Like “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed” strides genres. Nguyen delivers a literary thriller that’s part political novel, part historical novel and part comic novel. He trades the conventions of the spy novel of the first book for crime. Gangsters, drug dealing, turf wars and shootouts propel hairpin plot-twists and belie an ambitious book of ideas.
“I thought that there would be a sweet spot for readers who would be willing to grapple with serious ideas and be entertained at the same time,” Nguyen says.
In 2019, Larry Persily, owner of the Skagway News, announced that he would give away his local Alaskan publication to a person or a pair demonstrating journalistic skill, self-motivation, grit, and—above all—affectionate dedication to the quirks and quiddities of rural small-town reporting. National news outlets picked up the story as a sort of lark, emphasizing the remote and small-town nature of Skagway, the rarity of the giveaway, and then, in a few short lines, the challenges of sustaining critical local news coverage. In such stories, Persily was a Willy Wonka figure, courting a successor.
Among the applicants were Melinda Munson and Gretchen Wehmhoff, teachers in the Anchorage area who cowrote a blog for Alaskan families. Munson and Wehmhoff envisioned a dream job not unlike that conjured in headlines: the freedom to write and the promise of a place in a tight-knit community. Over the course of months, Munson and Wehmhoff had several intense phone interviews with Persily; for some, they met in a room in the school building with the lights off, to avoid drawing the attention of their principal.
You know the old story about storks delivering babies? It’s true. I can prove it with statistics. Take a look at the estimated population of storks in each country, and then at the number of babies born each year. Across Europe, there’s a remarkably strong relationship. More storks, more babies; fewer storks, fewer babies.
The pattern is easily strong enough to pass a traditional hurdle for publication in an academic journal. In fact, a scientific paper has been published with the title “Storks Deliver Babies (p = 0.008).” Without getting too technical, all those zeros tell us that this is not a coincidence.
Pantone’s founder once said, “God created the world in seven days. And on the eighth day, he called Pantone to put color into it.” That seems a little presumptuous. Who put Pantone in charge of color? And why should Pantone decide the Color (or Colors) of the Year? What is Pantone anyway?
“Later” is yet another example of King’s talent in building stories out of the materials of his choosing, and like so many of his creations, it’s remarkable how well the thing holds together. The pace and ease of reading, the ratio of familiar to new. A roller coaster made of Legos is still a roller coaster, and even if I’ve been on this ride before it doesn’t make it any less fun.
The books America cooked from during 2020 will stand as cultural artifacts of the year when a virus forced an entire nation into the kitchen.
Why bury the lede? Sherry Turkle’s memoir, “The Empathy Diaries,” is a beautiful book. It has gravity and grace; it’s as inexorable as a fable; it drills down into the things that make a life; it works to make sense of existence on both its coded and transparent levels; it feels like an instant classic of the genre.
Lying is ubiquitous. Why should it be otherwise? There are far more reasons to lie than to tell the truth. Isn’t lying beneficial? Often, it is. And the importance of truth-telling — is it a fiction we tell ourselves? A fairy tale? A form of self-deception? Our original lie?
And yet we have this absurd belief that we are truth-tellers, or at least that we’re capable of occasionally telling the truth.
Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment; time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are. Rigorous analysis and science journalism, the form in which Kolbert truly excels, is needed now more than ever. But alongside it, to enrich it, there should be other stories too: tender, careful investigations into the feelings that drive and shape our efforts to save the world.
In her new book, “Appropriate,” Redkal addresses the conundrum of cultural appropriation with patience and care. She is deliberate as she picks her way through questions, focusing on literature, with close readings of poetry and prose that give heft to her case. The book’s power comes from its slow progress and occasional reversals, so a summary feels unfair, but her basic thesis is that culture is situated in its moment; careful consideration of where each of us is in that moment informs what we create, how we read, what literature is lifted up and what is left out.