Verso Review by Brian Tanguay Natasha Lennard lays out the aim of On/Uncertainty in the first few pages: she seeks to track pernicious certainty in action to understand how it…
Category: Nonfiction
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore
Liveright Review by Walter Cummins In her latest book, Jill Lepore presents her analysis of how we have reached the creation of the Artificial State where machines set the guidelines…
Endless Endings: The Many Forms of Death and What They Teach Us About Life by Ricard Solé, trans. by Eduardo Aparicio
Princeton Review by Walter Cummins Endless Endings brings to mind lines from Hotspur’s dying speech in Henry IV, Part 1: “And time, that takes a survey of all the world, …
Summer of ’71: Five Months That Changed America by John A. Jenkins
Citadel Press Review by Brian Tanguay I was twelve years old in 1971 and oblivious to much of the social and political turmoil happening in Washington D.C. and on university…
Brought To You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy by Amy Westervelt
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Truth or spin. Fact or opinion. Journalism or propaganda. In our time, information flows in volumes impossible to keep pace with and much of it…
The Slap and the Salamander by Chris Arthur
Serving House Review by Walter Cummins I had my first contact with Chris Arthur several decades ago when he submitted an essay to a quarterly I was editing. We, the…
The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Emily Eakin’s life in theory began in the late 1980s when she was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Harvard and fell “under the Frenchmen’s spell.” That’s…
The Long American Shadow
Essay by Brian Tanguay I acquired American Visions by Edward L. Ayers and Democracy In Black by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., at the same time, but had no conscious intention…
California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California by Miriam Pawel
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay As Miriam Pawel writes in the Preface to her superb history of the University of California system, the many aspects of this educational juggernaut defy…
Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran
Scribner Canada Review by Brian Tanguay By the reckoning of the acclaimed Turkish writer, Ece Temelkuran, there are many ways to become unhomed. Climate change, war, and rising fascism are…