Saxton Reads! & Reviews

Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, honored last night, with comments from the NBCC:
 

• Fiction: Jennifer Egan for A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf). "A novel at once experimental in form and crystal clear in the overlapping stories it delivers, offering us a sense of youth and what gets lost along the way."
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• Nonfiction: Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House). "A magisterial work, taking its title from a poem by Richard Wright, that chronicles the movement of the six million African Americans who left the Jim Crow South starting in the early 20th century and spread throughout the country."
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• Autobiography: Darin Strauss for Half a Life (McSweeney's). "A brave and heartbreaking account by the novelist of the half a life he's spent coming to terms with an accident he was in that caused a classmate’s death."
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• Biography: Sarah Bakewell for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press). "A fresh and original treatment from British author Bakewell, a former curator, of the great French essayist in a book that remakes the concept of literary biography."
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• Poetry: C.D. Wright for One with Others: [a little book of her days] (Copper Canyon). "A book that affectingly blends poetry and journalism to detail a significant moment in the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas."
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• Criticism: Clare Cavanagh for Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press). "A deeply scholarly yet lucid study of hundred years of poems in three languages from the Northwestern University professor."

Have you read any of these? I'm particularly interested in Eagan's "A Visit from the Good Squad". It's made so many lists but I've heard nothing about it from our readers.  It's about an aging former punk rocker and a record executive who confront their past as it pertains to their ever widening world. Though funny at times there is an underlying melancholy througout.