Orders From Berlin
by Simon Tolkien (St. Martin’s)
Just as the big film of his grandfather’s book “The Hobbit” comes out this week, here is Simon Tolkien’s fourth novel, set during the London Blitz. The ex-chief of MI6 is murdered. Is it a result of a family dispute — or the heart of a Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill? Tolkien tells Required Reading he never considered a pseudonym to get away from J.R.R.’s legacy. “My books are very different than my grandfather’s. The London Blitz is a long way away from Middle Earth. I think that I didn’t start writing fiction until I was 40, as I felt inhibited by being J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson, but . . . I feel that I have carved out an identity of my own which allows me to enjoy my relationship to my [late] grandfather and take pride in his achievement.”
The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax
Words, Photographs, and Music
by Tom Piazza (W.W. Norton))
The archives of folk-song collector and chronicler Lomax in the Library of Congress includes 5,000 hours of sound recording, 400,000 feet of motion-picture film, hundreds of photos and more. His recording of James Carter and other Parchman Penitentiary inmates singing “Po’ Lazarus” was in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” While this book includes Lomax’s journeys with his father, John, in the 1930s and ’40s, its focus is his 1959-60 trip through the South, where he revisited some of the artists he and his father found earlier. In addition to the striking photos — from front porches to prisons — and Piazza’s commentary, readers get a CD of the artists from the book, most never commercially recorded.
Raised From the Ground
by José Saramago (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
For the first time, Portuguese Pulitzer Prize-winner Saramago’s epic novel has been translated into English. Saramago, who died in 2010 at 87, looks at the history of his nation in the last century by following the lives of the Mau-Tempos — a family of landless peasant farm laborers, not unlike the author’s own grandparents — through the years of political upheaval, dictatorship and World Wars.
The Holy or the Broken
Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’
by Alan Light (Atria)
Now it’s played so frequently that it’s almost like our national anthem for the melancholy. But when Leonard Cohen first recorded “Hallelujah” for 1984 album “Various Positions,” his Columbia label refused to release the album. Light, former editor of Vibe and Spin, didn’t get Cohen, but he interviews his collaborators and some of the artists who’ve covered the song — Bono, Jon Bon Jovi and k.d. lang among them.
Seal Team 666
by Weston Ochse (Thomas Dunne Books)
We all hailed Navy SEAL Team 6 for its bin Laden coup. Now, for a bit of fun, here’s SEAL Team 666. Conjured up by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Ochse, the elite 666ers chase demons, cults and ancient evils. Their tale is told from the point of view of naval cadet Jack Walker, who, in the middle of his training, is whisked away to join the mysterious special ops team — four SEALs and a dog. Of course, the fate of the entire world is at stake in a battle with the supernatural.