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Sunday Selections

Written on: May 3rd, 2010 by: in Blog Posts

Quick hits from the weekend book reviews:

• First-time novelist Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists was “so good [Christopher Buckley] had to read it twice.” Reminiscent of Roald Dahl, Evelyn Waugh amongst others, the interlocking stories of an English-language newspaper in Rome and its staff are hilarious and immaculately composed.
• Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife by Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller is a breathless tour “through theological controversies and interviews with some of the roughly 80 percent of Americans who say they believe in heaven” with a magazine article style overview of religions and cults from Swedenborgism to Orthodoxy.
• Jonathan Eig’s Get Capone is an account of the famous mobster’s rise to power and the final coordinated efforts of the U.S. government to bring him down. It’s also a salutary warning about the perils of unenforced prohibition. Using unprecedented access to government files, as well as formerly unpublished notes and research from previous biographies of Capone, Eig’s book is “a gore-spattered thriller and a more nuanced upgrade over previous takedowns and hagiographies.”