Advertisement

New & Noteworthy

Image

MAN VS. BABY By Matt Coyne. (Scribner, paper, $17.) Coyne’s exasperated Facebook post about early parenthood (a baby’s cry is like “having the inside of your skull sandpapered by an angry Viking”) has been viewed 15 million times. That initial rant is now a funny memoir and parenting manual for the equally “inept.” THE HOPE CIRCUIT By Martin E. P. Seligman. (PublicAffairs, $28.) A major figure in the world of psychology, Seligman describes how he turned his practice from one that focused on eliminating misery to one centered on gratitude, resilience and hope. THE PLANT MESSIAH By Carlos Magdalena. (Doubleday, $26.95.) In a world whose ecology is changing so fast, only a special kind of obsessive would concern himself with saving endangered plant species. That’s Magdalena, the senior botanical horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who recounts adventures that have taken him from the Amazon to the jungles of Mauritius on a quest to preserve as much flora as he can. EVERYTHING IS BROKEN UP AND DANCES By Guido Maria Brera and Edoardo Nesi. Translated by Antony Shugaar. (Other, $18.95.) Nesi and Brera rail against globalization and its deleterious effects on a country like Italy. Nesi, who had to close his grandfather’s decades-old textile business, understands the problems firsthand. WHAT THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE Edited By Jim Al-Khalili. (The Experiment, paper, $14.95.) In this collection, eminent writers flesh out the future of science and technology, from genomics to robotics to synthetic biology.

In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.

“When Muammar Qaddafi’s regime fell in 2011, the writer Hisham Matar listened by phone from London as revolutionaries knocked down the doors in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison to free the political dissidents who had been shackled there. Matar hoped his father, Jaballa Matar, an anti-regime activist kidnapped and imprisoned in 1990, was among them. Matar heard cell doors being hammered open one by one. Behind the final door was a blind man who had lost his memory. His only possession was a photograph of Jaballa. This story appears close to the beginning of Matar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir THE RETURN, but it is not the prelude to a manhunt: Matar must reconcile himself to his father’s death. He nonetheless returns to Libya after living abroad for over three decades, drawn by his childhood memories and a hunger to learn any information he can about his father’s final days. In cool, meticulous prose, Matar documents the exquisite joy of the exile’s return, and the depth of a grief that knows no closure. The tragedy of his father’s disappearance is documented in all its historical specificity — but Matar discovers in his own story a universal one about how fathers remain just out of reach for their sons.”

— Sasha Weiss, culture editor,
The New York Times Magazine

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter, 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 , Page 4 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: New & Noteworthy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/books/review/new-noteworthy-sasha-weiss.html
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-39
251425
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PMH27HN7CRK6MMY6X2JMGPSARPKDYJG3
<urn:uuid:b3fa5261-0e08-4e6c-b748-d4b48ccb8853>
2019-09-18T15:07:20Z
151.101.249.164
text/html
sha1:TPYQW7RZM73YLQQE3WNPDWHXY2CNYIRD
<urn:uuid:916032be-2973-49f0-b816-38557deb6c01>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/books/review/new-noteworthy-sasha-weiss.html
response
<urn:uuid:fb5401ce-f4ba-49e3-834b-2d2ad099a26b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-51.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/