Also of interest ...

The Downhill Lie

by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $22)

Give Carl Hiaasen credit for turning a shameless bid for Father’s Day gift buyers into an entertaining read, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Though this slim account of Hiaasen’s return to recreational golf after a 32-year hiatus is “skimmable” in parts, his “foolproof comic timing” and “fine-tuned sense of the absurd” will please even fathers who wouldn’t recognize a low fade if it hit them.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

Everyday Drinking

by Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $20)

When it came to drinking, British novelist Kingsley Amis was “reflexively opposed to snobbish appeal,” said Eric Felten in The Wall Street Journal. Amis’ fans will not be surprised that the first of the “general principles” he shares in this “wickedly funny” collection of old drinking columns is that, within reason, a host buying alcohol should always go for quantity over quality. And you can be sure his hangover cures are based on experience.

Inventing Niagara

by Ginger Strand (Simon & Schuster, $25)

It’s annoying when a writer believes that the story of her obsession with a subject is as interesting as the subject itself, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. Several of Ginger Strand’s other narrative gambits may also try your patience, but the author does have some “startling, interesting things to say” about Niagara Falls and its history. To Strand, the legendary honeymoon destination is a “monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature.”

Leisureville

by Andrew D. Blechman (Atlantic Monthly, $25)

Andrew Blechman is more disturbed by Sun Belt retirement communities than his readers likely will ever be, said Glenn Ruffenach in The Wall Street Journal. In Leisureville, Blechman “sounds the alarm” about all the golf, tennis, and sex he witnessed in one gated utopia in Florida. But because he is a “thorough reporter,” his chronicle reveals that the need for companionship, much more than hedonism, motivates these seniors.

The River Queen

by Mary Morris (Holt, $24)

Mary Morris’ second memoir never lives up to its premise, said Kevin Nance in the Chicago Sun-Times. When her father dies and her only daughter leaves for college, the Brooklyn-based author decides to take a Huck Finn–ish odyssey down the Mississippi River in a decrepit houseboat. Unfortunately, there’s a “slack, dispirited quality” to many of the adventures she recounts, and her end-of-the-journey epiphanies feel “unearned and possibly contrived.”