recent book reviews washington post

Alexandra Fuller’s new book is not your typical grief memoir

‘fi,’ written in the aftermath of her son’s sudden death at 21, is terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling.

In one of the best-loved memoirs of the early aughts, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Alexandra Fuller wrote of her childhood in Africa during the tumultuous 1970s and ’80s. The author, who was born in England, spent much of her youth in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and her childhood was marked by adventure and tragedy, including three dead siblings.

Who could have imagined that in the two decades since, life would give her material for three more grief memoirs, written in the spaces between a novel and several other nonfiction books. In “Leaving Before the Rains Come” (2016), she documented the painful end of her long marriage ; in “Travel Light, Move Fast” (2019), the passing of her beloved, complicated father. Then, in that book’s epilogue, she revealed that as bad as things may have seemed, they were now much worse: Her sister and mother had stopped speaking to her, the romance that saved the day post-divorce was over, and, dwarfing every other possible misery, her 21-year-old son had died.

She returns to these difficult topics in “ Fi: A Memoir ,” a book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down — a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read. Toward the end of the memoir, Fuller quotes Franz Kafka: “A book must be an axe to the frozen sea inside us.” This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.

Fi was the nickname her son, Charles Fuller Ross, chose for himself. He was as lively and dear and beloved in their small “Wydaho” community as a boy can be. His death in 2018 was almost completely out of left field. “Three days ago, I’d walked with him along the Snake River — distracted,” Fuller writes. “He’d been home only a few days from Argentina, where he’d had the first inexplicable seizure at the end of his semester abroad — stress of finals, late nights studying, packing up to come home.” Then he had another seizure, and a week later, he died. That is all Fuller knows about it — she did not care to read the autopsy report or join the meeting his father had with the doctors and the medical examiner.

“It’s not only that I didn’t want to know the details of what the experts could only speculate had been the cause of Fi’s seizures and therefore the cause of his death; it’s mostly that I didn’t have time for guesses. I wanted to know for certain: where, now, is my only begotten, beloved son?”

Where he is, now, is in this book she has written — and also, incidentally, in a lovely series of articles in the online journal Medium by his sister Sarah Ross. The biggest challenge and also the saving grace of the period after Fi’s death was the fact that Fuller has two other children, who still very much needed a functioning mother. Sarah, then 24, and Cecily, then 13, were extraordinarily close to their brother, which had been partly their mother’s doing and also her joy. “Because of the rupture from my siblings, the lifetime of pain it’d been, I’d soldered my children to one another.”

Fuller came to this responsibility prepared, having been mothered herself by a woman scalded by the loss of two infants and a toddler who drowned. “Everyone has always said that my mother’s bouts of blackout drinking, her suicide attempts, her periods of insanity make sense. People have always told me that I should understand this; when a mother loses a child, her surviving children lose a mother. But I didn’t lose my mother; she hung on, mothering away, dragging and coaxing and encouraging us when she could, how she could; ignoring us and poisoning herself when she couldn’t. I didn’t lose a mother when she lost my siblings; that was my mother, marinated in grief but also tough, glamorous, heartbroken, capable, creative, resilient, determined to have a ball anyway.”

For reasons that are not discussed in the book but may have something to do with Fuller’s memoirs, her mother is completely absent from her life now. To have to go through this tragedy without the support of close family adds bitterness to the flavor profile of Fuller’s pain, and it’s particularly confounding to read that her ex-husband, Charlie, flew over to spend time with her mother and sister in Africa. Fortunately, Fuller does have one ferociously committed ally, a woman named Till, a younger ex-lover who — though Fuller rejects her, refuses to sleep with her or even talk to her (she communicates with flash cards), and generally treats her like an incompetent servant — refuses to let her be totally alone. Till moves with her to the middle of nowhere, staying down the road because she’s not allowed in the “sheepwagon” Fuller inhabits herself. Till drives Fuller to a grueling-sounding silent retreat in a former mental institution in Canada. She feeds her, waters her, stands between her and self-harm. She is certainly the hero of this book.

