Harvard Review by Brian Tanguay Immigration has been a contentious issue in the United States for a long time, and at numerous points in American history has motivated intense passions…
Category: Nonfiction
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide Edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro
Verso Review by Brian Tanguay A recent joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call, revealed that civilians account for 83 percent of the death toll in Gaza.…
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI by Karen Hao
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Karen Hao’s exposé of the tensions and reversals at the multi-billion company OpenAI reads like a satire of organizational follies, a topic often mocked in…
The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them by Aziz Rana
University of Chicago Press Review by Brian Tanguay Why do Americans revere the Constitution? Why do many of us believe that this founding document, written by mortal and fallible men…
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life by Sophia Rosenfeld
Princeton Review by Walter Cummins In The Age of Choice, Sophia Rosenfeld, an academic historian, joins the perspectives of psychology and sociology to her historical presentation of developments in recent…
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper
Norton Review by David Starkey Peter Kuper’s book-length comic, Insectopolis: A Natural History, begins with an entomologist and her brother walking to the New York Public Library to see an…
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels
Doubleday Review by David Starkey The subtitle of Elaine Pagels’s new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, isn’t meant to question whether Jesus existed—Pagels finds plenty of…
The Peepshow: The Murders At Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins The Peepshow, Kate Summerscale’s latest true crime book, goes beyond the gruesome details of serial butchery, with corpses stashed under floors, behind walls, and stuffed…
Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield
Grand Central, New York & London Review by Rasoul Sorkhabi David Attenborough, the world-famed BBC broadcaster and writer of nature documentaries, celebrated his 99th birthday on May 6th this year.…
Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Before reading Sick and Dirty, queer representation in Hollywood wasn’t a subject I’d given much thought to or had occasion to study. By the time…