Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will & Attention, and Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy: A Life all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.
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1. Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry
(Mariner)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“As Kafka once wrote, ‘a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us.’ This book, and this author, are that ax … Much is laid before us, with great precision: finely tuned metaphors, graceful repetitions. Facts are faced, faults are noted, death and life are seen and held. That is all—and that is truly plenty, this valuable and beautiful account a gift to the reader, grieving or not.”
–Amy Bloom (The New York Times Book Review)
=2. On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman
(Catapult)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“Cathartic and often wondrous … Witnessing her altered mind grapple with some of humanity’s most sweeping questions is an undeniable pleasure.”
–Publishers Weekly
=2. Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O’Gieblyn
(Doubleday)
6 Rave • 1 Positive
“A remarkable memoir … Complex and surprising … Brave in its disclosures but more so in its demands, its spiritual rigor, and its ardent intellectualism … Eloquent, intelligent … Remarkably honest … Alarmingly open and unfinished.”
–James Wood (The New Yorker)
4. Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty
(St. Martin’s Press)
6 Rave • 2 Mixed
“Engrossing … Daugherty…deftly separates the writer from the myth, capturing McCarthy’s evolution from a Southern writer to a Western one with a biography that pulls you along like a novel. But he doesn’t shy away from the troubling details.”
–Bill Heavy (The Wall Street Journal)
5. Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes by Lindsey Fitzharris
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
4 Rave • 4 Positive
Read an excerpt from Sleuth-Hound here
“Fitzharris rescues Bell from the periphery of the Holmes story and restores him to his rightful position as the inspiration and model for the great consulting detective.”
–David Pitt (Booklist)
