New Cold Wars (Scribe) by David E Sanger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author, argues that America is at a crossroads. The thinking two decades ago was that Russia and China could be pulled into a West-led order. But the Ukraine invasion and Chinese claims over Taiwan reiterated thatthere’s now a new, thornier conflict of superpowers with difficult choices ahead. The result of many top-level interviews and detailed research, this book is one that America-heads and policy wonks will pore over.
Another political doorstopper is Robert Fisk’s final work, Night of Power (Fourth Estate). Fisk, a historian-reporter who died in 2020, spent four decades in the Middle East. He was a trenchant critic of US foreign policy in the region and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which some saw as bias. As Patrick Cockburn writes in his foreword, Fisk had his detractors, but was dogged in questioning official narratives and “sought in his journalism and books to tell people … about the terrible things that happen and to identify those responsible for these horrors”.
How do you co-write an up-to-the-minute thriller when you’ve been dead for 16 years? You start writing it in 1980 and your widow works with mega-bestseller James Patterson to finish it. Eruption (Century) is a pot(lava)-boiler about a volcano that’s about to blow the Big Island of Hawaii apart, and the military have left a problem that will make things much worse. It’s sheer escapism, delivered in brief chapters, driving plot and dialogue, with a smart, brave lead, but other characters you’ll forget after a minute. A movie adaptation is, of course, in preproduction.
Maureen Callahan’s Ask Not (Mudlark) is a punchy, gossipy chronicle of the Kennedy family and their treatment of the women in their lives. It’s harsh on Camelot’s men: JFK’s affair with Marilyn, Teddy’s Chappaquiddick cowardice, JFK Jr’s flying hubris and RFK Jr’s alleged insensitive treatment of his second wife. But the Kennedy women, such as Jackie and Carolyn, don’t get off scot-free, either.
