Our recommended books this week take a philosophical turn — from novels that sneak meditations on memory and identity into their rousing stories of war (“The Ghosts of Rome”) or sex (“Soft Core”), to a look at the implications of global food production (“How the World Eats”) and a history of personal freedom (“The Age of Choice”). Also up: Geraldine Brooks’s memoir of grieving her husband, Tess Chakkalakal’s biography of the writer Charles W. Chesnutt and James Stourton’s insider account of how the British art market jumped the formaldehyde shark. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
MEMORIAL DAYS:
Geraldine Brooks
Brooks, the Pulitzer-winning author of “Horse” and other novels, here recalls her loving marriage to the journalist Tony Horwitz (himself a Pulitzer winner) and the stunned grief that led her to retreat to an island off Australia after his sudden death at age 60.
THE AGE OF CHOICE:
A History of Freedom in Modern Life
Sophia Rosenfeld
For centuries, when obedience was celebrated as the highest virtue, the right to choose for oneself in virtually all the key aspects of life would have seemed either absurd or wicked; only rebels questioned the strict authorities who led families, churches and states. Rosenfeld, a historian, offers a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living.
A MATTER OF COMPLEXION:
The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt
Tess Chakkalakal
Chesnutt (1858-1932) was a prolific and gifted novelist who brought a Black perspective to bear on Southern culture, only to be overshadowed by white contemporaries like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. In this first biography of Chesnutt in a generation, Chakkalakal, a professor of African American and American literature at Bowdoin College, asks the reader to see him as he saw himself: a writer and student of American letters at a time when the literary marketplace struggled to take him seriously.
SOFT CORE
Brittany Newell
In Newell’s vivid novel, a San Francisco sex worker’s carefully compartmentalized life starts to unravel as she moves between men, moods and ways of being. Newell has a talent for drawing out the particulars of varied worlds; through Ruth’s eyes we see San Francisco in three dimensions.
THE GHOSTS OF ROME
Joseph O’Connor
This historical novel (the second in a trilogy, though it stands alone) explores a real-life World War II resistance network based in the Vatican, through the eyes of a countess who helped an Irish priest spirit refugees away from the Nazis.
ROGUES AND SCHOLARS:
A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000
James Stourton
In his erudite and authoritative history of the London art market from World War II to our century, Stourton — a former chairman at Sotheby’s UK — traces how auctions, formerly quiet industry affairs supplied mainly by country estates, became celebrity events.
HOW THE WORLD EATS:
Julian Baggini
Baggini, a philosopher who has previously written about individual food consumption, here takes a wider view by attempting to come to terms, ethically and logically, with the implications of producing food on an industrial scale and moving it from one part of the world to another.
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