Advertisement

New & Noteworthy

Image
CreditCredit

THE DAMASCUS ROAD, by Jay Parini. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Parini, a poet, novelist and biographer whose previous books include a historical account of Jesus, here uses fiction to imagine the life and times of St. Paul and explore the early spread of Christianity.

THE MOMENT OF LIFT: How Empowering Women Changes the World, by Melinda Gates. (Flatiron, $26.99.) Gates shares stories of the women she has met through her philanthropic work, and uses data to argue that strong women are essential to strong societies. “I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up,” she writes.

WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON’T TALK ABOUT: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence, edited by Michele Filgate. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Mother-child bonds are among our most intimate. But as these powerful essays attest, their evasions can be crucial. Contributors include Melissa Febos, Kiese Laymon, Leslie Jamison and more.

SACRED LIBERTY: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom, by Steven Waldman. (HarperOne, $28.99.) Religious freedom, enshrined in the First Amendment, is central to America’s identity. Waldman shows how remarkable that is, and how tenuous.

PERMISSION, by Saskia Vogel. (Coach House, paper, $17.95.) The grieving heroine of Vogel’s debut novel turns for solace to the Los Angeles dominatrix scene, testing the boundaries of desire and power and personal freedom.

Image

I’m in the middle of THE COST OF THESE DREAMS: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business, a new collection by Wright Thompson. I’ve been a big fan of Thompson’s since he profiled Michael Jordan at 50 for ESPN The Magazine, where he works. I don’t understand sports that much, but when I read the Jordan profile, which is included here, I see the aspects of magazine stories that still thrill me: grandness, skepticism, drama, humor and an overwhelming sense of emotion and heart. In particular in that Jordan profile is the understanding that we’re only really serving our readers and even our subjects when we let their personalities shine through, so we can see how our grudges and triumphs — our history — dominate our future. It’s present in Thompson’s other work, too: his Pat Riley profile and his Tiger Woods profile and more, all of it, thankfully, included.

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner, staff writer for The Times Magazine

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 4 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: New & Noteworthy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/books/review/recommended-reading.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-22
263409
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A4XR3KQ2FRQM3KFPW5AYBFQOMRI3D7OR
<urn:uuid:11379d97-bd11-4f0f-9e12-b178fd3bbe30>
2019-05-26T02:48:38Z
151.101.201.164
text/html
sha1:KFY5E6JMM6UTTIV4STDMHYBOMND2H5YL
<urn:uuid:6deb95dc-d769-4964-9b8a-e8868899832d>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/books/review/recommended-reading.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
response
<urn:uuid:9e0b0297-a7ba-4c6d-93ff-a9ea71b54720>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-22
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-109-171-211.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/