Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age To AI by Yuval Noah Harari

Random House Review by Walter Cummins It turns out that Yuval Noah Harari, in Nexus, his latest book, isn’t a complete fatalist. But one has to read to the end…

What Is It Like to Be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer

Eastover Review by Walter Cummins Despite the seeming implication of Chris Arthur’s title of this, his tenth essay collection, he is not seeking an existential generalization about an abstract ontological…

Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut

Columbia Review by David Starkey If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some…

Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker

Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins Before I attempt to say something about a book that theorizes life’s emergence from the perspective of the science of physics, I should admit that…

Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin by Andre Dubus III

Norton Review by Walter Cummins Andre Dubus III explores his vulnerabilities throughout the essays in this collection. Despite his literary regard and economic success as a writer and university teacher…

Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein

University of Chicago Press Review by Brian Tanguay When William Freeman, a young Black man, stabbed four white people to death in Cayuga County, New York in March 1846, the…

American Outrage: A Testamentary by H. L. Hix

BlazeVOX Review by Walter Cummins With every page of American Outrage—with every listing of the name of a person killed by gun violence, with every accumulating fact about guns in…

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From A Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor

University of California Press Review by Brian Tanguay Environmental justice advocates have long used origin stories to frame experience of disease, displacement and disability, to personalize and collectivize such experiences…

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss

Penguin Review by Walter Cummins In his quest to explain the creative process behind works of fiction, poetry, drama, art, dance, and music, Adam Moss interviewed forty-plus creators for their…

Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show by Tommy Tomlinson

Avid Reader Review by George Yatchisin As I was reading Tommy Tomlinson’s Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, something delightful and ridiculous—at least in…