Great reads to engage or escape
Two excellent new works of nonfiction and three new novels to help jump-start your summer.
Frenemies
The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) Ken Auletta Penguin Press, $30
In his earlier books on Google and television networks and his New Yorker essays under the rubric “The Annals of Communication,” Auletta has considered advertising as an aspect of the stories he is telling, but with “Frenemies,” he makes it the main story. “Trying to understand the media without understanding advertising and marketing, its fuel supply,” he writes, “is like trying to understand the auto industry without regard to fuel costs.” Auletta focuses his laser-sharp attention on the ad industry’s response to the convulsions wrought by technological change — why publishers push native advertising, how Big Tech collects marketing data and wields extraordinary influence and, ultimately, how advertising sustains the information ecosystem.
Tailspin
The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It Steven Brill Knopf, $28.95
Rather than taking a conventionally partisan view of America’s dysfunction and decline, Brill makes a lucid and engaging argument that our meritocracy has produced an aristocracy in which knowledge workers build moats around themselves and the nation declines. Founder of Court TV, the American Lawyer magazine and Yale’s Journalism Initiative, Brill writes of his own experience as a bookworm from working-class Queens who ended up at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, then Yale College and Law School — and describes how the nation’s embrace of a meritocratic world he knows well has had a slew of unintended consequences. In this kaleidoscopic, bighearted and ambitious book, he bets that “Americans will retake their democracy.”
True
Karl Taro Greenfeld Little A, $24.95 In “True” — short for Trudy — Greenfeld has created a compelling teen antiheroine whose rage and passion elevate the novel beyond a traditional coming-of-age tale. With her mother dead and her disengaged father a gambler, True feels responsible for her younger sister, who has severe autism. She escapes her family’s dysfunction by immersing herself in what Greenfeld depicts as the weirdly fascinating and highly demanding world of elite soccer. Athletically gifted and wildly competitive, True contends with her fury on the field and off, and as Greenfeld traces her trajectory to become one of the world’s best soccer players, he keys into her disappointments, fears and anxieties in ways that are profound and universal.
The Dante Chamber
Matthew Pearl Penguin Press, $28
While Pearl’s bestselling thriller “The Dante Club” was set in 1865 Boston with its brilliantly re-imagined Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, in “The Dante Chamber,” he has relocated the action across the pond to London, with a captivating circle of luminary poets. At the heart of the novel is Christina Rossetti, whose brother, the eccentric artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, has disappeared. She and another brother are joined by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Holmes in an attempt to solve the mystery. While parts of the story evoke Dante’s “Purgatory,” a rereading of his “Divine Comedy” is not necessary to appreciate this wildly clever novel of suspense.
Visible Empire
Hannah Pittard Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25
Pittard’s 2011 debut novel, “The Fates Will Find Their Way,” centers on a tragedy that shadows a town, and that theme has played out in her later books. But with the captivating “Visible Empire,” she brings her kaleidoscopic perspective to a catastrophe on an epic scale. She draws from the 1962 Air France crash that killed more than 100 of Atlanta’s elite — art patrons on a tour of Europe — during a summer of Camelot with the civil rights movement gearing up in the South. With her keen eye for social markers and a deft weave of intersecting storylines, Pittard exposes social fissures and tensions over race and class, and how power and privilege play out in the shadows of grief.