[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]

City of Bohane, by Kevin Barry. Reviewed by Pete Hamill in the New York Times.

Kevin Barry’s outlandish first novel overflows with “literary marvels,” Hamill claims, “marvels of language, invention, surprise.” It takes place in anachronistic 2053 Ireland, where computers and cell phones do not exist, and the housing projects are named after poets. It features a violent gang called the Fancy and a noirish style that reminds Hamill of Frank Miller (the creator of the comic books Sin City and 300). Despite all that, the “the binding story is about love.” Sounds like a high-risk, high-reward genre mashup.

Damn Yankees, edited by Rob Fleder. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.

This collection of baseball essays sounds perfect for the start of the season. They seem to be centered around the Yankees, and the review (Ulin is a Yankees fan himself) carries some fire. Plus the anecdote about Ulin playing Wii baseball with his daughter is pretty hilarious.

The Crusader, by Timothy Stanley. Reviewed by Matthew Continetti in the Washington Post.

This biography of human paraquat Pat Buchanan sounds more interesting than I would’ve thought. Continetti leans right, but still admits that “Buchanan’s life has been remarkably consistent: He tends to bring out the worst in people,” and doesn’t seem to admire Buchanan’s historic brand of vitriolic political punditry. I certainly won’t be picking up the book, but it’s interesting to see the gears working inside a famous (and famously durable) crazy person.

Butterfly in the Typewriter, by Cory MacLauchlin. Reviewed by James Parker in the BN Review.

Last week, I knew only the broad strokes of John Kennedy Toole’s life: he committed suicide after failing to find a publisher, then his mother worked tirelessly to get his great novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, published, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twelve years after Toole’s death. As it turns out, the details are more gruesome and heartbreaking than even that cheerless synopsis would indicate. Butterfly evidently weaves a biography of Toole together with an account of the creation and publication of Confederacy. Parker sticks to the latter (and tries a bit too hard), but if you’re a Toole fan, read this review and the Toole Wikipedia entry at least.

In brief: A little optimism in tough times. … Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has a new book out in the UK. It’s out in America in mid-May. … An interview with Etgar Keret. … Joyce Carol Oates does nothing but write. … Ben Marcus reviews Mark Leyner’s latest weirdness.

[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]

Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton. Reviewed by David Brooks in the New York Times.

Alain de Botton seems like an eloquent intellectual who descends only occasionally into maddening pretension. His latest book, in which he prescribes that atheists adopt some of the practices and rituals of organized religion, is the kind of pretentious societal prescribing that should’ve probably been killed. Brooks indulges him for quite a while, teasing out the most enlightening facets of de Botton’s thesis, before finding that “many of his ideas seem silly.” This is a book to read about, but not one to read. Also, the sketch of de Botton’s idea for a “Temple of the Earth”—a Washington Monument that you stand inside to become non-deifically inspired—is something to see.

The Cove, by Ron Rash. Reviewed by Ursula K. Le Guin in the Guardian.

This odd review throws a wet blanket on my own anticipation of Rash’s latest novel, portraying it as a straightforward, mechanical tale of doom, described in simple language, with inevitable results. That would also be a fair description of Serena, Rash’s excellent previous novel, but Le Guin doesn’t find much to recommend The Cove. It’s cause for a bit of concern, if not yet panic.

Reading for My Life, by John Leonard. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.

Ulin’s opening line reads: “I want to talk about criticism, about what it is and how it operates.” He never really quite gets there, not in the way I wanted from one of the country’s best book critics writing about another critic whom he obviously admires. But along the way, Ulin’s meanderings are worth the trip, and it seems John Leonard would’ve liked it that way.

Arcadia, by Lauren Groff. Reviewed by Ron Charles in the Washington Post.

This might be one of those books that everybody likes but me—it wouldn’t be the first time. Ron Charles writes pretty sharp reviews, and he’s obviously smitten with Groff. She writes good characters, I’ll stipulate that, and it sounds like this novel will play to her strengths (interiority, as opposed to interaction). But I’m still not buying.

In brief: Spring books preview in the LA. Times. … Interview with Jonah Lehrer, whose new book concerns the neuroscience of creativity. … The Expats seems indeed to be a solid if unmemorable thriller. … Mystery roundup in the Wall Street Journal. … On the birth, evolution, and death words. … Michael Dirda on a sci-fi novel that still holds up decades later.

[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]

King Larry, by James D. Scurlock. Reviewed by Bryan Burrough in the New York Times.

This weird biography follows Larry Hillblom, who took a part-time job as a courier in law school, founded DHL (he’s the H), forced out his two partners, got rich, sold his shares, and then quit and became “a glorified sex tourist, trolling the dives and brothels of Vietnam and the Philippines for pubescent girls.” Weird, and gross, but sounds like it could make for a good story. Burrough positively gushes over it, saying, “Mr. Scurlock has returned with a story that is everything I enjoy in a book: strange, exotic, inspiring, extensively researched, clearly written and, yeah, sort of creepy.” This despite the fact that Hillblom’s chasing after teenage prostitutes is too distasteful for more than an oblique mention in a family newspaper.

House of Stone, by Anthony Shadid. Reviewed in the Washington Post, by Philip Caputo.

