NONFICTION
Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, by A.N. Wilson, $30 The reign of Queen Elizabeth II “is the one in which Britain effectively stopped being British,” argues A.N. Wilson.
Mass immigration, the loss of national sovereignty to the European Union and the unremitting Americanization of the country’s culture are to blame.
“Our Times” is the third book in Wilson’s history of modern Britain, covering the period from Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 to the present day. It is a sharp-tongued elegy for what Wilson considers a vanished country.
War hero Winston Churchill is panned as “tired, old, in decay” during his final years as prime minister in the mid-1950s. The queen is “shockingly, badly educated.”
The Beatles are dismissed as “pappy” and “rock music’s easy listening.” And Prime Minister Gordon Brown is accused of being the man who “sent Britannia packing.”
“Our Times” is told more or less chronologically. Wilson likes zooming in on individuals and then pulling away to consider broader implications.
An anecdote about supermodel Naomi Campbell leads to French thinker Michel Foucault’s concept of madness and is followed by the author’s thoughts on the rise of pharmaceuticals.
In that instance, the technique works; other times, the connections feel scattershot. But the author’s often unconventional and funny takes on even the most familiar of subjects keep the pages turning.
On the sexual liberation of the 1960s, he quips, “My suspicion is that British human beings had no more orgasms in the 1960s than they did in the 1860s or even in the 1260s.”
FICTION
A Taste of Honey, by Jabari Asim, $13, paperback The time is 1967; the locale, black St. Louis, lightly camouflaged here as “Gateway City.” Revolution may be in the air, but young Crispus Jones has other concerns: his unruly hair, for example, which mandates weekly subjection to the painful ministrations of his stern grandmother.
In 18 brief, interconnected vig nettes that, with their conversational pacing and good humor, read more like the chapters of a coming-of-age story than the usual short-fiction grab bag of discrete narratives, Asim, a former deputy editor at the Washington Post Book World, nails the grain and flow of a community with “energy older than pain and stronger than time.”
Despite the serious themes of police brutality and institutional racism, these tales are characterized by a winning lightness of touch and tone — a fundamental generosity of spirit, dusted with nostalgia — that make his first book of fiction for adults go down sweetly indeed.