There are plenty of non-heroes, as well. As usual, in times of tragedy, people say the darndest things, and Fuller has not forgotten them: “‘You will never get over it,’ a woman of my acquaintance assured me quite casually, as if pointing out to someone pinned under a bulldozer: Oh, that won’t budge in this lifetime .” Fuller’s reply, “thank you,” hid her real thoughts: “I’m not ready to eschew my pain, wrap myself in prayer flags, and fade out with the bells. I am merely in the early learning stages of grieving my only possible son.”

As Fuller reminds us, she is far from alone, but “one of millions of mothers to have lost a child every year.” Then she asks: “If none of us suffered, where would we be? Without wise women is where; suffering brings wisdom. So, a gift, this suffering, a promissory note for sagacity.” With “Fi,” I would call the note paid in full, though — Fuller being Fuller — I won’t be surprised if there are future installments.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”

By Alexandra Fuller

Grove. 272 pp. $28

More from Book World

Love everything about books? Make sure to subscribe to our Book Club newsletter , where Ron Charles guides you through the literary news of the week.

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

Still need more reading inspiration? Super readers share their tips on how to finish more books . Or let poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib explain why he stays in Ohio . You can also check out reviews of the latest in fiction and nonfiction .

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

The Best Books of 2022, According to The Washington Post

Always books. Never boring.

View All posts by Community

The Washington Post throws its hat into the ring of early released end-of-year book lists with a roundup of 10 of the best books according to its editors and reviewers.

The list includes a mix of fiction and nonfiction titles, with topics that range from colonialism to memoirs centering friendships. Among the authors are a Nobel Prize winner and a Kirkus Prize winner .

Here are The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2022:

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Mecca by Susan Straight

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson

G-Man: J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change by Geoff Dembicki

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind by Robert Draper

Compared to Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s lists, The Washington Post’s best books of 2022 list varies entirely except for one book it has in common with Amazon’s ( Demon Copperhead ).

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

Also In This Story Stream

• Kobo Is Launching Its First Color Ereaders
• 5 Books Trending On Amazon Today (and Why)
• The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist
• The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists
• The Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 (So Far)
• Surprise 4th Book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Hit Southern Reach Series Coming Out This Year
• The 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Winner Has Been Announced
• Watch the Trailer for TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, Based on the John Green Novel
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Award 8 Writers $175,000 Each

You Might Also Like

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Future Fables
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Just the Right Book
• Lit Century
• The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan
• New Books Network
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

What Should You Read Next? Here Are the Best Reviewed Books of the Week

Featuring new titles by leigh bardugo, alexandra fuller, anne lamott, and more.

Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar , Alexandra Fuller’s Fi , and Anne Lamott’s Somehow all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

1. The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron)

“Bardugo brilliantly explores the wavy line between the supernatural and the divine … When Bardugo chooses to venture further into the darkness, it’s that much more devastating because of how much fun the reader has been having. In fact, she is a master of anticlimax: She builds apprehension for huge events that do not come to pass, then blindsides the reader with something totally unexpected instead … A thrilling addition to her canon about oppression and liberation, and anyone interested in this historical period and the themes she’s exploring will find it engrossing.”

–Charlie Jane Anders ( The Washington Post )

2. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas (Simon & Schuster)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“For Thomas, nothing seems to be off the table. She shifts between erotic thrills, gothic drama, postmodern deconstruction and kitchen-sink realism. Through her bold storytelling, The Sleepwalkers becomes a work of peculiar, gonzo genius … Thomas takes a glamorous late-capitalist setting, with rosé and catamarans, and shreds, twists and warps it into a story that is surprising, humane and political to its bones.”

–Flynn Berry ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. The Limits by Nell Freudenberger (Knopf)

2 Rave • 5 Positive Read an excerpt from The Limits here

“Freudenberger is fluent in every realm, social conundrum, and crime against the earth she brings into focus, keenly attuned to science and emotion, tradition and high-tech, race and gender, greed and conscience, irony and tragedy. Each character’s challenges are significant on scales intimate and global and their wrestling with secrets, anger, and fear grows increasingly suspenseful in this lambent, deeply sympathetic, and thought-provoking novel.”

–Donna Seaman ( Booklist )

1. Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller (Grove Press)

“Fuller leaves nothing under the table, under the rug or under wraps … The last thing you expect to do when you read a book about a child dying is to laugh … The wit in this memoir is soul-piercing … Fuller is sagacious and perspicacious. She is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad, but this book is a mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss—surviving life.”

