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Text New Releases: May 15th
Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything
 The latest book by British journalist and provocateur Christopher Hitchens sees the political pugilist shift his focus to religion and deliver a ranting atheist manifesto that is as offensive and entertaining as his political criticism. Hitchens, who once described Mother Teresa as
"a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," radically extends his list of religious wrongdoers to encompass the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi and attacks religion as the cause of every major historical crisis and contemporary woe. This has some reviewers commending his
"on-ground-glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes" and others describing his understanding of religion as one held only by
"fundamentalists and their atheistic doppelgangers." Whether his case is ultimately convincing or not, readers will concur that Hitchens upholds his characteristic ability to turn phrases like this one:
"monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a
hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a
fabrication of a few nonevents." |
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Rebecca Scott -
Ghostwalk
 The first non-fiction release of a new Random House imprint, British historian Rebecca Scott's debut novel is a hypnotic and intelligent thriller that blends the supernatural with modern quantum theory, the current war on terror with Isaac Newton's work on light and gravity, and his experimentations with alchemy in the 17th century. The mysterious drowning of a Cambridge Scholar who was working on a controversial biography of Isaac Newton leads her successor into to a series of seemingly separate murder queries that span the 17th century to the present. Scott's twisting interconnection between past and present creates an atmospheric novel that critics are lauding as both mind-boggling and mind-expanding. More than a clever page-turner, Scott's debut, in the words of Iain Pears, weaves a complex mystery that is
"audacious, convincing, and will make readers think anew about what
history is." |
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Vincent Bugliosi - Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
 Here is yet another book about the assassination of J.F.K. This one by the man best known as Charles Manson's prosecutor – who spent more than 20 years writing this defense of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the person singly responsible for Kennedy's death. The book is structured according to subject, such as theories of the KGB, anti-Castro Cubans, or the role of the FBI, and results
"massive tome" will either overwhelm readers with its unrelenting attention to detail, or come as a welcome historical exegesis that covers the entire case, addressing each and every conspiracy theory and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. |
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Don DeLillo -
Falling Man: A Novel
 Celebrated American author Don DeLillo, whose work is renowned for atomizing modern paranoia and primitive fear at the heart of contemporary American society, sets his latest novel in the aftermath of 9/11. The novel begins with lawyer Keith Neudecker's escape from the World Trade Center and his impulsive return to his recently separated wife and son. The reader then becomes privy to the family's idiosyncratic and insightfully rendered reactions to the dramatic event. While Keith's son obsessively searches the sky with binoculars for planes and
'Bill Lawton,' his wife goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Middle-Eastern, and Keith, having become acquainted with luck, devotes himself to the game of poker. DeLillo reserves Keith's escape, rendered with a brilliant sequence of sights and sounds, until the novel's devastating end, and the author's virtuoso command of language, that has the
"intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram," is sure to make the reader recapture the emotions felt on this historic date. |
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Miranda July - No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories
 This unconventional debut of collected stories by Miranda July (already familiar to some from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know) mixes a series of eccentric narratives that all access a similarly capricious emotional register. Characters often find themselves in extreme situations effected by their quests to be loved and accepted, and continuously resort to fantasy worlds as antidote to the stunted reality they inhabit.
"Majesty" explores a middle-aged woman's strange fixation with Prince William, while the self-effacing narrator of
"The Shared Patio" fabricates a touching romance around her epileptic Korean neighbor. With a voice that is as immediate and distressing as a confessional, July's unadorned style has been compared to Lorrie Moore, Karen Finley, Douglas Coupland and
"overheard bus conversations," and manages to create dreamlike universe in which the marginal individual borders on the grotesque.
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