New York Review of Books Review

THE TRUTH ABOUT ANIMALS: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales From the Wild Side of Wildlife, by Lucy Cooke. (Basic Books, $16.99.) From the marvelous to the utterly bizarre, there's an astonishing diversity of life on display in this book. Cooke, a noted zoologist and documentarían, devotes each of her chapters to a misunderstood creature, upending our assumptions and beliefs about animals. THERE THERE, by Tommy Orange. (Vintage, $16.) This polyphonic debut novel is centered on a group of Native Americans as they travel to a powwow in Oakland, Calif. Structured as a series of short chapters featuring different characters, the book raises questions of identity, belonging and history's relationship to the present. "There There" was named one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2018. IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies, by Howard Blum. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) Blum looks at the two men who helped track down Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and whose work uncovered a secret Soviet spy network. The book reads like a detective thriller as it describes their efforts, and offers a fresh consideration of Cold War-era history. LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin, $17.) An Ohio town is rattled when the house of a wealthy white family is set ablaze. As Ng delves into the past to help solve the mystery, the town is further cast into turmoil by the disappearance of two newcomers, a mother and teenage daughter, and a custody battle springing from an interracial adoption. Our reviewer, Eleanor Henderson, praised the book's "vast and complex network of moral affiliations - and the nuanced omniscient voice that Ng employs to navigate it." TIGER WOODS, by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) There's no shortage of biographies of Woods, but this one stands out for the new details it uncovers about the athlete's rise to become a champion - and his eventual fall from grace. As the Times critic Dwight Garner wrote of the book, "It has torque and velocity, even when all of Woods's shots, on the course and off it, begin heading for the weeds." MOTHERHOOD, by Sheila Heti. (Picador, $18.) The narrator of Heti's latest book, a female writer in her late 30s, wrestles with her ambivalence about having a child before time runs out. As the woman untangles her feelings - "I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living," she says - the novel becomes a broader exploration of creativity, art and selfhood.