The 10 Best Books of 2012
The New York Times, November 30, 2012
The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Photograph by Kristina DiMatteo and Rex Bonomelli
Related
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100 Notable Books of 2012 (December 2, 2012)
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Sunday Book Review: Children's Books: Notable Children’s Books of 2012 (December 2, 2012)
Kristina DiMatteo and Rex Bonomelli
FICTION
Taking up where her previous novel, “Wolf Hall,” left off, Mantel makes
the seemingly worn-out story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn newly
fascinating and suspenseful. Seen from the perspective of Henry’s chief
minister, Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless maneuverings of the court move
swiftly to the inevitable executions. Both this novel and its
predecessor were awarded the Man Booker Prize. Might the trilogy’s
forthcoming conclusion, in which Cromwell will meet his demise, score
Mantel a hat trick?
Ware’s innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by
breaking it apart. Packaged in a large box like a board game, the
project contains 14 “easily misplaced elements” — pamphlets, books,
foldout pages — that together follow the residents of a Chicago triplex
(and one anthropomorphized bee) through their ordinary lives. In doing
so, it tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and
existential loneliness in a way that’s simultaneously playful and
profound.
In an empty city in Saudi Arabia, a middle-aged American businessman
waits day after day to close the deal he hopes will redeem his forlorn
life. Eggers, continuing the worldly outlook that informed his recent
books “Zeitoun” and “What Is the What,” spins this spare story — a
globalized “Death of a Salesman” — into a tightly controlled parable of
America’s international standing and a riff on middle-class decline that
approaches Beckett in its absurdist despair.
Smith’s piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the
friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest
London, their lives disrupted by fateful choices and the brutal
efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments,
uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent
language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and
searingly direct.
A veteran of the Iraq war, Powers places that conflict at the center of
his impressionistic first novel, about the connected but diverging fates
of two young soldiers and the trouble one of them has readjusting to
life at home. Reflecting the chaos of war, the fractured narrative jumps
around in time and location, but Powers anchors it with crystalline
prose and a driving mystery: How did the narrator’s friend die?
NONFICTION
BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
By Katherine Boo.
Random House, $27.
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
By Katherine Boo.
Random House, $27.
This National Book Award-winning study of life in Annawadi, a Mumbai
slum, is marked by reporting so rigorous it recalls the muckrakers, and
characters so rich they evoke Dickens. The slum dwellers have a skillful
and empathetic chronicler in Boo, who depicts them in all their
humanity and ruthless, resourceful glory.
For more than a decade, Solomon studied the challenges, risks and
rewards of raising children with “horizontal identities,” traits that
they don’t share with their parents. As he investigates how families
have grown stronger or fallen apart while raising prodigies, dwarfs,
schizophrenics, transgendered children or those conceived in rape, he
complicates everything we thought we knew about love, sacrifice and
success.
The fourth volume of Caro’s prodigious masterwork, which now exceeds
3,000 pages, explores, with the author’s signature combination of
sweeping drama, psychological insight and painstaking research,
Johnson’s humiliating years as vice president, when he was excluded from
the inner circle of the Kennedy White House and stripped of power. We
know what Johnson does not, that this purgatory is prelude to the event
of a single horrific day, when an assassin’s bullet placed Johnson, and
the nation he now had to lead, on a new course.
THE PATRIARCH
The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.
By David Nasaw.
The Penguin Press, $40.
The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.
By David Nasaw.
The Penguin Press, $40.
Nasaw took six years to complete this sprawling, arresting account of a
banker-cum-speculator-cum-moviemaker-cum-ambassador-cum-dynastic
founder. Joe Kennedy was involved in virtually all the history of his
time, and his biographer persuasively makes the case that he was the
most fascinating member of his large, famous and very formidable family.
WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
An Existential Detective Story.
By Jim Holt.
Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton & Company, $27.95.
An Existential Detective Story.
By Jim Holt.
Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton & Company, $27.95.
For several centuries now, thinkers have wondered, “Why is there
something rather than nothing?” In search of an answer, Holt takes the
reader on a witty and erudite journey from London to Paris to Austin,
Tex., as he listens to a varied cast of philosophers, scientists and
even novelists offer solutions that are sometimes closely reasoned,
sometimes almost mystical, often very strange, always entertaining and
thought-provoking.
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