New Books by Buckley and Hunter

Another fall, another satirical novel from Christopher Buckley. This year he turns his wit-powered pen to the legal world with Supreme Courtship, which he jokingly promises will be his only court satire.

Another fast read will be Stephen Hunter’s new thriller, Night of Thunder, again starring Bob Lee Swagger, the character played by Mark Wahlberg in the movie Shooter.

Novelist Porter Shreve’s semiautobiographical When the White House Was Ours is set in a DC alternative school during the Carter administration and the national bicentennial—an era Shreve recalls from growing up in Washington. He got so inspired at the time that he painted his bedroom red, white, and blue.

On the nonfiction front, New York Times diplomatic correspondent Helene Cooper is out with The House at Sugar Beach, a memoir of her childhood in Liberia, which ended when a coup forced her family to flee after her uncle was killed, her father wounded, and her mother raped. Two decades later, she returned to the continent to see the foster sister she had left behind.

Closer to home, Pulitzer finalist Philip Dray’s Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen is a history of an often overlooked chapter. The stories of men like Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first black senator, are all the more powerful from some 140 years before Barack Obama began his presidential quest.

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Garrett M. Graff