New books this week track John Williams’ life, future pandemics and NASA fiction

Class is back in session in many places across the U.S., meaning a likely sea change in students’ overall reading habits. Gone are the heady days of the beach read, summarily swapped for the kinds of books a school board can really get behind.

At least, that’s true for the lucky folks who still get to make learning their primary occupation. For everyone else, there’s a consolation for the drudgery of the day job: those happy off-hours when, instead of The Great Gatsby, say, you can still crack open whatever you darn well please.

So when you turn to this week’s publishing highlights — a bumper crop of biography, science and fiction — make sure to spare a bit of schadenfreude for the students among us. But don’t linger too long — there is plenty of learning left to be done, wherever you stand in life.

John Williams: A Composer’s Life by Tim Greiving

It’s virtually impossible to overstate the ubiquity of Williams’ music. The composer has produced so many instantly recognizable scores for film and TV, it’s a tall task to find just about anyone who doesn’t have at least one of them tattooed on their brain – whether that’s the theme to Star Wars, Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Olympics or any number of others. Far less familiar is the voice of the man himself – but that’s an omission that Greiving aims to correct here. In this comprehensive biography, the regular NPR contributor has collected interviews not only with Williams but also a raft of other Hollywood headliners for this detailed exploration of the life and work of the nonagenarian icon.

Amity by Nathan Harris

When your first swing in the big leagues is a home run, the second visit to the batter’s box tends to bear a heavier set of expectations. In Harris’ case, that first swing was The Sweetness of Water, a historical epic that drew attention from Oprah, former President Obama and the literary prize circuit. His follow-up, Amity, like his debut novel, addresses the perilous situation for freedmen in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Only this time, things are headed even farther south, as protagonist Coleman crosses the border into Mexico on a quest to reunite with his sister June, even as the shadow of their former master looms dangerously over them both.

The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker

Gush all you want about Stephen King, but no one can summon nightmares quite like an epidemiologist. Osterholm, founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, ably shoulders his role as herald of the horrors on the horizon. In 2017, he teamed with true-crime author Olshaker to produce Deadliest Enemy, a disconcertingly prescient book about public health emergencies and how to deal with them. Now the pair is back to persuade readers that, despite killing more than 7 million people worldwide, COVID-19 still can’t be considered “the big one.” They are reserving that label for the possibility of an even worse pandemic, whose likely effects — and the ways we may still prevent them — they lay out here.

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage

Steph Harper, the narrator of Ramage’s debut novel, follows a much more complicated trajectory than the book’s title implies. Sure, she aims to become NASA’s first Cherokee astronaut but her grueling path to the launchpad – which includes an escape from an abusive parent, a youth spent on reservation and a queer coming of age – makes a lunar roundtrip look comparatively simple. Ramage, a member of the Cherokee Nation herself, stuffs the book to the brim with big ideas and digressions, from indigenous history to family identity, but it is the eminently human voice of Steph that keeps this maiden voyage feeling grounded and real.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

No one could reasonably accuse Roy of resembling the stereotype of the navelgazing novelist. Since winning the Booker Prize nearly three decades ago for her first novel, The God of Small Things, the Indian author has largely directed her work toward the kind of political activism that has made her a regular thorn in the side of the Indian government. In Roy’s new memoir, though, the writer turns inward to reflect on a complicated relationship with her late mother, herself an activist, whose barbed love of Roy and her brother could by turns sustain and devastate.

Mercy by Joan Silber

When Silber was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s fiction prize for 2017’s Improvement judges noted that the novelist tends to eschew spectacle for intimate and “profound insight into human nature, making art of everyday lives.” The engines behind her stories operate quietly, in other words, deriving momentum from the kinds of tiny moments that feel bigger to those who experience them than any splashy headline. The moment that haunts Mercy is one man’s panicked decision to abandon his friend during an emergency. Like the proverbial fluttering butterfly, this incident has unexpected consequences, not just for these friends but also for a skein of characters that Silber follows across decades.