Basic Books Essay by Brian Tanguay Many of the books and articles I’ve read about the Middle East during the past year make passing reference to the Ottoman Empire, often…
Author: Brian Tanguay
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In early March 2022, at Berenike, a barren spot on the shores of the Red Sea, a team of archaeologists made several remarkable finds. From…
Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
4th ESTATE London Review by Brian Tanguay During his long career as a foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk won the Orwell Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Prize, and was seven times named…
Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich
Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay The demise of John W. Stephens is emblematic of the challenge that faced Ulysses S. Grant and the proponents of Reconstruction. In the eyes of…
The Chutnification of History: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Penguin Essay by Brian Tanguay I first read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie thirty years ago, but hadn’t thought about the book again (though in that time I have read…
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay No journalist that I’m aware of has chronicled the rise of the Christian right as assiduously and comprehensively as Katherine Stewart has. From her first…
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Metropolitan Books Review by Brian Tanguay Of the many books Rashid Khalidi has written about Palestine, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is by far his most personal one. Khalidi…
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World Review by Brian Tanguay “I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated…
I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause
radiant press Review by Brian Tanguay The central event in Suzy Krause’s latest novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before, is the end of the world. Sometime just after Christmas…
Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Stephanie L. Canizales
University of California Press Review by Brian Tanguay Imagine for a moment that you’re a fourteen-year-old boy living in El Salvador with your family — mother, father, and multiple younger…