Also of interest...in life during wartime
The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s, $27)
Not many stories about the Vietnam War focus on the in-country experiences of American women, said Beatriz Williams in The New York Times. Enter the best-selling author of The Nightingale, who’s “in top form” throughout her new novel about a San Diego debutante who volunteers as a combat nurse. With Kristin Hannah “confidently in control,” we swoop over the jungle in a Huey chopper and plunge into the horrors of combat medicine. Though you may want to look away, “you simply cannot give up on her characters.”
Tripping on Utopia by Benjamin Breen (Grand Central, $30)
“The psychedelic flowering of the Sixties has, it turns out, a prequel,” said Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker. Benjamin Breen’s “lively” new book explores America’s first major flirtation with consciousness-expanding drugs, which emerged early in the Cold War when many experts, including married anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, hoped LSD might better the world. It didn’t, and Breen, in his account, “reveals a gift for introducing even walkon characters with brio.”
The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree (Basic, $35)
“Andrew Pettegree likes to tackle big subjects,” said Jonathan Rose in The Wall Street Journal. The media historian’s “fascinating and sometimes ghastly” new survey addresses the role of books during wartime from Sun Tzu to the present, a story that
“can hardly be contained in a single volume.” Pettegree devotes most of his attention to the 20th century, a singularly violent era that vividly illustrated the ways that war inspires books, is shaped by books, and “destroys books on an inconceivable scale.”
Held by Anne Michaels (Knopf, $27)
“Held may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post.
But don’t expect a fairy tale. “If you require a neat, linear plot, beware.” After opening on a bloody World
War I battlefield where a wounded soldier is pining for his wife, the novel regularly leaps back and forth across time while telling a story spanning nearly 120 years. At issue are the metaphysics of love—whether it can survive war’s horrors and even last beyond death.