Review by New York Times Review
SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. (Harper Perennial, $22.99.) Harari, an Israeli historian, delves into humanity's history, exploring why Homo sapiens - once just one human species among several - dominated. This sweeping account attempts to tell a genetic, cultural and social history, with a particular focus on the roles of cognition and agricultural and scientific advancements in our evolution. MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: Stories, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen. (Vintage, $16.) In these seven tales, emotionally adrift men long for the women they love; one story compares the experience to "a pastelcolored Persian carpet." Our reviewer, Jay Fielden, praised the "rainy Tokyo of unfaithful women, neat single malt, stray cats, cool cars and classic jazz played on hi-fi setups." WRESTLING WITH HIS ANGEL: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, 1849-1856, by Sidney Blumenthal. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) By 1849, Lincoln's only term as a representative comes to an undistinguished end. The second installment of this biography follows Lincoln as he clashed with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, who advanced policies that helped expand slavery; eked out a political future; and aligned with the Republicans. THE BURNING GIRL, by Claire Messud. (Norton, $15.95.) Julia and Cassie, two teenagers in Massachusetts, have been best friends since nursery school, but as they edge into adolescence the friendship begins to unravel. Messud is skilled at capturing the perils and rites of passage that come with being a teenage girl, along with the intimacies and heartbreak of female friendships. Ultimately, the book is "a story about stories - their power, necessity and inevitable artifice," our reviewer, Laura Lippman, wrote. WHY WE SLEEP: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker. (Scribner, $17.) Walker, who directs Berkeley's Center for Human Sleep Science, sees our societal sleep deficit as "the greatest public health challenge we face in the 21st century." The virtues of sleep, he says - everything from better memory retention to the ability to overcome negative feelings - can dramatically improve your life. MY ABSOLUTE DARLING, by Gabriel Tallent. (Riverhead, $16.) Fourteen-year-old Turtle is growing up feral in Northern California, raised by her father to be a self-reliant survivalist. Her world is limited to school, where she's an outcast, and home, where her father trains her and preys upon her. A romance offers an escape, and she must use the skills she learned from her father against him in a fight for her freedom.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Whether in his epic-scale fiction or in his shorter work, Murakami mixes motifs drawn from ordinary life (Italian food, movies, jazz, the Beatles) with the extraordinary presence of alternate realities, but somewhere in that hypnotic combination, there is always a love story. In these seven short tales, told with the author's signature flatness of tone, which always camouflages deep wellsprings of emotion, the overriding theme is the absence of love, at least on the surface. The narrators' circumstances vary widely from a man who strikes up a friendship with one of his dead wife's lovers to an inverted version of Gregor Samsa (his metamorphosis is from cockroach to man) but they all share a deep melancholy and a profound loneliness as they remember the curious paths their lives have taken. The title story, which appears last and serves as a kind of summing up, features an ordinary married man who receives a phone call telling him that his former lover, M, has committed suicide. Juxtaposing the almost clinical narrative style against both scenes of excruciating loneliness and flashes of deadpan humor (What I remember most about M is how much she loved elevator music), Murakami upends all our expectations, revealing the tragic yet sustaining lie of his title: the men in these stories live both on and below the surface of reality, and in the latter, they will never be without women.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this collection of new stories, Murakami (1Q84) returns to familiar themes of youthful regrets, untenable romantic triangles, strange manifestations of sexual frustration, and inexplicable, often otherworldly happenings while dipping into the lives of seven middle-aged men, each caught up in the passions of a mysterious woman. In "Drive My Car," a stage actor hires a new driver, his first female chauffeur. Between rehearsing lines and listening to classic rock, the normally reticent widower begins to chat with the young driver, eventually revealing a friendship he formed with one of his former wife's lovers. In "Yesterday," a man who works at a coffee shop convinces a coworker to date his girlfriend while he works to pass his university entrance exams. In "An Independent Organ," a plastic surgeon who lives a contrived life of well-managed affairs descends into depression and starves himself to death after falling in (unrequited) love with one of his liaisons. Although the plotting can be repetitive, Murakami's ability to center the stories on sentimental but precise details creates a long-lasting resonance. For instance, the narrator of "An Independent Organ" can never use a squash racket the plastic surgeon left him: the lightness reminds him of his frail, dying body. In "Scheherazade," the standout of the collection, a man who can never be outside for unexplained reasons develops a bond with his in-home caretaker, who tells him stories after they have sex. She remembers being a lamprey in a former life and misses the profound silence of the sea floor. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Murakami's (Kafka on the Shore) latest short story collection maintains the author's high standard of literary weird fiction. This collection centers on the titular concept, with stories of life after men's relationships have ended in death or divorce, addressing how these men are changed by that disconnection. The author's style takes a variety of forms, from straightforward in a tale of an actor relating his search for answers about his deceased wife to his chauffeur, to magical realism in the tale of a spirit saving a bartender from his own emotional stasis and entropy after he walked in on his wife with another man. Kirby Heyborne is a perfect reader for Murakami's characters, lending just the right cadence and timbre to match the complex and often reserved men of whom he speaks. Verdict Another fantastic collection from Murakami, rich with emotion and written with mastery. Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction, Japanese fiction, weird fiction, and domestic fiction and for older male readers.-Tristan Boyd, Austin, TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Our relationship isn't exactlynormal": as ever, a glimpse into the strange worlds people invent by the always inventive Murakami (Absolutely on Music: Conversations, 2016, etc.).If you are one of Murakami's male characters, you do what you can to be different: sure, you sleep around and drink a lot of whiskey, but you also read books and listen to music, especially his beloved Beatles, who provide two of the seven chapter titles here. If the title story pays homage to Hemingway, there's nothing much Hemingway-esque about any of the players except perhaps a world-weary resignation to the way things are, as well as a few odd affectations that may not mean much to non-Japanese readers; in the story "Yesterday," for instance, one character speaks a dialect from a region that isn't his own. "Why does somebody who was born and raised in Tokyo go to the trouble of learning the Kansai dialect and speak it all the time?" Why indeed? If you are a female Murakami character, you are likely to be disaffected and a little lonely, though no more passive than any of the males: things happen to Murakami's people more than they make things happen. Nowhere is this more true than in the compellingly odd tale "Samsa in Love," which opens, with Kafkaesque matter-of-factness, with the words "He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa." Aside from a certain priapism, things aren't all that much different in his life, though a woman he meets schools him in an important truth: "Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart." Considering the state of the world, that's a valuable takeaway and well worth the price of admission. Not groundbreaking but certainly vintage Murakami: a little arch, a little tired, but always elegant. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
