The Original Black Elite, by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (Amistad). In the decades following the Civil War, a proud “colored aristocracy” emerged. This history focusses on two of its members—Daniel Murray, the son of a former slave, who, in 1897, became chief of periodicals at the Library of Congress, and his wife, Anna, a descendant of one of John Brown’s raiders. Taylor documents the inaugural balls they organized, the properties they owned, and their political efforts on behalf of their race. Ultimately, affluence, respectability, and their light complexions couldn’t save them from the humiliations of Jim Crow. By 1919, Murray had been demoted, his salary slashed, and he was forbidden to dine in the library’s public cafeteria.
The Genius of Judaism, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated from the French by Steven B__. Kennedy (Random House). The French philosopher and telegenic celebrity offers a meditation on the “inner work on Judaism,” which he says has guided his adventures in revolutionary politics, in an eclectic treatise that includes a long examination of resurgent anti-Semitism. His arguments tend to be wayward; a defense of his support for intervention in Libya takes the form of an interpretation of the Book of Jonah. And there are moments of real contradiction, as when he calls the Holocaust a “crime without parallel” but then professes befuddlement at the phenomenon of “competitive victimhood.” Still, Lévy writes with passion. When people stop reading Judaism’s great texts, “to challenge and oppose them no more,” he declares, “the genius dies.”
Moonglow, by Michael Chabon (Harper). Set in 1990, this novel narrates the life of the author’s grandfather, who is dying of cancer. A powerful painkiller has brought “its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence,” so that stories of his exploits, failures, and secrets emerge in a non-chronological, occasionally cartoonish manner. The form allows Chabon to take on a range of modes and subjects—there’s a bravura Second World War sequence, and an extended prison episode following his grandfather’s attempt to kill his boss after losing his job to Alger Hiss. The most vivid element of the novel is the old man’s relationship with his wife, a French war survivor haunted by terrifying visions.
The Animators, by Kayla Rae Whitaker (Random House). This tender, lively début traces the friendship and the artistic partnership of two young women. After meeting in college, Sharon and Mel spent a decade making (per their critics) “small, thoughtful cartoons and out-of-mainstream animation shorts for a thinking woman’s audience.” But their first full-length film, based on Mel’s childhood in a Florida trailer park, wins a prestigious award. As their work gains recognition, Mel’s hard-living ways strain her relationship with the quieter, anxious Sharon, until a medical emergency changes everything. The tension between private life and public art occasionally feels familiar, but Whitaker’s nimbly created characters are as vibrant as the novel’s title suggests.
