Browsing Books

Paperback Row

PEELING THE ONION, by Günter Grass. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. (Harvest/Harcourt, $15.) This memoir by Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in 1999, takes him from his childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk) to the publication of “The Tin Drum” in 1959. The autobiography created controversy because it disclosed for the first time that Grass, the teller of truth about Germany’s Nazi past, had been drafted into the Waffen SS in 1944, when he was 17. “Memory is like an onion,” Grass writes, and this book removes several layers: “I practiced the art of evasion.” Our reviewer, John Irving, found “Grass’s honesty about his dishonesty” to be “breathtaking” and concluded that the memoir “is as good as the very best of Grass’s novels.”

FALLING MAN, by Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $14.) Don DeLillo’s books have been weirdly prophetic about 21st-century America; his 9/11 novel, though, focuses on two middle-class Manhattanites, a man who escaped from the towers and his estranged wife. The hijackers and a performance artist called Falling Man also appear.

BROTHERS: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot. (Free Press, $15.) John F. Kennedy’s assassination still haunts the American imagination. In this “fearless, passionate, often angry book,” as Alan Brinkley described it in the Book Review, Talbot argues that Kennedy’s presidency posed dangers to many interests in and out of government. He assembles the arguments against the Warren Commission’s conclusions, although he does not choose among the theories. Vincent Bugliosi, on the other hand, believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. His book “Reclaiming History,” which appeared last year, was a 1,612-page brief to that effect. Now the narrative section of that book has been published as FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Norton, $17.95). Our reviewer, Bryan Burrough, called that section — this book — “as good a second-by-second reconstruction of the assassination and its aftermath as I’ve read.” Another look at the Kennedy years comes from Burton Hersh, who reviews the struggle between the attorney general and the head of the F.B.I. in BOBBY AND J. EDGAR: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America (Basic Books, $18.95).

CONFESSIONS: An Innocent Life in Communist China, by Kang Zhengguo. Translated by Susan Wilf. (Norton, $15.95.) Growing up in Mao’s China, Kang was not a political dissident but a dreamy boy who loved books — which led to his expulsion from university, his sentencing to a detention center and life as a “substandard peasant” in a commune. This gripping and well-written (and translated) memoir has a happy ending, as Kang returns to school and eventually takes a job in the United States. Another individualist, Gao Xingjian, was the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize (in 2000). His Nobel lecture and several other essays have been collected in THE CASE FOR LITERATURE (Yale University, $16), with a helpful introduction by the translator, Mabel Lee. “Literature can only be the voice of an individual,” Gao, the author of “Soul Mountain,” writes.

Image

MICHAEL TOLLIVER LIVES, by Armistead Maupin. (Harper Perennial, $13.95.) Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” set in the 1970s and ’80s in a Barbary Lane boarding house run by Anna Madrigal, a transsexual, began as a serial in The San Francisco Chronicle, then became novels and a popular PBS miniseries. In 1989, Maupin finished the story. But now he has taken it up again, catching up with many of the familiar characters. He focuses on Mike Tolliver, surprised to be alive and living with AIDS at 55, running a landscaping business and recently married to a handsome young man.

BOOMSDAY, by Christopher Buckley. (Twelve, $13.99.) A young blogger comes up with a brilliant idea: spare Generation Whatever from having to pay taxes to support baby boomers on Social Security by encouraging them to commit suicide by age 70. She calls it “voluntary transitioning.” A breezy Washington satire follows.

THE MAYTREES, by Annie Dillard. (Harper Perennial, $13.95.) In her second novel, Dillard, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” offers a graceful meditation on the evolution of love as a bohemian couple on Cape Cod come together, separate and eventually find their way back to each other.

TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Translated by Klara Glowczewska. (Vintage International, $14.95.) A literary journalist who died last year, Kapuscinski spent more than four decades writing about the developing world. The editor who gave him his first foreign assignment presented him with Herodotus’ “Histories,” and he took the book everywhere. As he describes some of those journeys here, “one finally sees that in writing about Herodotus, Kapuscinski is actually writing about himself,” Tom Bissell said in the Book Review.

RICKLES’ BOOK, by Don Rickles with David Ritz. (Simon & Schuster, $14.) “We might have known it all along: Rickles is a softy,” our reviewer, Liz Brown, reported after reading the insult comedian’s memoir.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/PaperRow-t.html
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-16
243862
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:N6FUV47PQPAHFPKJYYURIQZGQ42HUAK6
<urn:uuid:77d597b9-a5a4-4240-9eba-21a202d6c285>
2020-04-05T07:06:31Z
151.101.201.164
text/html
sha1:WDMKMKKOHKS2MZNKAVLKSVDG66E2IYO5
<urn:uuid:6ac564af-2102-47db-8de8-cab8a365c437>
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/PaperRow-t.html
response
<urn:uuid:8d5303e6-16a7-41f8-8831-6d0611b69df6>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-16
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March/April 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-86.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (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/