Grand Central, New York & London Review by Rasoul Sorkhabi David Attenborough, the world-famed BBC broadcaster and writer of nature documentaries, celebrated his 99th birthday on May 6th this year.…
Category: Nonfiction
Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Before reading Sick and Dirty, queer representation in Hollywood wasn’t a subject I’d given much thought to or had occasion to study. By the time…
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay As I read Omar El Akkad’s scathing polemic exposing the moral shortcomings of the Western world order, I was reminded of the Fire Next Time…
Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene, Edited by Brigitta Olubas
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…
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…