Books

At the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, we have become unwitting experts on the subjective nature of time. In joy, hours escape us, when waiting in expectation the second hand stands still, and when we have nowhere to go and nothing to do for a year, we reconsider what time means to us.

In his new book, “The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge,” Peter Kaufman (an author who lives in Lakeville, Conn.) takes us deep into history to locate the moments when information was made accessible to the people — and the moments when making it accessible was a crime punishable by death.

This is a masterclass in a book. In “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russian Writers Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life,” George Saunders, fiction author extraordinaire and professor of creative writing at Syracuse, takes us through a close reading of seven short-story masterpieces, all by Russian writers.

Simon Winchester was an adventure traveler, a young Brit in the 1960s who started small by hitchhiking around North America and then dove deeper by joining a six-man sledding expedition in an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice cap. 

The beginning of the new year is a time of optimism, when we hope that the coming 12 months will be better than the past 12 months. 

If such high spirits seem unwarranted to you, then a new book by David Pogue called, “How To Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos,” will perfectly suit your mindset. 

Tom Morrison, of Salisbury, Conn., lampoons the legal world in his first novel, “Torts ‘R’ Us,” published this fall and available at Oblong Books in Millerton, N.Y., and Salisbury Pharmacy.

The winter hasn’t been that bad yet (even though it is 2020 and one might have expected this to be the worst early winter in decades). But soon it will be very cold and snowy and we will be quarantined and the conditions will be just perfect for reading the work of Leo Tolstoy. 

This review was written by Robert Lehrman, who was Chief Speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. He is the author of several award-winning novels as well as “The Political Speechwriter’s Companion.” He is also the cousin of editor Cynthia Hochswender.