Both Thelonious Monk’s compositions and his piano playing—with spare, “open” chords and skittish melodies—were one-of-a-kind. Though celebrated as a jazz giant, he was often portrayed as a reclusive, crazy eccentric. But in his epic, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, $30), Robin D.G. Kelley gives the genius his due—while sweeping away the myths and stereotypes—to reveal Monk as a working musician and family man. Kelley’s many interviews with musicians, club-owners, family, and friends give us an oral history woven into a well-researched analysis of Monk’s music and his times.
Felice C. Frankel and George M. Whiteside’s No Small Matter (Harvard Univ., $35) is a breathtakingly poetic book that approaches the big ideas of existence, such as love, life, and death from a scientific perspective. Each photograph of something on a nano- or microscale—the cell in silhouette, MRIs of brain activity, the nano transistors that compose the Internet—is discussed alongside “big” ideas that frame human existence and lead us to question the workings of our world. Beneath our different surfaces, we all share the same basic structures of life: atoms, electrons, and the tiniest nucleus around which everything in the universe revolves. As Frankel and Whiteside beautifully state, this “is all there is, and all we are.” Small things, in fact, do matter. Lacey Dunham
Shortly after Ben Bernanke stepped into the role of Fed Chairman, the Great Panic commenced. Bernanke, a relative newcomer to Washington, spent the bulk of his career in academia dissecting the Great Depression and, according to David Wessel’s account, In Fed We Trust (Crown Business, $26.99), the one thing Bernanke knew as a Depression scholar was that he would not allow history to repeat itself. Wessel gives a thorough retelling of the early days of the Great Panic as the Bernanke triumvirate—with Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson—desperately try to keep ahead of the collapsing markets in their attempt to prevent the global meltdown from spiraling into a full-blown economic depression. Wessel’s account isn’t Indiana Jones but it is a chilling reminder of how close we came to complete economic collapse.
