In this intrepid memoir, Russian political dissident Navalny, who died under suspicious circumstances last February, recaps his career fighting against what he depicts as a kleptocratic bureaucracy. After Putin’s rise to power in 1999, Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation exposed massive theft committed by government officials, state-owned companies, and Putin himself. Navalny ran for office several times, including for the presidency in 2018; his campaigns were thwarted by bureaucratic interference and trumped-up corruption charges. In 2020, Navalny suffered a near-fatal poisoning, allegedly by Russian intelligence services. The book’s second half comprises Navalny’s prison diary after his incarceration in 2021; in it he denounces Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, gets convicted of more corruption charges, and weathers subtler torments (“The fluorescent light is now flashing brightly at random intervals.... It’s impossible to read”). His narrative is full of mordant humor—“in Volgograd, thirty Cossacks... tried to drag me out of the headquarters by my legs, while my supporters were pulling me back inside by my arms”—and Kafkaesque absurdism. (His application to see a prison dentist was “withdrawn by the censors as containing evidence of a crime.”) Navalny faces demoralizing injustice with good grace, enduring it with simple appeals to decency and poetic evocations of his homeland (“I love the melancholic landscapes, when you look out of the window and want to cry; it’s just wonderful”). It’s a stirring final testament. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this poetic, quietly moving ode to his deceased mother, the painter Sue Bird, cartoonist Bird (The Great North Wood) arranges a duet between his comics and her paintings. Tim recalls a home and childhood full of Sue’s artwork—a librarian with working class roots who grew up in the 1960s, Sue was an enthusiastic lifelong learner who “loved to paint the sea” but was not particularly interested in selling the results. After her death, Tim uncovers a discrepancy in a family story about a contest his mother won as a child, but it’s not a portal into a secret life. Rather, he discovers that “there are always mysteries—big or small—that go unanswered when you think you know everything about someone. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.” In a dialogue of sorts, Sue’s rich oil landscapes and still lives are interspersed throughout, along with a scrapbook of her letters and documents. Like his mother’s paintings, Tim’s narrative allows for physical and temporal space to bloom, though his touch is lighter and flatter. The final image depicts an elderly Sue in a small boat on a starlit ocean, as if Tim is granting her wish to be near the sea eternally. It’s an elegant and eclectic tribute to art as antidote to grief. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

“Leading companies... have much to learn about survival and success from family owned companies,” according to this informative guide. Business consultants DeCiantis and Lansberg (Succeeding Generations) assert that family companies use “seven building blocks of stability” to persevere amid political and economic turmoil, including entering new markets when resources become scarce and “investing in backup resources and processes for all essential systems.” Illustrating the seven tenets with real-world examples, DeCiantis and Lansberg suggest family businesses thrive by targeting “an underserved niche in conditions hostile to traditional competition,” recounting how the AJE Group, a Peruvian soft drink company, was founded in the late 1980s by the Añaños family to fill the void created after rebels opposed to multinational corporations drove Coca-Cola and Pepsi from the country. Though the authors make the fascinating argument that family businesses flourish in turbulent markets because familial relationships provide the structure and stability that’s lacking from society at large, several of the case studies indicate that cozy relationships with the state might be just as important (Japanese construction company Kongo Gumi prospered for around 1,500 years thanks to their “treasured relationships with the Imperial Court,” for instance). Still, this provides an insightful dissection of the strengths of family businesses. Agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Artists. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

Psychiatrist Gold discusses how she neglected her own mental health while caring for others at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in her touching and raw debut. Long considered a close listener and empathetic friend, Gold found psychiatric medicine a natural fit. Over the years, however, she came to realize that her focus on others was “as much a way to distract myself from my own feelings and struggles as... an act of selflessness and meaning.” She traces her journey toward better self-care and more stable mental health while providing a behind-the-curtain peek at the life of a therapist, sharing how she and her colleagues stay alert on off days and highlighting her work with several clients during the pandemic, including a medical resident who obsessively worried that he’d contract Covid and a nurse scarred by the death of one of her patients. Candidly illustrating both the hard work of talk therapy and the toll it can take on practitioners, Gold admirably exposes her own failings (she was late to several Zoom meetings and called patients by the wrong names during the peak of the pandemic). It’s an eye-opener. Agent: Kristin van Ogtrop, InkWell Management. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

Andrews and Wilson’s second entry in Clancy’s Jack Ryan series (after Act of Defiance) is a solid shoot-’em-up centered on tensions between China and the United States. At the outset, China’s defense minister and top diplomat have just been “disappeared.” The new defense minister, Qin Haiyu, has authored a plan to reintegrate Taiwan into mainland China, which Chinese president Li is preparing to execute despite its likelihood of igniting a war with the U.S. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Katie Ryan—President Jack Ryan’s daughter—is an up-and-coming analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Hoping to avert a war, Qin warns the Americans of the looming attack on Taiwan, setting the stage for a clash between President Ryan and President Li. Katie leads the U.S. effort against China alongside John Clark, director of operations for a secret task force called the Campus. With the exception of an intriguing new character—a Chinese superspy for the Americans known as “the Spider”—this is mostly business as usual, with Katie now firmly established as one of the Ryan family’s freedom fighters. Series fans will be satisfied. Agent: Tracy Fisher, WME. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Hilburn (Paul Simon) serves up an affectionate tribute to Randy Newman, the singer-songwriter and film score composer best known for “I Love L.A.” and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Born in 1943 into a musical family (uncles Alfred, Lionel, and Emil composed scores for Hollywood films), Newman developed an early love for classical piano. He shifted his focus to pop music as a teen before becoming a professional songwriter as a young adult. Capturing the full sweep of Newman’s career, Hilburn examines how his self-conscious wit and predilection for character-driven storytelling, combined with his “Jewish intellectualism, political liberalism and a healthy dose of contrarianism,” resulted in lyrics that critiqued the moral state of American society. For example, 1983’s “Song for the Dead,” which is narrated by an American soldier stationed in Southeast Asia who must bury his dead comrades, interrogates the sacrifices made to support the Vietnam War. Throughout, Hilburn astutely analyzes how Newman uses literary devices like the unreliable narrator to probe the absurdities of “a strange and tragic period in [America’s] history.” In the process, Hilburn makes clear, Newman broadened the boundaries of what pop music can do. The result is an intimately detailed portrait of a vital American songwriter. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

