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      Martin Luther King Jr. Biographer Wins American History Prize

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      The New-York Historical Society honor goes to Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” presents the civil rights leader as a brilliant, flawed 20th-century “founding father.”Jonathan Eig, the author of “King: A Life,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded annually for the best work of American history or biography.Billed as the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on recently declassified government records and other new sources to take a panoramic yet intimate look at Dr. King. The book places him in the context of the many figures, inside and outside the civil rights movement, who shaped his thinking and actions.The biography, almost 700 pages long, shows a young King struggling to establish himself in the shadow of his father, a prominent Baptist preacher and community leader in Atlanta. As King and his movement grew, Eig shows him in a complicated dance with white leaders like President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sometimes supported and sometimes hampered him, and with more radical Black activists who increasingly saw him as dedicated to an outmoded form of “respectability politics.”While hailing King as “one of America’s founding fathers,” Eig doesn’t stint on his personal struggles and flaws, including his marital infidelities and posthumous revelations of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation. Reviewing the biography last year in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a very human, and quite humane, portrait” that is “worthy of its subject.”The historical society’s prize, which comes with a cash reward of $50,000, honors books that are accessible to a general readership. It generally focuses on works of political history that keep founders, presidents and other prominent figures at the center of the frame, if not always in a celebratory way. Last year’s winner was “G-Man,” Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine Dr. King, authorizing wiretaps of his home and office and planting bugs in his hotel rooms.In a statement, the historical society’s board chair, Agnes Hsu-Tang, called Eig’s biography of Dr. King “a deft, multidimensional portrayal” that avoids hagiography, showing how “America — and its many founders — can be both heroic and imperfect.”Other past winners of the prize include Alan Taylor, Drew Gilpin Faust and Jill Lepore. More

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      Can You Uncover the 13 Hidden Book Titles in This Puzzle?

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      The colder temperatures were here to stay so she knew it was time to follow the geese and head south to America. The internship at the research station had been an endurance test, but she was definitely now more educated about Canadian wildlife. A stiff wind hit her as she said goodbye to the rangers.All that she carried up there originally still fit in the back of the Chevy, along with her new stack of journals and the library book that was now seriously overdue. She smiled, realizing that she’d won the wager back at school about her ability to last the five months at the station and then thought wistfully of her unbroken run of daily moose observations. With a sigh, she flipped on the radio just as “Bad Blood” came on to start her trip back to Minnesota.The colder temperatures were here to stay so she knew it was time to follow the geese and head south to America. The internship at the research station had been an endurance test, but she was definitely now more educated about Canadian wildlife. A stiff wind hit her as she said goodbye to the rangers.All that she carried up there originally still fit in the back of the Chevy, along with her new stack of journals and the library book that was now seriously overdue. She smiled, realizing that she’d won the wager back at school about her ability to last the five months at the station and then thought wistfully of her unbroken run of daily moose observations. With a sigh, she flipped on the radio just as “Bad Blood” came on to start her trip back to Minnesota.The colder temperatures were here to stay so she knew it was time to follow the geese and head south to America. The internship at the research station had been an endurance test, but she was definitely now more educated about Canadian wildlife. A stiff wind hit her as she said goodbye to the rangers.All that she carried up there originally still fit in the back of the Chevy, along with her new stack of journals and the library book that was now seriously overdue. She smiled, realizing that she’d won the wager back at school about her ability to last the five months at the station and then thought wistfully of her unbroken run of daily moose observations. With a sigh, she flipped on the radio just as “Bad Blood” came on to start her trip back to Minnesota. More

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      A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered.

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      When the author received an impassioned email, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx, listening as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”A boy wearing blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some form of disconnection, even trauma,” Michael Almanzar, 19, said. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in some faraway land. That’s literally your next-door neighbor.”The class broke into a round of finger snaps, as if we were at an old-school poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not in an English class at Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenues.Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility — the semicircle of earnest, engaged teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing “There There” (“hope,” “struggle,” “mourning,” “discovery”); the shelf of well-thumbed copies wearing dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.When Orange spoke, students paid close attention. Many identified with the characters in Orange’s book “There There” and with the world it portrayed. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHis eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that said “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. When three consecutive students spoke about how they related to Orange’s work because of their own mental health struggles, he was on the verge of tears.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Entering the ‘Matrix of Language’ With a Crossword Puzzle Fiend

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      Anna Shechtman’s new memoir-history hybrid, “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” explores the gender politics behind one of the world’s most popular word games.Anna Shechtman was 15 when she started building crossword puzzles, and 19 when her first puzzle was published in The New York Times. She later helped to found The New Yorker’s crossword section where, as one of very few female puzzle creators, she has been part of an ongoing effort to diversify the field.Now 33 and a resident scholar at Cornell, Shechtman has spun her experience and her deep knowledge of puzzles into a book, “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle,” published earlier this month. Part history, part memoir, part feminist reconsideration, it offers a sweeping overview of the American crossword puzzle over the last century, told primarily through the stories of four pioneering women who were integral to its evolution.A significant portion of the book is also an intimate chronicle of Shechtman’s struggle with anorexia, which began around the same time her interest in puzzles emerged. She sees the two as tightly linked — attempts to “retreat from the hard fact of [my] embodiment into a world of words, into its order and disorder.”“The Riddles of the Sphinx” poses questions — What kinds of intellectual work is considered worthy of our attention? What boxes have women historically been permitted to fill? — only to consistently invert and twist them. What emerges is a surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page.In an interview that has been edited and condensed for clarity, Shechtman discussed her investigation of this legacy and the revelations, both personal and political, that came from finding her place within it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Novels to Make You Sweat and Shiver

