Review by Brian Tanguay As much as Louis Dejoy was in the media spotlight in the months before the presidential election of 2020, one might assume that no person as…
Author: Brian Tanguay
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
Review by Brian Tanguay Mohsin Hamid doesn’t entertain simplistic themes or easily resolved problems in his novels. His first book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, dealt with the mistrust between the West…
The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles
Review by Brian Tanguay I have never seen the Salton Sea with my own eyes. My experience of the Colorado Desert is limited to one or two road trips to…
A Conversation with Bill Lascher
Bill Lascher is the author of Eve of a Hundred Midnights, an account set in the early days of World War II, and his journalism has appeared in a wide…
The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees by Bill Lascher
Review by Brian Tanguay It’s tempting to think of history as a succession of recurring events and to look to the past to foretell what might happen in the future.…
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Review by Brian Tanguay When Daiyu, the protagonist of Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, is abducted from the fish market, she’s a desperately hungry thirteen-year-old…
The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right by David Roediger
Review by Brian Tanguay Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in America, made a statement in 2006 about class warfare which is often cited on the infrequent occasions when…
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Review by Brian Tanguay On July 4, 1915, a band of armed and mounted Mexicans crossed the border and murdered three white men in southern Texas. For the next five…
The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society by William Deresiewicz
Review by Brian Tanguay After reading Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, I was hooked on William Deresiewicz. The next book…
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone
Review by Brian Tanguay I began reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by the late theologian James H. Cone the week before a white gunman murdered ten black people…