker Percy once observed that "for most of us, the communication of beauty takes two — the teacher and the hearer, the pointer and the looker." When I was a child, one of my first experiences as a looker and hearer involved stories about lands far away — tales like The Secret Garden or Rudyard Kipling's stories set in Central Asia. I didn't realize then that the beauty I perceived in those stories was refracted through a lens of empire. But Sitara, the Afghan child heroine in Nadia Hashimi's new novel Sparks Like Stars , knows this.

As her story opens Sitara quotes Kipling to prove the brutality of his claim over her heritage, and the strength of her own agency. Her life was violently disrupted during a military coup against the Afghan government in 1978. The beauty which is revealed through her unraveling, survival and search for her own resilience comes from a place of authenticity — she is a child of Afghanistan and her story isn't imposed, it's part and parcel of her heritage.

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We first meet ten-year-old Sitara Zamani inside the Arg, Kabul's presidential palace. There, her father serves as an adviser to the president and her family resides in apartments reserved for close members of the President's extended coterie. At a state dinner party where Soviet diplomats and their tanks both hover in the background, the President reveals archeological treasures destined for Afghanistan's history museum. Sitara is determined to examine the treasures up close, and she convinces her father to show her the place in the palace basement where they are hidden. But her plans to personally excavate the packing crates where the treasure is stored are disrupted when Soviet-backed rebels stage a coup; witnessing the slaughter of her family, Sitara hides in the secret compartment with the hidden treasures and finally escapes with the help of a palace guard.

She eventually makes her way to the United States with the help of Antonia Shepherd, an American embassy worker, with a detour in a foster home before Antonia finally adopts her. Then the story fast forwards to 2008, and we find Sitara with a new name and a career as an oncological surgeon in New York City — but everything changes when the palace guard who rescued Sitara in 1978 shows up at her hospital as a cancer patient. The sudden jolt of his presence unlocks the memory and the trauma of her loss and catalyzes a long-suppressed desire to reclaim her family by reclaiming her heritage, so she sets off for Afghanistan in search of herself.

The question of whether Sitara can go home again is the existential and physical journey Hashimi conjures, in a story at once surreal and deeply rooted in the history of Afghanistan's modern turmoil and ancient enchantment. I found myself eagerly following her adventure in a way I hadn't remembered in a long time — the way a child reads a new book about the unknown, impatient for the next twist and turn of the story, worried about the safety of the heroine, wondering if I could be as brave and bold as her.

This is Hashimi's sixth book set in Afghanistan and her fourth to illuminate the path of in a world of international intrigue, treachery and reconciliation. She puts her medical background (she's a pediatrician) and her lived experience as a daughter of Afghan immigrants to good use, blending history, heritage, culture and traditions within a narrative that's as suspenseful as it is emotionally compelling. The place where Sitara's struggle to assimilate, grief and survivor's guilt intersect is where Hashimi's story reaches its zenith, and as her stepmother consoles her, we're compelled to both look and listen:

"Don't be sorry," Mom insists, her face pinched. She wraps an arm around me. "You know, we're so damned afraid that talking about the ones we've lost will hurt us as much as losing them did. So we just stop talking about them. But that's when you truly lose them." She's right. I've stopped myself from thinking about my family because I'm afraid of spilling into grief that has no bottom, into a place from which I cannot climb out.

In Hashimi's beguiling tale of Sitara's survival, a young girl calls us to see. And though her truth becomes our discovery, Hashimi sets it at the disposal of the Afghan people, centered within the shadow of their suffering. When Sitara returns to her homeland, she's not sure what she's looking for, only that she must find it out — is it some kind of revenge by proving her survival? Or is it another kind of archeological excavation — of long buried mourning, forever changing her heart and yet eternally the same?

Hashimi beautifully communicates the answer to these questions — and catharsis when it arrives is tenderly wrought. Afraid to yearn, Sitara constantly seeks relief from her memory; she is determined not to fall victim to mere nostalgia. The elusive location of the compartment where her memory and remembrance are hidden is both a burial place and a place to pray. If she can find that, then she, all of us, will be able to rest.

Marcela Davison Avilés is a writer and independent producer living in Northern California.

