The Land of Green Plums
by Herta Müller
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Only a few novels by Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate, have been published in English. This 1994 work tells the story of a young woman in Communist Romania who moves to the city to get an education. But instead of getting ahead, said Larry Wolff in The New York Times, she “has brutal sexual encounters, hangs herself with a belt, and is posthumously expelled from the Communist Party.” Müller’s dark take on Nicolae Ceausescu’s police state “reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity, and brutality.”
The Children’s Book
by A.S. Byatt
(Doubleday, $27)
This “tour de force” of historical fiction was a finalist for the Booker Prize, said Brooke Allen in The Wall Street Journal. Byatt constructs her novel around an Edwardian-era fairy-tale writer who “ends up destroying the child she loves best.” It tracks dozens of characters among a circle of bohemian adults who chase utopian fantasies. Byatt’s sympathies “are unreservedly” with the children, and the flawed “Mother Goose” character “will haunt the reader months after the book is closed.”
Lessons in Disaster
by Gordon Goldstein
(Holt, $16)
Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s top advisor on Afghanistan, has made this paperback a “must-read” in the White House, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. In a review Holbrooke wrote for the Times last year, he called this book about McGeorge Bundy, an architect of the Vietnam war, “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” Its great achievement, Holbrooke said, is that it shows, better than any book before, how “a man of surpassing skill” could wind up providing two presidents with terrible advice.
A Better War
by Lewis Sorley
(Harvest, $16)
White House staffers may be reading Lessons in Disaster, but U.S. military leaders have been passing around this “far more timely and applicable” 1999 book, said Fred Barnes in WeeklyStandard.com. Lewis Sorley contends that, by 1968, American troops using counterinsurgency methods had all but won the Vietnam War. Both Vietnam and the “surge” of troops in Iraq prove that counterinsurgency tactics work. Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan “should be a no-brainer.”
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