Books of the Times

Book reviews by The Times’s critics.

How ‘Muskism’ Is Changing the Way America Works
In a new book, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue that Elon Musk’s disruptive approach to business is transforming both politics and the economy.
By Jennifer Szalai
In ‘Famesick,’ Lena Dunham Diagnoses Celebrity, Illness and Herself
This unusually unfiltered memoir takes us to the hospital, to therapy and to the sometimes hostile set of “Girls.”
By Alexandra Jacobs
A Brand-Name Novelist Revisits His Old Friend and Alter Ego
Jay McInerney has written about the literary party boy Russell Calloway once a decade since the 1990s. He returns in the Covid novel “See You on the Other Side.”
By Dwight Garner
A Teenager Plunged to His Death. A Reporter Found More to the Story.
A new book by Patrick Radden Keefe retraces the secret life of a 19-year-old Londoner who fell in with a gangster underworld.
By Jennifer Szalai
A New Orleans Heroine Who’s Uneasy in the Big Easy
The well-born protagonist of Nancy Lemann’s novel “The Oyster Diaries” returns home and immediately feels like an outsider.
By Dwight Garner
Road-Tripping With a Historian Through America’s Past
In anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, a Pulitzer winner visited 300 sites to see how history is displayed and, sometimes, erased.
By Jennifer Szalai
Confessions of a 17th-Century Diarist, Power Broker and Predator
Samuel Pepys’s journals are an invaluable record of British history. A new book reconsiders his infamous sexual exploits.
By Dwight Garner
A Novel as Slim as an iPhone Has a Lot to Say About Technology
In “Transcription,” Ben Lerner considers a famous father, a loyal protégé and a distant son, bound by devotion and separated by miscommunication.
By Alexandra Jacobs
Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All?
A new history by Trevor Jackson argues that the economic system that transformed global living standards depends on endless growth impossible to sustain.
By Jennifer Szalai
Teddy Bears and Groucho Glasses: How Jews Built the Business of Fun
In “Playmakers,” Michael Kimmel traces, and celebrates, the immigrant roots of the American toy industry. (Batteries not included.)
By Alexandra Jacobs