10 New Books We Recommend This Week – The New York Times

THE SECRET LIFE OF DOROTHY SOAMES: A Memoir, by Justine Cowan. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) I didnt love my mother, Cowan declares. But this investigation into her mothers life is equal parts memoir and love letter to the difficult, occasionally cruel woman who was not the person she claimed to be: Far from growing up in the wealthy, fox-hunting circles she had always suggested, her mother had in fact been raised in a foundling hospital for the children of unwed women. Cowan is a public interest lawyer accustomed, when taking on a new case, to plunging into a heap of documents and piecing together a narrative, Ellen Barry writes in her review. The propulsive parts of the book come as Cowan uncovers the past that her mother was so intent on hiding.

THE CROOKED PATH TO ABOLITION: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, by James Oakes. (Norton, $26.95.) In this carefully and rigorously argued book, Oakes describes how the antislavery movement used the federal Constitution to buttress its cause, emphasizing every provision and every clause that could be used on behalf of abolition. Gradually the antislavery advocates accumulated a variety of textual protections for freedom and limitations on slavery, Gordon S. Wood writes in his review. Then they began moving beyond the text of the Constitution to invoke its spirit. In his final and perhaps most original chapter Oakes traces the winding route Lincoln followed in order to get to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States once and for all.

TROUBLED: The Failed Promise of Americas Behavioral Treatment Programs, by Kenneth R. Rosen. (Little A, $24.95.) Rosen experienced a few of the tough-love institutes that he writes about in this searing expos: wilderness camps and therapeutic programs that treat young substance abusers and troublemakers, largely unregulated. Often, he claims, the programs do more harm than good. Rosen approached dozens of former participants before finding people who were willing to open up, and he spent a number of years with each of them to understand them better, Robert Kolker says in his review. This alone turns Troubled into not just a work of extended empathy but a public service; these life stories, taken together, shine a light on an industry that has been able to thrive in darkness.

AMERICA AND IRAN: A History, 1720 to the Present, by John Ghazvinian. (Knopf, $37.50.) This book presents the long, troubled relationship between the United States and Iran in a breezy and supple narrative, replete with poignant anecdotes, to posit convincingly that antagonism between Iran and America is wholly unnecessary. Abbas Milani, reviewing it, applauds Ghazvinian for detailing how there is in the United States a powerful chorus that wants nothing to do with Iran, along with elements in Israel and Saudi Arabia working against normalized relations between the two countries. Milani adds: The book is commendably exhaustive in its effort to expose the machinations of these forces. Even when we disagree with Ghazvinian, the story he offers is delightfully readable, genuinely informative and impressively literate.

CRAFT: An American History, by Glenn Adamson. (Bloomsbury, $30.) Adamson, the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, has assembled a startlingly original history by examining the mostly unsung artisans who built the country literally by hand from Indigenous and enslaved populations to todays maker movement. That no one has ever previously attempted this may be because when we bother to think about craft at all, it is usually through a gauzy haze, Deborah Needleman writes in her review. Yet Adamson manages to discover making in every aspect of our history, framing it as integral to Americas idea of itself as a nation of self-sufficient individualists. There may be no one better suited to this task.

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10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times