Books: Decluttering, a masterful Lincoln biography, and history-making moms
Do you have tsundoku? That’s what they call book hoarding in Japan. I’m Carolyn Kellogg, book editor, and I’ll admit I’m a book collector (but I hope not hoarder, or at least, not quite). Welcome to this week’s books newsletter.
THE BIG STORY
Japan, perhaps not coincidentally, is where Marie Kondo launched her world-changing decluttering movement with “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” Writer Mark Haskell Smith follows her lessons — and some from the many books that have cropped up to surf the Kondo wave — and declutters his own home. One of the big questions, he explains in this essay, was what to do with all of his books.
A MASTERFUL LINCOLN BIOGRAPHY
In “Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856,” the second volume of his massive political life of Lincoln, the Democratic operative and writer Sidney Blumenthal sketches Abraham Lincoln in the wilderness — after his single term in the House, before his landmark Senate campaign against Stephan A. Douglas — that challenges the established notion that for more than half a decade the future president sat quietly and idly in Illinois, more a passive observer than an activist as his party, his vision of America and his country split apart, tumbling to civil strife and then to civil war. Lincoln was not only seeking a newer world, as Tennyson put it in a poem written a decade earlier, or the way to assemble one. He was also seeking his main chance. Read the review by David Shribman.
ROXANE GAY IN L.A.
If you didn’t make it to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Tuesday night, don’t fret — Agatha French attended the benefit there for PEN Center USA and wrote about the candid conversation between Roxane Gay and Randa Jarrar.
REMARKABLE MOMS
Although the children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommies” was nothing but celebratory, it was at the center of some of the biggest culture war debates of the 1990s. “We didn’t think it was going to become what it became,” its author, Lesléa Newman, told me this week. Since reissued and updated with new art and additional text, the earliest and hard-to-find first editions have become collectible.
And then there’s this: “My American dad was a dreamer, and he painted my mother in these oversized terms — she was Miss Burma, she was the most famous actress in Burma for a time, she was a woman warrior,” Charmaine Craig tells the Times. So she was inspired to research that story, and go back a generation to her grandparents, and “take the novelistic leap.” That book is “Miss Burma” and she tells us all about writing it.
WRITING THRILLERS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
“Any day’s news supplies plots so fantastic that most make-believe story lines pale in comparison,” John Altman writes. The thriller writer — whose next book, “False Flag,” debuts Tuesday — reveals what it’s like to ply his craft during Donald Trump’s tumultuous administration.
BESTSELLERS
Bill O’Reilly was dismissed from Fox News in April, but his book “Old School: Life in the Sane Lane” still has a presence. The treatise on old-school values, co-written by Bruce Feirstein, is now in its fifth week on our nonfiction bestseller list, hanging in at No. 9.
RICHARD FORD
“ ‘Between Them: Remembering My Parents’ ” is a lovely volume,” writes Thomas Curwen, “told from a son’s protective if not defensive voice for two lives drawn thin by the circumstance of his birth.” Richard Ford is, of course, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of “The Sportswriter.” Now in his 70s, he has decided to pen a memoir — devoted to his parents. Read our review.
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