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There are action-packed summer books - in which, say, a shark attacks on the Fourth of July or a well-tailored man with a mysterious past throws wild parties - and then there is Sag Harbor (Doubleday; 273 pages), the new autobiographical novel by Colson Whitehead. Not much happens in Sag Harbor. It's 1985, and Benji, a 15-year-old New York City kid, takes off for his family's beach house on Long Island, where for the first time he'll look after himself and his brother while his parents are at work...
...grandparents were among a group of professional African Americans who bought land in Sag, built homes and created a community. "According to the world," says Benji, "we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses." With this, Whitehead creates just enough tension for his coming-of-age novel. His teenage hero is both insider and outsider, working nonstop to find his place among the white kids he attends prep school with from September to June, the black kids he hangs out with in Sag and the expectations he's beginning to have for himself as a black American...
That's when you realize Whitehead has tapped the most classic summer-novel activity of all: nostalgia. It doesn't matter if nothing much happens in Sag Harbor, if in all the boys' games with BB guns no one actually loses an eye. The pleasure is in the way Whitehead recalls it, in loving and lingering detail...
Highlight Reel: Books, Journals, Documents: The database contains some old favorites, like the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as well the constitutions of numerous countries. There are also gems like the first printed edition of the 16th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, and a journal kept by a Venetian scholar who accompanied Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage around the world. If English is more your speed, try the translation of a French voyager's tour of the Indian Ocean - maybe a safer trip than it is today...
...writing about real-life acquaintances in his fiction. “I take great pleasure in putting real people into books. I take their permission, well, not entirely,” he said, before warning event host Professor Arthur I. Applbaum that he might come up in a future novel. McCall-Smith, a former professor of medical ethics at the University of Edinburgh, was born in Zimbabwe and lived for many years in Botswana. His fictional oeuvre includes “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series, about the adventures of Mma Ramotswe, a female detective...