NEW BOOKS

Camino Winds John Grisham Doubleday

Just as Bruce Cable’s Bay Books is preparing for the return of bestselling author Mercer Mann, Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course. Florida’s governor orders a mandatory evacuation, and most residents board up their houses, but Bruce decides to stay and ride out the storm.

The hurricane is devastating, a dozen people lose their lives. One of the victims is Nelson Kerr, a friend of Bruce’s and an author of thrillers. But the nature of Nelson’s injuries suggests that the storm wasn’t the cause of his death.

Who would want Nelson dead? Bruce begins to wonder if the shady characters in Nelson’s novels might be more real than fictional. And somewhere on Nelson’s computer is the manuscript of his new novel. Could the key to the case be right there—in black and white? As Bruce starts to investigate, what he discovers between the lines is more shocking than any of Nelson’s plot twists— and far more dangerous.

If It Bleeds Stephen King Scribner

The four never-beforepublished novellas in this collection represent King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend’s cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an EC Comics vibe. In the profoundly moving “The Life of Chuck,” a series of apocalyptic incidents bear out a claim that “when a man or a woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin.” “Rat” sees a writer strike a Faustian bargain to complete his novel, and in the title story, private investigator Holly Gibney, the recurring heroine of King’s Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, faces off against a ghoulish television newscaster who vampirically feeds off the anguish he provokes. This excellent collection delivers exactly the kind of bravura storytelling King’s readers expect.

Pelosi Molly Ball Henry Holt and Co.

She’s the iconic leader who puts Donald Trump in his place, the woman with the toughness to take on a lawless president and defend American democracy. Ever since the Democrats took back the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi has led the opposition with strategic mastery and inimitable elan. It’s a remarkable comeback for the veteran politician who for years was demonized by the right and taken for granted by many in her own party—even though, as speaker under President Barack Obama, she deserves much of the credit for universal access to health care, to saving the US economy from collapse, allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. How did an Italian grandmother in four-inch heels become the greatest legislator since LBJ?

Based on exclusive interviews with the Speaker and deep background reporting, Ball shows Pelosi through a thoroughly modern lens to explain how this extraordinary woman has met her moment.

Keto Friendly Recipes: Bake It Keto Jennifer Marie Garza Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The keto diet continues to take the country by storm as people not only experience dramatic weight loss, but keep the weight off too. One of America's leading keto and low-carb experts is Jennifer Marie Garza, the best-selling author of Keto Friendly Recipes: Easy Keto for Busy People, whose popular Facebook page Keto Friendly Recipes has amassed more than 450,000 loyal followers. Jennifer Marie's recipes taste too delicious to be good for you, and fans keep coming back for more, so she knows what people like best—the baked goods, both savory and sweet, such as keto breads, muffins, cookies, casseroles, and more.

In her new book, Jennifer Marie brings back fan-favorite recipes plus all new dishes, organized into chapters for breakfast, lunch, dinner, appetizers, and foil-pack meals for people on the go. It doesn't get much easier than these 120 one-dish recipes, like Keto Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas, Baked French Toast, Keto Pot Pie, and Portobella Mushroom Pizza.

The Story of More Hope Jahren Vintage

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth.

In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.

She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, The Story of More is the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it.

The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad Mike Birbiglia Grand Central Publishing

In 2016 comedian Mike Birbiglia and poet Jennifer Hope Stein took their fourteen-month-old daughter Oona to the Nantucket Film Festival. When the festival director picked them up at the airport she asked Mike if he would perform. And so Mike began sharing some of his darkest and funniest thoughts about the decision to have a child. Jen and Mike revealed to each other their sides of what had gone down during Jen’s pregnancy and that first year with their child. Over the next couple of years, these stories evolved into a Broadway show, and the more Mike performed it the more he heard how it resonated.

So he pored over his journals, dug deeper, and created this book. Along with hilarious and poignant stories he has never shared before, these pages are sprinkled with poetry Jen wrote as she navigated the same rocky shores of new parenthood.