–David Sheff ( The New York Times Book Review )

=2. The Wives: A Memoir by Simone Gorrindo (Gallery/Scout Press)

3 Rave • 2 Positive

“Gorrindo’s memoir is a gorgeously rendered peek behind the curtain of military life, as she recounts reckoning with her husband’s participation in violence—and examining why his job exists at all.”

–Courtney Eathorne ( Booklist )

=2. Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott (Riverhead)

3 Rave • 2 Positive Read an essay by Anne Lamott here

“In her trademark godly yet snarky way, she extracts every life lesson from her latest new experience with the deft zeal of a chef reducing flour and fat to roux … At times, Somehow made me huffy about—by which I mean envious of—Lamott’s gift for writing powerfully, deeply, often radically, while appealing to, well, everyone … No matter one’s external descriptors, Lamott speaks to the human in all of us, challenging us to bear her beam of love, and our own.”

–Meredith Maran ( The Washington Post )

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Previous Article

Next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Lit Hub Daily: April 12, 2024

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Advertisement

Free Newsletters

Sign up now

Two new books look inside The Washington Post and The New York Times

(Dreamstime/Deanpictures)

by Bill Mitchell

View Author Profile

Follow on Twitter at @bmitch

Join the Conversation

Collision of Power is an apt title for the new memoir by journalist Martin Baron, and not just the collision of "Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post" highlighted in the subtitle.

Baron, who retired as executive editor of the Post in February 2021, provides a participant's account of the forces buffeting news organizations everywhere. He puts a face — often his own — on the clash of print and digital platforms; the tensions between social and traditional media; the efforts of a free press to publish information sealed off by secretive government agencies.

So, too, does The Times by Adam Nagourney deliver more than what's promised in its subtitle: "How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism."

Nagourney, who joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1996, gained extraordinary access to the correspondence and other records of the organization's key leaders from 1977 to 2016. Supplemented by 300 interviews over the course of more than five years, those documents provided Nagourney with rich material for a colorful portrait of the Old Gray Lady.

These are big books, beginning with their page counts.

Too much for general readers? Perhaps, but my hunch is that serious consumers of national and international news — a market niche well-represented among NCR members and subscribers — will appreciate the context these books provide for the journalism both newsrooms produce.

If you'd like to get a sense of the books before diving in, you can view this friendly conversation about Baron's book between Baron and retired New York Times editor Dean Baquet, as well as this discussion of Nagourney's book between Nagourney and one of his colleagues, Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Both books examine how the people in charge of their respective newsrooms deal with the power handed to them along with their titles — and how that power is shifting in the digital age.

Nagourney chronicles the personalities and struggles of a half-dozen Times executive editors, two of whom were fired, and three publishers named Sulzberger: the current one, known as A.G.; his father (Arthur); and his grandfather (Punch). 

Baron, who applies a tighter focus and time frame (his own 2013-21 term as executive editor), documents his share of internecine battles. But he is more concerned with threats to the paper, if we can still call it that, beyond its walls.

Chief among them: Even 30 years after news organizations published their first digital editions, the impact of the internet on print journalism has still not sorted itself out. The impact of the internet disruption has been far more devastating for smaller, metropolitan newspapers unable to attract the kind of national and international digital readers and advertisers that help support the Times and the Post.

People are seen near the entrance of the New York Times building in New York City May 31, 2018. (Dreamstime/Bumbleedee)

At papers big and small, though, print circulation has fallen dramatically. Average daily circulation of the Times plummeted from 1,230,461 in 1993 to 296,329 this year, a 76% decline. The Post lost 83%, dropping from 833,332 to 139,230.

Another telling indicator: The Times spent about $1.4 billion to buy The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette in 1993, selling them 20 years later for about $70 million.

"It was a huge miscalculation," Nagourney says of the ill-fated investment, arguing that it "underlined how much Punch Sulzberger and others in his generation did not see what was becoming so visible to their younger associates: that the internet would transform the newspaper business."

Since then, the Times and the Post have generated substantial new cash via their paywalls but one much more than the other — the Times with 9.4 million digital subscribers, more than triple the Post's 2.5 million.

