STEPHANIE ALLISON

Forget the chick lit! Our official reader has some intense summer books for you.

DAILY: New York Times (online and print), Wall Street Journal, Financial Times (online and print), Washington Post (online), New York Post (online), Science Daily (online), Three Quarks Daily, Politico.com
WEEKLY: Economist, Guardian Weekly, New Yorker, National Review (online)
BI-WEEKLY: New York Review of Books
MONTHLY: Harper’s, Atlantic, Allure, Bitch, Vogue, Hastings Center Report, American Journal of Bioethics, Nature, Neuroscience

TITLE	AUTHOR	COMMENT
Slow Man	J.M. Coetzee	Familiar Coetzee-an themes embedded in a meta-fiction designed to bewilder the characters and open a discussion on will and the author-creation-reader relation for the reader. It may, however, vex instead, given its limited conceptual return. Still, this is Coetzee, and he is unerring on aging, loneliness and desire even when his formal choices are less satisfying than usual. Yes.
The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual—the Biggest Bank Failure in American History	Kirsten Grind	A well-told narrative and analysis of one banking group’s failure among the many institutional collapses of our recent influential crisis. Dramatic, sad and very readable.
The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art and Money	John Brewer	Is a painting that has been in the U.S. for almost a century a Leonardo or not? Hopes are raised, dashed and raised again. Questions of connoisseurship, the vagaries of attribution and the rise of scientific analysis of works of art underpin this story, which has not yet reached its conclusion. Very readable.
Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All	Rose Shapiro
Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial	Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D.	Two British works on the same subject—the credulous acceptance of “alternative medicine.” Both cover the same ground well. Shapiro brings an angry brio to her analysis. The Singh and Ernst book reflects Ernst’s experience as a professor of complementary medicine whose research has led him to concede only a very limited utility to a few alternative medicine practices.
Eating Bitterness: Stories From the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration	Michelle Dammon Loyalka	Loyalka was interviewed for wwword.com on the Chinese word generally translated as “eating bitterness,” chiku. The grand-scale narrative is the familiar one of Chinese economic modernization and its screaming pace of urbanization. Loyalka’s book is of special interest for its focus on a western Chinese city, Xi’an, rather than the coastal metropolises familiar from other books on this topic. Focusing on eight rural immigrants, she tells us a great deal about the range of possible outcomes for these folk navigating a new city life. Eating Bitterness is a fine bookend to Leslie Chang’s equally insightful Factory Girls. Loyalka includes an excellent annotated bibliography of general interest and academic works on Chinese economic modernization. Compelling and vivid.
Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall	Alexis L. Boylan, editor	This collection of essays is most interesting for the roaring undercurrent of uncertainty on how to treat the recently deceased Kinkade, the sentimental schlockmeister painter whose images are said to be in one in 20 American homes. For most of the essayists, Kinkade functions as the worthy but still contemptible subject against whom all the apparatus of art speak can be brought to bear. One piece by the artist-curator Jeffrey Vallance on his experience of organizing a Kinkade exhibition in the high-art setting of a university gallery is refreshing in its open-endedness.
Cities of Salt	Abdelrahman Munif	A re-read after 20 years, motivated by the continuing changes and conflicts of the post-Arab Spring. An explicitly political epic centered on the exploitation of oil resources and attendant cultural conflicts in a fictional Middle Eastern state from the 1930s to the 1950s. Not a read for its literary qualities in translation, rather, it is uncomfortably prescient about the issues now playing out to uncertain ends in the region. Yes.

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