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Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the July 23rd issue include:

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, by Sam Kean. Little, Brown and Company. Print length: 400 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...makes even the most abstract concepts graspable for armchair scientists." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground..." - Amazon.
Sam Kean is a reporter for Science magazine. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate and The New Scientist.

The Island, by Elin Hilderbrand. Reagan Arthur Books. Print length: 416 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...as escapist beach reads go, her latest is consistently smarter and more compelling than it needs to be." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (21 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Birdie Cousins has thrown herself into the details of her daughter Chess's lavish wedding, from the floating dance floor in her Connecticut back yard to the color of the cocktail napkins. But Birdie, a woman who prides herself on preparing for every possibility, could never have predicted the late-night phone call from Chess, abruptly announcing that she's cancelled her engagement. It's only the first hint of what will be a summer of upheavals and revelations. Before the dust has even begun to settle, far worse news arrives, sending Chess into a tailspin of despair. Reluctantly taking a break from the first new romance she's embarked on since the recent end of her 30-year marriage, Birdie circles the wagons and enlists the help of her younger daughter Tate and her own sister India. Soon all four are headed for beautiful, rustic Tuckernuck Island, off the coast of Nantucket, where their family has summered for generations. No phones, no television, no grocery store - a place without distractions where they can escape their troubles. But throw sisters, daughters, ex-lovers, and long-kept secrets onto a remote island, and what might sound like a peaceful getaway becomes much more..." - Amazon.
$9.99 or less alternative: another Hilderbrand beach read: The Blue Bistro.

Father of the Rain, by Lily King. Atlantic Monthly Press. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...big, powerful punch of a novel...will linger in your mind long after you've finished it." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In her most ambitious novel to date, critically acclaimed author Lily King sets her sharply insightful family drama in an upper-middle-class East Coast suburb where she traces a complex and volatile father-daughter relationship from the 1970s to the present day. When eleven-year-old Daley Amory's mother leaves her father, Daley is thrust into a chaotic adult world of competition, indulgence, and manipulation. Unable to place her allegiance, she gently toes the thickening line between her parents' incompatible worlds: the increasingly liberal, socially committed realm of her mother, and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But without her mother there to keep him in line, Daley's father's basest impulses and quick rage are unleashed, and Daley finds herself having to choose her own survival over the father she still deeply loves. ...a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities, mercurial contours, and magnetic pull of families." - Amazon.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, by Rob Sheffield. Dutton. Print length: 288 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "A funny, insightful look at the sublime torture of adolescence..." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Music journalist Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape) chronicles his passage through the 1980s in a series of chapters in which period groups - from headliners like Roxy Music and Prince to one-hit wonders like Haysi Fantayzee of Shiny Shiny semifame - provides musical accompaniment to his adolescent angst. They are the soundtrack to his fumbling attempts to dance or make passes at girls, to weather a winless stint on the high school wrestling team, to survive a summer job as an ice-cream truck driver. The relationship insights he arrives at - chiefly, the imperative of unquestioning submission to female whims - are no more or less cogent than the song lyrics he gleans them from. The book really shines as a collection of free-form riffs on the glorious foolishness of Reagan-era entertainment - the movie E.T., he writes, was about a sad muppet who thought he was David Bowie - and its weirdly resonant emotional impact. The result is a funny, poignant browse from a wonderful pop-culture evocateur." - Publishers Weekly.
$9.99 or less alternative: Sheffield's earlier musical memoir, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life, Loss, and What I Listened To.