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Ann Patchett’s Pandemic Novel

By Katy Waldman

When the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations can still return her to “those happy afternoons.” The cemetery, crowded but lonely, gives off echoes of her unconventional ménage, and Patchett fashions it into a figure for family itself: a plot in which you’re trapped with a bunch of strangers, a place of mingled loss and togetherness.

Most of Patchett’s work is directly or indirectly about the experience of being stuck in a difficult family. She is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. “Bel Canto” (2001), her breakout novel, traces the bonds that develop among terrorists and their prisoners. “State of Wonder” (2011) follows a scientist searching for her colleagues in the Amazon rain forest. In the Pulitzer finalist “The Dutch House” (2019), two grown siblings return compulsively to their unhappy childhood: “Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.”

Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape. In “Commonwealth” (2016), her most autobiographical novel, six children flung together by their parents’ affair form a fraught alliance, in which the older kids routinely drug their baby brother with Benadryl. The father leaves his gun within easy reach of the kids, and the mother grabs glassy-eyed time-outs in the car. One son becomes obsessed with the art of setting fires, almost burning down his school.

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In her twenties, Franny, the protagonist, appears to transcend her upbringing by recounting it to a famous novelist, who turns it into a best-selling work of fiction. It’s a thrillingly illicit inversion, or seems to be: Franny was trapped in her family, but now she has trapped them in a book; she has transformed the sinkhole of her past into a resource. But as her relatives bear up under “the inestimable burden of their lives”—the kids marrying and procreating, the parents retiring and sickening—their family narratives evolve. A mute sibling is rebranded “the smart one.” When Franny reconnects with Albie, the brother so monstrous his siblings fed him Benadryl, she notes with surprise that “there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.” Franny’s family is a resource, she realizes, but she has mistaken its nature—it is not an heirloom to be handed off to a stranger but a commons, an inexhaustible font of ever-changing roles and stories. As the novel draws to a close, Patchett celebrates this reserve, accelerating through scenes of connection: a beach trip, a party, a talk on the porch. The gatherings suggest that talismanic word, abundance. They portray a kind of land wealth—a richness of common ground.

In “Tom Lake,” Patchett’s ninth and newest novel (Harper), members of a summer theatre troupe in rural Michigan in the nineteen-eighties coalesce into something like an incestuous family. They share housing, meals, and beds; their community is rife with intense, fleeting intimacies. As the group is putting on a production of “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder, the actress cast as Emily, the play’s ingénue, drops out. A young performer named Lara arrives to pinch-hit. Lara didn’t formally study theatre, but she has an uncanny ability to inhabit the role. “He understood what he was looking at,” she says of one director. “A pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing.”

At Tom Lake, the town where the troupe is based, Lara is greeted by the cast as star, savior, and potential love interest. She has eyes only for twenty-eight-year-old Peter Duke, who plays Emily’s father. Within days, she and Duke are spending all their time together, rehearsing, having sex, or swimming in the lake. The summer becomes a blur of overlapping absorptions—in Wilder’s language, in the water, in one another. “We wore our swimsuits under our clothes and ran to the lake in lieu of eating lunch,” Lara recalls. “We could get from the stage to being nearly naked and fully submerged in four minutes flat.”

Tom Lake is a fairy tale, a conjunction of person, time, and place, and it is as transient as any idyll, slipping through Lara’s fingers even as half a day seems to last “a solid six months.” “No one gets to go on playing Emily forever,” she thinks, preëmptively grieving. The curtain falls sooner than she expects. On the tennis court, Lara ruptures her Achilles tendon; her understudy, a magnetic Black dancer named Pallace, steps into the Emily part. Watching her friend take the stage, Lara later remembers, “I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.” When the summer ends, Duke goes on to a wildly successful career in Hollywood. Lara quits acting, marries a cherry farmer, and becomes a mother.

In the spring of 2020, at the start of the COVID -19 lockdown, Lara, now fifty-seven, is sheltering in place on the family farm with her husband, Joe Nelson, and their three twentysomething daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell. With harvesters scarce, the Nelsons have to pick and process their own fruit; to make the time go by faster, Lara tells the girls about her brief career as an actor.

