Baum on Books

The king of horror and supernatural haunting, Stephen King, hasn’t forgotten his fan base — there’s a nod in his new book to The Shining’s creepy Overlook Hotel — but in Billy Summers, King’s latest, he takes readers on a different kind of thriller ride in what some are saying is his best book yet. It may also be his most moving, getting us to care deeply about a professional killer.

Seventy years ago this past spring, husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted for spying for the Soviet Union, largely on testimony against them by Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, who worked at the Atomic Lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Forgotten in Death is the 53rd book in J.D. Robb’s Eve Dallas murder mystery series, as in fill-in-the-first-word: “_____ in Death,” the first book being Naked in Death in 1995, and the one before this one, Faithless in Death.

It can’t be easy writing a new book in a series because you have to consider readers who may be coming to you for the first time, as well as keep up with characters fans tell you they want to see back. But longtime Richmond Virginia newspaperman Howard Owen showed 10 books ago in his Willie Black murder mysteries that he can continue to create absorbing new challenges for Willie, his smart, sardonic, biracial protagonist reporter, now 60, and still working the police night beat because — well, a couple of novels back — he misbehaved. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

There are books galore about American presidents — biographies, memoirs, analyses by colleagues, family members, scholars, journalists, by presidents themselves — but Gary Ginsberg hits on something new: a close-up look at various presidents through the eyes of their closest companions.

Here’s a book that’s well named: “Bald.” To emphasize the point, the cover contains an illustration of a man in profile, his pate as smooth as stone, and a back flap front-face photo that shows one hairless Simon Critchley, professor of philosophy, looking a bit perturbed. But not because he’s bald. Critchley announces the fact as his opening sentence: “I’m bald.” The condition started when he was 19 and then, he says, “like the Roman Empire, my hair went into a long and irreversible decline and fall.”

Erik Larson is so good a storyteller that as you read through The Splendid and the Vile, his magnificent saga of Winston Churchill during the bombing of Britain — “the year Churchill became Churchill,” as Larson says — you wonder how it will all turn out! The book is what’s been said of Larson’s earlier works: “addictively readable.”

Though Amagansett-based author Ellen Feldman’s compelling new novel The Living and the Lost is set in Berlin shortly after World War II, with flashbacks to 1938, it resonates today with disturbing themes about the heritage of hatred, and suggests that the title “The Living AND the Lost” may well have been “the Living ARE the Lost.”

A new and expanded edition of a book first published 58 years ago about a man said to have been the world’s greatest conductor shows why the myth took hold and why it remains unchallenged.

You know how writers are sometimes asked whom they would like to have over for a small dinner party? Well, historian, biographer and academic Walter Isaacson, out now with another magnificent tome, The Code Breaker, says – with nods to other innovators he’s written about, including Einstein, Steve Jobs and his favorite genius, Leonardo Da Vinci – that his guests would be Benjamin Franklin and Jennifer Doudna.