Why such a gap? "Importantly," Baron says of the Post, "unlike The Times, we had not insinuated ourselves into people's daily, non-news routines." If you pay to play the Times' Wordle or Spelling Bee games — or perhaps access recipes at cooking.nytimes.com — you know what he's talking about.

Martin Baron, then executive editor of The Washington Post, smiles during a newsroom celebration April 16, 2018, after the newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes. (AP/Andrew Harnik, File)

In terms of personal mistakes, Baron describes his failure to seek a top-level editor to address diversity issues in the Post's coverage and staffing as "regrettably the most serious error of my tenure at The Post."

(Both Baron and Baquet, the retired Times editor, acknowledge that the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the failure of both newsrooms to listen carefully enough to what people were thinking and saying around the country.)

Presidential elbow pokes at a secret White House dinner

Baron opens his book with previously undisclosed details of a small, secret dinner at the White House in June 2017. Seated to the left of Trump, Baron recalls the president repeatedly jabbing him with his elbow as he denounced the Post's coverage as "awful."

Also at that dinner was the third richest man in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had purchased the Post for $250 million in October 2013, less than a year after Baron joined the paper. 

Trump followed up at 8 a.m. the next day with a call to Bezos' mobile phone, pushing Bezos to get the Post to be "more fair to me."

Baron reports that Bezos demurred, telling Trump, "I'd feel really bad about it my whole life" if he interfered with news coverage.

Billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos talks about the history and character of the Post during a dedication ceremony for its new headquarters in Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 2016. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Baron says Bezos stuck to his hands-off stance on coverage throughout Baron's time as editor.

He also says he grew to like and respect Bezos, and managed to avoid or make acceptable most of the new owner's suggestions for organizational innovations. (Among the Bezos ideas that survived was one championed by his former wife, MacKenzie: the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" slogan that appears beneath the paper's name in print and online.)

Baron says Bezos never interfered with the Post's coverage of Amazon, other companies he owns or his personal life.

Baron adds: "If there was bias in our coverage of Amazon, it was toward subjecting the company to extra scrutiny," a claim he buttresses with a quote from media critic Jack Shafer of Politico : "If anything, the paper has been more aggressive on Amazon stories, often beating competitors to the punch."

The Columbia Journalism Review disagrees, arguing in a piece headlined " The Washington Post has a Bezos problem " that media ownership by an economic force like Bezos represents an inherent conflict of interest that The Post still needs to address.

Power shift to big tech firms

Baron points readers to a congressional investigation of digital competition that addresses abuse of power by big tech companies.

"These [big tech] firms typically run the marketplace while also competing in it," the report concludes, "a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another."

Interestingly, just as smaller retailers find themselves at the mercy of Amazon's control of the marketplace, so, too, does the Post suffer the consequences of an advertising market now controlled by the likes of Facebook and Google.

Millions of retailers, their foot traffic dramatically diminished by online sales, now must follow Amazon's rules in order to sell their goods and services on the Amazon platform.

And with sites like Google and Facebook generating the vast majority of advertising revenue, print newspapers' share of that revenue fell from 53% in 2000 to 5% in 2020.

Framing the journalistic role as one not opposing Trump but instead covering him aggressively, Baron made an observation that became a trademark of his approach: 'We're not at war. We're at work.' Tweet this

Baron, who served as The Boston Globe's top editor from 2001 to 2013, notes that he was portrayed as "humorless, laconic, and yet resolute" in the "Spotlight" movie chronicling the Globe's investigation of clergy sexual abuse.

In his book, Baron recounts the ways he remained resolute on issues that proved divisive with much of his staff and with some media leaders and thinkers.

The main points of conflict: the extent to which journalists should be free to express their personal and political views on social media (not very, Baron argues) and the stance journalists should take in coverage of disingenuous politicians like Trump.

Framing the journalistic role as one not opposing Trump but instead covering him aggressively, Baron made an observation that became a trademark of his approach: "We're not at war. We're at work."

A view of the Washington Post newsroom in Washington, D.C., in spring 2016 (Dreamstime/Alexander Khitrov)

Baron says issues involving diversity and social media caused growing fissures between him and his staff. As much as he'd hardened himself to attacks by Trump and others complaining about coverage, he says, "the invective leveled against me by colleagues — whose skill and bravery I admired and whose news organization I had busted my butt for eight years to turn around — was tougher to take. Nothing was more hurtful."