The early pandemic, with its claustrophobic intimacy, seems almost tailor-made for Patchett’s interests. “Tom Lake” is about being caught in an intractable family situation. It is about being constrained by one’s role—in this case, motherhood—and it is about the transformations wrought by the passage of time and the search for confinement’s upsides. The seasonal beauty of the fruit trees evokes the ephemeral loveliness of youth, romance, and fame; the novel, which is haunted by classics of theatre, repeatedly invokes Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” as if Lara, like that play’s central character, were lost in a reverie about herself in her prime.

But Patchett airs the suggestion that Lara is stranded in the past only to gently put it to rest. Despite Duke’s “ubiquitous presence in the world,” Lara notices, scrubbing a lasagna pan to the strains of one of his movies, “I thought of him remarkably little.” Chekhov, with his warnings about the hazards of nostalgia, turns out to be a red herring; a bigger portion of the book’s soul resides in “Our Town,” Wilder’s play about daily life which ends in a cemetery, where the dead are “weaned away from the earth.” Lara uses the text as a touchstone, channelling its mood of elegiac acceptance as she carefully detaches herself from her old wounds and triumphs:

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.

Lara’s thinking here feels infused with sensitivity to the personal—to the vividness of life as it pierces a single subject—but the immediacy of pain and joy has mellowed, over time, into something richer and stranger. “Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before,” Lara says of Duke. Later: “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.”

A story is artificial, which means it can be fun. Lara isn’t so much recalling the summer of 1988 as she is performing it—playing both her younger self and her current one, selectively concocting a PG-rated soap opera for her wide-eyed Zoomers. She finesses, elides. “I’m not telling them the good parts,” she says, meaning the incredible sex with Duke. The girls, participating in the game, cast themselves as a socially progressive Greek chorus. “You can’t say ‘crazy,’ ” one interrupts. When Lara describes Pallace’s “preposterous” legs, they protest that she is objectifying her.

In these scenes, the source of Lara’s contentment is sweetly obvious. When Nell laments the celebrity Lara could perhaps have been, she exclaims, “Look at this! Look at the three of you! You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?” The pandemic portions of the book conjure an adult world of trade-offs and compromise, in which family offers abundant recompense for lacklustre Google search results. The girls themselves are delicious creations. Emily is fiery; Maisie, a veterinarian-in-training, is sensible; Nell is intuitive, the most in tune with her mother. She shares Lara’s fanciful streak and sometimes wears lipstick to go cherry picking. Musing about whether to pursue an argument with one of her daughters, Lara thinks, “I will always be afraid of waking up the part of Emily that has long been dormant. I will always be afraid of accidentally breaking something in Nell that is fragile and pure. But Maisie is up for it; no one will ever worry about Maisie.”

In other words, the ingredients have been assembled for a wistful meditation on mothers and daughters learning to handle the seasons of their lives. “Tom Lake” guides Lara to equanimity and closure, mostly by awakening her to the value of the people around her. Here, as in much of Patchett’s work, togetherness compensates for loss; being with others, even if they’re not exactly the others you wanted and you’re not with them in exactly the right way, is a genuine form of flourishing.

But the novel’s alchemical transformation of pain into peace feels, at times, overstated. In “Bel Canto,” gunfire interrupted the harmony Patchett painstakingly built between terrorists and captives. “Tom Lake” softens such dissonance. Lara doesn’t just acquiesce to her second act; she discovers that the convergence of motherhood, lockdown, and fruit harvesting has created “the happiest time of my life.” The interlude, she thinks, is “joy itself.” (Nell’s opinion: “I want to get the hell out of this orchard.”) For Lara, the farm is not an earthly place; its red-and-white fields ripple with magic. Amid a “pointillist’s dream” of fruit trees, she can play all her roles at once, reënacting her glory days at Tom Lake, parenting her grown children, and indulging the maternal prerogative of steering the family narrative. Lara sees the selves she’s shed throughout her life jumbled and reallocated among her daughters. Nell shares her “naturalness” onstage, “an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away.” Emily, her most difficult child, she construes as a fugitive piece of her own soul: “No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here.” The farm holds, or has held, or will hold, all the people Lara loves. It even encompasses a graveyard—with tangled daisies, a “pretty iron fence,” and “benevolent shade”—where generations of Joe’s family are buried. The Nelsons “resting beneath the mossy slabs . . . had never wanted to be anywhere else,” Lara thinks, projecting her bliss upon the dead.

