Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde
by Rebecca Dana (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)
Dana’s coming-of-age story is more than another typical tale of a wide-eyed girl heading to New York to find her dream life. While she’s hitting all the right clubs, wearing all the right clothes — thanks to her job with the Daily Beast/Newsweek — and suffering from a horrible breakup, this not-so-observant Jew from the Pittsburgh suburbs winds up sharing an apartment in Crown Heights with a martial-art-practicing Orthodox rabbi named Cosmo. No, he doesn’t become her Mr. Big, but the two share a friendship and help discover what they are each searching for as Dana makes her way back to Manhattan.
Ignorance
by Michèle Roberts (Bloomsbury USA)
Roberts’ elegant novel about growing up in ugly wartime France tells the story of two young girls, Catholic Marie-Angèle and Jewish Jeanne, who have been left by their families in a convent school in a small village just before the war. Together, the girls learn some harsh lessons about the world as they evade a sexually predatory priest and other evils. But detail is more important than plot in this novel, as the author uses sensory tidbits — the smell of damp wool, the texture of slivers of ice on the wash basin, the color of light — to conjure up remembrances of things past.
Sugar in the Blood
A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire
by Andrea Stuart (Knopf)
In this memoir of slavery and the Caribbean, Stuart traces her roots. She uncovers a 1660s English plantation owner, slaveholder and empire builder in Barbados, as well as a name on a list of incoming slaves from Africa. The author explains how the Caribbean sugar business brought great wealth to Europe and fueled the Enlightenment, but also created slavery, first in the Caribbean and then in North America. At the same time, she looks at the subtler issues of varying hues of skin and birth circumstances.
Francona
The Red Sox Years
by Terry Francona and Dan Shaughnessy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
We thought longtime Sox manager Francona was busy worrying about our Yankees. But according to his book, he spent as much time mulling over his kooky bosses in Boston. He says a team marketing report looking to maximize revenue concluded “Women are definitely more drawn to the soap opera and reality-TV aspects of the game.” But when the team turned soap opera, with late-game beer and fried-chicken clubhouse bashes by the players, the team tanked on the field, too.
The Saxophone
by Stephen Cottrell (Yale University Press)
City University of London music prof Cottrell’s 390-page opus offers everything you ever wanted to know about sax — but were afraid to ask. From Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax (his creation was patented in 1846) to the saxophone’s widespread use in miliary bands in the 19th century, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and other jazz greats, and all the way to sax-blowing President Clinton and even Kenny G, Cottrell covers it all.