New fiction, nonfiction land with punch
Buzzy new titles in fiction and nonfiction.
Sting Like a Bee Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America, 1966-1971 Leigh Montville Doubleday, $30
Leigh Montville has found one of the most fascinating episodes of the turmoil-filled Vietnam era: Muhammad Ali’s time as conscientious objector. A former Sports Illustrated senior writer and a biographer of baseball greats Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, Montville writes vividly about Muhammad Ali’s boxing career, from his start as an amateur in Louisville to his iconic battles with Joe Frazier. At the same time, “Sting Like a Bee” delivers a rich social history of the period, tracing Ali’s embrace of Islam and illuminating how during this brief fiveyear period, both the boxer and the nation transformed so dramatically. “He was part of an argument about race, religion, politics, war, and peace,” writes Montville. “Not to mention boxing. It was an unmatchable story.”
Testimony A Novel Scott Turow Grand Central: $28
It has been 30 years since Scott Turow’s bestselling legal thriller “Presumed Innocent,” and in “Testimony,” his engrossing new page-turner, he leaves Kindle County behind for Bosnia, Washington, D.C., and the Hague. His protagonist, Boom, is leading an investigation into a report that a decade earlier, more than 400 Roma (commonly known as Gypsies) had been herded into a cave and killed by explosives. Time passed, and while evidence of a mass atrocity seemed thin, the Gypsies did disappear. Like Rusty Sabich in Kindle County, Boom chases clues where they lead and remains devoted to the ideals of the law, if somewhat sour on the practice. In this shift to an international stage, with its complex web of alliances and deceptions, Turow has created a compelling, all-consuming drama that maintains the themes that thread through his fiction: the contradictions and conflicts of characters with secrets, often from themselves, and how idealism can be shaken when law, politics and capitalism mix to distort fairness and justice.
The Other Side of Impossible Ordinary People Who Faced Daunting Medical Challenges and Refused to Give Up Susannah Meadows Random House, $28
In her hugely shared New York Times Magazine story “The Boy With the Thorn in His Joints,” Susannah Meadows chronicled her son’s diagnosis with juvenile idiopathic arthritis, a devastatingly painful condition that can last a lifetime. When the powerful medications with potentially harmful side effects failed, in desperation the family entered a “healthcare underground, women and families supporting each other, offering possible leads and kindness when traditional medicine was not enough.” In this compelling medical travelogue, Meadows describes “a community of the defiant” pursuing unfamiliar ways of healing, determined to solve the unsolvable. A former senior writer for Newsweek, Meadows goes beyond her own story to connect with others across the country dealing with conditions such as MS and ADHD. She heard their stories about alternative medicine, radical changes in diet, Chinese herbs, and consulted a range of medical professionals about what she was learning. “After all,” Meadows writes, “what the people in this book show is that perseverance, taking control, can work.”
Salt Houses A Novel Hala Alyan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26
“When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie,” begins “Salt Houses,” Hala Alyan’s debut novel. She draws on her talent as a poet and psychologist as she astutely chronicles four generations of a Palestinian family, stretching from Iraq, Kuwait, Palestine, Beirut and Paris, from the beginning of the Six-Day War in 1967 to the present. Over the decades, the Yacoub family disperses around the world, and then Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait forces many of them to uproot again. Alyan elegantly moves back and forth through time and through multiple points of view, registering the emotional lives of a wide range of characters, from those who wish to assimilate to those who believe in political resistance.
He Calls Me by Lightning The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty S. Jonathan Bass Liveright, $26.95
On a deserted highway one night in summer 1957, in the small gritty city of Bessemer, Ala., a white police officer named James “Cowboy” Clark stopped 17-yearold Caliph Washington for an alleged infraction. There was a struggle over Clark’s gun, Clark died, and Washington fled for Mississippi, where he was later captured. Historian S. Jonathan Bass weaves a fascinating story out of this incident; the racist and legendarily corrupt 1950s Alabama town in which it took place, and the trials with all-white juries and successive appeals that ensued. Washington was on death row, awaiting the fearsome “lightning” of the electric chair, when Gov. George Wallace issued a reprieve. This complicated, elusive tale of justice and injustice in the Deep South continues until Washington’s death, when he was still in a state of legal limbo.