What Do Women Want?, by by
Daniel Bergner (Ecco), upends every notion and instinct we
have about female sexuality. All the old gender biases get
exploded, from misogyny to double standards. Bergner takes an
academic approach to cutting-edge research taking place in the fi
eld of sexology, strips it down to layman’s terms, and then
elevates it to a poetic level not unlike a Greek drama. So strong
are Bergner’s treatments of neuroscientists and their subjects,
the granular details of research involving probes, blood fl ow
measurements, pornography, and sexcapades, the characters and
their stories take on an almost spiritual air. It is as if instead
of parsing through hard science, Bergner is penning a monograph of
an ancient tantric guru. The book’s takeaway is that despite
millennia of suppression, female eros is a powerful and
intoxicating force, worth researching and well worth setting free
to pursue satisfaction.
Freud’s Mistress, by
Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman (Amy Einhorn Books), is a
fascinating foray into historical fi ction, envisioning the human foibles of a
worldchanging thinker and his paramour. Yet in Mack and Kaufman’s rendition, we
fi rst meet Freud not as the iconoclast patriarch of an entire school of
thought, but rather as an academic espousing radical theorems of psychology,
theorems yet to reach mainstream acceptance, let alone validation from his ivory
tower colleagues. Enter Minna Bernays, the sister of Freud’s wife, who comes to
stay with the couple in their Vienna home. The authors chronicle the development
of their passion in vivid detail, exploring Minna’s struggles to square her love
for Freud and his mind with her loyalty to her sister, all while navigating the
promising yet stifl ing cultural tableau that Vienna represented to a smart,
unmarried woman at the turn of the century.
And the Mountains Echoed,
by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead), cements Hosseini’s
status as one of our most powerful and evocative storytellers. In this book, his
third novel, Hosseini explores many of the themes of his previous bestsellers:
the bonds of family and friendship, the circumstances that strain these bonds,
the class tensions in Afghani society that bring about these circumstances. Yet
the exploration of these themes is fi ltered through the prism of Abdullah and
Pari’s lives, lives that are rich with emotion and sensory detail of their
worlds as the narrative threads transport the reader from the small rural
village in Afghanistan to Paris to America. Like a modern-day Scheherazade
spinning tales in the One Thousand and One Nights, Hosseini fuses folklore with
history, only to reveal in the end that Pari and Abdullah’s arcs are touched by
loss, war, displacement, and yet still they seek their dreams of happiness and
redemption.
The
Lost Bank, by Kirsten Grind (Simon &
Schuster), lets you consider the 2008 economic meltdown through the
microcosm of the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. Grind takes us back to
the heady days of cheap money, ever-rising home prices, and sketchy fi nancial
products cobbled together like the body parts used to create Frankenstein’s
monster, painting a picture of a culture of commerce gone completely to seed.
There are pinstriped bankers making a killing on Wall Street and foreclosures
way out in California, there are the hapless regulators and the rapacious side
bets. And of course, there is the panic, the massive withdrawals, the
insolvency, and the quickly brokered sale to JP Morgan. Five years later, the
story of the fi nancial crisis is all the more urgent, and Grind’s account of
WaMu going belly up is an imperative read.
