Longtime readers of The New York Times may recognize the name Margalit Fox from the byline of some of our most memorable obituaries. But Fox (who worked at the Book Review before she started reporting on dead people, and who retired from The Times in 2018) has also written five books, on topics ranging from linguistics to true crime; her latest, “The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,” explains how a 19th-century Jewish immigrant worked her way up from street peddler to mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise that made her one of America’s first mob bosses. That’s one of our recommended books this week. Maybe read it with Dan Slater’s “The Incorruptibles,” which takes the story of Jewish organized crime in New York into the 20th century?
Also up: a surprisingly fascinating look at the science of keeping things cold, and new novels from Lev Grossman, Claire Lombardo and Liz Moore. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
FROSTBITE:
How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
Nicola Twilley
In this absorbing exploration of the vast network of refrigerated trucks, rail cars and shipping containers that bring us bananas and avocados all year round, Twilley illuminates the impact on our food as well as the colorful characters who keep the system going.
THE BRIGHT SWORD:
Lev Grossman
Grossman’s latest is a winning dive into the world of King Arthur. The novel follows a knight who dreams of joining the Round Table, but when he arrives, the king is dead. Disappointed but not defeated, he embarks on a quest with the remaining knights to figure out the future of Camelot.
THE TALENTED MRS. MANDELBAUM:
The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
Margalit Fox
From Lower East Side street peddler to mastermind of a sprawling criminal operation employing pickpockets, bank robbers and corrupt lawmen, Fredericka Mandelbaum harnessed the Gilded Age’s entrepreneurial spirit to highly lucrative, illicit ends — brazenly defying, in Fox’s spirited account, the fate assigned to her as a poor, Jewish, female immigrant.
THE INCORRUPTIBLES:
A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld
Dan Slater
Pitting colorful mobsters against earnest reformers in a battle of wits and gunfire, Slater’s diverting narrative of New York City’s Jewish gangland in the early 1900s doubles as a slyly sophisticated primer on an overlooked chapter of American crime history, drawing heavily on the contemporary accounts of an undercover investigator named Abraham Shoenfeld.
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
Claire Lombardo
In her 500-page multigenerational examination of the ties that bind, Lombardo focuses on a woman at midlife. Julia Ames is on the brink of a new phase — a graduation, a wedding, a grandchild on the way. Before she turns the page, so to speak, she looks back at how she got to where she is and how (or whether, in some cases) she wants to move forward.
THE GOD OF THE WOODS
Liz Moore
A pair of missing siblings spark a reckoning at the Adirondack summer camp at the heart of Moore’s latest novel. Separated by more than a decade, the disappearances spark a reckoning about the powerful, wealthy and possibly wicked family whose house — and presence — loom over the lakeside idyll.
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