Paperback Row


Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

THE FORCE, by Don Winslow. (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Detective First Grade Dennis John Malone and his fellow members of an elite Manhattan police squad are hardly better than the criminals they pursue. Our critic, Janet Maslin, named the book as one of her top picks of 2017, praising Winslow’s “realistic tableau of police privilege, pragmatism, racial bluntness, street smarts, love of partners and loyalty to what they call the Job.”

AN AMERICAN SICKNESS: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, by Elisabeth Rosenthal. (Penguin, $18.) Rosenthal, a doctor and former reporter for The Times, blames drug prices and hospital bureaucracy for health care’s outsize costs. She tells of Providence Portland Medical Center, a system founded by nuns, that turned into “a weird mix of Mother Teresa and Goldman Sachs.”

FEVER DREAM, by Samanta Schweblin. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Riverhead, $16.) As Amanda is dying in a rural hospital, a creepy young boy, not her child, is at her bedside, pressing for details of recent, unnerving events. Strains of maternal and ecological horrors underpin this story; Amanda is preoccupied by “rescue distance,” or her ability to protect her daughter, and a poisoned environment figures into a child’s monstrous transformation.

WHY? Explaining the Holocaust, by Peter Hayes. (Norton, $16.95.) Hayes, an emeritus professor at Northwestern, structures his exploration around eight questions, including: Why the Germans, and why the Jews? Why didn’t they fight back more? Why didn’t they receive more help? In this study, which our reviewer, Nicholas Stargardt, called a culminating “final lecture,” Hayes offers “an intellectually searching and wide-ranging study of the Holocaust in a modest, didactic form.”

THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS, by John Freeman Gill. (Vintage, $16.95.) Growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Griffin tries to get closer to his father by helping pilfer architectural ornaments from the city’s tenements and skyscrapers. Griffin reflects on the period and his father’s obsession with the sculptures, and the resulting novel is an adventurous coming-of-age tale and a homage to a bygone city.

FLÂNEUSE: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, by Lauren Elkin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) Inspired by Jean Rhys, George Sand and Virginia Woolf, Elkin rejects the typically male figure of the flâneur. The book, part history and part travelogue, strays into memoir when Elkin writes about Paris, where she first experienced the pleasures of the aimless stroll.


A version of this article appears in print on , Page 24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Paperback Row. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe