Political hot spots feature prominently in this week’s recommended books, with sobering views of conditions on the ground in Ukraine (“Looking at Women Looking at War”) and Gaza (“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”) and here in the United States, where Katherine Stewart’s “Money, Lies, and God” considers the recent rise of the right. We also suggest a baseball biography, a sex memoir and a life of the German refugee who returned to prosecute Nazi war crimes; in fiction, we recommend new books by Cristina Rivera Garza, Michelle de Kretser and Curtis Sittenfeld. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
Some people celebrate turning 85 with grandchildren, gardening or a nice cake. White has published a gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender sex memoir: a guided tour of gay desire in which libido is the wellspring of just about everything.
De Kretser, a first-rate Australian novelist who emigrated from Sri Lanka as a child, has long been fascinated by the gap between our ideals and our actions — between theory and practice — including with respect to the novel itself. Her latest is an enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction, about a graduate student in English literature and her consuming affair with an engineering student who already has a girlfriend.
Catapult | $25
This remarkable book by a Ukrainian writer began in 2022 as a diary of Russia’s invasion and occupation. But as the conflict wore on and Amelina embarked on a mission to gather evidence of Russian war crimes, it evolved into a kind of detective story. It may also be considered a battle cry — one cut short when the author became a casualty of the war herself, killed by a missile strike on a pizza parlor, her book left to be assembled by colleagues and friends.
In her new book Stewart, a journalist, examines how Donald Trump rode a wave of “reactionary nihilism” to the White House, and details a far-right movement seething in resentment, suspicious of reason and determined to dominate at all costs.
Bloomsbury | $29.99
Fairweather tells the story of Fritz Bauer, the German jurist who fled the Nazis before the war, then returned afterward to put his country on trial, helping find the SS chief Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and bringing Auschwitz guards to justice.
Crown | $35
The stories in “Show Don’t Tell” — Sittenfeld’s ninth book, and second collection — are messy, delicious, spun through with bits of quotable wisdom and complete with endings that will make you sit and think. Sittenfeld’s headline-adjacent musings don’t shy from addressing biases and assumptions of all stripes, nor does she fear a character who brings the cringe.
Miller’s vivid biography captures the banty, blustering genius of Earl Weaver, who as the Baltimore Orioles manager in the 1970s and beyond was famous for his hot temper, theatrical antics and — not least — his impressively winning strategies.
Avid Reader Press | $30
In this fiercely agonized book about Western responses to the devastation of Gaza, El Akkad is trying to get American readers to think of Palestinian victims not as “them” but as “us.” Part memoir and part polemic, his book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.
Rivera Garza won a Pulitzer Prize for her memoir “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” about her sister’s 1990 murder in Mexico. This novel, translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, is a detective story with some of the standard fare of the mystery: bodies and clues, suspects and investigations, a pungent sense of fear and unease. But it radically scrambles the genre, adding a feminist twist and a winking overlay of literary analysis to the gruesome killing spree at its center.
