Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in September. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s OverDrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” by Ben MacIntyre (Sept 15)
In 1981, KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, codenamed Redwood, was the best Soviet officer in Iran, running spies in the wake of the Islamic revolution and working with a hidden network of Iranian communists to undermine the new regime. But Kuzichkin had a problem, a sexual secret that, if revealed, would humiliate him with his colleagues, cost him his job, and send him into exile. Desperate for a solution, he reached out to the only place he believed could help: Britain’s MI6. So begins one of the most astounding true spy stories of the Cold War, set against the terrifying prospect of nuclear armageddon. Taking readers through shadowy back alleys of Tehran, across bloody streets and into cloistered intelligence offices, Ben Macintyre unfolds a world in turmoil, where no one’s motive is what it seems, and exposure means death. As Kuzichkin helps the Soviet leadership plot an overthrow of the Ayatollah’s fledgling regime — and the American government secretly contemplates a nuclear response if they do — it falls on MI6’s resourceful young undercover officer Ian McCredie to spirit Kuzichkin’s vital information back to the West. But when both Iranian intelligence and the KGB close in on the Russian double-agent, McCredie must design an improbable high-stakes escape plan for Kuzichkin, in which failure is almost certain and the direction of the Cold War hangs in the balance. This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage, and its extraordinary unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It’s about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, and betrayal. Drawing on never-before-seen archival material and revealing interviews with the participants, “Redwood” plunges readers back into the world of The Spy and the Traitor, where the fate of millions turns on the split-second decisions of spies under pressure.
“Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music” by Chuck Klosterman (Sept 22)
The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in the spring of 1967. For decades, the cliche has been that it initially only sold 10,000 copies, though everyone who bought it supposedly started a band. It is the definition of a record whose influence outstrips its mass popularity. But what if the opposite had transpired? What if instead of selling 10,000 copies, it had sold… 10 million copies? What if it had sold 100 million copies? What would have happened if the Velvet Underground had inexplicably become the biggest group in the history of popular music, and everything about the rest of the 20th century was merely a footnote to that phenomenon? Whatever answer you imagine is an infinitesimal splinter, at least when compared to “Rock*.” Chuck Klosterman has generated a fictitious universe where almost everything is different, except for the songs. The songs remain the same — the difference is how they are heard and what they now mean. Lou Reed is a messiah, reversing the monoculture and dictating the outcome of presidential elections. The Beatles disappear, though they never break up. The Rolling Stones collapse while Led Zeppelin goes bankrupt. Punk rock fills stadiums, undermined only by insouciant radicals like Boston and Van Halen. Disco is destroyed. Hip-hop becomes country. The 1980s are defined by disposable pop icons (like G.G. Allin) and Christian revivalists (like Madonna). Lenny Kravitz lets love rule, Oasis collides with a wonderwall, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are somehow blamed on the Strokes. Presented like The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll if written by Philip K. Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, and Patrick Bateman, “Rock*” intermixes satiric contrarianism and Spinal Tap-ish absurdity with darker theories about what makes art popular, how success delineates perception, and the inescapable consensus of subjective history. It is not, nor does it claim to be, the greatest book ever written about rock and roll. But it’s probably the last one that ever needs to be written.
“The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia” by Robert Kolker (Sept 29)
In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins “The Vanishing Family,” journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to “Hidden Valley Road.” This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking — shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility — and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish — and there is a 50-50 chance that it will happen to their children, too. “The Vanishing Family” unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia — including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, “The Vanishing Family” is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.
More Notable Releases in September
It was an aquarium (or rather, a video of an octopus attempting a daring escape from one) that eventually pulled Van Pelt toward writing “