By mid 2020, Baron says he was "feeling physically vulnerable and drained," citing a steadily worsening genetic bleeding disorder that was causing "sudden, severe and seemingly unstoppable nosebleeds." 

Although publisher Fred Ryan persuaded him to stick it out until February 2021, Baron reports that, many months earlier, his "desire to continue working at The Post was disintegrating."

Anybody who's anybody reads the Times

Nagourney opens his book with a profile of Abe Rosenthal, the legendary New York Times editor who ran the place from 1969 to 1986 and is described by the author as "a package of brilliance and insecurities."

Adam Nagourney (Courtesy of Crown Publishing Group)

In a single paragraph, Nagourney sums up what may be the Times' greatest strength and limitation:

You have to understand this, Rosenthal once said to a young reporter in his office ... When an educated, important person anywhere in America runs into another educated, important person anywhere in America, each will have assumed of the other that they have read The New York Times.

Rosenthal's world of "educated, important" people for the most part consisted of white, male and straight people, and Nagourney documents what it took over the years to widen that view of Times staffers as well as readers.

With some notable exceptions, Nagourney is probably right when he asserts, "Newsrooms as a rule are unhappy places: roiled by self-doubt, anger, competitiveness, resentments, and vindictiveness. There may well have been no newsroom in the country as unhappy as the one Abe Rosenthal ran for those seventeen years. But few were as good."

Indeed, both Nagourney and Baron recount extraordinary journalistic achievements by the staffs of both papers. But as journalists do, they devote more attention to digging into what didn't turn out so well.

For Nagourney, that means explaining how the Times became a cheerleader for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by falling for the government's lies and deceptions regarding weapons of mass destruction. And it means probing how and why Jayson Blair was able to inflict his plagiarism and fabrications on Times readers before his editors finally caught up with him in May 2003.

The executive editor in charge at the time of both fiascos, Howell Raines, was fired less than a month after the Times ran a 7,239-word investigation of Blair's deceptions.

But it was also Raines who, less than two years earlier, had led the Times' coverage of the 9/11 terrorism attacks and their aftermath, work that would earn the paper seven Pulitzer Prizes.

People line up to buy newspapers on Sept. 12, 2001, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. (AP/Chad Rachman)

Nagourney reports that, in the midst of overseeing 66 stories about the attacks for the Sept. 12, 2002, paper, Raines paid scant attention to how the Times was covering the story online.

"But if the attacks proved to be a defining moment for the new executive editor," he writes, "they would turn out to be even more transformative for the website — a demonstration of the potential of the internet to do what the print newspaper could not: provide information to a huge readership that was hungry for minute-to-minute coverage."

Innovation and enterprise from below

The idea for the most striking feature of the Times' 9/11 coverage came from two staff members whose names appeared nowhere on the masthead.

Faced with overwhelming reports of people unaccounted for after the attacks, reporter Janny Scott and Christine Kay, a metro desk editor, proposed writing brief essays about individual victims. The work distinguished the Times' coverage in ways that helped earn it the biggest of Pulitzer honors: the Gold Medal for Public Service .

Initially headlined "Among the Missing," the collection of 2,310 essays was eventually called "Portraits of Grief" and became a model of journalistic innovation and enterprise.

Nagourney's detailed reconstruction of the 9/11 coverage and other key moments over four decades reflects his deep familiarity with the institution and its people, a journalist able to secure a level of access afforded a trusted colleague.

As insiders, though insiders of a different sort, Nagourney and Baron both got their hands on information not likely getable by less connected chroniclers.

By the same token, it's worth wondering if more independent investigators might have probed more deeply the consequences of these media powerhouses becoming part of the power establishment they're charged with holding to account.

For now, that task rests with us, the readers.

Most Read Stories

Latest News

In a church that has yet to deal justly with women, I stay a keeper of the vision

'Struggle for Racial Justice' urges Catholic conversions of hearts and minds

'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' contains surprising Easter wisdom

Third Sunday of Easter: The only lasting power is love

Subscribe to ncr's free newsletters.