So here it is. This book is an experiment —sort of like a family.

opinion

The U.S. is still exceptional—but now for its incompetence By FAREED ZAKARIA Washington Post March 26, 2020

When a crisis hits the United States, the country’s general instinct is to rally around the flag and wish the best for its leaders. That’s probably why President Trump has seen his approval ratings rise, even though he has had a delayed and fitful approach to this pandemic. But at some point, we Americans must look at the facts and recognize an uncomfortable reality. The United States is on track to have the worst outbreak of coronavirus among wealthy countries, largely because of the ineffectiveness of its government. This is the new face of American exceptionalism.

The United States [has] the largest number of cases of COVID-19 in the world, outstripping even China. The first line of defense against the disease is testing. On this key metric, the U.S. experience has been a fiasco: We started late, using a faulty test, and never quite recovered.

President Trump’s claim that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” is a cruel hoax. Access to tests remains much worse than in most advanced countries. His assertion that the U.S. has tested more people than South Korea is nonsense because it doesn’t take into account that South Korea has one-sixth America’s population. Per capita, South Korea has done five times more testing than the United States, as of the end of March. But forget about South Korea. Italy, a country not known for the smooth workings of its government, has tested four times as much per capita as the U.S.

The U.S. has shortages of everything—ventilators, masks, gloves, gowns—and no national emergency system to provide new supplies fast. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says his state will need 40,000 beds for critical care. It has only 3,000. That means many patients will die simply because they lack access to care that is available under normal circumstances. Not even three weeks into this pandemic, health care workers are reusing masks, sewing their own, and pleading for donations. In a searing essay in the Atlantic, Ed Yong writes, “Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared.”

Why did this happen? It’s easy to blame Donald Trump, and the president has been inept from the start. But there is a much larger story behind this fiasco. America is paying the price today for decades of defunding government, politicizing independent agencies, fetishizing local control, and demeaning and disparaging government workers and bureaucrats.

This was not always how it was. America historically prized limited but effective government. In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” Franklin Roosevelt created the modern federal bureaucracy, which was strikingly lean and efficient. In recent decades, as the scope of government has increased, the bureaucracy has been starved and made increasingly dysfunctional. In the 1950s, the percent of federal civilian employees compared to total employment was above 5%. It has dropped to under 2% today, despite a population that is twice as large and a GDP that is seven times higher (adjusting for inflation).

Federal agencies are understaffed but overburdened with mountains of regulations and politicized mandates and rules, giving officials little power and discretion. The FDA’s cumbersome rules and bureaucracy—which > 24

A president unfit for a pandemic Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has blood on his hands. By THE EDITORIAL BOARD of the Boston Globe March 30, 2020

The president has made grave errors in addressing the coronavirus outbreak. Come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost and the suffering endured.

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of untold suffering.

The United States, long a beacon of scientific progress and medical innovation with its world-class research institutions and hospitals, is now the hub of a global pandemic that has infected at least [as of March 30] 745,000 people and already claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Now that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States—more than 140,000—has surpassed that of any other nation, Americans are consigned

for the coming weeks to watching the illness fell family members and friends, and to fearing for their own fate as they watch death tolls rise.

While the spread of the novel coronavirus has been aggressive around the world, much of the profound impact it will have here in the United States was preventable. As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership.

The outbreak that began in China demanded a White House that could act swiftly and competently to protect public health, informed by science and guided by compassion and public service. It required an administration that could quickly deploy reliable tests around the nation to isolate cases and trace and contain the virus’s spread, as South Korea effectively did, as well as to manufacture and distribute scarce medical supplies around the country. It begged for a president of the United States to deliver clear, consistent, scientifically sound messages on the state of the epidemic and its solutions, to reassure the public amid their fear, and to provide steady guidance to cities and states. And it demanded a leader who would put the country’s well-being first, above near-term stock market returns and his > 24