Holiday gift guide
A selection of books for the avid reader
For the readers in your life, books are the perfect gift. Let the editors of Book World make it easy for you with these picks. by Ben Katchor (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). “It’s a great time to be an American cartoonist,” artist Ben Katchor declares in the introduction of this rich and witty collection of the best comics of the year. The book includes work by such cartoonists as Ed Piskor, Bill Griffith, Laura PallMall and Gabrielle Bell. $16.19 by Liza Mundy (Hachette Books). The once-secret story of the American women whose code-breaking helped win World War II. Mundy skillfully interweaves the history of the war and the evolution of military intelligence with the lives of the women who were racing to decipher enemy messages, while dealing with sexism, romance and heartbreak at home. $16.80 by Michael W. Twitty (Amis- tad).
Twitty, a culinary historian who is partial to dressing in the period attire of antebellum slaves and writes the blog Afroculinaria, chronicles his travels through the South, searching to understand himself through food and his family history. It’s part memoir and part history of American slavery. $18.89
by Sarah Perry (Custom House).
When a wealthy young widow decides to take up paleontology and track down the fabled Flying Serpent of Essex, she excites fears and passions in a quaint English village. Though set in the late 1890s, this is a subtly modern novel about science and belief. $21.44
by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster).
The Renaissance genius comes to life in this ambitious new study. Isaacson, who has written celebrated biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, draws a vigorous, insightful portrait of the world’s most famous portraitist and concludes with worthy lessons we can all learn from da Vinci. $21
by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant (Knopf)
The Facebook executive’s deeply personal self-help book, written with organizational psychologist Adam Grant. illustrates that nothing can inoculate us against grief. But interspersed among devastating scenes about the death of her husband in 2015 are powerful strategies for coping when your world feels as if it’s falling apart. $14.99
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by Joel Sartore (National Geographic).
This stunningly illustrated book shows one man’s race against time to record thousands of animal species around the world before environmental destruction snuffs many of them out forever. Sartore’s arresting photos are accompanied by the words of wildlife writer Douglas Chadwick and a foreword by Harrison Ford. $23.79 by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf).
In this quiet masterpiece, we follow the lives of two Irish sisters who arrive in Boston in the 1950s.
One starts a family, while the other retreats to a convent, but neither finds what she expected. Sullivan’s story draws us into the essential qualities of motherhood and the compensations of faith. $16.13 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf).
This companion to Ken Burns’ TV documentary captures the war’s ambiguities through the varied experiences of ordinary men and women whose lives were shaped by the conflict. The volume includes many classic photos, but it also features hundreds of images likely to be unfamiliar even to experts on the war. $35.90 by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World).
A collection of essays that Coates published during the Obama years, including Fear of a Black President and The Case for Reparations.
Interspersed among these essays are personal reflections that provide the story of a writer at work, with all the fears, influences and insights that the craft demands. $16.80 by Ben Sasse (St. Martin’s Press).
A Republican senator from Nebraska warns that American culture is producing a generation of ignorant, passive young adults who don’t read, have no grasp of civics and don’t embrace hard work because their meek helicopter parents have waited on the little darlings for far too long. $17.67
by Jeff Flake (Random House). In a stinging anti-Trump polemic, the Republican senator from Arizona explains how the conservative movement in America has gone awry.
As future generations study this tumultuous time, Conscience of a Conservative – in many ways a sequel to Goldwater’s 1960 book of the same title – will be an important data point. $17.51
by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon and Schuster).
In this candid memoir, Hillary Rodham Clinton opens up about her failed campaign for the presidency, veering between regret and righteous anger. She writes of her disappointment – with herself and with the media and other players. It’s a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena. $17.82 by Jeremi Suri (Basic Books).
Historian Jeremi Suri makes a compelling case that the Oval Office has devolved into something that dooms even talented leaders to failure: The occupants have acquired ever more power, their ambitions have soared to absurd heights – and the combination has made it impossible to satisfy the electorate. $18