Parenting and its attendant anxieties underlie a number of our recommended books this week, from Jonathan Haidt’s manifesto against technology in the hands of children to Emily Raboteau’s essays about mothering in an age of apocalypse to Clare Beams’s novel about a haunted hospital for expectant mothers.
Also up: a double biography of the Enlightenment-era scientists and bitter rivals who undertook to catalog all of life on Earth, a book arguing that the ancient Greeks’ style of debate holds valuable lessons for the present, and a surprising history of America before the Civil War that shows how German philosophers helped shape abolitionist thinking. In fiction, we recommend an Irish novel about a bungled kidnapping, a political novel based on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and a three-part novel of ideas about the hidden costs of our choices. (That one also deals with parenting anxieties, in its way.) Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
EVERY LIVING THING:
The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts
Most of us have heard of the 18th-century taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his systems of categorization; less familiar is his rival, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In Roberts’s view, this is an injustice with continued repercussions for Western views of race. His vivid double biography is a passionate corrective.
THE ANXIOUS GENERATION:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media. Sure to provoke both thought and discussion, his book rejects complacency.
AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND:
Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
Matthew Stewart
In this absorbing intellectual history of the lead up to the Civil War, Stewart shows how German philosophers like Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx influenced the American abolition movement.
CHOICE
Neel Mukherjee
Narratives linked to a frustrated London book editor explore the gap between wealth and poverty, myopia and activism, fact and fiction, in an exquisitely droll heartbreaker of a novel.
THE ANCIENT ART OF THINKING FOR YOURSELF:
The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times
Robin Reames
To bridge our nation’s political divide, we must learn to argue not less but better, contends Reames, a professor of rhetoric, in this wryly informative primer on ancient Greek and Roman oratorical techniques and the Sophists and sages who mastered them.
LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL:
Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”
Emily Raboteau
The perils — political, racial, climatic — multiply fast in this collection of elegant and anguished essays, by Raboteau, a writer and mother struggling to retain hope for the future while bearing witness to the encroaching threats all around her.
THE GARDEN
Clare Beams
Maternal body horror finds its eerie apotheosis in Beams’s pleasingly atmospheric novel, in which an isolated home for expectant mothers circa 1948 turns out to contain more life-giving powers than its medical staff lets on. (If you’re thinking “Pet Sematary” meets “Rosemary’s Baby” with a literary sheen, carry on.)
WILD HOUSES
Colin Barrett
In Barrett’s debut novel, a poorly planned kidnapping upends the lives of several young characters in a rural Irish town. Barrett, the author of two standout story collections, shifts gracefully between the kidnappee, who’s being held in a basement by two unstable brothers, and his intrepid girlfriend, who sets out to find him.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Vinson Cunningham
In this impressive first novel, a Black campaign aide coolly observes as aspiring power players angle to connect with a candidate who more than resembles Barack Obama.
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