“Tom Lake” collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in “Our Town.” Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled with lichen.” Lara herself “would lie in the grass between the graves, so pregnant with Maisie I wondered if I’d be able to get up again, and Emily would weave back and forth between the granite slabs, hiding then leaping out to make me laugh.”

As “Tom Lake” goes on, the determined positivity begins to feel slightly menacing, or at least constrictive. Is Lara really that happy? Or is she hiding inside the myth of her happiness to avoid confronting her daughters’ unhappiness and her own shortcomings as a parent? I was tempted into a paranoid reading of the three Nelson girls, scanning for covert signs of distress. Nell, like her mother, dreams of the stage, but she is stuck wearing sad quarantine lipstick, thumbing through plays in her bedroom at night, and practicing lines with her friends over Zoom. Dependable Maisie is always off to deliver a litter of puppies or tend to a calf with diarrhea. Was she forced to grow up too soon? Meanwhile, Emily declares her intention not to procreate. Her decision is a poignant nod to climate change, but it could also be glossed as a salvo against a controlling parent.

Ultimately, though, the novel endorses Lara’s rosy perspective. The girls gratefully receive the tale of Tom Lake—“I’m not sorry to know,” Maisie assures her mom—and the family draws closer. With cherries harvested and blessings scattered, the cast convenes joyfully in the cemetery. Lara thinks, “There is room up here for all of us.” The scene seems oddly unreal, like plastic flowers on a grave. Yet there’s something subversively wise and self-aware about the book’s investment in its own fantasy. “Tom Lake,” the fiction, seems conscious of its status as a magical place, a locus of gentle make-believe. Even as Patchett validates Lara’s performance of contentment, she appears to know that behind the artifice lies a more complicated truth. The same might be said of the graveyard itself, with its friendly daisies and eternally fulfilled ancestors. Strip away the props: there, perhaps, is Forest Lawn cemetery, in Los Angeles, where Patchett and her father were briefly resurrected into one another’s lives. ♦

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Mostly what god does: reflections on seeking and finding his love everywhere audible audiobook – unabridged.

Read by the author.

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Guthrie persuasively renders the evolution of a hard-won religious belief that makes room for imperfection and "does not require us to ignore... the sorrows we experience or the unjustness we see but to believe past it." This openhearted offering inspires.— Publishers Weekly

Mostly what God does is love you.

If we could believe this, really believe this, how different would we be? How different would our lives be? How different would our world be?

If you ever struggle with your connection to God (or whether you even feel connected to a faith at all!), you're not alone. Especially in our modern world, with its relentless, never-ending news cycle, we can all grapple with such questions. Do we do that alone, with despair and resignation? Or do we make sense of it with God, and with hope? In these uncertain times, could believing in the power of divine love make the most sense?

In this collection of essays, Savannah Guthrie shares why she believes it does. Unspooling personal stories from her own joys and sorrows as a daughter, mother, wife, friend, and professional journalist, the award-winning TODAY show coanchor and New York Times bestselling author explores the place of faith in everyday life.

Sharing hard-won wisdom forged from mountaintop triumphs, crushing failures, and even the mundane moments of day-to-day living, Mostly What God Does reveals the transformative ways that belief in God helps us discover real hope for this life and beyond.

A perfect companion to your morning cup of coffee, this incisive volume—not a memoir but a beautiful tapestry of reflections crafted as a spiritual manual—includes:

• a fresh, biblically rooted look at six essentials of faith: love, presence, grace, hope, gratitude, and purpose;
• an honest exploration of questions, doubts, and fears about the love of God;
• a dose of encouragement for the faith-full, the faith-curious, and the faith-less; and
• …and much more.

This deeply personal collection is designed to engage the practical ways that God loves you—not just the world, but you—and to inspire you to venture down a path of faith that is authentic, hopeful, destiny-shaping, and ultimately life-changing.

The diagram can be found in the audiobook companion PDF download.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

• Listening Length 5 hours and 19 minutes
• Author Savannah Guthrie
• Narrator Savannah Guthrie
• Audible release date February 20, 2024
• Language English
• Publisher Thomas Nelson
• ASIN B0CK9S123W
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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• PICTURE QUOTES
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68 Book Review Quotes To Inspire You

Following is our list of the most famous book review quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational book review quotes. Hopefully, these book review quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your book review knowledge!

