Columbia Review by David Starkey Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene are far from household names. Granted, Hazzard was the author two widely acclaimed novels—The Transit of Venus (1980), winner of…
Category: Nonfiction
Golden State: The Making of California by Michael Hiltzik
Mariner Review by David Starkey The first time I really noticed the bumper stickers on the cars in front of me was when I began driving, in the late 1970s.…
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington
Norton Review by Brian Tanguay The world of elite and oligarchic money is shrouded in secrecy. A series of leaked documents — the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, and Pandora Papers…
Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America by Erik Baker
Harvard University Press Review by Brian Tanguay I read Make Your Own Job after hearing Erik Baker, a lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University, on a podcast…
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins For many readers of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction, an immediate satisfaction will be Frank’s close consideration of more than thirty novels…
Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920 – 1970 by Pollyanna Rhee
University of Chicago Press Review by Brian Tanguay The city of Santa Barbara, California, has always traded on its unique location, tucked snugly between the Santa Ynez mountains and the…
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times by Ross Benes
University Press of Kansas Review Brian Tanguay Although I lived through the era of their ascendancy, I never understood the immense popularity of professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, the Beanie Baby…
Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman
University of North Carolina Press Review by Brian Tanguay Scholar Brittany Friedman begins Carceral Apartheid with a black and white photograph of her maternal grandmother. The year is 1939, and…
99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life by Adam Chandler
Pantheon Review by George Yatchisin A few weeks into the oligarchical hell of “Trump II: This Time We Leave the Country Stripped on Blocks,” Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New…
Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North by Kathleen Lippa
Dundurn Press Review by Brian Tanguay What most impressed me about Arctic Predator, journalist Kathleen Lippa’s book about the crimes of notorious sexual predator Edward Horne, is her determination to investigate…