Shadid’s final book, a memoir about his time restoring his grandfather’s house in Lebanon, might not be as important as a lot of his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, but it sounds as epic and elegant as such a book could be. Shadid evidently incorporates his family’s history in the Middle East, and his own personal history in war zones, to craft a compelling and impressive narrative. (For more on Shadid, and his death last month by horse allergy while on assignment in Syria, check out this piece by the photographer who accompanied him on that last trip.)

The Man Without a Face, by Masha Gessen. Reviewed by Graeme Wood in the B&N Review.

Gessen’s “political history” of the reign of Vladimir Putin (who was elected president of Russia by a suspiciously wide margin last Sunday) sounds fiery and cutting, if perhaps biased. Wood, by contrast, comes off as a Putin apologist, saying that, even if you’d call Russia amoral and destructive, at least Putin has “a coherent long-term strategic vision for his country.” It’s a weak defense, and Wood’s review sounds almost as “furiously accusatory” as he calls Gessen’s book. Still, a profile of a career KGB agent and government manipulator should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, no matter what it says.

Londoners, by Craig Taylor. Reviewed by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times.

Completing the nonfiction quadfecta this week, Taylor’s book is an oral history of London, compiled from five years’ worth of interviews with “subway workers and sex workers; homeless people and millionaires; enthusiasts and malcontents; immigrants and old-timers; the practical and the dreamy; people going and people coming.” Lyall’s verdict finds the result sympathetic, entertaining, and wildly diverse. For more, trying China Mieville’s recent sprawling piece on the same city.

In brief: Slate’s new book section has a lot of promise, even though it has relatively few actual book reviews. Here’s a piece about an existential kids’ book, and here’s one on the horrors of the pregnancy classic, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. … Random House, as it turns out, isn’t as cool as it looked like they might be for a second. … The Lorax, a crassly commercialized adaptation of a classic Dr. Seuss book, rockets to the year’s best opening weekend. Looks like selling out pays. … And the takeaway from this piece is that Amazon is moving away from monopolization. Those boycotts are working.

[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]

The Mirage, by Matt Ruff. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.

In my February Book Radar, The Mirage earned the unillustrious bottom spot, reserved for books I think I’ll probably hate. Ulin, with characteristic insightfulness, explains what I might have been feeling: while couched as alternative history, Ruff’s construction turns out to be “a high concept, in which reality is less important than spectacle.” Ulin compares Mirage to Philip K. Dick’s alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle. In Castle, the Allies lost World War II and America is split between two occupiers, Germany on the east coast, and Japan on the west—Dick takes a real historical event and branches out at a specific point, exploring history through fictional alternatives. Ruff’s novel, on the other hand, takes the details of a real event (9/11) and projects their mirror images in a pseudo-fictional near-satire, with no real message behind itself. In Mirage, Osama bin Laden is a special agent for the United Arab States (but he still acts like a terrorist), and LBJ leads Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh in a religious attack on the World Trade Center in Baghdad. Ulin calls it a terrific setup, but laments how poorly the pieces play out, and how hollow they feel, being, as the title implies, an illusion separate from the “real world.” I think “terrific” is a stretch for this premise: to me it feels like an arbitrary, even exploitative, reshuffling of history, made for shock value and not meaningfulness.

Zona, by Geoff Dyer. Reviewed by Sukhdev Sandhu in the Guardian.

A few weeks after slews of breathless blurbs got me all pumped up for Geoff Dyer’s new book, some real reviews have given me pause. In this one, Sandhu praises Dyer’s engaging, approachable handling of a very difficult-to-watch movie (Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky)—but I don’t really care about Dyer’s handling of the movie, I care about his weird non-sequiturs, and the unpredictable rambling I was promised. Regarding those, Sandhu says the book is mostly a movie synopsis, accompanied by “riffs and asides more whimsical than enlightening.” Dyer’s prose, meanwhile, lacks the “bruised lyricism that lit up earlier works.” I won’t be pulling the trigger on this one just yet.

Gypsy Boy, by Mikey Walsh. Reviewed by Dwight Garner in the New York Times.

Evidently Britain loves its Gypsies. Gypsy Boy, just the first of a passel of Gypsy memoirs slowly making their way to America, concerns Mikey Walsh, the descendant of a long line of Gypsy bareknuckle boxing champions (the descriptions reminded me a lot of Snatch). There’s only one problem: Mikey is gay, and because of that his father put a bounty on his head. Dwight Garner, one of the Times’s premier book reviewers, can’t quite bring himself to whole-heartedly recommend Gypsy Boy, calling it “melodrama” and “grim” by turns. But the pleasure he took in reading it is undisguiseable.

Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, by Eric G. Wilson. Reviewed by Peter Lewis in the B&N Review.

Train Wreck is an English professor’s exploration of why we all find disaster so enthralling. Lewis describes it as a comfortably written book, even if its subject matter (like the market for Jeffrey Dahmer memorabilia) is sometimes distasteful.

In brief: Barnes & Noble releases a $200 Nook Tablet, probably because they were getting thumped by the Kindle Fire. … Ron Charles in Shit Book Reviewers Say … The Elements of Style, rapped. … I’m guessing the latest “Facebook book” will be about as mediocre as the last Facebook book. … And the Authors Guild calls Amazon’s pricing “predatory.” Only about 15 years late to the party, fellas.