FICTION: Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive.В Sasha isВ the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, this is aВ startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.
HISTORY: In The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincolns youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although “naturally anti-slavery” for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states. But the political landscape is transformed in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes the expansion of slavery a national issue.
BIOGRAPHY: In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as Americas first president.
GENERAL NON-FICTION: The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.
POETRY: Kay Ryan’s recent appointment as the Library of Congress’s 16th poet laureate is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The 200 poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.
DRAMA: Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris is an acerbically brilliant satire that explores the fault line between race and property in a Chicago neighborhood first in 1959 and revisited in 2009.
Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting and magisterial- siddhartha mukherjee has rightly been awarded the pulitzer prize. congrats!
Siddhartha mukherjee