Harper Collins Review by Walter Cummins While Simon Winchester’s book is an entertaining read because he writes well and tells a good story, a more accurate title might be Knowing…
Category: Nonfiction
In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey by Jeff Biggers
Melville House Review by Linda Lappin Sardinia’s landscapes captivate visitors: pink granite cliffs whipped into weird shapes, massive basalt boulders, tawny hills where tiny wild horses roam, dunes of sparkling…
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond
(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay What Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is to racial inequality in the criminal justice system in America,…
The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Review by George Yatchisin It’s not every self-helpish book that asks you to create your own poetry anthology, but The Wonder Paradox is sui generis. As…
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph
(Basic Books) Review by Brian Tanguay Like many Americans, I saw the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a long awaited turning point in race relations in this country.…
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
Riverhead Books Essay by Brian Tanguay This past February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the armed standoff between the US Marshall Service, FBI, and members of the American Indian Movement…
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Sarah Bakewell begins Humanly Possible by delineating the characteristics of humanism and then goes on to describe how these ideas emerged and were developed through…
Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering by Scott A. Small
Crown Review by Walter Cummins One of the frequent plaints that emerges when two or more people of my age get together is lamentation over what we’ve been forgetting, primarily…
Wildflowers of North America by the National Audubon Society
Knopf Review by David Starkey It’s spring here in Coastal California, and the atmospheric rivers that deluged our state have resulted in an abundance of wildflowers, which makes the publication…