Review by New York Times Review
STICKY FINGERS: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan. (Vintage, $17.) This appraisal of Rolling Stone's co-founder and publisher holds nothing back: not his narcissism and violent temperament, nor his legendary appetites - especially when it came to sex. Even though rock music's importance faded and the magazine has thinned, Hagan makes a case for Wenner's lasting place in 20th-century history LEA, by Pascal Mercier. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Grove, $16.) Two Swiss men meet by chance in Provence; one is trying to repair his relationship with his daughter Lea, a brilliant but mercurial violinist who is hospitalized in an asylum that once sheltered Vincent van Gogh. As the men's stories and identities mix, the novel poses unsettling questions: Who are we? And what might it be like to be someone else? A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford. (The Experiment, $16.95.) Blending data from archaeology to evolutionary biology, this rollicking study investigates how DNA links us to our ancestors. Rutherford takes readers back hundreds of thousands of years to the beginnings of the most recent iteration of humanity, and mines genetics to see our history in a new light. HARMLESS LIKE YOU, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. (Norton, $15.95.) This debut novel traces two coming-of-age stories: Yuki persuades her parents to leave her in New York so she can focus on her artistic development - and continue her love affair with the city in the 1960s and '70s. Years later, the son she abandoned tracks her down in Berlin. As our reviewer, Ñamara Smith, said, Buchanan reminds us that "the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today." I CAN'T BREATHE: A Killing on Bay Street, by Matt Taibbi. (Spiegel & Grau, $18.) This deeply reported account frames the death of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in New York in 2014, as a consequence of profound societal inequities. Taibbi integrates the facts with the economic and political realities of Garner's life, from institutional poverty to crooked landlords to racist law enforcement agencies. THE NINTH HOUR, by Alice McDermott. (Picador, $17.) In Irish Brooklyn in the early 1900s, nuns take up the cause of a young widow and her daughter, Sally. Sally seems headed for a life in a convent, too - until worldly temptations interfere. Our reviewer, Mary Gordon, praised McDermott, saying, "She has now extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this enveloping, emotionally intricate, suspenseful drama, McDermott lures readers into her latest meticulously rendered Irish American enclave, returning to early twentieth-century Brooklyn, the setting for Someone (2013). A man's suicide would have left his young, pregnant widow destitute but for the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, who care for everyone in their parish with zestful efficiency. Annie is given a job in the convent laundry under the direction of the taciturn, secretly softhearted Sister Illuminata, while young, sweet, surprisingly worldly Sister Jeanne helps Annie care for her clever, funny daughter. Sally thrives in this immaculate basement sanctuary where stains and stinks evidence of toil, suffering, and sin are urgently eradicated with soap and prayers. While Annie, in spite of the convent's piety and orderliness, embraces the rampant messiness of life, even illicit love, Sally's calling to become a nun is cruelly tested on a hellish train journey into the dirty world. Like Alice Munro, McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty, a sensitive and consummate illuminator of the realization of the self, the ravages of illness and loss, and the radiance of generosity. As she considers the struggles of women, faith and inheritance, sacrifice and passion, she pays vivid tribute to the skilled and sustaining sisters, a fading social force. McDermott's extraordinary precision, compassion, and artistry are entrancing and sublime. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This is one of literary master McDermott's most exquisite works, and a national tour and concerted publicity campaign will generate avid requests.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Award winner McDermott (Someone) delivers an immense, brilliant novel about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness. Set in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, the story begins in tragedy as young and pregnant Annie, an Irish immigrant, returns home to her shabby tenement apartment to find her 32-year-old husband dead from intentional carbon monoxide poisoning. In order to make money, Annie takes a job doing laundry at the local convent. In turn, the nuns of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor help Annie raise her daughter, Sally, after she is born. As Sally pushes through adolescence, the influence of the strict yet benevolent sisters and the church's teachings takes hold. At 18, Sally embarks on her own novitiate journey, accompanying Sister Lucy and bubbly Sister Jeanne to the cluttered homes and sickbeds of New York's most poor and wretched. The novel jumps around in time and spans three generations, exploring the paths of Annie, Sally, and Sally's children. But it's the thread that follows Sally's coming of age and eventual lapse of faith that is the most absorbing. Scenes detailing her benevolent encounters, especially her stint taking care of cantankerous and one-legged Mrs. Costello, are paradoxically grotesque and irresistible. As in her other novels, McDermott exhibits a keen eye for character, especially regarding the nuns (Sister Lucy, who "lived with a small, tight knot of fury at the center of her chest," is most memorable). (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This seamlessly written new work from National Book Award winner McDermott (Someone) asks how much we owe others, how much we owe ourselves, and, of course, given McDermott's consistent attention to the Catholic faith, how much we owe God. Not much on any account for Irish immigrant Jim, down on his luck through his own doing, who turned on the gas in his early 1900s Brooklyn tenement and killed himself while nearly incinerating the building. He left behind pregnant wife Annie, comforted by Sister St. Saviour of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, who boldly bargains with God in an effort to assure the victim a proper Catholic burial. Annie secures work at the convent, helping tough-but-tender Sister Illuminata in the laundry while befriending spitfire young Sister Jeanne and raising her daughter, Sally. In the end, both Sally and Jeanne make sacrifices of conscience to assure Annie's happiness. But as we see, Michael Tierney, head of a family to which both mother and daughter are close, refused to sacrifice himself to his father's wishes. VERDICT In lucid, flowing prose, -McDermott weaves her characters' stories to powerful effect. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/8/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. "It was Sister St. Savior's vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawersto peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands." By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mothera neighbor with a houseful of babiesthen they finagle a baby carriage, and "the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses." This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what's to comefor example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriagesthis novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms. Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott's (Someone, 2013, etc.) stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
