America’s Great Game
by Hugh Wilford (Basic, $30)
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Vanished
by Wil S. Hylton (Riverhead, $28)
Wil Hylton’s tale about the search for 11 lost World War II airmen is “a remarkable achievement,” said John B. Saul in The Seattle Times. Blending military history with intimate personal dramas, Hylton connects readers with the hope that long sustained the soldiers’ families, then makes the search come alive by focusing on a biotech magnate who funded the hunt. We hear too much about the technical challenges of underwater searches, yet Vanished engages a reader “to the last page.”
Priscilla
by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harper, $28)
To young Nicholas Shakespeare, his Aunt Priscilla was a living legend, said Anna Shapiro in The New York Times. In this sometimes sensational biography of an Englishwoman who married into French royalty and survived internment in a Nazi camp, the British novelist uses a trove of archived writings to pick apart the mystery of his glamorous forebear. Though the truth about how she survived turns out to be less inspiring than the myth, that truth is arguably more touching.
Red Fortress
by Catherine Merridale (Metropolitan, $35)
Catherine Merridale’s deep-dive portrait of the Kremlin could serve beautifully as a single-volume chronicle of Russian culture “from the dawn of recorded history to the arrival of Vladimir Putin,” said Edward Lucas in The Wall Street Journal. Untangling the facts about Moscow’s greatest landmark isn’t easy, but Merridale “does a brilliant job of piecing together the clues of the past” as she shows us why the 500-year-old complex is an object of both ridicule and national pride.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”