Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay It’s not often I start a review with, “I loved this book,” but in the case of The Perfect Tuba by Sam Quinones it’s the…
Category: Nonfiction
Saving Ourselves From Big Car by David Obst
Columbia Business School Publishing Review by Brian Tanguay When I lived in Tokyo many years ago, my street was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass within inches of…
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand
Washington Square Review by Walter Cummins Pria Anand starts The Mind Electric by relating two childhood fascinations—her grandfather’s neurological symptoms from post-polio syndrome and, before she could read, the fantastical…
The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press Review by Brian Tanguay Pankaj Mishra is a writer of capacious erudition which he has demonstrated in eight books of non-fiction, two works of fiction, and dozens of…
Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation by Marla A. Ramirez
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…
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…