Weekend Whats

What to Book: These days, I usually opt for novels (since the news is giving me more of the real world than I can take), but I made an exception for Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent, London Falling. It’s described as “a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface.” But it’s also an education on how geopolitics, immigration patterns, economic shifts, and new technologies can change a city in the historical equivalent of the blink of an eye.

+ What to Watch: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Billie Boullet, and Alice Braga star in the entertaining (if not very realistic) Man on Fire on Netflix. “Haunted by his past and hunted by his enemies, a Special Forces veteran fights to keep a teenage girl alive on the deadly streets of Rio de Janeiro.”

+ What to Doc: Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World is both a father-son story about one of my favorite NYC spots, and a moving look at how the craziness of the Ukraine invasion impacted a restaurant and community thousands of miles away.