1. Kitty Kelley’s review of Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton by Martha Ackmann (St. Martin’s Press). “A biography of Dolly Parton ought to cartwheel out of bookstores because if ever there was a life story to celebrate, it’s one about the little girl from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee who grew up as one of 12 children in a tar-paper shack with no indoor plumbing. ‘We wet the bed sometimes just to keep each other warm,’ Dolly would tell audiences, laughing at the memory. Years later, though, she admitted, ‘The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.’ Today, the singer’s net worth is $650 million, proof of magnificent talent matched to monumental ambition.”


2. Jan Burzlaff’s review of The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity by Robert Wright (Simon & Schuster). “The book’s most audacious claim is also its most clarifying. Large language model (LLM) training is not merely analogous to natural selection — it is natural selection, operating on a third substrate after biology and individual learning. The implication follows: AI development carries the same remorseless, directionless logic as biological evolution, which means ‘alignment’ is roughly as easy as asking natural selection to be kind. Wright bookends his argument with Edward Fredkin, the self-taught MIT maverick who told him in 1983 that humanity’s mission was to create AI. That claim reads very differently now.”


3. Marcie Geffner’s review of A Year of Marvelous Ways: A Novel by Sarah Winman (G.P. Putnam’s Sons). “Magical realism might account for Marvelous’ spry condition at her advanced age, the curative power of her presence, and the multiple coincidences, but it can’t overcome the jarring effect of the novel’s jumble of other mystical elements, which include Christian images (saints, God, grace, light, Jesus, and heaven) alongside ghosts, mermaids, and — wait for it — egg divination. How this all fits together as a magical system is...well, it doesn’t.”


4. David O. Stewart’s review of Agrippa: A Novel of Ancient Rome’s Descent into Dictatorship by Robert Harris (Doubleday). “This is an Agrippa with little inner life. He marries women selected for him by Augustus, despising one and cuckolded by another (the emperor’s daughter, no less). The reader waits for emotional rage, vituperation, vengeance. And waits. But no. Agrippa has battles to win, roads and giant construction projects to build, so he shrugs, takes a deep breath, and sets his shoulder to the wheel of duty. This is the tale of a natural henchman, an instinctive No. 2. Shakespeare wrote two plays featuring Agrippa’s contemporary and rival, Mark Antony, a man who dared greatly, loved dangerously, and ended ignominiously. Agrippa defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium, but it is Antony whose fame endures, who still claims our imaginations.”


5. John P. Loonam’s review of What We Can Know: A Novel by Ian McEwan (Knopf). “Absent the actual poem, Tom relies on reading or rereading every note, text, email, journal entry, interview, or article about the Blundys and the six others who attended the birthday dinner where the great verse was read aloud. This recounting of the events of 2014 raises thorny questions regarding history’s effect on language, the role of biography in assessing and understanding literature, and the use of speculation in the telling of history. These are all matters we struggle with today, and McEwan magnifies them by focusing on a poem no living person has ever seen. But Tom is convinced a copy exists and that paying attention to the details of past events will help him find it.”

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