Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia

basic books

How’s this for spicy music criticism? “Disciples of the new school … dismember melodies with hockets and sing lugubrious discants. … They know not what upon they build.” So griped Pope John XXII in an early-14th-century edict blasting polyphony, which was on its way to becoming the defining sound of Catholic music. Such papal pitchforking is just one of the many amusing examples of elite distrust marshaled in Ted Gioia’s survey of an art form in perpetual rebellion. Across millennia, sonically adventurous courtesans, slaves, monks, gang members, and other marginalized folks offended polite society before conquering it. The book goes beyond asserting that every form of music was the punk of its day, though. Feistily and authoritatively, Gioia draws out cross-cultural axioms to rewire the reader’s ear. Music’s ability to heal gets dissected in scientific, sociological, and even supernatural terms, but so does its link with violence—a link that might explain why new sounds have been so often met with fear. — Spencer Kornhaber

Say Nothing, A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe

doubleday

One of my oddest memories growing up in London was hearing, one morning as I lay in bed, a sound that even an 8-year-old could identify as an explosion. A mile from where I lived, the Irish Republican Army had left a bomb at Clapham Junction train station, one of 25 the paramilitary group detonated that month. Life in England in the 1980s and ’90s was colored in all kinds of ways by the conflict in Northern Ireland, but I never understood it until I read Say Nothing, the New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s epic analysis of the period known as the Troubles, and the people whose lives (and deaths) were anchored to it. By framing his narrative around human stories—like that of Jean McConville, the mother of 10 who was taken from her home in 1972, never to return—Keefe makes the atrocities committed more comprehensible. He also examines the obsessive tribalism that can turn ordinary men and women into murderers, and deftly unpacks the trauma they leave in their wake. — Sophie Gilbert

Trust Exercise, Susan Choi

henry holt and co.

Where Susan Choi’s American Woman reimagined an eye-popping moment in U.S. history, her newest novel, Trust Exercise, evokes a more familiar feeling of adolescent cocoonage—all quick-changing alliances and burgeoning dreams. Set at a high school for the arts, the book homes in on the drama students Sarah and David, who compete in the cutthroat world of theater while falling in and out of love. But Choi then turns the narrative on its head, multiple times. She manages to merge this tale of teen angst and ambition with another about the failures of teaching institutions. How the pair and their peers handle betrayal involves different, and even wildly creative, forms of faith. Using unreliable and shifting narrators, Choi crafts a story within a story about the weapon that is fiction—and its ability to heal, to hide, and to reveal. — Jane Yong Kim