In Vendela Vida’s “exquisite” new
novel, adolescence is a dangerous,
overwhelming force for four 13-year-
old friends, “and even the best adults
can’t help,” said Maureen Corrigan
in NPR.org. The girls live in San Fran-
cisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, which in
1984 mixed funkiness with privilege and
offered a ready stage for the beautiful,
wealthy fabulist who is the best friend
of our charismatic narrator, Eulabee. A
rupture occurs when Eulabee refuses
to back Maria’s claim about a voyeur,
but then Maria briefly disappears, the
victim of an apparent kidnapping. Real
predation does occur in We Run the
Tides, said Sam Sacks in The Wall
Street Journal. But in this, her sixth
novel, Vida seems “mainly interested
in the strange glamour that attaches
to female vulnerability.” Eulabee is
constantly aware of how her body is
changing and the effect that that has
on men. The book relies too much for
its suspense on the gullibility of adults.
Still, “it’s insightful about the ways that
girls of a certain age feel pressured to
let their imaginations run wild.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Nicole Perlroth’s first book is “scarier
than the scariest sci-fi movie,” said Glenn
Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Though we’ve been told before that our
water, electrical, and other critical systems
are vulnerable to cyberattack, Perlroth
has flipped on the flashing red lights with
a “stunningly detailed” book that “tells
the untold story of what may well be the
clearest and most present danger facing
the world.” The New York Times reporter
focuses on the booming global market for
backdoor access to crucial software. The
U.S., which initially was the main customer
for such hacks, lost control of the market in
the 2010s—and even had its secret stockpile
of such digital picklocks cleaned out by
unknown hackers in 2017. The market for
such digital weapons is now a free-for-all,
Perlroth reports, and the attacks they enable
are mounting.
Overcoming leuke-
mia does not make
everything else about
life instantly easy,
said Heller McAlpin
in NPR.org. When
Suleika Jaouad
emerged, in her mid-
20s, from a nearly
four-year battle
against the disease,
she was “newly
single, frail, and
lost.” She had already written about enter-
ing “the kingdom of the sick” in a blog
that became a popular New York Times
column, and she retraces that journey in
her new memoir. The details are all here,
beginning with the excruciating itching in
her legs that she first experienced during
her senior year at Princeton. But Between
Two Kingdoms stands out even among
other powerful recent cancer memoirs
because Jaouad has survived, enabling her
to devote half of her “sometimes painfully
honest” book to what she has called the
hardest part of her ordeal: figuring out how
to live again.
Book of the week
“Taxpayers and citizens will be rightly fum-
ing at all this,” said Edward Lucas in The
Times (U.K.). Perlroth’s main argument
is that the U.S. National Security Agency
made us all less safe when its spending
fueled the rise of the huge gray market in
weaponized clandestine hacks, known in the
trade as “zero days.” The results have been
episodes like the “devastating” U.S.-Israeli
cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and
Russia’s temporary destruction of Ukraine’s
electricity grid, stories that are more fright-
ening here because of the collateral damage
Perlroth reveals. And the threat is wide-
spread, said Jonathan Tepperman in The
New York Times. Perlroth reports that
Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all
now have hidden gateways into U.S. criti-
cal infrastructure, while various nonstate
rogue actors are already causing mischief.
In 2019 and 2020, 600 U.S. city, town,
and county governments were struck by
ransomware attacks.
Perlroth spent years digging up secrets,
said Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, and
her account of that work is both spell-
binding and misleading. She blames the
NSA for spending exponentially more on
cyberwar offensive capabilities than on
defense, but that failure obscures a larger
truth about what’s gone wrong since the
dawn of the internet age: When everyone
and everything is online, and software runs
the world, true security and privacy become
impossible. “The arrogant recklessness of
the people who have been buying and sell-
ing the vulnerability of the rest of us is not
just part of an intelligence- agency game; it
has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon
Valley for decades.” Government can keep
trying to bar the door to hackers, but the
horses have left the barn.
This Is How They Tell
Me the World Ends: The
Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth (Bloomsbury, $30)
Novel of the week
We Run the Tides
by Vendela Vida (Ecco, $27)
Between Two Kingdoms: A
Memoir of a Life Interrupted
by Suleika Jaouad (Random House, $28)
“Jaouad’s self- awareness is part of what
makes this book such a transformative
read,” said Maggie Smith in The Wash-
ington Post. “She doesn’t hide the least
flattering parts of herself in those years—
her neediness, her selfishness, even the
cruelty she inflicts on those closest to
her.” Later, she helps us understand how
strange it can be to return to normal life
after years of being defined by an illness.
“Everything smells the same, looks the
same, feels the same, but you are differ-
ent,” she writes.
Jaouad never depicts herself as alone on
her journey, and “she writes most mov-
ingly about her fellow travelers,” said
David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. In
the second half of the book, she describes
a 100-day road trip in which she visited
various strangers who had written to her
when she was in treatment and produc-
ing her Times column. The change in tone
“can be jarring,” yet it’s part of the point:
“Jaouad is writing about a process,” a
back-and-forth in which the period after
illness can’t truly be a place wholly sepa-
rate from the illness. “Jaouad’s point is
that we never fully get better, just as we
were never fully well in the first place. Life
and death, health and sickness; they over-
lap and blur together.”
The NSA’s cybersecurity headquarters in Utah
AP