Select any of the newsletters below, then enter your email address and click "subscribe"

Watch CBS News

The Book Report: Washington Post critic Ron Charles (October 22)

By Ron Charles

October 22, 2023 / 8:55 AM EDT / CBS News

By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles

With Halloween creeping up on us, here are some new books haunted by ghosts and monsters of one kind or another.

By the time old spirits start gathering in Daniel Mason's new novel "North Woods" (Random House), it's too late to flee. You'll already be hooked by this elegant, time-spanning novel about a homestead in western Massachusetts.

Mason starts about 400 years ago when two naughty Pilgrims run away from their settlement and marry themselves in the woods. Over the centuries, every time the story returns to this place, fascinating new people have moved in, but something of the old residents still lingers to create this work of sheer storytelling magic.

READ AN EXCERPT: "North Woods" by Daniel Mason

"North Woods" by Daniel Mason (Random House), in Hardcover, Large Print Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

"Let Us Descend" (Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, part of Paramount Global), by two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward, is a dramatic story about an enslaved Black girl in the American South. Her owner is also her father, but that doesn't stop him from selling off her beloved mother – and then her.

Over an impossibly cruel march to New Orleans, she begins to communicate with a spirit inspired by her grandmother, who was a powerful warrior in Africa.

This is a novel thick with ghosts, and history, and searing poetry.

READ AN EXCERPT: "Let Us Descend" by Jesmyn Ward

"Let Us Descend" by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

Eleven years ago, Ben Fountain won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his first novel, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk." Now, Fountain is back with  "Devil Makes Three"  (Flatiron), a big political thriller with touches of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

The story opens when Matt, an affable young American in Haiti, loses his scuba business after the coup that sent President Aristide into exile.

Desperate for work, Matt decides to start diving for treasure off the coast. But when the Haitian military gets wind of that, they want a cut of the gold that must surely be down there.

READ AN EXCERPT:  "Devil Makes Three" by Ben Fountain

"Devil Makes Three"  by Ben Fountain (Flatiron Books), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble  and  Bookshop.org

In 1816 the notorious poet Lord Byron and some of his friends were trapped by bad weather in a Swiss villa. To pass the time, they decided to write ghost stories. One of those guests was 18-year-old Mary Shelley, who dug up the tale of "Frankenstein" from her remarkable imagination.

And now, Dutch writer Anne Eekhout recreates that astonishing young writer, and some of the events that may have inspired her, in a fresh historical novel called "Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein" (HarperVia).

It's passionate. It's brooding. IT'S ALIVE!

READ AN EXCERPT: "Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein" by Anne Eekhout

"Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein" by Anne Eekhout (HarperVia), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org

anne-eekhout.com

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" at 200 ("Sunday Morning")

That's it for the Book Report. Check in with your librarian or local bookseller for more suggestions. I'm Ron Charles. Until next time, boo!

      For more info: 

• Ron Charles, The Washington Post
• Subscribe to the free  Washington Post Book World Newsletter
• Ron Charles' Totally Hip Video Book Review
• Indiebound (Bookshop.org)  (for ordering from independent booksellers)

       For more reading recommendations, check out these previous Book Report features from Ron Charles: 

• The Book Report (September 17)
• The Book Report (August 6)
• The Book Report (June 4)
• The Book Report (April 30)
• The Book Report (March 19)
• The Book Report (February 12)
• The Book Report: Ron Charles' favorite novels of 2022
• The Book Report (November 13)
• The Book Report (Sept. 18)
• The Book Report (July 10)
• The Book Report (April 17)
• The Book Report (March 13)
• The Book Report (February 6)
• The Book Report (November 28)
• The Book Report (September 26)
• The Book Report (August 1)
• The Book Report (June 6)
• The Book Report (May 9)
• The Book Report (March 28)
• The Book Report (February 28)
• The Book Report (January 31)

      Produced by Robin Sanders and Roman Feeser.

• Books and Beyond

More from CBS News

Robert MacNeil, longtime PBS news anchor, dies at 93

Congress is gearing up for the next funding fight. Will this time be different?

"Sunday Morning" archives: Impressionism at 150

Memphis police officer killed in shooting; 1 suspect dead

Book review: Be all that you can be… to support the mission, a central theme of ‘The Wives’

“The Wives” hit close to home.

