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The Book Report: Washington Post critic Ron Charles (October 13)
By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles
Here are four great new books to sink into this fall.
W.W. Norton
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers is back with “Playground” (W.W. Norton), a brilliant new novel about artificial intelligence and the race to save the oceans.
The story moves along three tracks: There’s a computer genius looking back at his life; an oceanographer recounting her love for sea creatures; and a small group of people on a tiny island in the South Pacific who’ve been offered a fortune by a shadowy group of tech billionaires.
How Powers manages to draw these three stories together will change the way you see the world.
Read an excerpt: “Playground” by Richard Powers
“Playground” by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Richard Powers (Official site)
Scribner
“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner (Scribner) looks like a spy thriller, but it’s even trickier than that. The narrator is a freelance agent who specializes in infiltrating radical groups.
She’s been hired to pose as a translator in France and work her way into a commune of environmental terrorists who follow a spiritual leader who believes we should live more like the Neanderthals once did.
But as she gets closer to sabotaging this group, she falls under the spell of this Neanderthal philosophy.
Read an excerpt: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner
“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner (Scribner), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Rachel Kushner (Official site)
Riverhead
Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” (Riverhead Books) is a sharp, witty satire of our attitudes about racial identity and pop culture.
At the center of the story is a writer who spent years working on a vast history of biracial people, only to discover that nobody will publish it. And so, desperate for money, she turns to Hollywood and tries to sell her idea for a biracial TV sit-com.
But what would that be, and why would it be funny? That remains a mystery, but this is a wickedly funny novel about trying to make it in America.
Read an excerpt: “Colored Television” by Danzy Senna
“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna (Riverhead Books), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Random House
Yuval Noah Harari is a genius at helping people imagine and comprehend enormous spans of time. A decade ago, he published a bestseller called “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”
And now, his new book – “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” (Random House) – looks at the way information was used to control past human societies, and how artificial intelligence is already reshaping our world.
“Silicon chips,” he warns, “can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, despots that never die. How will this change society, economics, politics?”
Read an excerpt: “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari
“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” by Yuval Noah Harari (Random House), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
Yuval Noah Harari (Official site)
For more suggestions on what to read, contact your librarian or local bookseller.
That’s it for the Book Report. I’m Ron Charles. Until next time, read on!
For more info:
For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles:
Produced by Robin Sanders and Roman Feeser.
The House Ethics Committee, which has been conducting an investigation into sexual misconduct and obstruction allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, scheduled a vote for Friday on whether to release its report, according to three sources with knowledge of the committee’s work.
Hours after President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to nominate Gaetz to be attorney general, Gaetz resigned his congressional seat, effective immediately.
“I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress, to pursue the position of Attorney General in the Trump Administration,” Gaetz said in his resignation letter obtained by CBS News
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that there was about an eight-week period during which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could fill his seat by setting the date for a special election.
Now that Gaetz has resigned, it is unclear whether the panel will vote on releasing the report, since Gaetz is no longer in Congress.
There is precedent in Congress on the Senate side for an ethics committee report to become public after a member resigns from Congress, however. In 2011, this happened when Sen. John Ensign of Nevada resigned amid allegations that he tried to hide an extramarital affair.
But it’s not clear that that would apply to the House, leaving open the possibility that the report on Gaetz would not be released.
In June, the House Ethics Committee released a statement saying it was investigating a range of allegations against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and bribery.
Multiple sources at the time told CBS News that four women had informed the House Ethics Committee that they had been paid to go to parties that included sex and drugs, and that Gaetz had also attended. The committee has Gaetz’s Venmo transactions that allegedly show payments for the women.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has called the committee’s investigation a “frivolous” smear campaign.
Some of the allegations of sexual misconduct under review by the committee were also the subject of a previous Department of Justice probe into Gaetz. Federal investigators sought to determine if Gaetz violated sex trafficking and obstruction of justice laws, but no charges were filed.
The House Ethics Committee resumed its investigation into Gaetz in 2023, following the Justice Department’s decision not to pursue charges against him.
Gaetz has long blamed then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, also a Republican, for the probe. And Gaetz later led the movement to sack McCarthy as speaker.
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