It is a riveting¹ meditation² on the state of race in America that has arrived at a tumultuous moment in America's history of racial strife³.

 

What it does better than any other recent book is relentlessly⁵ drive home the point that "racism⁶ is a visceral experience..."To be black in the ghetto⁷ of Coates's youth "was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape⁸, and disease."

 

A black man's stark⁹, visceral experience of racism.

 

 

The Islamic State, whose radical¹⁰ Islamic warriors¹¹ have inflicted¹² their brutality¹³ across the globe from the Middle East to Paris, was founded as al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 by a Jordanian thug known by his nom de guerre, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

 

IJoby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, explains the importance of this gangster¹⁴ and analyzes¹⁵ his continuing influence on the Islamic State long after his death in 2006.

 

Joby Warrick shows in painful but compulsively readable detail how a series of mishaps¹⁶ and mistakes by the U.S. and Jordanian governments gave this unschooled hoodlum his start as a terrorist superstar and set the Middle East on a path of sectarian violence that has proved hard to contain.

 

 

In the summer of 1942, German soldiers expelled almost 200 starving children from an orphanage¹⁷ in the Warsaw Ghetto and packed them into rail cars bound for Treblinka.

 

Drawing on his imagination and dozens of historical sources, Shepard brings the Warsaw orphanage to life in this remarkable¹⁸ novel about a poor Polish boy and his friendship with the caretaker of the orphans¹⁹, the pediatrician Janusz Korczak.

 

Aron relays his world just as he experiencesthat his town slides into hell. Although relentless⁴ in its portrayal²⁰ of systematic²¹ evil, "The Book of Aron" is nonetheless a story of such candor²² about the complexity²³ of heroism²⁴ that it challenges us to greater courage.

 

 

Jon Meacham's new biography of George H.W. Bush accomplishes a neat trick.

 

In Meacham's telling, Bush indeed lacked an ideological²⁶ vision, was as overmatched in domestic policy as he was masterful on the global stage, benefited from his family's influence, and remains²⁷ overshadowed "by the myth of his predecessor²⁸ and the drama of his sons ' political lives."

 

What Meacham so skillfully adds to this understanding -- through extraordinary detail, deft²⁹ writing and, thanks to his access to Bush's diaries, an inner monologue³⁰ of key moments in Bush's presidency³¹.

 

 

The book's first half concocts³² the blessed life of Lancelot "Lotto" Satterwhite, the adored son of a wealthy family who has great ambitions to be an actor. His wife, Mathilde, so long impoverished³³ and alone, willingly takes on the chore of encouraging Lancelot.

 

And halfway³⁴ through, Groff turns from "Fates" to "Furies." Here's a woman as determined³⁵ as Antigone, as ferocious³⁶ as Medea.

 

'Fates and Furies' review: A masterful tale of marriage and secrets.

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