Happy reads for COVID-19 times: Books to get you through this summer
Recommendations that are—sometimes unexpectedly—hopeful, to add to your reading list during what will surely be another strange few months
Books
The artist who eclipsed Picasso
A new biography looks at how Andy Warhol changed art forever
When Canada finally started to remember World War II
A new book by historian Tim Cook looks at how World War II fits in Canada’s historical imagination, and why it was vulnerable to neglect for so long
A new Canadian pandemic novel is astonishingly prescient
Saleema Nawaz’s much-researched book, ’Songs for the End of the World’ is haunting, morally nuanced and oddly hopeful
Why pet people are the animal lovers that wildlife needs
Author Peter Christie urges pet owners to extend their love to increasingly vulnerable non-domestic creatures
Meet the chefs who fed some of the world’s most notorious dictators
A new book features interviews with chefs who served Idi Amin, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein on how—and why—they cooked meals for a dictator
What Mackenzie King’s diaries reveal about the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died
Neville Thompson: Churchill and Roosevelt not only respected King as a ’highly-skilled and dependable head of a vital country but enjoyed his company and confided frankly in him. They had no idea that he was recording it all in his diary.’
The unsustainability of modern life and how COVID-19 may be exposing cracks in our society
’I think the coronavirus is putting into sharp focus the vulnerabilities in the way that modern society is organized,’ says Tara Henley, author of ’Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life’
Notes from an Apocalypse: What we might learn from the COVID-19 pandemic
Author Mark O’Connell, whose well-timed new book, ’Notes from an Apocalypse,’ is out this month, on the pandemic: ’Civilization is actually strengthened in a certain way in a situation like this.’
Walking and reading alone through pandemic days
John Geddes: Reading lists for outlasting COVID-19 have leaned on plague stories. But what about the personal, interior aspects of this coronavirus year?