| | | | | | | | December’s Reader Choice Selection: “Moonglow” | | “Moonglow” is a wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory. Michael Chabon suggests that it was written as an act of rebellion against his upbringing. “Keeping secrets was the family business,” he says, “but it was a business that none of us ever profited from.” His courage to break that code of silence was inspired by stories his dying grandfather told him more than 25 years ago. “His fetish for self-reliance made him secretive,” Chabon says, but their final meeting produced an unusual torrent of reminiscence. “Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life,” Chabon writes, “I heard during the final ten days.” And — what do you know! — the old man turns out to have been a Jewish superhero with a brain “whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence.” | |  |
| | Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World Editor • Read the full review » |
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 | | | THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2016 | | In The Washington Post’s annual survey of the best books, readers will find 10 that Book World reviewers think are exceptionally rewarding and 100 notable titles that you shouldn’t miss. Also, look for their special recommendations for lovers of mysteries, graphic novels, audiobooks, romance, poetry, memoirs, and science fiction and fantasy. | | Read more » |
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 | | | NOTABLE FICTION IN 2016 | | Book World reviewers compile their favorite fiction titles of 2016. The list includes the story of an anthropologist revisiting her old Brooklyn neighborhood and recalling her adolescence; a profoundly sad story about the friends and relatives who lose loved ones to a terrorist bomb in New Delhi in 1996; and more. | | Read more » |
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 | | | NOTABLE NONFICTION IN 2016 | | Book World reviewers list the top nonfiction books of 2016. The roundup includes a memoir by the long-serving editor and publisher who brought to print “Catch-22,” “Beloved” and many other foundational works of the 20th century; an extensively researched biography that provides the most balanced view to date of this complicated liberal hero who spent most of his life driven by the right-wing orthodoxies of his father; and more. | | Read more » |
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| “The Whole Town’s Talking” by Fannie Flagg | | In her new book, “The Whole Town’s Talking, ” Fannie Flagg tells the entire history of Elmwood Springs, Mo. — and residents of its hillside cemetery do some of the telling. Elmwood Springs sprang to life when Lordor Nordstrom, a Swedish immigrant with a newspaper-ad wife named Katrina, bravely moved to farmland he’d bought in an area called “Swede Town.” As the years fly by (you can almost see the calendar pages ripping from the wall), the Nordstroms helped their neighbors incorporate a new town, entice more settlers and woo businesses to support the burgeoning population. | | Read the review » |
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| “Twenty-Six Seconds” by Alexandra Zapruder | | Alexandra Zapruder, granddaughter of the videographer and a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has written a moving and enlightening account that is part memoir; part detailed history of the film and its (inestimable) role in the nation’s understanding of the President John F. Kennedy assassination; and part overview of the film as an inspiration for countless, often bizarre conspiracy theories, as well as for works of art as disparate as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and “Underworld,” and a particularly inventive episode of “Seinfeld.” So much history, embodied in a mere 26 seconds of footage! Not least, this film would one day be sold by the Zapruder heirs to the U.S. government for $16 million, the highest price ever paid for “an American historical artifact,” to be stored in the National Film Registry for scholars and historians to study. | | Read the review » |
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| “They Can’t Kill Us All,” by Wesley Lowery | | As a young black Washington Post reporter, Wesley Lowery was covering the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the police killing of Michael Brown when he was seized by two officers, shoved against a soda dispenser, restrained with a plastic zip tie and jailed briefly just days after he arrived in town. In the ensuing months, Lowery contributed passionate and rigorous reporting on Ferguson and other police killings of blacks that earned him a shared Pulitzer Prize in national reporting at the age of 25. His book, “They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement,&rdquo tells the story of his coverage. | | Read the review » |
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