Must-Reads

Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir

By Margaux Fragoso

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pages

It’s fashionable to suggest that memoir writers begin by making sure the events of their lives merit examination. No one could lob this accusation at Fragoso, whose Tiger, Tiger details the years she spent at the mercy of a pedophile, Peter Curran, with whom she had a “relationship” from the time she was 7 until she was 22. But is it as dangerous to lyricize trauma as it is to lack it? Fragoso’s Curran is less monster than pied piper, an eye-crinkling playmate who makes her world “ecstatic.” His suicide leaves Fragoso “chasing the ghost of how it felt … like the earth is scorched and the grass won’t grow back.” This prose, overly worked, keeps Curran at a pretty distance. His ugliness remains as unfathomable to us as it would to any child.

(See the top 10 nonfiction books of 2010.)

—LIZZIE SKURNICK

At the Fights

Edited by George Kimball and John Schulian

Library of America; 560 pages

A.J. Liebling once wrote that boxing was attached to its past “like a man’s arm to his shoulder.” That’s one thing writers share with pugilists. Since 1910, when Jack London was lured to Reno, Nev., to cover a mythic Jack Johnson bout for the New York Herald, only the baseball diamond has been as continuously hospitable as the boxing ring for American prose. The Library of America’s At the Fights gathers the most stylish dispatches from the past century, with literary heavyweights (Norman Mailer, James Baldwin) sharing space with past champs like W.C. Heinz and Jimmy Cannon. For a nimble sample of prizefight prose, Don King couldn’t have put together a better card.

—ERIC BANKS

Blood, Bones & Butter

By Gabrielle Hamilton

Random House; 304 pages

Hamilton’s tough-minded memoir, hyped as the best chef book since Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, delivers. Unlike Bourdain, Hamilton, the chef of New York City’s Prune, doesn’t provide a kitchen exposé; BB&B; is too personal for that. From a beautifully rendered rural girlhood that ends with a catastrophic divorce to the pains of corrupt waitresshood and the joys of chefhood, the book makes Hamilton as real to us as someone we’ve known all our lives and captures the essence of contemporary cool on the plate.

(See more of Josh Ozersky’s Taste of America food columns here.)