Review by New York Times Review
BEYOND WORDS: What Animals Think and Feel, by Carl Safina. (Picador, $18.) Humans have been far too anthropocentric when trying to understand the mental experiences of other animals, Safina, a marine conservationist, argues here. His observations on grieving elephants in Kenya, endangered wolves in Yellowstone National Park and a harmonious whale society in the Pacific Northwest build the case that other species are capable of nuanced thought and emotion. KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST, by J. Ryan Stradal. (Penguin, $16.) This bighearted novel is partly a culinary biography of Minnesota, tracing how traditions (lutefisk) give way to fads, and partly a sendup of food. The story's central character, Eva, is born into a food-obsessed family and soon displays preternatural gifts of her own, using cooking to overcome a childhood tragedy. THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen and Anthony Berris. (Riverhead, $16.) The author, an Israeli, has built a fan base devoted to his fantastical short stories. In this, his first nonfiction book, Keret focuses on the stretch of time between his son's birth and his father's death, and considers the absurdities of fatherhood and family life. DAYS OF AWE, by Lauren Fox. (Vintage, $16.) The death of Isabel's close friend in a car crash sets off a period of tragedies; a year later, Isabel and her husband have divorced, her adolescent daughter has grown aloof and a number of her other relationships have become unmoored. Isabel reconsiders her identity throughout this novel as the relationships that once defined her fall away, but her rapport with her mother remains at her emotional core. THE WEATHER EXPERIMENT: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, by Peter Moore. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) If forecasts and precise weather reports are now a ubiquitous part of life, in the 1800s, the premise was improbable - even laughable. Moore, a Briton, tells the story of the 19th-century scientists and sailors who set out to show that data could help predict future meteorological patterns, and he includes the American contributions to the field. THE GAP OF TIME, by Jeanette Winterson. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In this novel, the inaugural title in a series of books "covering" plays by Shakespeare, Winterson ad apts the story of "The Winter's Tale" to a con temporary, post-financial-crash setting. Leo, a paranoid hedge fund manager in London, sends his newborn daughter to New Bohemia, a facsimile of New Orleans, after a fit of jealous rage. MIDNIGHT'S FURIES: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition, by Nisid Hajari. (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) Hajari's account focuses on the months preceding the 1947 split between India and Pakistan, probing one of the conflict's central questions: How did two countries with so many commonalities end up as bitter rivals?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Even the most devout Shakespeareans have trouble with his late plays-the ones where lost children reappear, the dead live again, and, with enough coincidences and unlikely events, King Lear-level tragedy ends happily. Winterson (The Daylight Gate), however, loves The Winter's Tale so much that she's written a "cover version" of it in this, the first in Hogarth's Shakespeare series in which contemporary writers "retell" the Bard's plays. She replaces King Leontes with Leo, an arrogant English money manager; old friend King Polixenes becomes Xeno, a video-game designer. As in the play, Leo's conviction that the child his wife is carrying is not his but Xeno's results in broken hearts and ruined friendships, exile, and a daughter turned foundling, raised by a bar owner and his son in a New Orleans-like city. But Winterson doesn't just update the story: she fills in its psychological nuances. Why would Leo suddenly decide his wife is sleeping with Xeno? Winterson's backstory can't justify his actions, but it does add fascinating context. And in her version, the violence, by turns comic book and terrifying, happens onstage, not off. It's fun to see Winterson solve the play's problems, but the book's real strength is the way her language shifts between earthy and poetic and her willingness to use whatever she needs to tell the story (angels, video games, carjackings). She makes us read on, our hearts in our mouths, to see how a twice-told story will turn out this time. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Shakespeare did a pretty good job with his plays, but Hogarth Press is putting out a series of rewrites by contemporary novelists. This is Winterson's version of A Winter's Tale. Winterson says the play "has been a private text for me for more than 30 years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can't live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something." The play does have a thematic resemblance to Winterson's novels (The Daylight Gate, 2013, etc.) and memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 2012), with its autocratic father, hints of incest, passionate love shading into abuse, foundlings, and redemptive innocents. Shakespeare's telling reads like a fairy tale: a jealous king, convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend, has his baby daughter set adrift. She washes up on the coast of the friend's kingdom, Bohemia, where a shepherd finds her. Meanwhile, the Delphic Oracle vindicates the queen, who (supposedly) drops dead, only to reappear years later as a statue who comes to life once the lost princess is allowed to marry the Bohemian prince. Winterson changes the king into a London hedge fund tycoon, the queen into a French pop star, the shepherd into a black musician in New Bohemia, Louisiana, the queen's loyal scold of a serving woman into a Jewish executive assistant spouting Yiddish proverbs, and so on. It generally works well, but the transformation drains the story of some of its fairy-tale magic: for example, the statue business shows up only as a video game and a metaphor ("Every day she finds another carving, another statue and she imagines what it would be like if they came to life. And who trapped them in stone? She feels trapped in stone"). Winterson's most interesting addition is to make the king-king-queen love triangle explicitly sexual: here the two men are not just best friends, but boyhood lovers. Ponderous comic sections are redeemed by flights of epigrammatic lyricism that twist cynicism into hope. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