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      A love affair between jurors; reclaiming a classic.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesDear readers,Could I interest you in a literary field trip to the sauna? The oak branch whipping is optional. The cold plunge is not.Every so often these shocks to the system are tremendously welcome: a way to clear the mind, heart and qi, even if the dry sauna is filled with groaning men in a midlife trance. Even if the ice bath is really a repurposed meat freezer with no apparent filtration system.The novels I recommend here come close to replicating these extremes — a sudden shove from humid to arctic that stuns the senses. As with any good water circuit, you’ll be marveling at the effects for days.—Joumana“The Body in Question,” by Jill CimentFiction, 2019We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Guernica Magazine Retracts Essay by Israeli as Staffers Quit

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      An Israeli writer’s essay about seeking common ground with Palestinians led to the resignation of at least 10 staff members at Guernica.Guernica, a small but prestigious online literary magazine, was thrown into turmoil in recent days after publishing — and then retracting — a personal essay about coexistence and war in the Middle East by an Israeli writer, leading to multiple resignations by its volunteer staff members, who said that they objected to its publication.In an essay titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose, had written about her experiences trying to bridge the divide with Palestinians, including by volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to receive care at Israeli hospitals, and how her efforts to find common ground faltered after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza.It was replaced on Guernica’s webpage with a note, attributed to “admin,” stating: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” and promising further explanation. Since the essay was published, at least 10 members of the magazine’s all-volunteer staff have resigned, including its former co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who on social media wrote that the essay “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide” and called for a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.Chen said in an email that she believed her critics had misunderstood “the meaning of my essay, which is about holding on to empathy when there is no human decency in sight.”“It is about the willingness to listen,” she said, “and the idea that remaining deaf to voices other than your own won’t bring the solution.”Michael Archer, the founder of Guernica, said that the magazine would publish a response in the coming days. “The time we are taking to draft this statement reflects both our understanding of the seriousness of the concerns raised and our commitment to engaging with them meaningfully,” he wrote in a text.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Devout,’ by Anna Gazmarian

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      In “Devout,” an author who grew up in the evangelical church recounts her struggle to find spiritual and psychological well-being after a mental health challenge.DEVOUT: A Memoir of Doubt, by Anna GazmarianAnna Gazmarian did everything that millennial evangelicals were supposed to do: She wore a purity ring, listened to sanctioned bands and avoided Harry Potter. And yet, she believed, her faith was inadequate.Jo Lindsay CoIn “Devout,” Anna Gazmarian writes of being given a Christmas present she found impossible to keep: a pendant necklace holding a tiny seed. It was a reference to the passage in Matthew where Jesus tells his apostles that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.Gazmarian, struggling with bipolar disorder and an accompanying affliction of doubt, threw the necklace into the trash. It didn’t matter that it had been a gift from her well-meaning mother — what it symbolized was of no use to her. “I wanted a faith as large as a deeply rooted oak tree,” she writes, “the kind where you had to lean back to see the highest branches in the sky.”The evangelical Christianity Gazmarian had been raised in, which had taught her to see depression as a symptom of spiritual weakness — possibly even the work of the Devil — could not help her realize this vision, and in “Devout” she tells of how she eventually found healing for both mind and soul.In this, her first book, she does not condemn what wounds her. “I’ve been breaking down and rebuilding my concept of faith, searching for a faith that can exist alongside doubt, a faith that is built on trust rather than fear,” she writes in the preface. “A faith with room for prayer and lament.” “Devout” is both of these, “offered in the hope of restoration.”The memoir begins shortly after Gazmarian, having started college in her native North Carolina, receives a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. She takes this as yet another sign that her faith is at fault — despite having done all the things that millennial evangelicals were told to do. She’d worn a purity ring, listened to the sanctioned bands and stayed away from the supposedly occult- glorifying Harry Potter books.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Malachy McCourt, Actor, Memoirist and Gadabout, Dies at 92

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      Playing the professional Irishman, he returned from Limerick to New York, where he tended bar, appeared in soap operas, wrote a best seller, and, with his family, scattered “Angela’s Ashes.”Malachy McCourt, who fled a melancholic childhood in Ireland for America, where he applied his blarney and brogue to become something of a professional Irishman as a thespian, a barkeep and a best-selling memoirist, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Diana McCourt.In 1952, when he was 20, the Brooklyn-born Mr. McCourt reunited with New York.He embarked from Ireland with a ticket paid for with $200 in savings sent by his older brother, Frank McCourt, who had emigrated earlier and was working as a public school English teacher. Frank would also become a late-blooming author, whose books included the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical work “Angela’s Ashes” (1996).Malachy left school in Limerick when he was 13, two years after his heavy-drinking father deserted the family, leaving his mother, Angela, to raise the four of their surviving seven children. The family, Malachy would write, was “not poor, but poverty-stricken.”“Coming out of that life, the things that get you are the two evils of shame on one shoulder, the demon fear on the other,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “Shame says you came from nothing, you’re nobody, they’ll find you out for what you and your mother have done. Fear says what’s the use of bothering, drink as much as you can, dull the pain. As a result, shame takes care of the past, fear takes care of the future and there’s no living in the present.”In the mid-1980s, he gave up drinking and smoking.The barrel-chested, red-bearded Mr. McCourt appeared regularly on soap operas — notably “Ryan’s Hope,” on which he had a recurring role as a barkeep — and played bit parts in several films. In the 1950s, he opened what was considered Manhattan’s original singles bar: Malachy’s, on the Upper East Side.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More