In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.
Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of those novels that's always pulling a fast one on a reader. Take the opening section: You settle in, become absorbed in the story and, then, 100 pages or so later — Boom! — the novel lurches into another narrative that upends the truth of everything that came before.
Ultimately, Hershovitz's approach, in betting on his children's endless capacity to ask trenchant questions, has a bittersweet aspect — it's at once like faith and doubt. Rex and Hank's childhood years are finite. The portal to their seemingly infinite aptitude for wonder may close once they reach adulthood. Nevertheless, Hershovitz reminds parents to embrace our children's "strangeness" as long as we can, and maybe in the process find our way back to the questing child-philosopher within us.
Before I started reading “In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy,” I was reasonably sure I was not interested in learning about Minnie Pearl (1912-1996), the country-styled comedian who wore a straw hat with a price tag hanging off the side and opened her act by bellowing “Howdy!” I was certain I was familiar with Joan Rivers’s biography as we had briefly worked together on a project and I had been a fan of hers for years.
But Shawn Levy, whose previous books include biographies of Jerry Lewis and the Rat Pack, has done a sensitive job telling the stories of the nine pioneering women he has designated as those who cracked the glass ceiling of comedy.