Review by New York Times Review
GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, by Annie Lowrey. (Crown, $26.) Lowrey, a journalist who covers economic policy for The Atlantic, musters considerable research to make the case for a universal basic income - a government-funded cash handout for all. NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES ... AND OTHERS, by Robert Gottlieb. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) An esteemed book editor who can write well about nearly anything here brings erudition and passion to essays on romance novels, Hollywood classics and, especially, ballet. FROM THE CORNER OF THE OVAL: A Memoir, by Beck Dorey-Stein. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) The often-staid White House memoir genre gets a fresh, funny, candid boost from this addictably readable account by one of President Obama's stenographers, who turns out to be a skilled writer as well. TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT, by Katie Williams. (Riverhead, $25.) Williams's first novel for adults imagines a future in which machines generate "recipes" for individual happiness. The protagonist, who works for the machine company, must confront her son's unwillingness to follow its prescriptions. THE SHADES, by Evgenia Citkowitz. (Norton, $25.95.) An elegantly unnerving first novel that follows the remorseful decline of a British family in the aftermath of a daughter's accidental death. Written in cool and crystalline prose, "The Shades" unspools in a rational and realistic world in which all is not as it seems. THAT KIND OF MOTHER, by Rumaan Alam. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In his second novel, about a white woman who adopts a black son, Alam shrewdly explores the complexities of caregiving as employment, illuminating issues of class and race that arise when people are paid to do hard, dirty work and, in essence, to provide love. THE COST OF LIVING: A Working Autobiography, by Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, $20.) The prolific British novelist, playwright and poet reflects on the sacrifices and satisfactions of her career, drawing larger conclusions about the conflict between a woman's public and private responsibilities. PIE IS FOR SHARING, by Stephanie Parsley Ledyard. Illustrated by Jason Chin. (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, $17.99; ages 2 to 6.) This uplifting picture book features a buoyant group on a daylong picnic, with subtle political resonance to the theme of sharing. SMILEY'S DREAM BOOK, by Jeff Smith. (Scholastic, $17.99; ages 2 to 6.) Smith, creator of the Bone graphic novels, here offers a picture book in which sweet Smiley Bone walks in the woods, counting birds. Adventure and suspense sneak satisfyingly in. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
To call it a downgrade would be an understatement. After her marriage ended, Levy moved from the family home, where she had tended to her husband, daughters, and garden, to a grubby apartment building in London, supposedly about to be restored, with unnerving gray hallways reminiscent of The Shining. Levy calls them the Corridors of Love. In this evocative and insightful memoir, Levy describes her new freedom, in all its complexity and drudgery, and examines how society's expectations can define and confine women. She includes slices of life in which she observes interactions between men and women in public at a bar, or on a train that reveal larger truths about the dynamics at play in even temporary relationships and what happens when someone dares to challenge them. As an author and teacher, she regularly relates lessons from literature to her own situation. From her work writing in a freezing garden shed to her adventures coasting through London on an electric bicycle, Levy deftly relates the circumstances of her new life with a bewitching combination of wit and pathos.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This slim, singular memoir by British playwright and poet Levy (Hot Milk) chronicles a brief period following the ¿shipwreck¿ of the London writer¿s 20-year marriage. Levy, a Booker Prize finalist, moved from a large Victorian home to an apartment with her two young adult daughters, accepted an offer from an octogenarian friend of a small shed in which to write, and began to rebuild her life. In the process, she explores the role she has played in the past: that of the nurturing ¿architect¿ of family life. Now she hopes to reinvent herself as an independent woman who not only provides for her children, but who enjoys a new physical (e.g., she whizzes about on an electric bike) and creative energy in ¿the most professionally busy time¿ in her life. She is occasionally drawn back to her former life; memories make her long for the past (a sprig of rosemary, for example, makes her think of a garden she once planted in the family house), but don¿t prevent her from moving forward. Levy describes writing as ¿looking, listening, and paying attention,¿ and she accomplishes these with apparent ease. Her descriptions of the people she meets, the conversations she overhears, and the nuances she perceives in relationships are keen and moving (about a man she has just met, ¿I objected to my male walking companion never remembering the names of women¿). This timely look at how women are viewed (and often dismissed) by society will resonate with many readers, but particularly with those who have felt marginalized or undervalued. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
After divorce and her mother's death, a writer struggles to redefine herself.In a memoir notable for its graceful prose, two-time Booker Prize finalist, playwright, and poet Levy (Hot Milk, 2016, etc.) reflects on the new reality of her life after two nearly simultaneous events: the end of her marriage and the loss of her mother. Moving with her daughters into a "large shabby apartment," she was determined to create "an entirely new composition" for all of their lives. "There are only loving and unloving homes," she writes. "It is the patriarchal story that has been broken." The author has much to say about ways that the patriarchal story erases women's identity. For example, she met several men who refer to women only as men's girlfriends or wives. At a party, one man never asked her one question about herself, all the while talking about his own books and his ailing wife. "It seemed," Levy writes, "that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his sidewho understood that he was entirely the subject." That experience was hardly unusual: "It is so mysterious to want to suppress women," she muses. "It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them," she adds. Levy wonders about how desire shaped her mother's life and how much her own desires shaped her perception of her mother: "If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us." Mothers receive "mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink." That poisoned ink infects any woman who dares to break from societal prescriptions. Rebellious women are expected "to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse." But the author's unexpected freedom from her role as wife liberated something "that had been trapped and stifled," generating renewed energy. Still, she admits, "freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs."An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
