Facing the Wave
by Gretel Ehrlich
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The Year Without Summer
by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
(St. Martin’s, $28)
This account of a planet-altering volcanic eruption “has a busy narrative itinerary,” said Daniel Dyer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora killed well over 90,000 people, darkened skies, drastically cooled temperatures, wilted crops, and may have even led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Though dry at times, this well-researched work keeps the alarming details “cascading like lava.”
Wave
by Sonali Deraniyagala
(Knopf, $24)
If this isn’t the saddest story ever told, “it’s the saddest I ever want to hear,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Sri Lankan–born economist Sonali Deraniyagala was visiting her home country when 2004’s Indian Ocean tsunami struck, killing her husband, parents, and two children. That shock comes first, in a book that “opens beneath you like a sinkhole.” Anger, guilt, and thoughts of suicide follow—made somewhat bearable by “the author’s gift for evoking her life before everything changed.”
Falling to Earth
by Kate Southwood
(Europa, $16)
The 1925 “Tri-State Tornado,” which killed nearly 700 people, serves “quite appropriately as the hand of fate” in Kate Southwood’s promising first novel, said Nicholas Mancusi in TheDailyBeast.com. Here, the twister destroys every building in an Illinois town except a lumberyard, setting the owning family on another tragic path when they must contend with their neighbors’ resentment. Southwood’s prose, with its “razor-sharp images” of life on the prairie, “is reminiscent of Willa Cather’s.”
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August 9 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include snake oil salesmen, Ghislaine Maxwell's new residence, and more
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5 hastily redrawn cartoons about redistrictingCartoons Artists take on Donald Trump's draughtsmanship, the White House ballroom, and more
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Bonnie Blue: taking clickbait to extremesTalking Point Channel 4 claims documentary on the adult performer's attention-grabbing sex stunts is opening up a debate
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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.”