author:
PIERRE BERG
w/ BRIAN BROCK

Non-fiction
304 pages
American Management Association

Pierre Berg of Nice, France was seventeen and had aspirations of being a hairdresser and a ladies man, but never imagined that the unspeakable could happen to him. While visiting a friend who owned a shortwave radio the two were captured and sent to Nazi Concentration camps because the Gestapo banned all shortwave radio broadcasting. Pierre and his friend made broadcasts of Laurel and Hardy, which were sent only to neighbors, but the Nazi’s suspected them of making long-range broadcasts. Pierre was sent to Auschwitz and his friend was never heard from again.

Written with the assistance of Brian Brock, the story unfolds with twists and turns, in a style that reads like a novel, but was real nonetheless, and fatal for many of the people portrayed. For instance, Berg’s life is spared thanks to the shaky hand of another prisoner whose job was to administer the camp tattoos. A guard misreads one of the numbers while reporting a serious infraction that Berg committed. The prisoner with the misread number is executed, and Berg attributes this to “outhouse luck.”

purchase via IndieBound

author:
REVA MANN

Non-fiction
368 pages
Dial Press Trade

Children veer from one extreme to another; it’s to be expected. When adults do it, it’s fascinating, troubling—and more than a little annoying.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, try as I might, I never warmed to Reva Mann over the course of her autobiography. The daughter of a progressive yet devout Orthodox rabbi, Mann spent her teens and early adulthood rocketing from the arms of gentile to the closeted life of a seminary in Israel. She abandons her life of rebellion in an episode, which is almost certainly partly invented, where her gentile ex-lover invites her to the Kind David Hotel and she declines to rejoin him for another hedonistic fling. Why do I think it’s partly invented? Because he’s staying in room 613—famously the number of laws to follow in the Torah—of the most famous hotel in Israel; I smell more than a whiff of poetic license here, which, to her discredit, surfaces repeatedly throughout the book.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
NEIL GAIMAN

Fiction
320 pages
HarperCollins

If there’s one thing ‘common pleasure’ Neil Gaiman excels at, it’s pitching a book so that it’s suitable for children but also compelling for adults. The Graveyard Book does this beautifully, as an episodic adventure story telling the tale of a boy who survives the brutal murder of his family only to be brought up by the dead.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as ‘Bod,’ is a likeable everyman; he’s the perfect foil to characters that include ghouls, the ghost of a fractious young witch, a (dead) Romantic poet and the shadowy un-dead guardian of the graveyard, Silas. Silas is the real star of the piece, with Gaiman receiving marriage proposals for this—pardon the pun—deadly serious character. It’s an admirably clever touch embodying the moral core of the story in a character whose nature (hint: he doesn’t go out in the daylight) might be considered inherently evil. Gaiman spends much the book subverting stereotypes, which is always to be applauded in a book that children might read.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
MALLA NUNN

Fiction
388 pages
Atria Books

Never read book jackets. They set up ridiculous and impossible expectations that undermine the voice of the author they seek to elevate.

Take the jacket of A Beautiful Place to Die, the first novel by South African filmmaker Malla Nunn. Some marketing wizard decided to write that Nunn “reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene.” Bah! She does not. She reads like herself. And that’s not a bad thing.

Nunn does not approach the crystalline prose, the poetry, the psychological depths (and, perhaps thankfully, the Catholic sensibilities) of Greene. Chandler may be closer but the point is moot.

In A Beautiful Place to Die, Nunn begins what is to be a series of novels around Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. Cooper has been sent from Johannesburg to solve the murder of a white Boer police captain in a rural outpost near the border of Mozambique. Nunn does a good job of confounding expectations about whodunit and keeping the reader guessing. Her story is tightly plotted and its twists and turns are founded in the racial complexities and laws of this particular time and place (South Africa at the dawn of apartheid laws in 1952).

purchase via IndieBound

author:
ROBERTO BOLANO

Fiction
912 pages
FSG

Roberto Bolaño spent most of his life as a broke, nomadic poet wandering through South America, Mexico and Europe. A political exile from his home country Chile, he spearheaded the notorious infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico. He eventually left Latin America for Europe, where he lived the rest of his life. He was only 50 when he died of liver failure in 2003.

2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s last and most gut-wrenching novel, which he was still revising up to the last year of his life. The book is made up of 5 parts, and the separate narratives all weave around Santa Teresa, a city based on Ciudad Juarez in Northern Mexico where over four hundred murders of young women have taken place since 1993, and few have been solved.

