(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…
Category: Nonfiction
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,…
Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake
(Abrams) Review by George Yatchisin What Marseilles is to the Mediterranean, New Orleans is to the Caribbean, a savory meeting place where countries and cultures, priests and pirates, hopeful and…
Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw
(Penguin Press) Review by Brian Tanguay In Personality and Power, historian Ian Kershaw poses and answers fundamental questions of historical analysis about twelve individuals who significantly impacted — for good…
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Review by Walter Cummins Like Rachel Aviv, the people whose mental issues she explores in Strangers to Ourselves are driven to write, some with works that…
The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
Review by Brian Tanguay Calling people out for their lack of political awareness or insufficient wokeness isn’t the problem with the political left; the problem is not calling people in.…
The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings, by Geoff Dyer
Review by George Yatchisin Some lines from Robert Christgau about Lloyd Cole have always stuck with me: “So what if he can’t stop talking about books and movies and gathers…
I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction, by Kidada E. Williams
Blacks didn’t just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they seized freedom and built homesteads, farms, churches, schools and communities; they tilled the soil and planted cash crops like…
Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit
Review by George Yatchisin Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses as a whydunit. Beyond admitting how much he influenced her as a writer/journalist/activist, Solnit was also moved to learn of…