A storied episode of airborne combat serves as a study in courage and chaos in this gripping account. Historian Hastings (The Abyss) revisits Operation Biting, a British paratrooper raid on Bruneval, a coastal village in German-occupied France; the operation aimed to capture a new German air-defense radar so that British scientists could develop countermeasures to it. The plan, Hastings contends, was a dangerous long shot, requiring 120 lightly armed paratroopers to drop behind enemy lines, dismantle and haul away the radar, capture a German radar operator, and fight their way to a beach for evacuation. Hastings, himself a former paratroop officer, probes beneath the glamorous aura of airborne warfare to its very unglamorous realities—“almost all the paratroopers’ first action on landing was to satisfy a desperate need to relieve aching bladders”—and unplanned turns of fortune. (Many paratroopers missed the drop site by miles, but their fatal mistake effectively confused the Germans as to the objective of the raid.) The outsize impact of seemingly minor decisions loom large in Hastings’s vivid narrative—he follows two French Resistance agents who gathered crucial intelligence on the radar station before the raid, assisted by a naive German sentry who gave them a tour of the site—and colorful personalities stand out. (He riffs on the “childlike vanity” of Lord Louis Mountbatten.) The result is a jewel of military history that highlights human-scale daring amid the mass carnage of war. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

For this nuanced and emotional contemporary, Fuller (The Proposal Plot) pairs Britt Branch, a 28-year-old vlogger with crippling social anxiety, and 30-year-old Hunter Pickett, a recovering alcoholic and the black sheep of a prominent Texas family. Britt makes videos about painting, which turn up on Hunter’s feed. Immediately drawn to her, he starts taking the art challenges Britt posts online, developing a new hobby. On a trip to the art supply store, he’s shocked to see Britt IRL and goes over to introduce himself as a massive fan, triggering Britt to have an anxiety attack. Hunter proposes a trade: he’ll help coach Britt through social situations if she’ll give him art lessons. Along the way, they fall in love. Meanwhile, Britt’s father, Daniel, another recovering alcoholic who happens to be working as Hunter’s father’s chauffeur, tries to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. The plotlines dovetail at a black-tie surprise birthday party that brings Britt, Hunter, Daniel, and Britt’s mother Amy together—with explosive results. Fuller gracefully handles the topic of addiction, delineating the toll it takes on both addicts and the people who love them. There are no sex scenes, but the romance is deeply felt. This smart, sensitive story is sure to tug on readers’ heartstrings. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wroe (Six Facets of Light) draws on her life and her career as obituaries editor for the Economist in this freewheeling exploration of “the unique and essential part of ourselves” most synonymous with the soul and the challenges of capturing it on the page. According to Wroe, the clues to this essential self are found in the particulars: a sugar cake whose sweetness evokes a great aunt; “the gesture of taking someone’s pulse, touching the fingers gently to the wrist, then falling silent to listen.” Exploring how other artists aim to capture their subjects’ “life-force,” she notes that figurative artists complete the first study of a figure in “a minute, to catch not the shape or the mass but... to seize something more,” while poets including Stanley Kunitz traverse the “boundaries between what they observe and themselves.” In the end, Wroe suggests the soul might be best defined as a transitory force that is rooted in a love that operates “according to its own laws. Instead of pausing over our troubles, it pours itself out continually among them.” Wroe delivers her perceptive insights into life, death, and the struggle for meaning in luminous prose, though her rapid shifts between topics (she moves from Fidel Castro’s mistress to chess champion Bobby Fischer in a few sentences) can feel haphazard. Still, spiritually curious readers will be captivated by Wroe’s wide-ranging quest to understand what comprises a life. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink

Weiner, cohost of ESPN Radio’s Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, teams up with radio producer Stanczyk for this irreverent debut compendium of heterodox takes on legendary sports figures. Revising championship tallies according to his whims, Weiner suggests that Kevin Durant’s two NBA championships shouldn’t count because he “took a shortcut” by signing with the Golden State Warriors in 2016 instead of sticking with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Bill Belichick is nothing without Tom Brady, Weiner contends, noting that Brady won the Super Bowl in 2020 after leaving the Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers while Belichick ended that season with a middling 7–9 record. Weiner’s not consistent in his judgments, asserting that San Antonio Spurs point guard Chris Paul’s lack of a championship ring should disqualify him from greatest-of-all-time consideration even as Weiner dismisses Joe Namath, who in 1969 brought the New York Jets their sole Super Bowl victory, as only the “thirteenth-best New York Jet quarterback of all time” because he threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Luckily, Weiner aims to provoke more than convince (“Deep stats are for irredeemable nerds”), successfully translating his flippant radio persona to the page. It’s a refreshingly idiosyncratic revision of the sports pantheon. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2024 | Details & Permalink