Book Reviews

Legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch's new book is packed with monkeys, cartoon magpies, and even Jesus; it starts with an account of killing time after eye surgery and gets wilder from there.

Author Michael Newton waxes rhapsodic in his new book about a century of acting, with a special fondness for performances about performance; it's taken for granted how much we love movies.

Known for the punch of her columns, The New York Times' Gail Collins sprinkles conversational, sardonic asides throughout No Stopping Us Now in an effort to keep the decades-long hike spry.

As a teen, Adrienne Brodeur helped her mother keep a long-term affair a secret. In her memoir, she writes of realizing that being her mother's confidant didn't equal the unconditional love she sought.

Richard Bell's true tale details how even as the Underground Railroad ferried enslaved people north towards freedom, free black people vanished from northern cities to be sold into plantation slavery.

Ten years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, where ornery Olive is learning about compassion, connection, and her own self.

O'Brien's 19th novel is based on the real story of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist group Boko Haram in 2014. It's a painful and essential read that ends on a hopeful yet realistic note.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, revered experts on the Russian secret service, give the book a credibility most others on Russian clandestine operations lack — and they also change the optics.

The author of the magisterial work A Short History of Nearly Everything turns his sights inside, but without the magic touch of the past that made his very big books transcend the common textbook.

Extremely personal, emotionally gritty, and unabashedly honest, Saeed Jones' memoir somehow manages a perfect balance between love and violence, hope and hostility, transformation and resentment.