From fine dining (“Care and Feeding”) to fine art (“The Maverick’s Museum”) to the golden age of glossy magazines (“When the Going Was Good”), our recommended nonfiction this week offers readers a chance to immerse themselves in the highs and lows of the leisure class. We also recommend a rape survival memoir, a history of … Read more
Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. His death … Read more
UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, by Laura Delano Laura Delano was 13, a studious, budding squash champion in Greenwich, Conn., when she looked in the mirror one night and felt her world dissolve. The life of pressure and privilege to which she belonged — she is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt — became … Read more
Nell Zink Couldn’t Have Written a Book Had She Stayed in the U.S.
Green also traces the history of the disease, which is caused by bacteria, usually attacks the lungs and for centuries indiscriminately killed both the rich and the poor. He chronicles the medical advances, most notably the arrival of effective anti-tuberculosis drugs in the 1950s, that have tamed the disease in wealthy countries. (Each year, the … Read more
Phil Hanley stood in a womb-like studio, psyching himself up to record the final section of his memoir. Peppermint tea, check. Hands in meditation position, check. Sheaf of highlighted, color coded pages printed in extra large type, check. But when Hanley leaned into the microphone to read from “Spellbound,” his candid account of growing up … Read more
THE HAUNTING OF ROOM 904, by Erika T. Wurth Ghosts are business left unfinished. Reminders of a wrong that needs righting. They are the unbalanced ledger, and, in the United States, unpaid debts never truly die. In Erika T. Wurth’s novel “The Haunting of Room 904,” ghosts appear on Page 1, and the debt they … Read more
Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s … Read more
D.G. Hessayon is widely recognized as the world’s best-selling gardening writer, although many people outside Britain may not recognize his name. At home, however, he was the Agatha Christie of the genre. Like Christie’s whodunits, Dr. Hessayon’s books followed a strict formula; and, like Christie, he shunned the limelight. “I’m far too round, far too … Read more
SUNRISE ON THE REAPING, by Suzanne Collins It has been 17 years since the first book in Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” series was published. In the nearly two intervening decades, the novel has spawned three further books, five movies and an endless supply of Halloween costumes, fan fiction and memes. So when it was … Read more