The memoir by Simone Gorrindo reminded me of stories I’d heard my stepdaughter talk about being married to an Army officer, which means you are hitched to the military complex, too. Her experiences are in ways so much different having a spouse as a high-ranking commander but in others very much the same as Gorrindo’s marriage to an enlisted soldier.

Both husbands served in the special forces in the same wars. I don’t know if they were in the same outfit, but I imagine their experiences were similar. I even finished the book while visiting the family on an Army base.

This is quite different from the usual war story, in that it centers on the wives left behind to run households and keep the family together during the husbands’ deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is the ultimate story of women supporting women.

After Simone marries Andrew, a man she grew up, and eventually fell in love with, he decides his future is with the Army, specifically the special forces. She gives up a dream job as an editor in New York City to move to Columbus, Georgia, where they are stationed at Fort Benning.

She quickly learns the hierarchy of rank and file, who she as the wife of a private can befriend and who will be merely social acquaintances.

“When I’d left New York, I’d had my editor job for only a year, and there were days I worried someone was going to escort me out of my office and tell me a terrible mistake had been made,” Gorrindo writes. “But I’d relied on my Senior Editor title as a crutch. It was shorthand that communicated my place in the world. Here, I was just a private’s wife. I didn’t know much about the Army, but I knew it didn’t get any lower than that.”

Independent and self-sufficient, Simone is not prepared for the rigors of war, monthslong deployment, and the Army rituals, which include hazing and the rigors of Ranger school. Each brings an emotional strain she wasn’t expecting.

Gorrindo’s writing is alive with introspection as she describes watching her gentle and thoughtful husband turn into a soldier carrying out deadly missions in the dark of night a world away. Army security keeps her from knowing details and guessing at what her husband’s life is like in most of the time he spends on the other side of the world.

“Before we got here, I had thought about how war might change Andrew, but I had never paused to consider how the culture of a storied institution might mold him, alter they way he spoke and walked and saw the world,” Gorrindo writes later, after her husband has been promoted. “Sometimes, when he came home, he’d bark in my direction and I’d have to remind him I wasn’t one of his privates. More and more, the Andrew who returned at the end of the day was Andrew the soldier, the sergeant, not Andrew my husband. The problem with that was Andrew the husband was Andrew the soldier.”

Gorrindo builds such tension in her marriage, created by the Army and war, that I had to stop in the middle and read the author’s biography in the back to see if they were still together. She lives with “her husband” in Tacoma, it read. But was this the same husband? Had she moved on? I’d have to keep reading.

But the real story here is about the soldier’s wives. Here is a group of women with little in common other than the Army, randomly thrown together on a patch of American soil in the deep south, who would not have become friends had they lived in the same town under other circumstances. They don’t have much in common, in interests, in books, in philosophy or in politics. Yet they form their own battalion of tough, courageous troopers fighting against a common enemy, the U.S. Army. We get to know and care about Rachel, and Haley, Jo and Maggie and Sadie, and we come to realize they just might be the strongest of the lot. Of course, these aren’t their real names. Gorrindo has changed names to protect privacy. But her writing makes them unmistakably real.

They battle fatigue and deep depression and navigate a world where respect and support are merely frosted toppings disguising layers of misogyny. Gorrindo’s book sandwiches a time before and after the Army allowed women in combat roles, so women are squarely kept in roles of the past – something hard to get your head around for anyone who has lived in the rest of the modern world.

There are also lighter times, when Gorrindo has to accompany her husband, and other wives to backyard barbeques held by commanders, with lawn games and bounce houses for children. I’ve been to such parties, and it’s easy to spot the people who come because they have to.

There’s also the drama of the wives waiting in the dark, jumping at each ring of a phone or flash of headlights, wondering if they will be delivering the message that they will never see their husbands again.

You cheer for these wives, cry with them and wonder if they will ever get to go back to life the rest of us would recognize as normal.

Ovarian cancer: How Amy Lindh fought a hard-to-diagnose cancer – and won

With the help of gynecologic oncology specialists at Providence, Amy beat cancer—and found the courage to accomplish things she’d never dreamed of.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Fallout review – an absolute blast of a TV show

This immaculately made, supremely witty post-apocalyptic drama is yet another brilliant video game adaptation. It’s funny, self-aware and tense – an astonishing balancing act

The following review contains spoilers for the first episode of Fallout .

