Review by New York Times Review
HILLBILLY ELEGY: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. (Harper, $16.99.) Vance uses the lens of his childhood to analyze the despair and stagnation of his white working-class America. He doesn't hesitate to blame Appalachian culture, which he says "increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it," but offers a compassionate primer on the struggles of the white underclass. COMPASS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandeli. (New Directions, $18.95.) The narrator, a Viennese musicologist dying of an unknown illness, spends a sleepless night dreaming of his travels to the Levant; the careers and work of other scholars of the East he has known; and his great love. The novel won the Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, in 2015. MERCIES IN DISGUISE: A Story of Hope, a Family's Genetic Destiny, and the Science That Rescued Them, by Gina Kolata. (St. Martin's, $16.99.) Kolata, a science reporter for The Times, follows members of the Baxley family, who were blindsided after learning their father had a rare neurodegenerative disorder. As they grapple with their own risk, the story poses a wrenching question: Would you want to know if you carried a fatal genetic mutation? SWIMMER AMONG THE STARS: Stories, by Kanishk Tharoor. (Picador, $16.) In tales that leap across time and space, Tharoor considers the tensions of cultural preservation and loss, and the burdens of power. A princess's gesture has profound consequences for an elephant; diplomats orbiting Earth must choose a new headquarters for the United Nations. And in the title story, ethnographers pay a visit to the last speaker of a language, who tries to invent words for modern terms: astronaut, tractor, prime minister. JANE AUSTEN: The Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly. (Vintage, $17.) In the 200 years since her death, Austen has remained categorically misunderstood, and deserves to be read with an eye to Britain's politics of the time, Kelly argues. She is particularly convincing on the Austen family's designs to neutralize Jane's image over the decades; as our reviewer, John Sutherland, put it, "Colin Firth's wet shirt is hung out to dry." GIRL IN SNOW, by Danya Kukafka. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) After the murder of a beautiful teenager, Lucinda Hayes, three misfit characters offer clues to the crime: the outcast who loved - and stalked - Lucinda; a classmate who couldn't stand her; and even the police officer investigating the case, with a personal connection to a leading suspect. This thrilling debut novel has strains of "Twin Peaks."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In his first book, a short story collection, Tharoor shows depth and deliberation as he takes on such varied characters as the last speaker of a language and a photojournalist talking on the phone with one of his subjects, a miner. Tharoor demonstrates nuance and insight in his recasting of the folklore about Alexander the Great and in the snippets about historical wanderers in Letters Home. The world is Tharoor's canvas, and in the best sense, his is a humanist perspective as he tells and retells tales that reach across history and geography. He evokes a sense of aching wonder about disparate lives: a mahout, UN diplomats, Sogdian (an ancient people of Iran) letter writers, tea drinkers in a city about to be attacked. Cosmopolitan in its approaching the world as one large village with many shared narratives, this collection reminds us of all that we have in common, even as we demarcate our differences with walls and borders. Tharoor writes with a clarity that expresses his insights into characters and contexts, ultimately attaining a striking lushness.--Viswanathan, Shoba Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In "Cultural Property," one of the most intriguing and salient stories in Tharoor's debut collection, a young Indian archeologist is waiting on a cold beach on the North Sea, having secretly uncovered a centuries-old sword of Anglo-Saxon iron. Having just called smugglers to bring the sword to a museum in Patna, India, he imagines the sword labeled there as an artifact of "Primitive Britain," a thought that confirms for him that this act is far more than "revenge." It's these big themes-of history, war, invasion, and exploration-that Tharoor seeks to humanize. In the title story, an old, unnamed woman in an old, unnamed country is the "last speaker" of an old, unnamed language, and young academic ethnographers have arrived to record her, unintentionally raising all kinds of questions about the quest to capture what's already been lost. In "Elephant at Sea," a princess in Morocco requests an Indian elephant. But by the time one arrives, years later, the princess is studying abroad and everyone, including the elephant, is vexed by how one powerful person's whim can create a mess no one knows how to fix. In "A United Nations of Space," a future delegation of international ambassadors convenes in the cosmos to "rally the world around the memory of order." Though the tendency to keep characters unnamed and their lives painted in broad strokes blends the stories together, Tharoor's collection is imaginative and relevant. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Tharoor's debut story collection ranges widely across geography, between centuries, among circumstances.In the first story, a woman, the last speaker of an unnamed language, is interviewed by a handful of anthropologists. "Please speak as it comes naturally to you," they tell her, so they can record the language before it dies out completely. She finds herself making up a story for them: a bride takes off on a rocket after realizing she'd always wanted to be an astronaut and never a bride. But because there is no word for "astronaut" in the woman's language, she constructs one herself, from suffixes that literally mean "swimmer among the stars." So language becomes both the setting and the means for exploration, for wonder. The idea echoes through the collection's other stories. In "Tale of the Teahouse," a small city prepares to be overtaken by Genghis Khan's army: men and women sip tea and munch pastries as they speculate on the habits and customs of the marauders. In "Elephant at Sea," an Indian diplomat assists in the laborious transportation of an elephant to Morocco, a gift for the Moroccan princess. Tharoor, who presented the popular BBC program Museum of Lost Objects, seems equally at home in the present and in the distant past. His debut work of fiction is a truly global collection: he skips as easily between continents as if he were jumping rope. Sometimes he specifies the time period and setting of a story; other times, you're left to wonder. Either way, he takes obvious delight in the playful, the gently absurd. His prose can be elegant, ironic, deadpan. Just as often, it is sweetly melancholic. Tharoor is clearly a monumental talent, and his debut is a pleasure, from the first page to the last. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
