The Next Great Migration, by Sonia Shah (Bloomsbury). Countering the perception that today’s human and nonhuman migrations represent a global crisis, this engrossing book draws on history, interviews, and a wide range of scientific research to show that migration is “an unexceptional ongoing reality.” Shah deftly traces the influence of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose commitment to the Christian idea of a static, divinely ordered world led him to dismiss the reality of natural migration, and whose bigotry led him to reject the possibilities of human migration and of shared ancestry. She shows how Linnaeus’s ideas formed the basis for centuries of so-called race science, eugenics, racist state structures, and xenophobia.
Max Jacob, by Rosanna Warren (Norton). The poet, painter, and astrologer Max Jacob embodies both the euphoric inception and the tragic demise of European modernism in this lively literary biography. A friend of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, and a mentor to Jean Cocteau, Jacob was a Zelig of Paris’s bohemian demimondes, but Warren also makes a case for the importance of his ecstatic prose poems and cabaret verse, which appear in her own deft translations. As the aesthetic conflicts between Symbolism and Cubism, Surrealism and Dada give way to the advent of real violence, Warren’s account takes on an elegiac tone. Jacob, a devout Catholic who converted from Judaism, died in an internment camp in 1944, two days before his scheduled deportation to Auschwitz.
Silence Is My Mother Tongue, by Sulaiman Addonia (Graywolf). Caught up in the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, Saba, the teen-age protagonist of this enigmatic novel, has been forced to flee to a Sudanese refugee camp with her brother and mother. The siblings’ bond sustains them as they navigate the camp, a place of friendship and rough justice, of rigid tradition and sexual awakening. For the refugees, “life itself was suspended, quietly churning like milk in a goatskin,” Addonia writes. “Soon it would curdle.” When Saba, who had wanted to become a doctor, is pushed into marriage, she makes a choice that carries her far from her brother, believing all the while that “dreams for a woman are no longer inherited but created.”
The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter (Harper). Set primarily in Spokane, in 1909, this masterly novel dramatizes the free-speech riots led by the Industrial Workers of the World, and features such historical figures as the labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and John Sullivan, the police chief who put her in jail. The plot centers on two brothers who join “this army of the poor and broken.” Shifting perspectives and sharp plot twists contribute to the richness of the story, bringing a tumultuous time in American history to life. Walter illustrates how injustice can galvanize young men but also wreck them. “We were flies buzzing around the heads of millionaires,” one of the brothers observes. “Fooling ourselves that we had power because they couldn’t possibly swat us all.”
