Nick Kristof's "Hot Books"

“Don’t tell anybody, but I love thrillers,” writes Nicholas Kristof on his blog, On The Ground. And although he says the genre has largely gone downhill since the Cold War, he has a new favorite: Alex Berenson’s The Silent Man, about a man who infiltrates Al Qaeda and then becomes a Muslim. Another of Kritsof’s “Hot Books” is Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, a Best of Everything-esque story about four girls who graduate from Smith and try to make it in the real world. Both books were penned by Kristof’s Times colleagues, and of Sullivan, he writes: “I knew nothing about her novel until one day there was a joyful scream outside and I learned that Knopf had bought a novel that she had been writing for years.”