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• Famous Book Review Quotes

Short Book Review Quotes

More book review quotes, the most famous book review quotes.

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Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. — Kurt Vonnegut 87

Book is the new cool for the txt generation — Erica Wagner 0

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. — Walter Benjamin 25

Write your own book instead of reading someone else's book about success — Herb Brooks 65

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents. — Friedrich Nietzsche 0

Beware the man of the single book — Bertrand Russell 0

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it. — Edward P. Morgan 71

We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal. — Friedrich Nietzsche 0

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. — James McCosh 48

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. — Gail Hamilton 0

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. — John Steinbeck 71

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. — Walter Benjamin 65

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it. — Danielle Steel 48

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. — John Milton 32

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way. — Caroline Gordon 43

• A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story. — Chip Kidd
• Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author. — Jean De La Bruyere
• Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. — Salman Rushdie
• Books succeed, and lives fail. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. — Henry Miller
• A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. — Mark Twain
• The abundance of books is distraction — Seneca

People Writing About Book Review

As I’ve reviewed Schwab’s work, he reminds me of a stage magician, diverting your attention with one hand, so you don’t see what he’s doing with the other. It’s easy to be fooled, as Schwab is comfortable with the kind of gee-whiz, ain’t it cool, upbeat, pop psychology business books that were once so popular. One can view him as a well-trained persuader, but once you see the game he’s playing, it’s difficult to retain any respect for him. — Alex Jones 74

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. — John Updike 52

It may sound a bit like an army barracks, but the truth of the matter is: there must be some time laid aside for arranging, time for working on either a book or an article - I've written two articles in the last four months for the New York Times book review section. — Mel Torme 51

There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press...and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs. — Eugene McCarthy 33

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention. — William S. Burroughs 24

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up. — Cyril Connolly 23

One cannot review a bad book without showing off. — W. H. Auden 15

If I begin my book with a review of the coup, it is only to show that my abiding interests for Australia did not end with it. They shall end only with a long and fortunate life. — Gough Whitlam 14

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books. — Richard Ford 9

I’m interested in so many different things and I’d like to cover a lot of territory. I’m trying to see my show as the Sunday Times. You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review...even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships. — Joy Behar 9

I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them. — John Grisham 9

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. — George Orwell 8

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular. — Christopher Hitchens 8

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off. — W. H. Auden 8

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. — Robert Anton Wilson 6

The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book. — Dorothy Parker 6

I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed. — Gregory Maguire 5

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics. — Isaac Bashevis Singer 5

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. — Evelyn Waugh 4

We set up a beta site, a test site, with movie, music and book reviews. If you're reading them and you want to buy a book or a ticket for a movie that's reviewed on the site, you can do that without leaving our site. — Jay Chiat 4

I had many wonderful experiences, received beautiful letters, and my Christian books received substantive and thoughtful reviews. But there was always argument, dispute, questions as to what I "really" believed, lectures from here and there on "the real truth," etc. — Anne Rice 4

There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient. — Agnes Repplier 4

Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed. — Sara Paretsky 4

I look at 'The New York Review of Books.' It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred. — John Podhoretz 4

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books. — Anna Quindlen 3

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. — Anne Lamott 3

Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers. — Garry Wills 3

The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book. — Louis Aragon 3

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books. — Anthony Doerr 3

Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned. — Alfred North Whitehead 3

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus. — Austin O'Malley 3

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means — Clifford Geertz 3

A mom reads you like a book, and wherever she goes, people read you like a glowing book review. — Robert Breault 3

Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes. — John O'Hara 3

There is interest in a crime-based reality show. With my novels, we are now editing the second book in a series about a defense lawyer whose name is Samantha Brinkman. And I am reviewing speaking engagement opportunities. — Marcia Clark 2

The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum. — Lev Grossman 2

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc. — Alexander Theroux 2

I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities. — Anton Chekhov 2

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan. — Stephen Jay Gould 2

When I reviewed Hayek's book, The Pure Theory of Capital, it is my sincere conviction that this work contains some of the most penetrating thoughts on the subject that have ever been published. — Fritz Machlup 2

Ads answered out of desperation in the New York Review of Books proved equally futile as…the 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires. — Woody Allen 2

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time. — Manuel Puig 2

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. — Sydney Smith 1

The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.' — Sasa Stanisic 1

I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong. — Antony Beevor 1

In Conclusion

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OF TIME AND TURTLES

Mending the world, shell by shattered shell.

by Sy Montgomery ; illustrated by Matt Patterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2023

An engaging, informative, and colorful journey into the world of turtles.

