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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. The actual start of summer is still almost a month away, but you're forgiven if this past weekend made you ready to spread your towel on the sand or find your way to the nearest hammock and start reading. Yes, it's time to get your list of beach reads and other summer reads ready to go. We turn to Pamela Paul, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, for some suggestions of new books that make for perfect summer reading to keep us entertained and maybe even informed. Let's note as well, Pamela brings us some-- Never mind that part. Pamela, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us.
Pamela Paul: Thanks for having me.
Brian Lehrer: The Book Review put together a list of 24 new books that look promising, and it looks to me like many of them are crime-related.
Pamela Paul: We're trying to narrow it down but yes, there is crime, both fictional and true crime. Both of them, for whatever grizzly reason you want to come up with, are traditional summer favorite. If you're looking for real crime, one that editors at the Book Review are excited about is called What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl by Katherine Dykstra. This is a book about a true story obviously. In July of 1970, an 18-year-old girl named Paula left her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She borrowed a car from a friend. She never came back. Dykstra, who was a journalist, delved into this story. There's a whole Reddit thread devoted to this case. People have just been constantly fascinated by it. This looks into the mystery of why one woman died, but also the larger fascination with why are we always so interested in women who disappear and never come back.
Brian Lehrer: Some of these cross categories like A Slow Fire Burning, the new one from Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train fame, to true crime like the Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown's follow-up to her reporting with Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. What else?
Pamela Paul: Summer is a great time for narrative non-fiction. The Julie Brown, there's a lot of anticipation around that. She is, of course, the reporter from the Miami Herald, who first broke the Jeffrey Epstein story. This is the book on that subject that everyone has been waiting for. There's also the new books from Lawrence Wright. Both he and Michael Lewis have the year-of-the-pandemic books. Michael Lewis is looking at behind the scenes, people who had a premonition as to what was coming, people who are on the forefront. The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID by Lawrence Wright, it's built on a story that ran in The New Yorker, but as he does so well, he turns stories about things that we think we already know about into a thriller-like page-turner. That should be another big popular book this summer.
Brian Lehrer: Memoirs are a subset of non-fiction, and you've got a few on the list, like Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven, a fox and a Raven meet in Montana.
Pamela Paul: Yes, a very interesting odd premise. This is the first book from the newly relaunched Spiegel & Grau. They are two popular editors who just have started [inaudible 00:03:39] publishing company after leaving one of the big five publishers. This book, it's a riff on Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. It is about a woman who finishes her PhD in biology and is all alone in Montana, when she is visited by a fox and sparks a friendship.
Brian Lehrer: You also have on the list, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, which is a hybrid memoir/history.
Pamela Paul: Yes, this is about a woman who uses item that was passed down from mother to daughter to tell a family history. This is by Tiya Miles. It's called All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. It looks at the history of African American women and their craftwork through the story of this one family.
I'd like to mention another one along those lines, On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed, which is similarly a hybrid history/personal memoir. Annette Gordon-Reed is, of course, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote about Sally Hemings and the Jefferson family. This book looks at her childhood in Texas and the celebration of Juneteenth, which, of course, a lot of people are thinking about as we enter the anniversary of George Floyd's murder.
Nationwide, I think more and more people are celebrating Juneteenth, which is the day that marks the enslaved peoples’ emancipation in this country. What Gordon-Reed does in this book is she tells a very personal story about her growing up in Texas and interweaves that with the larger story of Black people in Texas, and really complicated history of Texas between the Indigenous people, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, the early Texians. It's a short book, but I think really also a very worthwhile non-fiction book for the summer.
Brian Lehrer: Since Annette Gordon-Reed is undoubtedly going to be very busy that week, leading up to Juneteenth, happy to say we have her locked in for an appearance here. Folks, if you're interested in that, that will be on Thursday, June 17th. I see former president Bill Clinton made your list of summer reads, not for a book about policy, but as co-author of a thriller.
Pamela Paul: Yes. James Patterson and Bill Clinton teamed up a few years ago for a thriller called The President is Missing, and this is their much-anticipated follow-up. That book was a big bestseller. This new one is called The President's Daughter. It's about the daughter of the former President Matthew Keating, who is kidnapped. The president, of course, is not only president, but a former Navy SEAL, and vows to bring her home. Some real heroics.
It's interesting that's landing at the same time roughly that Stacey Abrams, who was a former candidate for governor of Georgia, has her first thriller out. She is, of course, the author of a number of romance novels, which she wrote under a pseudonym, but this is her first thriller. That one concerns the death unexpected of a Supreme Court justice.
Brian Lehrer: Finally, from your list of 24 summer reads, you've got three literally summer reads in that they're about summer, or it's a fact, I guess, if we want to get a little meta in our beach reads, read about it being summer. You've got two books about the sea. You can get really meta while you're reading by the seashore. The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat that Imperils It. That's all one title, by Helen Scales, and The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans by Cynthia Barnett. Also, one about sweating. I see The Joy of Sweat. The Strange Science of Perspiration by Sarah Everts very appropriate. You want to talk about any of those?
Pamela Paul: Sure. It's nice that we'll actually get to be back on the beach and maybe even do a little bit of travel this summer. We don't have to vicariously read about the summers that we may not have quite had last year when so much of the country was on lockdown. One of those I think is particularly intriguing, at least to me, which is The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. It's one of those books that hones in on a single object. The way that we've done with Cod and other. It's a micro history. This looks at the seashell and how they are made and the people who collect them and the stories that they tell. That is by Cynthia Barnett. That is coming out in July.
Brian Lehrer: Beach reading about the beach sounds really fun. We thank Pamela Paul, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, for the suggestions of new books that could make for a perfect summer reading from the Book Reviews list of 24 new books that look promising. Pamela, thanks a lot. Happy summer.
Pamela Paul: A pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.
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