5 New Books We Recommend This Week
It’s Independence Day, when Americans traditionally gather to grill meat and blow things up while they celebrate the nation’s founding — but in our recommended books this week, we’re casting an eye on more recent history: Tom McGrath’s “Triumph of the Yuppies” looks back to the “greed is good” era of the 1980s and shows how it marched unimpeded to the present day, while John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke” finds the roots of today’s culture wars and ascendant right wing in the seemingly quieter politics of the early 1990s. Also up: the biography of an influential book editor, a novel set on a small Welsh island in the 1930s, and a graphic novel that explores themes of independence and self-invention. Happy reading, and Happy Fourth. — Gregory Cowles
TRIUMPH OF THE YUPPIES:
America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation
Tom McGrath
In this breezy history, McGrath sets out to explain why the United States suddenly fell in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed in the 1980s. He follows a series of colorful figures in their pursuit of crass materialism, including the junk bond king Michael Milken and the former yippie activist Jerry Rubin.
Credit…“Graduating from an elite college and moving to the city to try to get rich has become so common that we barely notice it. The ultimate triumph of the yuppies is that we don’t even call them yuppies anymore.”
From Jacob Goldstein’s review
Grand Central | $32
WHEN THE CLOCK BROKE:
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
John Ganz
The 1990s marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Clintonian “triangulation,” giving the impression of a bland consensus coalescing around a political middle. But as Ganz shows, the early part of the decade was also a time of social unrest and roiling resentments. His vibrant narrative account captures an emerging “politics of despair” that would eventually benefit the far right.
Credit…“Captures the sweep of the early ’90s in all its weirdness and vainglory…. Ganz recounts all of this with a formidable command of the history. But he also has the skills of a gifted storyteller — one with excellent comedic timing, too — slipping in the most absurd and telling details.”
From Jennifer Szalai’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30
WHALE FALL
Elizabeth O’Connor
Brief but complete, blunt but exquisite, Connor’s debut is set in the fall of 1938 on an unnamed Welsh island with a population of 47, including the bright and restless 18-year-old Manod, her mysterious younger sister and her lobster fisherman father. Unsettling disruptions to the landscape include a whale corpse washed up on the beach and English ethnographers who enlist Manod’s help but woefully distort island life in their work.
Credit…“An example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude. … Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions.”
From Maggie Shipstead’s review
Pantheon | $27
THE EDITOR:
How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
Sara B. Franklin
This essential if adulatory biography argues that Jones has been given short shrift, credited mostly as the culinary editor who championed Julia Child, but who did much more to burnish Knopf’s exalted reputation in the book business.
Credit…“Jones’s contribution to the history of regular old literature has often been minimized or outright erased. … She burnished and sustained Knopf’s reputation as the most prestigious publishing house in the country while also earning it piles of money.”
From Alexandra Jacobs’s review
Atria | $29.99
VERA BUSHWACK
Sig Burwash
In this graphic novel debut, Burwash transports the reader to Nova Scotia by exploring the lives of a nonbinary protagonist named Drew and their alter-ego, Vera Bushwack (a chainsaw-wielding, chaps-wearing nonbinary hero of sorts), as they work to clear land in order to build a cabin in the woods, exploring gender, independence and several other big themes along the way.
Credit…“Burwash gives the book’s art a lovely personality. It is surprisingly plastic; sometimes their renderings of Drew and her environs are simple contours, sometimes the images are drawn from such a height that they’re almost maps.”
From Sam Thielman’s graphic novels column
Drawn & Quarterly | $29.95
