Review by Walter Cummins For me, the essential advice Kieran Setiya offers in Life Is Hard is related to the distinction he makes between telic and atelic activities in the…
Category: Nonfiction
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
Review by Brian Tanguay As much as Louis Dejoy was in the media spotlight in the months before the presidential election of 2020, one might assume that no person as…
Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami
Review by Walter Cummins Novelist as a Vocation—Haruki Murakami’s collection of ten essays on novel writing, first published in Japan in 2015 but not translated into English until 2022—suggests that…
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Review by David Starkey Patrick Radden Keeffe tells us in the Preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the twelve long-form…
The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles
Review by Brian Tanguay I have never seen the Salton Sea with my own eyes. My experience of the Colorado Desert is limited to one or two road trips to…
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz
Review by George Yatchisin Forget about the butterfly effect, it seems the last 130 years of U.S. foreign involvement should be called the Butler Effect. By that I refer to…
Hidden Cargoes by Chris Arthur
Review by Walter Cummins Hidden Cargoes—like Chris Arthur’s previous eight essay collections—is a book that can change your life, not so much your behaviors and beliefs but how you relate…
The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees by Bill Lascher
Review by Brian Tanguay It’s tempting to think of history as a succession of recurring events and to look to the past to foretell what might happen in the future.…
Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the System that Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle by Lise Olsen
Review by Walter Cummins The lengthy subtitle to Lise Olsen’s exposé explains what the book is all about but doesn’t reveal the outcome of the long process that followed the…
The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right by David Roediger
Review by Brian Tanguay Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in America, made a statement in 2006 about class warfare which is often cited on the infrequent occasions when…