Lamott (Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy) dedicates this book to her niece and grandson, stating that she will attempt to record all that she knows about everything in order to provide them with guidance in their lives. This leads to a rather disordered presentation that pings from topic to topic, mixing seriousness with casual offhand asides. Lamott addresses the overwhelming feelings of despair and uncertainty caused by modern life and offers advice on how to combat them with a combination of religion, spirituality, positivity, humor, and learning. She never glosses over the difficulties of everyday existence; indeed, she seems to find life to be a general cause of tremendous stress and sorrow. However, she also is able to see the joys in many things, given time to fight against her darker feelings. -Lamott always does the unexpected-a chapter on God is mostly devoted to a friend who is an avowed atheist. While Lamott is clearly Christian, she is open to other religions and explores them for possible nuggets of wisdom. One suspects this is probably a better read than listen, largely because the author is the narrator. Unfortunately, -Lamott's diction is poor and her pacing leaves much to be desired. She has a lot of one-liners in the book that fall totally flat in her monotone delivery. -VERDICT Established fans of Lamott's will likely enjoy this work, but the scattershot organization and less than stellar narration may leave others cold.-B. Allison Gray, Goleta Valley Lib., CA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

KEEPING AT IT By Paul A. Volcker with Christine Harper. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Volcker was chairman of the Federal Reserve through most of the 1980s, a period of American prosperity. In this memoir, he recounts his life story as well as the economic booms and busts he has seen along the way. IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE By Fox Butterfield. (Knopf, $26.95.) Finding a unique way to examine the issue of mass incarceration in the United States, Butterfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter, delves into the experience of one family, the Bogles, and how prison has become a legacy for them passed from parents to children over multiple generations. CHRONIQUES By Kamel Daoud. (Other Press, $28.95.) Daoud is the francophone journalist and author of "The Meursault Investigation," which retold the story of Albert Camus's "The Stranger." In this collection of his columns from the Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d'Oran, he writes about the trials and tribulations of Arab society teetering between change and entrenchment. ALMOST EVERYTHING By Anne Lamott. (Riverhead, $20.) Lamott seeks reasons for hopefulness at a moment when, like many of us, she finds herself most often "doomed, stunned, exhausted and overcaffeinated." WHY JOURNALISM STILL MATTERS By Michael Schudson. (Polity, paper, $22.95.) One of the most important media scholars of our time, Schudson approaches the business of making news from a sociological and historical perspective, offering a new way to think of questions that bedevil us every day "As a White House correspondent specializing in foreign policy, I've written dozens of stories about how the United States confronts - or more often, fails to confront - the horrors of civil war in Syria, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Mohsin Hamid's slender novel EXIT WEST takes the geopolitics out of war completely - it doesn't even name the country being ravaged - and views it purely through the lens of a young couple, Nadia and Saeed, who fall in love among the ruins. The language is spare and unsentimental; Hamid follows the young couple to bleak refugee camps in Mykonos, London and Marin County, Calif. (he names those places, sketching out a dystopian portrait of a world coping with a mass-migration future). Nadia and Saeed are brave, heartbreaking and utterly credible. But they make their journey around the world by passing through mysterious black doorways - an abrupt turn to magical realism that has leftsome readers puzzled. I think it captures how quickly, in an era of mass mobility and digital communications, the victims of distant wars can end up on the West's doorstep." - MARK LANDLER, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, ON WHAT HE'S READING.

Lamott (Hallelujah, Anyway) shares wisdom on truth and paradox in this comforting book of reflections inspired by the current social and political climate. "In general, it doesn't feel like the light is making a lot of progress," she writes. Each brief essay explores a theme or topic such as hope, love, or faith with Lamott's customary optimism. In the opening essay, "Puzzles," she sets the stage for the book by considering the physics of light, which is both particle and wave, as an example of how paradox can be the seed of truth. "Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding," she writes, "has sprung from hurt, loss, and disaster." Fans of Lamott will find her deeply personal, honest yet humorous style on full display and those same fans will also recognize some familiar material, such as the "bird by bird" story that she uses to encapsulate the writing life. There is no doubt of Lamott's brilliance, but this collection rings of speed rather than depth, with some of the essays ("Bitter Truth" and "Hands of Time") reading like series of aphorisms and lacking narrative cohesion. Though the book is clearly written to capitalize on the present political moment, its brevity makes it a useful introduction to Lamott's work and philosophy for any interested novitiate. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Another distillation of the author's life philosophy.As a gift to her grandson and niece, novelist and nonfiction writer Lamott (Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, 2017; etc.) sets out to record "everything I know about almost everything." The result is an obsessively inward-focusing hodgepodge of life stories, advice, and ramblings. Though hope is the author's tagline and even the title of her concluding chapter, readers find her struggling through virtually every life event, buried in anxieties. Lamott explains early on that she was struck to hear a child say the words, "I has [sic] value." She realized that it "would have completely changed my life had I heard and internalized [that idea] as a child." The incident serves to clarify the author's central struggle: a lifelong search for self-value. Her writing cries out for an internal peace she cannot find. In a chapter on family, she focuses mainly on conflict with her uncle, whom she once called "a scumbutt" in a moment of anger, which affected her for decades. In a chapter on God, which the author defines in a number of nebulous ways, she focuses on an atheist friend who committed suicide. Another chapter is centered entirely around dieting and body image, revealing another self-esteem pitfall, and Lamott devotes an entire chapter to her unabashed hatred of Donald Trumpthough she refuses to use his name, as if she were discussing Voldemort. The author's view of life is often depressing; she refers to it as "this sometimes grotesque amusement park," and she answers the question, "how did we all get so screwed up?" with, "life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up."Those who enjoy Lamott's consistently self-deprecating humor, vulnerability, and occasional nuggets of positivity will enjoy her latest; others will be adrift. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.