It’s an absolutely singular work of fiction—not as haphazardly romantic or vibrantly poetic as Bolaño’s previous masterpiece The Savage Detectives—and yet 2666 is enigmatic, casually insightful, journalistically styled, and real, real, real. And it’s consumed with death—not surprising, seeing as how Bolaño knew he had little time left as he was struggling to complete the book.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
SARAH THORNTON

Non-fiction
256 pages
Norton

What is art? This is always a very difficult question, and one that has been addressed in countless conversations held by those from the cultural upper echelon all the way down to teens with spray paint and a few stencils. In Seven Days In The Art World, Sarah Thornton makes no distinction as to what defines art, but rather provides the reader with a riveting insider account as to the way the art world functions. While much of this world consists of cocktails and caviar, much of what occurs treats art as nothing more than a commodity where a work’s value and a buyer’s portfolio acquisitions supercede beauty and talent.

As the title suggests, Seven Days In The Art World visits seven separate functions of the current art world, these consisting of: The Auction (places like Christie’s where the last paddle up in the air takes home the prize), The Critic, The Fair (Art Basel), The Prize (The UK’s Turner Prize), The Magazine (Artforum), The Studio Visit, and The Biennnale (Venice). Thornton interviews some of the “elite” within the art world, and while many of her confidants acknowledge how contemporary art has become a circus of sorts, all seem to revel in their status and standing.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
DICK MEYER

Non-fiction
271 pages
Crown Publishers

Reality television. Annoying cell-phone ringtones. Bridezillas. The ills of modern American society make us sick, and yet we perpetuate their existence. In his charmingly cranky Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium Dick Meyer attempts to explain why.

A CBS News reporter and producer for twenty-three years, Meyer is now an editor for NPR, and—with his news media veteran status—is in a unique position to call bullshit. The book’s thesis is compelling, if semi-problematic: According to Meyer, the liberation of the nineteen sixties alongside the technology of today equates to “why we hate us.” We’re no longer oppressed, but we’ve taken it too far. We’re rude when we should be mannerly, we text message when we should be talking, and I don’t know what we should be watching, but it’s probably not “Rock of Love.”

purchase via IndieBound

author:
JOSE SARAMAGO

Fiction
256 pages
Harcourt

The world seems awash in talk of taxes. The current election has us reading the fine print and posting it for our Facebook followers to revel in (or discount). The other inevitability in this world seems to have been trumped, at least for the moment. But not to be totally outdone, Jose Saramago has given death its due, albeit with a few conditions. Death With Interruptions is the Nobel Prize winner’s latest and the title fails to disappoint. You most certainly get what you pay for here: death, Death (you will see soon enough), interruptions, politics, and Nobel-worthy prose. Sort of.

The package is slick and the concept is brilliant, but Saramago fails to ever make it “his.” Blindness, the Portuguese author’s most well-known work, seemed, to me at least, to fall into the same category—brilliant on so many levels, but failing to drive that final rusty nail into the center of my conscience. This book did not consume me, but I found myself talking about it over dinner more than most of the others on my nightstand. And maybe that is the genius of a writer of Saramago’s talent: his ability to cut you without you noticing, a scalpel just nipping at your elbows and palms, eventually making its way to your inner being.

purchase via IndieBound

author:
ROSE GEORGE

Non-fiction
290 pages
Metropolitan Books

Why do we have so much trouble talking about shit? How is it possible that in these times two fifths of the world’s population literally does not have a pot to piss in? Are there safe, effective ways of disposing of and even recycling fecal matter? The fact that Rose George isn’t able to answer all the questions she raises in her new book doesn’t make it any less captivating. As she says in what sounds at times like a call to arms, “The first thing sanitation needs is a spotlight shining on it. It needs to be unshackled from shame. It needs some scrutiny.” In The Big Necessity, she provides some of that scrutiny.

Here in our society of flush toilets and hidden sewers, we all take the disposal of this most basic of bodily functions for granted. George comes at the problems raised by shit (she dislikes the term “waste”) from a number of different angles. She examines the language of defecation, including our need for euphemism—why is it nearly impossible to even utter the word ’shit’ in polite company? She goes on to show how different cultures deal with sanitation issues, examining everything from the poorest villages in India where “manual scavengers”—untouchable even by other untouchables—clean up shit with pieces of tin or their bare hands, to the robotic thrones of Japan which not only warm, wash and dry your buttocks, but will do so to the accompaniment of a pleasant tune. She discusses the history of sanitation, exploring the sewers of London and New York as well as modern “biosolid” treatment plants.

purchase via IndieBound