BOOKED FOR SUMMER

Bright Shiny Morning
James Frey
Harper
After his reputation was shattered into a million little pieces in Oprah Winfrey’s studio and beyond for fabricating parts of his memoir, James Frey tries to salvage it with his new novel in which Los Angeles gleams along with its little big lives — a Mexican-American maid, an action-movie star, a teenage couple on a moped, a homeless man, a meth-addicted girl.

Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
Penguin
The first of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy will be released in India on June 1. Just before the Opium Wars begin, the north Indian countryside is languid with the smell of poppies, in enormous factories almost-naked men with drugged eyes are stomping on leaves to be later sent to China and the schooner Ibis is sailing to Mauritius with a host of strangers, indentured labourers, running from their past, creating stories on the way and indelibly caught in the tides of history.

Breath
Tim Winton
Picador
“We come sweeping up the tree-lined boulevard with siren and lights and when the GPS urges us to make the next left we make it so fast that all the gear slams and sways inside the vehicle.” Winton’s new book opens like this and the gear-slamming urgency, an about-to-swerve feeling, remains throughout the novel on Bruce Pike or Pikelet, a 12-year-old boy in Perth, and his encounter with surf and sex and heartbreak and fear. You can taste the salt in the sea breeze.

Devil May Care
Sebastian Faulks
Penguin
“Bond is back in London after an enforced ‘sabbatical’ on medical grounds. He returns to the summer of love in full swing — and a dangerous new global threat to conquer.” As Faulks turns Fleming, advance word has it that a yoga-addled M sends 007 on the trail of the monkey-pawed villain Dr Julius Gorner and his drug trade. Bond, Johnnie Walker/Walther PPK in hand and a tad aged, flits from Rome and Paris to, of all places, Tehran. As M says, “It’s good to see you back.”

The Painter from Shanghai
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Penguin
It is a fictionalised portrait of Chinese artist Yulian — who moved from the brothels of Shanghai to the ateliers of Paris, who found art in the make-up-less faces of prostitutes and whose unapologetically casual nudes shocked the early 20th century China. If Yulian’s brush strokes are delicate, so are Epstein’s descriptions; but the debut novelist does not let details crowd out the characters, much like the artist who gave her bathing women neat, bold contours.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: A WAR STORY
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
Picador
Author of the seminal We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch has written a definitive war story for our times, based on the interviews filmmaker Errol Morris conducted and the documents he collected for his film Standard Operating Procedure. This book of the same title tells the story of American soldiers in Iraq — the fatal irony of deemed liberators turning into jailors and oppressors of the kind that had made Saddam Hussein’s regime infamous. The narrative is built on the centrality of the Abu Ghraib scandal. But not the shock and awe of the photographs of prisoner abuse. It is, rather, an attempt to understand the nature of man through the eyes of soldiers who perpetrated a great injustice while they themselves were the victims of another. The book comes with a complete list of the author’s sources for readers and scholars willing to move beyond the covers.

The Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria
Norton
There is a new world order taking shape and it’s become something of a sport amongst foreign policy wonks to give it a name. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Richard N. Hass calls it a non-polar world, Parag Khanna talks of the rise of the Second World (see below), and Fareed Zakaria calls it the post-American world, an appellation that is perhaps most apt and likely to be used widely. The point, says Zakaria, is not that the United States is in decline. It is that the rest are rising, whether it be countries like India and China, groupings like the EU, or non-state actors like multinationals and non-governmental organisations. He explains this multipolarity in the context of the paradox of our times: “The world’s politics seems deeply troubled, with daily reports of bombings, terror plots, rogue states, and civil strife. And yet the global economy forges ahead, not without significant interruptions and crises, but vigorously upward on the whole. Markets do panic but over economic not political news. The front page of the newspaper seems unconnected to the business section.”

The Second World
Parag Khanna
Allen Lane
Khanna organises the world into three superpowers, the US, European Union and China. These three are competing for influence in what he calls the Second World: Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, and the Middle East and East Asia. For much part, the book reads like a collection of encyclopaedia entries of the countries in this region. The paradigm’s a bit thin, but fun to engage with. Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our

Next Decade
Bill Emmott
Harcourt
The title is self-explanatory about the book’s central dynamic. But Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is also not convinced that the United States is in sharp decline as a world power, or even that it must share superpower status with China and the EU. Instead, he inquires into how the US could use the so-called power struggle between India, China and Japan to further its own interests in Asia.

THE ASSAULT ON REASON
Al Gore
Bloomsbury
This is the paperback edition of Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, first published in 2007. Critics accuse Gore of being a time-server who changes his persona according to the demand of the day. Nevertheless, his book, Earth in the Balance, and the film, An Inconvenient Truth, were not without impact. In fact, Gore does appear to be one of those who speak the voice of reason, regardless of his hold on one’s attention. He is deeply concerned about the environment. But this book deals with environment of a different kind — the political one in the George W. Bush era. Gore examines the nature of politics and the use of media to deconstruct the “politics of fear” that Bush & Co. used to sell the Iraq war to the public. For instance, a couple of television ads seem to have convinced most Americans that Saddam had a role to play in 9/11. Gore’s book exposes how appeals to emotion and paranoia defeated logic and clarity of thought. And how this epic loss of reason compromised long-term policy on security, health, the economy and the environment. A poignant book, albeit pontificating and thus somewhat boring.

Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography
Cherie Blair
Little, Brown
There is this photograph in the 400-plus-page-book: Tony Blair is holding a bottle-sucking baby Leo, while Cherie Blair in pajamas and Bill Clinton look at a sheaf of papers. The autobiography is something like that: casual, despite Cherie’s 10 years at No. 10 Downing Street. It is about her life in working-class Liverpool, her fashion debacles and faux pas with the queen; it is about thinking Bill “was bloody stupid” when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke out and seeing “how angry she (Hillary) was with him. Not just for humiliating her but also for jeopardising their joint project…”; it is about Christmases and kids and Alastair Campbell joking that Princess Diana fancied him at a dinner party.