Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  The Diary Keepers, by Nina Siegal (Ecco). Nearly three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust, yet after the Second World War the Netherlands claimed a national memory of unified defiance. In a challenge to this account, Siegal has assembled the wartime diaries of seven Dutch citizens, among them a Jewish journalist, the wife of an S.S. official, and a shopkeeper active in the Resistance. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Dean of Shandong, by Daniel A. Bell (Princeton). In 2017, Bell, a Canadian scholar, was appointed the dean of Shandong University’s School of Political Science and Public Administration. Bell places the minutiae of academic administration in the context of China’s post-Cultural Revolution attempt to reinstate a “complex bureaucratic system informed by the ideal of political meritocracy.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Laughter, by Sonora Jha (HarperVia). The protagonist of this biting novel, set in the days before the 2016 election, is Oliver Harding, a G. K. Chesterton specialist at a liberal-arts college near Seattle. As the campus is swept by a wave of student-led anti-racist protests, he discovers far too late that he has been “invited to something, to a nearness and vastness I still don’t understand.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Pineapple Street, by Jenny Jackson (Pamela Dorman). This engaging début novel centers on a family of wealthy real-estate moguls, the Stocktons, living in the historically preserved “fruit streets” of Brooklyn Heights. The story’s focus alternates among the eldest of the family’s three grown children, who has forsaken her career for motherhood; the youngest, who works off her hangovers with tennis; and the wife of the lone male scion, whose middle-class background stands in contrast to her husband’s upper-crust one. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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