Cultures collide in a number of our recommended books this week: There’s an account of Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Europe thanks to personal ads in a British newspaper, a poetry collection by a Nobel laureate who fled Stalinist Poland, a historian’s look at the complicated relationship between the United States and Latin America, and a satirical novel about U.S. internment camps targeting Vietnamese Americans. Also up: a graphic memoir of childhood trauma, a linguistic tour of pronouns and their evolution, and two books that seem accidentally in conversation with each other: a dystopian novel in which married sex is taboo, and a history of Christian sexual mores in which, surprisingly often, married sex is also taboo. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Precious Rubbish
by Kayla E.
The art in this graphic memoir by a talented young cartoonist borrows knowingly from the midcentury comic-book series “Little Lulu” — but the subject matter, detailing the protagonist’s childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her older brother, and her religious parents’ tacit acceptance of it, represents a brave stance against old-fashioned cultural norms and enforced silence. If the content of “Precious Rubbish” makes it difficult to read, the playful form and frequent grim humor make that difficulty a pleasure as well. Read our review.
Poet in the New World:
Poems, 1946-1953
by Czeslaw Milosz
Milosz, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1980 after living in the West for decades, was well known as a poet of exile. Before earning his reputation, however, Milosz (1911-2004) was a young poet much like any other, searching for a style and a sensibility that might sustain him over a lifetime. This process is made visible in a new collection of his early work, “Poet in the New World,” which covers a period of Milosz’s career never fully drawn into English before — the years immediately after he left Warsaw near the end of World War II. Read our review.
Vanishing World
by Sayaka Murata
Murata’s deadpan dystopian novel envisions an alternate universe where artificial insemination is the global norm, and even married sex is frowned on as an incestuous violation of the family structure; couples are meant to raise children, not create them. As the narrator comes of age, however, she becomes addicted to love in a way that most of her generation — 80 percent of whom are predicted to remain virgins into adulthood — are not. Murata deploys both visceral language and body horror to convey Amane’s lust. Read our review.
Lower Than the Angels:
A History of Sex and Christianity
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Christians today might disagree on any number of questions around gender and sexuality, but as MacCulloch — a distinguished scholar of the English Reformation and the son of an Anglican clergyman — explains in this magisterial new history of the many different Christian attitudes toward sex, these preoccupations define only the past half-century of the faith. For the previous 1,900 years or so, the most important question was this: Is it sinful to get married and have kids? “Lower Than the Angels” sometimes veers into passages only a specialist could love, but this arcana is well balanced by MacCulloch’s dry wit and flair for narrative sweep. Read our review.
Pronoun Trouble:
The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
by John McWhorter
This short but stylish treatise by a noted linguist and New York Times contributor runs through the genealogies of pronouns, those small, vital words that are “at the very foundation of human expression at all times.” The book is far more than simply a rehearsal of our current debates about gender-neutral address: McWhorter, blessed with a chatty and accessible manner, leads us methodically along the pronoun table, through “I,” “you,” “he,” “she” and “it,” and all the controversies they have stirred up over the last thousand years. By the final chapter, on “they/them,” readers primed for outrage will have gleaned that his approach is generous, measured and historically informed. Read our review.
I Seek a Kind Person:
My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust
by Julian Borger
Borger was a child when his father — an Austrian Jew who had fled to Wales in 1938, when he was 11 — died by suicide. Decades later, working as a writer and editor at The Guardian, Borger discovered something startling: His father’s flight to freedom had been facilitated by a heartbreaking personal ad in his very newspaper, one of dozens that frantic parents in Nazi Europe had placed to find foster homes for their children. In this haunting and revelatory book, part memoir and part history, Borger tracks down the subjects of several of those ads to tell their stories alongside his own, illuminating the anguishing tension between forgetting and remembering. Read our review.
America, América:
A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin
This stirring new book by a Yale historian shows how, over the course of five centuries, the United States of America and its neighbors in Latin America have shaped each other through war, conquest, competition and cooperation. Their intercontinental relationship has had implications for not only the Western Hemisphere but also the modern world. While allowing that the conquistadors were responsible for enormous bloodshed, Grandin emphasizes what he sees as a strain of Latin American humanism that became foundational to ideals of international cooperation and global institutions, including the United Nations. Read our review.
Mỹ Documents
by Kevin Nguyen
Nguyen’s comically macabre sophomore novel asks how a nation founded on freedom could strip thousands of its citizens of their rights overnight, as a series of terrorist attacks leads the United States to create detention camps for Vietnamese Americans. The half siblings at the heart of the book have to go from navigating the mundane (internships) to confronting the horrific (internment) after Nguyen — a stellar satirist who takes bold imaginative risks — kicks this alternate history of the 2010s into high gear. Read our review.
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