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7 New Books You Should Read This July
An uplifting spin on the divorce novel, an argument for a forgotten natural resource against warming, a layered story about queer youth in Lagos.
The newest entry in the small but mesmerizing genre you might call Condé lit (also see: Graydon Carter’s recent memoir and Tina Brown’s now-classic The Vanity Fair Diaries from 2017), this reported saga doubles as a shrewd cultural history of the 20th century. In particular, it homes in on the moment Si Newhouse, the less trusted of two sons of a tenement-born businessman, had the idea to publish a fleet of magazines that captured his sometimes tawdry aspirational energy, which he sensed was also thrumming through the middle class in the late ’70s and ’80s. Blocking bus commuters, children on treeless playgrounds, and farmworkers, among others, from the sun can literally be lifesaving, which is why environmental journalist Sam Bloch thinks that shade’s scarceness in American-built environments is both a tragedy and a historical anomaly — but one that can be solved.
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