The first thing to note is that, as with The Last of Us, there is no need for any viewer to be au fait with the source material of Fallout, Amazon’s new competitor in the field of hit video game adaptations (though a fan of the game who watched it with me assures me that there is much to enjoy in addition to the basic narrative if you are).

For newcomers such as me, this intelligent, drily witty, immaculately constructed series set in the Fallout universe fully captivates and entertains on its own terms. It opens in 1950s America, at the height of the cold war and the “red scare”, with former TV star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) reduced to appearing at a children’s birthday party after being tarred with the pinko brush. A mushroom cloud appears on the horizon, the blast wave hits, the apocalypse arrives.

All those who can afford it rush to the secure vaults they have had built in preparation. We cut to Vault 33 two centuries later, by which point they appear to be doing very nicely. All the naivety of the 50s and the better parts of its mores – politeness, consideration, cooperation, modesty and restraint – have been preserved, albeit with the occasional twist. Like daily weapons training, and chipper approaches to the avoidance of marrying one of your many cousins.

The underground idyll is shattered when they are brutally raided by surface dwellers led by a woman called Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). Vault Overseer Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan) is kidnapped and his daughter Lucy (Ella Purnell) defies orders from the remaining Council and leaves the Vault to find him. As a wide-eyed believer in the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), she is wildly unprepared for the array of delights surface-dwelling holds. It’s not like she can disguise herself effectively either. As one gnarled resident of the desperate nearby town of Filly says – “Clean hair, good teeth, all 10 fingers. Must be nice.”

Surface threats include, but are not limited to: giant cockroaches, godawful sea monsters (the Gulper’s innards haunt my dreams), radiation poisoning, strung-out survivors, fanatics of various kinds, puppy incinerators and cannibalistic Fiends. The Brotherhood of Steel try to control the Wasteland but you can’t help but feel, committed warrior faction though they are, that they are on a losing wicket. The Brotherhood is divided into Lords (in battered Iron Man-esque suits), Squires who attend and hope to become them and Aspirants training as Squires. Aspirant Maximus (Aaron Moten) is our guy and we follow him as he rises from bullied victim to rogue Lord. His mission? Acquire the severed head that Lucy also needs to find, containing a chip that Moldaver wants (and which Lucy hopes to trade for Daddy MacLean).

The biggest threat of all, however, is the Ghouls, and one in particular – a noseless, mutated remnant of Cooper Howard who is also hunting for the head and the bounty on it. He is the first to cross paths with Lucy, and oh the fun we have! By the end of a fishing trip, she’s in such a state that if she were to return to Filly, they would probably accept her unquestioningly as one of their own.

Co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner somehow manage to combine traditional post-nuclear apocalypse tropes with semi-ironic takes on 50s motifs, B-movie conventions and horror-level blood and gore (and work in plenty of Easter eggs and other pleasures for gamers). It’s a perfectly paced story that is both funny and self-aware without winking at the camera, undercutting our increasing emotional investment in characters who reveal – and sometimes unexpectedly redeem – themselves layer by layer. If I tell you that the organ-harvesting robot is voiced by Matt Berry, that the Ghoul’s meeting with a long-lost, rotting colleague almost made me cry and that neither element jarred with the other, perhaps that will convey something of the triumphant balancing act that is maintained throughout the eight-episode series.

It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, an absolute blast. Goggins is wonderful as both the unsullied golden boy Cooper and the wretched Ghoul, Moten brings such nuance to what could easily be a one-note role and Purnell performs Lucy’s fall from innocence brilliantly. The growing mystery back at Vault 32, as Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) becomes suspicious of the origins of the murderous raid and the supposedly benign Council that has protected them all these years, adds yet another strand to the story and ratchets up the tension even further. In short, for Fallout, I’m all in.

after newsletter promotion

Fallout is on Prime Video

Most viewed

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Pick

‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

• Share full article

‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies .

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

“Fallout,” TV’s latest big-ticket video game adaptation, takes a satirical, self-aware approach to the End Times .

“Sasquatch Sunset” follows the creatures as they go about their lives. We had so many questions. The film’s cast and crew had answers .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.