Great news, everybody! The publishing industry has been working overtime to explain all the weirdness that was the year 2016. Already sportswriters unraveled the mystery of the World Champion Cubs (The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse by Tom Verducci, 3/28, Crown Archetype). The warning about Russian hacking (How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft by Edward Jay Epstein, 1/17, Knopf) may be coming a little late, but it’s fitting that by the time Donald Trump assumes the presidency there will be not one but two books about how he managed to win the election, one from the left (Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi, 1/17, Spiegel & Grau) and one from the right (The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution by Roger Stone, 1/31, Skyhorse). In this exciting new era, we get to live in multiple realities. It’s just like science fiction! Or Paul Auster’s new novel.
A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1/10, Knopf) Admit it, you’ve always wondered how the sister-wives arrangement worked in early Mormonism. Ulrich, by the way, is the historian who gave us the wonderful slogan “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Long Shot: The Struggles and Triumphs of an NBA Freedom Fighter by Craig Hodges and Rory Fanning (1/24, Haymarket) “With its sharp observations about Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and the state of race relations in the NBA, Long Shot is likely to cause a stir,” Ben Joravsky wrote in his Reader profile of Hodges last month.
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall (2/7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Marshall’s two previous books, biographies of the brilliant Peabody sisters and the early feminist Margaret Fuller, were both great. Now she turns her sights on Bishop, with whom she took a poetry-writing workshop as a college student in the 1970s.
Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission by Barry Friedman (2/21, FSG) Friedman, a law professor at NYU, argues that law enforcement needs to become less secretive and more democratic.
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in 15 Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (3/7, Knopf) This is Adichie’s response to a letter from a childhood friend who asked how she could raise her daughter to be a feminist.
