Ruins are a theme in this week’s recommended books, from the collapse of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire to the lives wasted by colonialism that Dionne Brand seeks out in classic British literature to the journalistic standards that lie trampled in the entertaining oral history “Paper of Wreckage,” about the tabloid excesses of The New York Post. We also recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s new history of human communication and Aaron Robertson’s study of Black utopianism; and, in fiction, new novels by Eva Baltasar and Alan Hollinghurst. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
PAPER OF WRECKAGE:
An Oral History of The New York Post, 1976-2024
Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo
This account traces the fate of one of America’s most flamboyant tabloid newspapers in the nearly 50 years since Rupert Murdoch took control of it in 1977, encouraging unforgettable headlines, a chortling tone and frothing-at-the-mouth politics that paved the way for another of his products, Fox News.
OUR EVENINGS
Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for his 2004 novel, “The Line of Beauty,” about glittering characters in early-1980s London as the AIDS crisis loomed in the background. Here, in his languorous, elegant seventh novel, he skewers the hidden and not-so-hidden bigotries that define Britain by tracing the life of his narrator, a Burmese English actor who grapples with race and ambition, sexuality and love.
THE BLACK UTOPIANS:
Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
Aaron Robertson
What does utopia look like for Black Americans? Robertson’s grandparents had a farm in Promise Land, Tenn., and in his interesting and idiosyncratic new book — a hybrid of personal history and scholarly history — he explores the background and meaning of such utopian communities for African Americans.
SALVAGE:
Dionne Brand
For her new book, the Trinidadian-born writer Brand rereads classic English novels, teasing out the evidence they contain of the violence of empire and the ravages of colonialism. In these books, she shows, the minutiae of white characters’ daily lives conceal the unseen — unsalvaged — minutiae of the enslaved and Indigenous lives under imperial control.
SELLING SEXY:
Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon
Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez
Two veteran fashion journalists examine how Victoria’s Secret fell from grace in this brisk, lively chronicle of the global retail empire built on sweet-nothing bits of lace and rayon. But this is a book about bras in the same way that “Citizen Kane” is a movie about a sled — which is to say, not at all; it’s really about business and the flawed thinking that can bring it down.
NEXUS:
A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari
Despite its subtitle, Harari’s 500-page study of human communication is anything but brief. But if you can make it to the second half — essentially an extended policy brief on the risks of A.I. — you’ll be both entertained and scared.
MAMMOTH
Eva Baltasar
In sharp and forthright prose, adeptly translated by Julia Sanches, Baltasar’s novel tells the story of a heroine who is queer and determined to live alone, but also to get pregnant. The novel’s themes and the narrator’s palpable desires might feel contradictory, but only in the ways that life always is.
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