10 New Books We Recommend This Week

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/books/review/10-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html

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We start this week’s list of recommendations with the rare timely book that begins in an ancient era: Mary Beard’s “Women & Power: A Manifesto.” Beard opens her slender but powerful book by writing: “I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up.’ ” The scene she is talking about takes place in the “Odyssey.” And how’s this for timing? Our list this week also includes a new translation of Homer’s epic by Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the work into English. Among the other books also included below: a new history of hoaxes, a posthumous collection of essays by Oliver Sacks and an astronaut’s memoir of time spent in space.

John WilliamsDaily Books Editor and Staff Writer

WOMEN & POWER: A Manifesto, by Mary Beard. (Liveright, $15.95.) In her pocket-size new book, the Cambridge classicist writes about the ways in which women have been regarded as interlopers in public life from the time of Aristotle up to the present day. Our critic Parul Sehgal calls the book “sparkling and forceful” and “a straight shot of adrenaline, animated less by lament than impatience and quick wit.”

RADIO FREE VERMONT: A Fable of Resistance, by Bill McKibben. (Blue Rider Press, $22.) McKibben, a Vermonter and one of the best-known environmentalists of our age, turns to satire in this novel about an old-school radio host who stumbles into leading a secessionist movement. Our critic Jennifer Senior writes that McKibben is a proposing a thought experiment, “daring the reader to ponder the virtues of smallness in an age of military and corporate gigantism.”

BUNK: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, by Kevin Young. (Graywolf, $30.) Young’s enthralling, essential history is unapologetically subjective — and timely. Again and again, he plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover fearfulness and racism lurking inside.

A BOLD AND DANGEROUS FAMILY: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism, by Caroline Moorehead. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) This portrait of a renowned family of Italian anti-fascists, the Rossellis of Florence, depicts the ethical imperative and repercussions of dissent. The book revolves around two brothers whose resistance efforts ended only when they were murdered in 1937, in France.

THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS, by Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $27.) In this last, posthumous collection of essays, Sacks brilliantly delves into his favorite themes: the evolution of life, the workings of memory and the nature of creativity.

THE ODYSSEY, by Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson. (Norton, $39.95.) This landmark translation matches the original’s line count while drawing on a spare, simple and direct idiom that strips away formulaic language to let the characters take center stage.

ENDURANCE: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery, by Scott Kelly. (Knopf, $29.95.) In this charming if occasionally convoluted memoir, Kelly details the endless dedication that led to his groundbreaking 12 months in space. He pulls back the curtain separating the myth of the astronaut from its human realities.

THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, by Linda Gordon. (Liveright, $27.95.) In an enlightening study troubling for its contemporary relevance, Gordon says “the K.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed.”

FREYA, by Anthony Quinn. (Europa, paper, $19.) The journalist heroine of Quinn’s novel is both headstrong and ambitious. Neither will be assets in post-World War II Britain.

THE RELIVE BOX: And Other Stories, by T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Set in a close alternate reality, Boyle’s skewed stories feel as if they’re coming from the end of the world, from a time when we will finally be unable to live with what we are and what we have and what we have done.