Also of interest ... in American snapshots
The Day Wall Street Exploded by Beverly Gage; Nine Lives by Dan Baum; The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser; Down at the Docks by Rory Nugent
The Day Wall Street Exploded
by Beverly Gage (Oxford, $27.95)
Sept. 11, 2001, was hardly the first time terrorists have attacked New York’s Financial District, said Devin Leonard in The New York Times. Beverly Gage’s “engaging narrative” recounts how, 81 years earlier, someone detonated a shrapnel-filled bomb on Wall Street that killed 38. Officials soon “shredded civil-rights laws” searching for the culprits, whom they never caught. Parallels to today’s war on terror abound, but Gage “leaves it to her readers to draw their own connections.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Nine Lives
by Dan Baum (Spiegel & Grau, $26)
Dan Baum’s “kaleidoscopic, quick-cut” narratives follow nine New Orleans residents from the 1960s to the present day, said Jerry Shriver in USA Today. The New Yorker writer “paints incredibly intimate portraits” of a transsexual bartender, a “jazz-blowing” coroner, and other folks who could only exist in the Crescent
City. Though his lively collage can be “unwieldy,” his sympathy for working-class struggles and his nose for “gut-wrenching and life-affirming” stories are frequently reminiscent of Studs Terkel.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
The Gardner Heist
by Ulrich Boser (Collins, $26)
Ulrich Boser has created a “thrill” of a book from the greatest unsolved art theft in history, said Kriston Capps in the London Guardian. No, Boser’s own investigation hasn’t turned up any of the three Rembrandts or 10 other masterpieces that were lifted from Boston’s Gardner Museum on March 19, 1990. But his account does shed new light on the case as the author follows “whispers in the underworld” and encounters a colorful cast of crime figures, “hard-nosed FBI agents,” and various art-world obsessives.
Down at the Docks
by Rory Nugent (Pantheon, $25)
The waterfront of New Bedford, Mass., is a “Mafia-infested wilderness” in Rory Nugent’s elegiac “memoir of place,” said Alan Littell in the San Francisco Chronicle. “We tread in his wake” past fish houses, crack houses, and whorehouses, soaking up the author’s vignettes about “down-and-out fishermen, dope peddlers, insurance cheats, schemers of every stripe.” Though superfluous profanity clutters his otherwise crisp prose, Nugent “has a nose for sleaze,” and “he evokes it with panache.”
-
7 restaurants that beat winter at its own chilly game
The Week Recommends Classic, new and certain to feed you well
By Scott Hocker, The Week US Published
-
Crossword: December 24, 2024
The Week's daily crossword
By The Week Staff Published
-
Sudoku medium: December 24, 2024
The Week's daily medium sudoku puzzle
By The Week Staff Published