What Nails It by Greil Marcus

Yale Review by George Yatchisin Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already…

Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

4th ESTATE London Review by Brian Tanguay During his long career as a foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk won the Orwell Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Prize, and was seven times named…

Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich

Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay The demise of John W. Stephens is emblematic of the challenge that faced Ulysses S. Grant and the proponents of Reconstruction. In the eyes of…

Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer

Rosetta Review by Walter Cummins Most of us tend to consider the Middle Ages and those who inhabited those distant centuries victims of an inferior world that we’re fortunate to…

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss

Penguin Review by David Starkey I first saw Adam Moss’s The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing in a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, and immediately, like Wallace Stevens’s…

Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart

Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay No journalist that I’m aware of has chronicled the rise of the Christian right as assiduously and comprehensively as Katherine Stewart has. From her first…

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Metropolitan Books Review by Brian Tanguay Of the many books Rashid Khalidi has written about Palestine, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is by far his most personal one. Khalidi…

Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City by Richard E. Ocejo

Princeton Review by David Starkey In the conclusion of his new book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, Richard Ocejo, a sociology professor at John…

Life at the Dumpling by Trisha Cole

Review by George Yatchisin Despite the obvious misery of the pandemic, if you had the luck, privilege, and health to make it through, it also provided opportunity. It forced us…

A Year of Birds: Writings on Birds from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Geoff Wisner, illustrated by Barry Van Dusen

Mercer Review by David Starkey I happened to spend last Saturday morning at Walden pond, on a warm October day, with plenty of people fishing, swimming in the 68-degree water…