Letter from a Reader 6.24.25

A great Women's Prize winner, Stephen King's 'Cujo' sequel, and why Ocean Vuong's 'Emperor' wears no clothes

Stephen King / Scribner via Amazon

Hello from the sultry Gulf Coast, the land of “air you can wear.” Nobody here says “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” as they did back in New Jersey, because it’s always the heat and the humidity in lower Alabama. My sympathies to all of you who are dripping dry under that heat dome that’s trapped much of America.

Nothing I’ve read lately has put the nationwide steam bath in sharper perspective than a fact in Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming: Some of George Washington’s soldiers wrapped their shoeless feet in the hides of freshly killed animals to stave off frostbite at Valley Forge.

Would I want to trade our diabolical temperatures for that fate? No, I would not. And, yes—o ye of little faith!—I finished Atkinson’s 776-page cinder block. I recommend it to anyone looking for popular history that can hold its own against books like David Grann’s The Wager, which is having a long and well-deserved run on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list.

Rachel Clarke and The Story of a Heart / Hachette (U.K.) and Scribner (U.S.)

A heart-rending new winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction

June’s best literary news came from overseas. Rachel Clarke, a British physician, won the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction for The Story of a Heart, her wonderful account of the intersecting fates of two 9-year-olds linked by love, disaster, and medical heroism.

Keira Ball’s heart was sewn into the body of Max Johnson, who had spent months hospitalized with a heart condition that was slowly killing him, when she died after a catastrophic road accident. Her loving young sisters believed she would have wanted to be an organ donor, and their charm and kindness help to make this book unique among stories of life-or-death in hospitals and beyond.