Weekend picks for book lovers
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN's picks for the weekend include a new book about a modern-day covered-wagon journey.
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck; Simon & Schuster, 416 pp.; non-fiction
The best travel memoirs tell three stories at once — about the author, the trip itself and the territory being traveled. In The Oregon Trail, Rinker Buck excels at all three.
We watch Buck's evolution from a fussy Northeastern journalist bemoaning the slow-motion train wreck of American newspapers into someone able to weather the challenges of trail life. It took him just four months driving a three-mule wagon train from Missouri to Oregon to make it happen.
For more than 400,000 Americans in the 15 years before the start of the Civil War in 1861, the Oregon Trail represented a chance to move west for new opportunities, perhaps to strike gold, or to escape religious bias. It was a journey of great promise and peril; thousands never made it, falling victim along the way to accidents, disease or violence.
Buck, author of Flight of Passage, brings the land to life in a richly researched book that draws heavily from journals kept by the pioneers and their memoirs.
Paste BN says **** out of four. "A joy to read."
The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by Colin Quinn; Grand Central, 224 pp.; non-fiction
"If you read this book and don't find it funny, it's not because it's not funny, it's because you're brainwashed not to laugh at ethnic humor," standup comedian Colin Quinn writes.
Paste BN says ***. Quinn's "often-bruising, self-abasing rites of passage, whether in school playgrounds or Lower Manhattan bars…account for the much of the book's charm and grace."
The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows; The Dial Press, 512 pp.; fiction
Layla Beck, a young Washington, D.C., socialite kicked out of the house by her father and ordered to get a job, arrives in Macedonia, W.Va., to research a history of the town for the Federal Writers' Project.
Paste BN says *** out of four. "Engaging."
Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow; William Morrow, 352 pp.; fiction
Wylie Rose falls for the stunning Cesca Bonet, in this tale of the rich, set in the Hamptons and around the world.
Paste BN says ***. "Seduces readers with a tantalizing, salacious tale set in a world of lovely people untroubled by money matters — but troubled nonetheless."
Reagan: The Life by H.W. Brands; Doubleday, 803 pp.; non-fiction
A biography of the president known as the Great Communicator.
Paste BN says ****. "Brands is the rare academic historian who writes like a best-selling novelist."
Contributing reviewers: Ray Locker, Gene Seymour, Martha T. Moore, Don Oldenburg, Gregory Korte