Sarah Vowell can always tell when a book’s welling up inside her. “There’s usually a moment I either get riled up or realize how riled up I am,” she says. Her latest — “Unfamiliar Fishes,” a typically wry account of the American annexation of Hawaii — began in Oahu, where she tried and failed to pry her friends off the beach and into the Iolani Palace, to hear how the Hawaiian monarchy ended. “It dawned on me how fascinated I was with that story,” says Vowell, whose earlier books include “Take the Cannoli” and “Radio On.” You may have heard her on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” — or as the voice of Violet in “The Incredibles.” Here’s what she’s read lately.
— by Barbara Hoffman
Colonel Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
The final installment of Morris’ cracking trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt biographies chronicles Roosevelt’s life after the White House, including his African safari. Fauna of Kenya: Run for your lives! During the royal wedding hoopla, I thought back to TR’s attendance of the funeral of England’s King Edward VII in 1910. Roosevelt complained, “I felt if I met another king I should bite him!”
The Psychopath Test
by Jon Ronson
Ronson, the sweetly demented, deeply funny English journalist, writes compelling books about religious fanatics and the eccentrics inhabiting the far-out corners of the military industrial complex. His new one is another fascinating road trip amongst the unhinged, offering useful clues on how to spot the psychos among us.
The Panic Virus
by Seth Mnookin
By investigating and debunking widespread — and dangerous — myths about the relationship between autism and childhood vaccines, Mnookin, employing reason, logic and an investigative reporter’s shoe leather, has written an old-fashioned book. And by old-fashioned, I mean that he adheres to the principles of the Enlightenment.
The Troubled Man
by Henning Mankell
I love crime novels and grumpy people. Hence my fondness for Mankell’s Swedish policeman, Kurt Wallander, a lonesome, temperamental cop trying to make sense of growing old. The book has the gall to question the global domination of the US. We can take it, Sweden — and congrats on your global domination in the field of ready-to-assemble furniture.