Best bets for your weekend reading: Churchill bio, Christmas novels
What should you read this weekend? Paste BN’s picks for book lovers include an excellent new biography of Winston Churchill and an array of Christmas-themed novels.
"Churchill: Walking With Destiny" by Andrew Roberts; Viking, 982 pp.; non-fiction
Is "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" the best Churchill biography of them all?
Who in their right mind would presume to say, short of Winston Churchill himself, who maintained, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”?
All Churchill biographies stand in the shadow of their subject and on the shoulders of Churchill’s official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert, whose primary research constitutes the bulk of what we truly know.
In this sense, Roberts’ new biography stands tall, re-illuminating the well-etched contours of Churchill’s monumental life with scrupulous scholarship and a flair for unearthing the telling detail.
For example, Roberts notes that Churchill’s time in the trenches during World War I led to his stand against Adolf Hitler.
Paste BN says ★★★★ out of four. Roberts “(looks) twice where most biographers have been content to glance once…Time-honored Churchillian bio-tropes (are) reframed and refreshed by Roberts’ keen attention to historical context.”
“Alaskan Holiday” by Debbie Macomber; Ballantine, 224 pp.; fiction
Chef Josie is about to leave remote Ponder, Alaska, for a job at a hot new restaurant in her hometown of Seattle. But local boy Palmer wants her to stay and marry him. Can these kids work it out by Christmas?
Paste BN says ★★★. “A little gem of a holiday romance…promises to melt any frozen heart.”
“A Christmas Revelation” by Anne Perry; Ballantine, 173 pp.; fiction
In Christmastime London in the 1860s, an urchin named Worm and a former brothel owner named Squeaky team up as amateur detectives after Worm sees a beautiful woman accosted on the street by two men.
Paste BN says ★★★. “Dickens meets Gillian Flynn in Anne Perry’s latest Christmas period piece.”
“Mutts and Mistletoe” by Natalie Cox; Putnam, 310 pp.; fiction
In this holiday romance, a Londoner fills in for her cousin running Cozy Canine Cottages and encounters a pregnant beagle, a deaf Great Dane and a country vet with piercing blue eyes.
Paste BN says ★★★. “Light and funny…a sweet, festive tale guaranteed to cheer all you Grinches.”
“Fire and Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin; Bantam, 706 pp.; fiction
While fans wait (and wait) for the ceaselessly delayed “The Winds of Winter,” they can console themselves with this illustrated volume, which charts the rise and reign of the Targaryen family.
Paste BN says ★★★. “Charming… a lavish object, with charts, family trees, and stunning illustrations by comic book artist Doug Wheatley.”
"Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom" by Ariel Burger; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 259 pp.; nonfiction
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel taught for many years at Boston University; his former teaching assistant shares classroom memories of the late writer’s popular courses, a la "Tuesdays With Morrie."
Paste BN says ★★★½. “Has a ‘Wednesdays-with-Wiesel’ feel… Burger shares an album's worth of snapshots from Wiesel's time at BU.”
Contributing reviewers: Barry Singer, Jocelyn McClurg, Mary Cadden, Zlati Meyer