American politics are in the spotlight this week, with new books about the country’s ideological and cultural divide from George Packer (“Last Best Hope”) and Jonathan Rauch (“The Constitution of Knowledge”), along with a look at the origins of the Constitution itself (“The Words That Made Us,” by Akhil Reed Amar). We also recommend an account of the vaping company Juul Labs, and new fiction from Yan Lianke, Caitlin Wahrer, Tom Lin and Taylor Jenkins Reid — whose surf novel, “Malibu Rising,” might be just the thing to keep you company on your next beach vacation.
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
LAST BEST HOPE: America in Crisis and Renewal, by George Packer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) This slim but forceful treatise begins with patriotic despair: Packer paints a picture of a deeply splintered America that he divides into four irreconcilable categories. The result, he believes, is that we are losing the ability to govern ourselves. “Packer is at his best when he ties his thesis about Americans’ loss of the art of self-government to the inequality that he has covered extensively and intimately in his career as a journalist,” Emily Bazelon writes in her review. “He thinks America has fractured principally along lines of social class and material hardship, which increasingly persist across generations.” She adds: “If you feel implicated … that’s probably because you’re meant to be.”
THE CONSTITUTION OF KNOWLEDGE: A Defense of Truth, by Jonathan Rauch. (Brookings Institution, $27.99.) To support “the reality-based community of science and journalism,” Rauch shows how human understanding and the marketplace of ideas are now endangered by the excesses of both the left (via cancel culture) and the right (via trolling and disinformation campaigns). Emily Bazelon reviews the book alongside Packer’s, above, and says that Rauch is especially astute about the importance of hearing diverse viewpoints: “He writes at helpful length about the difference between criticizing and canceling,” she notes, and “tells a few good stories about how individual students have risen up and reinvigorated debate on their campuses.” Rather than silencing people you disagree with, Bazelon says, Rauch urges readers to debate them: “Win the argument. Criticize instead of canceling.”
HARD LIKE WATER, by Yan Lianke. (Grove, $27.) In the controversial Chinese satirist’s latest novel to be translated into English, the Cultural Revolution provides the backdrop for an affair between committed party members. The novel, a parody, sets itself up as a kind of Maoist “Anna Karenina.” Our reviewer, Jennifer Wilson, singles out the book’s “quasi-absurdist style” and “ecstatic, jumpy prose,” and says that “sexually charged political satire is nothing new to Yan”: The novel, she writes, “pokes fun at how easily an ideology can be contorted to satisfy individual desires. It also suggests that this might not be such a bad thing.”
THE DAMAGE, by Caitlin Wahrer. (Pamela Dorman/Viking, $27.) A close-knit Maine clan circles the wagons when one of their own is brutally attacked after a bar flirtation gone bad. With this small-town, bighearted mystery — and its head-spinning, Agatha Christie-style wrap-up — Wahrer establishes herself as a new writer to watch. “I love dark stories that let in a little bit of daylight,” Elisabeth Egan writes in her latest Group Text column, “and this is one of them. Wahrer’s characters are going through hell but still manage to be human and worth getting to know.”
THE DEVIL’S PLAYBOOK: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation, by Lauren Etter. (Crown, $29.99.) Resembling a USB drive crossed with a crack pipe, the Juul is an electronic nicotine delivery system that was sold as a way to get smokers to move away from cigarettes but has instead created a new generation of addicts. Etter recounts how a Silicon Valley start-up came to resemble the Big Tobacco it hoped to disrupt. Our reviewer, Sheelah Kolhatkar, calls it a “deeply reported and illuminating book” with “a rich narrative that rewards patience. The story of Juul’s rise and fall teaches us something about greed, capitalism, policy failure and a particular cycle in American business that seems destined to repeat itself.”
THE WORDS THAT MADE US: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, by Akhil Reed Amar. (Basic, $40.) Amar argues in this probing account that the United States Constitution emerged out of conversations and debates among the framers — and that those conversations continue to this day. “Amar is no exponent of the great man theory of history,” Adam Cohen writes in his review, “at least when it comes to the key documents of early America. He strongly suggests that America as a whole — through its great national conversation — did more to draft the Declaration of Independence than Jefferson, and more to write the Constitution than Madison. … In addition to educating the Americans engaged in this discussion about their rich constitutional legacy, the book has a generous spirit that can be a much-needed balm in these troubled times.”
MALIBU RISING, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. (Ballantine, $28.) In Reid’s sun-kissed, windswept follow-up to “Daisy Jones & The Six,” four surfing siblings get ready for their annual end-of-summer party over a period of 24 hours, with detours to their tumultuous past. “Because the novel begins with a short, nicely portentous chapter reminding us that ‘it is Malibu’s nature to burn,’ we are prepared,” Elinor Lipman writes in her review. “We wait for the party to ignite, wondering who among the drunken, stoned or marauding guests or family members will bring about the inevitable.” Surfing, she adds, “saves the brothers and sisters, and Reid knows the sport. Her descriptions and lingo sound to this nonsurfing reader authentic, insider-ish, without straining.”
THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU, by Tom Lin. (Little, Brown, $28.) Lin’s assured debut novel follows a Chinese American assassin on a quest to save his wife during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The book hums with striking descriptions of an unforgiving landscape. “Lin’s prose captures the terrifying, repetitive power of nature,” Chanelle Benz writes in her review. “His story is a new old narrative: part revenge fantasy, part classic bloody tale of the Old West. In this book, things return — people, oceans, violence — but remembering is a choice and the body bears the cost.”
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