The Book Review

The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in “Mark Twain,” Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century’s biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject.

“The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,” Chernow says. But at the same time, “I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America’s small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.”

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Summer arrives just over a month from now, and along with your last-minute scramble for a house share or a part-time job scooping ice cream, you’re probably also wondering what to read. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the books they're most looking forward to, from a James Baldwin biography to the true-life story of a young couple shipwrecked in the Pacific and a political thriller co-written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton.

Books discussed:

“The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda,” by Nathalia Holt

“Atmosphere: A Love Story,” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,” by Bryan Burrough

“Next to Heaven," by James Frey

“A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” by Sophie Elmhirst

“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“The First Gentleman,” by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

“King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby

“Bonding," by Mariel Franklin

“Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab

“Katabasis,” by R.F. Kuang

“Baldwin: A Love Story,” by Nicholas Boggs

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At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books.

Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle” is about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not that far off from Allende’s own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father’s cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits,” which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known.

Allende and Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz spoke about her life and career.

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Set in New York in the 1980s, Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” tells the story of a young actor named Griffin as he navigates the chaos of the city, of his family and of being a teenager, and the dangers that swirl around each. 

Although “Playworld” grapples with bleak material, it sparkles with Ross’s vivid eye and sardonic sense of humor. The result is a dark, off-kilter bildungsroman about one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult around him.

On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Playworld” with his colleagues Dave Kim and Sadie Stein. 

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Playworld,” by Adam Ross

“Mr. Peanut,” by Adam Ross

“The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” and “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger

“Long Island Compromise,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“How Little Lori Visited Times Square,” by Amos Vogel, illustrated by Maurice Sendak

“The Squid and the Whale,” directed by Noah Baumbach

“The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt

“Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel

“The Copenhagen Trilogy,” by Tove Ditlevsen

“Jakob von Gunten,” by Robert Walser

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Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII.

Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It’s now a decade later and the third book in Mantel’s series, “The Mirror and the Light,” has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27.

Joining host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode is Mantel’s former editor Nicholas Pearson. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction.

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