As Autumn’s imminent advent approaches, Summer’s flighty fun gives way to weightier matters and thoughtful treatises, with economists, election enthusiasts, and ebullient essayists offering their wisdom, wit and worldly wonder, with just a bit of fun and games to lead us gently into a new and cooler term.
Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How it Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus). The bestselling author of The World Is Flat (would we recognized the Sunday list without it?) offers a new volume that is unwaveringly certain and determinedly didactic. After a Hamptons summer where every party was Green and every farm turned Sustainable, Friedman’s book is an invitation to extend a trend into a movement. Nothing if not provocative, Freidman’s encyclopedic mind somehow churns out highly engaging prose that makes one feel both intelligent and unworthy; the task Friedman calls readers to is a difficult one. Taking on two major American issues, the latter a buzzword phenomenon and the former an unspoken angst, the New York Times scribe offers a solution to both: America’s surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11, and the global environmental crisis.
Friedman is—especially salutary in the current climate—delightfully nonpartisan; despite his critics, Friedman’s no ideologue, but his call for revolution is enough to make one pump one’s fist in the air and think bigger than changing light bulbs. Calling for a new innovation, what he calls “nation-building in America,” Friedman prompts the citizenry of the nation to marshal the intelligence, creativity, and fearlessness that are the hallmarks of the American spirit to overhaul the energy marketplace.
Though Friedman is an expansive thinker and visionary futurist, his suggestions are surprisingly coherent and practical (Friedman for President, anyone?). If words are actions and ideas are power, than this is a book that might do more than make you look smart on the subway.
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris (Little, Brown). True to Sedaris’ iconic style, his latest collection of essays delves yet again into the absurd, the extreme, and the hilarious encounters this beloved interpreter of American maladies inevitably confronts whenever he spills out his door. Whether he’s in his country home in France, his childhood home in North Carolina, or back in the East Village squat where he first lived in New York, Sedaris delivers his signature incredulous and sardonic voice to every uproarious situation. He is the master of creating moments that will make readers want to cringe while simultaneously laugh, and yet he manages to temper each with insight and sensitivity, and a fresh view of human joy, somehow making the oddities of his personal world speak to the common experiences of American life.
Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott (Thomas Dunne). American Horror flick legend Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog, Swamp Thing, Halloween) teams with bestselling YA novelist Michael Scott (of Alchemist fame, not Dunder Mifflin infamy) to deliver another installment in America’s recently intensified fascination with the figure of the Vampire, this time in the sexed-up, stylized and superficial world of Hollywood. In the cosmetic world of La-La Land, nothing is at it seems, and beneath the perfect landscape lies an underworld populated by centuries-old creatures of the night: in the City of Angels, the most talented actors and most powerful studio heads are the bloodthirsty undead (one of the many perks of Vampiricism: botox is completely unnecessary). Barbeau’s an expert in the structure of scream stories, and with Scott’s popping prose, this mystery marks the last great thriller of the Summer season.
One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell (Hyperion). Coming off a summer when Carrie Bradshaw fans whispered a millions prayers of thanks to the goddess Bushnell, whose Sex and the City characters have become permanent prototypes of urban femininity, the crisp, chic storyteller returns, with another cast of powerful femmes, this time centered in the most decadent of domiciles. Again Bushnell uses the secrets gleaned from a lifetime love affair with Manhattan and its resident eccentrics to offer a portrait of New York that’s both mimetic and fantastical, both Bravo! and Tom Wolfe. As always with Bushnell, there’s a sense of the authentic buried beneath the layers of cleverness that are occasionally too self-aware; in her nicer moments, the characters seem a mix of real and fabricant—this is the Manhattan that Bushnell lauds and laments, with a better sense of irony than we’ve seen from her so far.
I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley (Riverhead). Crosley’s biggest accomplishment—besides selling more copies than most Pulitzer Prize winners—is disarmament. Somehow, at the conclusion of her self-indulgent musings, readers do not hate her. In a marketplace overrun by navel-gazers with bookish ambitions, this is a feat worthy of celebration. In her debut collection of vignettes, Crosley offers herself up to her own incisive analysis of the ubiquitous Manhattan animal: a struggling mid-twenties professional tackling lousy bosses, flawed and falling boyfriends, and the trials and tribulations of New York apartment living. Crosley’s all you’d expect; dry, wry, witty, snarky, sharp, and deprecatingly charming. But the work is more than the sum of its post-adolescent tones. If Crosley’s voice can muster another raspy soliloquy without laughing too loudly at her own jokes, then the comparisons to Sedaris may not be premature.
Quick Picks:
New Jersey’s aging native son Philip Roth returns with Indignation (Houghton Mifflin), a novel whose title serves as fitting moniker for the Great American Novelist’s oeuvre. For the aging boomer, Dr. Robert Schwalbe offers a thorough, bold, and at times rebellious take on those nearing septuagenarian status in Sixty, Sexy and Successful (Praeger). Alec Baldwin leaves the comedy at the cover and takes on what he calls the “family law industry” in A Promise to Ourselves: Fatherhood, Divorce, and Family Law (St. Martin’s), a brave and personal analysis of the failures of a broken system to heal broken families. Longtime Republican fundraiser Nicole Sexton partners with Susan Johnston to pass along Party Favors (Lyons), a delightful insider’s novel of the political game, perfect for an election season where an informed humor lightens a commonplace cynicism.
