Chris Hayes’s spirited new book, “The Sirens’ Call,” takes a strong stand against the temptations of social media and information overload, on the grounds that the human attention span is ill equipped to absorb and act on such a constant stream of data. Among other things, the book — already a best seller, and one of our recommended titles this week — reveals that Hayes has abandoned scrolling for the old-fashioned pleasure of reading the newspaper in print each day, which sounds like a pretty good prescription to this fan of old media.
But you know what else makes a tonic for tired attention spans? Books. The act of settling in with an extended narrative or expert introduction to an overlooked corner of history or science forces a reader to focus; it concentrates the mind and feeds our attention in a way that our feeds never could. This week, besides Hayes’s book, we recommend a history of colonial-era Virginia and new novels by Charmaine Wilkerson, Virginia Feito and Allegra Goodman that will all hold your attention if you let them. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
GOOD DIRT
Charmaine Wilkerson
An unsolved murder haunts an elite Black family in New England in Wilkerson’s engrossing novel (her second, after the best-selling “Black Cake”). The book splices grief, suspense and the story of a jar made by an enslaved potter generations earlier to explore how intergenerational trauma shapes and complicates family legacies and bonds.
Lawler recounts the story of John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, a Scotsman installed as the governor of colonial Virginia shortly before the American Revolution who, among other efforts on Britain’s behalf, created a regiment of formerly enslaved Black soldiers to help fight the war. The author — a journalist who proves himself at home in historical archives — deftly dissects Dunmore’s choices in the midst of mounting revolutionary crises, revealing a man caught between competing loyalties and a rapidly shifting political landscape.
Atlantic Monthly Press | $30
This manifesto by the MSNBC host traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Hayes argues that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends: We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.
Penguin Press | $32
Feito’s deliciously macabre novel, about a murderous 19th-century governess, announces its narrator’s grisly intentions from the start: “In three months everyone in this house will be dead,” she announces a few pages in. Any attempt to justify the actions of a psychopath would be futile, but Feito does reveal that the young Winifred suffered willful neglect and harm by her own caretakers, including her mother, and that she has a specific score to settle with this household in particular.
ISOLA
Allegra Goodman
Based on an actual historical incident, Goodman’s new novel traces the fate of a 16th-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, who loved the wrong man and was consequently marooned with him on an unforgiving island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Marguerite recounts her travails in an even, cordial tone; there is an elegance to her restraint, as if her narration were an opportunity to impose order on a life she did not design.
