New in Paperback: ‘Running Home’ and ‘The Shadow King’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/books/review/new-paperbacks.html

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ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon, by Charles Fishman. (Simon & Schuster, 512 pp., $18.) Fishman argues that the race to the moon ushered in not the Space Age but the Digital Age (in particular integrated circuits and real-time computing), which made technology “a force in the everyday lives of consumers.” Our reviewer, Jill Lepore, offered a counterargument: “My country went to the moon and all I got was this lousy surveillance state.”

THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW, by Alice Hoffman. (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $17.) Our reviewer, Mary Pols, praised the “dazzle” of Hoffman’s storytelling in this “gravely beautiful” novel about a 12-year-old Jewish girl who flees Berlin for France in the spring of 1941, after her mother enlists a rabbi’s daughter to create a golem to protect her.

THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY, and Other Writings, by Gabriel García Márquez. (Vintage, 336 pp., $16.95.) “I do not want to be remembered for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ nor for the Nobel Prize,” García Márquez wrote, “but for the newspapers.” This collection of his journalistic work, from serious articles about his native Colombia to “witty meditations” on barbers and air travel, the Times critic Dwight Garner noted, shows that his “forthright, lightly ironical voice” was there “from the start.”

RUNNING HOME: A Memoir, by Katie Arnold. (Random House, 400 pp., $18.99.) An ultrarunner explores “how her growing preoccupation with running has been intertwined with loving and losing her father” — as Claire Dederer, our reviewer, put it — then layers on top of that “her own story as a mother who runs away, just a little.”

THE SHADOW KING, by Maaza Mengiste. (Norton, 448 pp., $17.95.) Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this novel set during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War tells the story of a young Ethiopian woman who rises from servant to warrior. Our reviewer, Namwali Serpell, called it “lyrical,” “remarkable,” and “breathtakingly skillful” in the way it manages to “solve the riddle” of how to “sing” the inherently complex idea of “the woman at war.”

FLASH COUNT DIARY: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, by Darcey Steinke. (Picador, 240 pp., $17.) In its “moments of pared-down honesty,” the Times critic Jennifer Szalai said of this collection of “thoughts and experiences, stippled with quotations from other writers,” it “glitters with a startling intimacy, as Steinke confronts a biological change that has metaphysical implications.”