If you missed any of the weekend's book reviews from around the country, we've gathered a few here for you.
"The Postmistress", by Sarah Blake
The Washington Post
Fortunately, Blake, who lives in Washington, does have a much better story to tell, though occasionally it gets lost amid her efforts to ratchet up the drama. The novel is set in 1940 and 1941, as Londoners struggle to survive the Blitz and Americans debate whether to join the struggle against Nazi Germany. Blake follows three women. Frankie Bard is a "leggy blonde" from Greenwich Village who goes to London as a radio correspondent because she believes that's where the action is. She is "a Diana who wore her red lips like a sword. And the page on her lap . . . a shield." Meanwhile, back on Cape Cod are two women who listen to her broadcasts. Emma Fitch is the young, lonely, pregnant wife of the town doctor, Will; Will has gone to London after a mother dies in childbirth on his watch. And there is the postmistress for the Cape Cod village of Franklin, Iris James, who loves order above all else and believes "if there was a place on earth in which God walked, it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America."
"Chronic City", by Jonathan Lethem
Dallas Morning News
Chronic City is a long, strange trip that has drawn disparate responses - sometimes from the same publication.
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani seemed personally offended by the book: "These creatures inhabit neither a real flesh-and-blood Manhattan nor a persuasive fictional realm, and they're so clearly plasticky puppets moved hither and thither by Mr. Lethem's random whims that it's of no concern to us what happens to them in this lame and unsatisfying novel."
"The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr", by Ken Gormley
The New York Times
"The Death of American Virtue" is so exhaustive that some of it raises doubts about the value of Mr. Gormley's exertions. There are times when this book seems akin to climbing Mt. Everest in house slippers: impressive but not entirely necessary. The early parts of the imbroglio, especially the Whitewater real estate investigation involving James and Susan McDougal, are no less confounding than they ever were. But by and large Mr. Gormley has packed his narrative with intense, overdue and definitive testimony about the still-surprising investigation of Mr. Clinton's activities spearheaded by Kenneth W. Starr.
"The Room and the Chair" by Lorraine Adams
The Washington Post
Adams lives up to her end of the bargain by spinning the action between geopolitical hot spots and by introducing, yes, a top-secret military program operating outside government boundaries. What becomes clearer, though, as the book goes along is that Adams isn't playing by all the hackneyed rules. Indeed, she is almost perverse in denying us the genre's received pleasures: sexual consummations, First Amendment triumphs, evil held at arm's length. No readers will rejoice at this story's conclusion, and no A-list actors will be clamoring to play any of its compromised people.
"A Dead Hand", Paul Theroux
The Seattle Times
In "A Dead Hand," Theroux brings his best gifts as a travel writer to one of his walk-on-the-dark-side fables of masked identity and psychosexual quest. The book's detail on Calcutta -- from its genteel hotel lobbies to its back street "underworld" -- couldn't be more vivid. There's macabre comedy here: for instance, when Charlie drawls at his mother, just back from a mysterious temple ceremony, "You're bloodstained as usual."
"Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation", by Rawn James
The Washington Post
In his determination to infuse his story with dramatic flair, James sometimes lets his prose run away from him. "Pennsylvania Avenue chortled its traffic and bustle," reads one unfortunate passage, as a "Washington winter was yielding to spring, returning sun and breeze like jewels to a lock-picked box." More important, James's understandable commitment to celebrating the NAACP's victories prevents him from grappling with some hard truths about the campaign's ability to right America's racial wrongs. It has been 57 years since Marshall argued Brown before the Supreme Court. Still, three-quarters of all African American students attend majority black schools, while most white students attend overwhelmingly white schools. It has been 62 years since the Court sided with the NAACP in its case against residential segregation, yet the nation's major metropolitan areas remain split along the color line. It's been 78 years since Houston won his first major civil rights case, in defense of an African American trapped in a criminal justice system that treated African Americans with disproportionate severity. Today black men are almost six times likelier to be imprisoned than white men. To acknowledge discrimination's enduring power wouldn't have drastically altered the story James wanted to tell. But it would have tempered it. The law is fundamental, of course. But it isn't enough.
"You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto", Jaron Lanier
Dallas Morning News
What's not to like [about web 2.0]? Plenty, says Lanier, who is no Luddite but a legendary Silicon Valley veteran who invented the computer environments called virtual reality in the 1980s. Lanier loved the sometimes crude and goofy creativity of the early Web, but he fears and loathes the so-called "hive mind" employed by the Web 2.0 superstars, and the collectivist hubris of those he calls "digital Maoists."
"The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008" (paperback reprint), Thomas Ricks
Courier-Journal
What Ricks' reporting suggests is that Iraq, post-surge, is no closer to a political reconciliation than it was in 2006, when the country seemed about to collapse into civil war.
"The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today", by Ted Conover
The Washington Post
Of course the claim that the subject under discussion in any given book "Changed the World" is such a commonplace nowadays that the only fit response is to roll one's eyes. It's best to put that out of your mind as you read "The Routes of Man," because it simply isn't applicable. Conover's six reports are variously interesting in and of themselves, and one shouldn't expect any more from them.
"Apparitions & Late Fictions", by Thomas Lynch
Los Angeles Times
Lynch has deep roots. He is an undertaker, the son of an undertaker, and he has been the funeral director in Milford, Mich., the town in which he grew up, since 1974. He has written about his work in three collections of poems and three books of essays. He has also written about his family's Irish roots in County Clare. You might guess, and you would be right, that he is a careful writer. He takes his time. He creates his characters thoroughly, with much detail and background (more background than foreground). In this way, he cares for his reader by taking the guesswork out of the fiction. He wants you to know exactly where you are in time and space. He is more interested in truth than speculation, substance than mystery.