Review by Brian Tanguay As the controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments and tumult over critical race theory makes evident, American history is contentious and unsettled, with nostalgia and…
Category: Nonfiction
Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From The Revolution to Reconstruction By Kate Masur
Review by Brian Tanguay Prior to reading Until Justice Be Done by Kate Masur, a historian who teaches at Northwestern University, I assumed that the critical period in the struggle…
Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America’s Golden Age by Cecelia Tichi
by George Yatchisin If you’ve ever wondered how historical nonfiction can be dry like a martini and not dry like a textbook tome, you need to pick up Cecelia Tichi’s…
The Cruelty Is The Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America by Adam Serwer
Review by Brian Tanguay When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016 he made many promises, from rebuilding America’s infrastructure to reducing the federal deficit to replacing the Affordable…
The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax
Review by Brian Tanguay On the coast of California where I live drought has been a constant feature of the past twenty years. Enough rain some years made us forget,…
We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller
Review by George Yatchisin In Charles Laughton’s fantastic 1955 fairy tale noir Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum’s curdled preacher is infamous for having “love” and “hate” tattooed across the…
We Are Pilgrims: Journeys In Search of Ourselves by Victoria Preston
Review by Linda Lappin As Bruce Chatwin relates in Songlines, our remote ancestors revered features of their landscape: mountain, rock, river, tree, cave, imbuing them with spiritual meaning and celebrating them in…
Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future by James Shapiro
Review by David Starkey The introduction to James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future recounts the Public Theater’s 2017 staging…
The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz
Review by Brian Tanguay For artists are these the best of times or the worst of times? Has technology toppled many of the barriers that once prevented aspiring musicians, filmmakers,…
Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught Between by Eric Nusbaum
Review by George Yatchisin If there were any justice, the names Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop would be as well-remembered a baseball triumvirate as Tinker, Evers, and Chance. But…