(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.…
Category: Nonfiction
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…
Seeking Authenticity by Walter Cummins
Del Sol Review by Jack Smith In this collection of essays and reviews, Walter Cummins, short story writer and essayist, deals with a broad range of topics, among them DNA…
The Intimate City: Walking New York by Michael Kimmelman
(Penguin) Review by David Starkey At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, it was not uncommon for people to pause and imagine a project they might carry out that would…
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
(Riverhead) Review by David Starkey The cover of Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius features a Victorian top hat hanging on the tip of the penis-like…
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
(Bloomsbury) Review by Brian Tanguay “False information need not be coherent to be effective, and the specters of vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are easy enough to conjure.” So…
And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
(St. Martin’s) Review by Walter Cummins The “finally” in Henry Marsh’s title refers to the clear signal that death awaits him. After seventy years of avoiding admission of that inevitability,…