Book Review | featured news

This study of Obama, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”

An Oxford professor examines the history of the Christian faith, starting a millennium before the birth of Jesus.

Karl Marlantes’s first novel, “Matterhorn,” is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes ­— a highly decorated Vietnam vet — spent 30 years writing this book.

Despite the book’s somber, scientific backdrop, “Solar” is Ian McEwan’s funniest novel yet. Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (“The Cement Garden”), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (“The Comfort of Strangers”), a dead woman’s conniving former lovers (“Amsterdam”), an adolescent girl who makes false accusations against a man that will alter his life and the life of her entire family (“Atonement”).

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

A riveting account of the flawed leadership, bad luck and virulent personalities that led to the 2006 murder of an entire Iraqi family by American soldiers.

It took Denis Johnson nine years to write Tree Of Smoke, his multilayered, 2007 National Book award-winning Vietnam epic. Nobody Move, Johnson's neo-noir shoot-'em-up about a small-time gambler and barbershop-chorus singer named Jimmy Luntz - who runs into trouble in the form of Ernest Gambol, a tall, sad, savage man with a very large head - feels like it was written in nine weeks.

Jack Foley has robbed 127 banks. Or 176. Or more than 200. It depends on whom you ask.

If opposites attract, then these two novels about adultery make a weird couple. Mary McGarry Morris and Jane Hamilton are critically acclaimed writers who've also been blessed by Oprah, but their new books offer entirely different views of the aggrieved wife.