New Books for the Pueblo Chieftain: September 27, 2021

The past comes flooding back for police detective Eira Sjödin when Olof Hagström, who served time for raping and murdering a local girl, returns home to find his father dead under suspicious circumstances.

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

"A major new work from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, MORNING STAR is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless Last night a new star appeared in the sky. The Morning Star. I know what it means. It means that it has begun. One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend...

"The United States has by far the most powerful naval fleet in the world. Other nations are not even trying to keep up. This has enabled America to stand sentinel over crucial waterways like the Strait of Malacca, ensuring safe passage of goods with little interruption. But we are entering a new era. What will happen if the US does not keep spending resources on improving trade between other nations? Will China's rising economic influence and regional...

"Rebecca Frankel's Into the Forest is a gripping story of love, escape, and survival, from wartime Poland to a wedding in Connecticut. In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods-through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids-until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944....

"Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it explain why there seems to be so much irrationality in the world, including, let's be honest, in each of us? These are the goals of Steven Pinker's follow-up to Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time"). Humans today are often portrayed as cavemen out of time, poised to react to a lion in the grass with a suite of biases, blind spots, fallacies, and illusions. But this, Pinker...