The Spies of Warsaw
by Alan Furst (Random House, $25)
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Ghost
by Fred Burton (Random House, $26)
When a real-life spy shares his story, sticking to “well-worn formula” can
be a virtue, said June Thomas in Slate.com. In Fred Burton’s long career with the Diplomatic Security Service, he apparently didn’t miss any of the training in “studiously displayed stoicism.” Still, “he supplies just enough scoop on his role chasing terrorists to keep things interesting.”
The Pixar Touch
by David A. Price (Knopf, $28)
“Businesspeople and creative artists alike” could learn from reading David Price’s deeply reported history of Pixar Studios, said Paul Boutin in The Wall Street Journal. Conventional wisdom has it that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs gave the phenomenally successful animation house its magic dust. But a chief lesson of Price’s well-told tale is that “no one invents anything in isolation.”
How to Be Useful
by Megan Hustad (Houghton Mifflin, $20)
This “clever” book is the perfect career guide “for the comp-lit graduate seeking to make it big in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, or Capitol Hill,” said Daniel Gross in Newsweek. After surveying a century’s worth of business-advice literature, former book editor Megan Hustad passes on the true pearls, repurposing them with “telling anecdotes from the contemporary workplace.”
Black Flies
by Shannon Burke (Soft Skull, $15)
This “arresting” new novel about a rookie paramedic in Harlem serves as “shock treatment for the conscience,” said Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times. Author Shannon Burke worked the same streets as his protagonist, so he knows how easy it is to be hardened by the job into someone unrecognizable. The most vivid scenes in Black Flies are “mercilessly detailed,” and the novel “contains more reflections of lived experience than some memoirs.”
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August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
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5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
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Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
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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.”