A celebration of a magnificent animal.

Melding science and memoir, naturalist Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus , The Hummingbirds’ Gift , and other celebrated nature books, shares her experiences as a volunteer at the Turtle Rescue League, in Massachusetts, where, along with wildlife artist Patterson, she worked laboriously to care for “the most imperiled major group of animals on earth.” Turtles fall victim to myriad threats: They are often run over by vehicles, “dogs and cats chew them, lawn mowers and farm equipment shred them, curious children harass and kidnap them, and asphalt and concrete displace their nesting areas.” Some are caught in the illegal wildlife trade: “A single Yunnan box turtle could command $200,000 on the black market. A Chinese three-striped box turtle, whose powdered plastron is rumored (incorrectly) to cure cancer, can fetch as much as $25,000.” Turtle eggs are vulnerable to predators such as raccoons and skunks and even trees, whose roots will penetrate the eggs to suck moisture in times of drought. Besides conveying the turtle’s amazing longevity and capacity for healing—they are able to regenerate nerve tissue—Montgomery offers vivid portraits of the distinct personalities of patients under the care of the heroic TRL staff: Among the many box turtles, spotted turtles, sea turtles, tortoises, and painted turtles were the feisty Fire Chief, a huge great snapper; the beloved painted turtle Sugarloaf; and gregarious red-footed tortoise Pizza Man. Each had a special relationship to caregivers— and to one another. Montgomery was surprised to learn that turtles communicate verbally. “Some species of Australian and South American river turtle nestlings,” she reveals, “communicate vocally with each other, and with their mothers, while still inside the egg.” Montgomery is justifiably admiring of the devoted TRL staff, who work to heal, restore, and rehabilitate their injured patients so they can be released back into the wild. The book includes Patterson’s delicate drawings.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023

ISBN: 9780358458180

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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by Sy Montgomery ; illustrated by Tiffany Bozic

by Sy Montgomery ; illustrated by Matt Patterson

by Sy Montgomery ; photographed by Tianne Strombeck

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | POLITICS

More by Walter Isaacson

by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

by Walter Isaacson

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE ELEPHANTS OF THULA THULA

by Françoise Malby-Anthony with Kate Sidley ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2023

A heartwarming and inspiring story for animal lovers.

The third volume in the Elephant Whisperer series.

In this follow-up to An Elephant in My Kitchen , Malby-Anthony continues her loving portrait of the Thula Thula wildlife reserve, which she co-founded in 1998 with her late husband, South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony, who published the first book in the series, The Elephant Whisperer , in 2009. Following his death in 2012, Malby-Anthony sought to honor his legacy by continuing his vision “to create a massive conservancy in Zululand, incorporating our land and other small farms and community land into one great big game park.” At the same time, the elephants gave her “a sense of purpose and direction.” In the Zulu language, thula means quiet , and though the author consistently seeks to provide that calm to her charges, peace and tranquility are not always easy to come by at Thula Thula. In this installment, Malby-Anthony discusses many of the challenges faced by her and her staff, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. These included an aggressive, 2-ton rhino named Thabo; the profound loss felt by all upon the death of their elephant matriarch, Frankie; difficulty obtaining permits and the related risk of having to relocate or cull some of their animals; the fear of looting and fire due to civil unrest in the region; and the ongoing and potentially deadly struggles with poachers. Throughout, the author also shares many warm, lighthearted moments, demonstrating the deep bond felt among the humans and animals at the reserve and the powerful effects of the kindness of strangers. “We are all working in unity for the greater good, for the betterment of Thula Thula and all our wildlife….We are humbled by the generosity and love, both from our guests and friends, and from strangers all around the world,” writes the author. “People’s open-hearted support kept us alive in the darkest times.”

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9781250284259

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS

More by Françoise Malby-Anthony

by Françoise Malby-Anthony with Katja Willemsen

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