Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay Abraham Lincoln believed that democracy was the single greatest achievement in human history. How Lincoln came to this belief is less well known than other…
Category: Nonfiction
The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors by Jackie Bennett, with photographs by Richard Hanson
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having…
Fascism in America: Past and Present, Edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward
Cambridge University Press Review by Brian Tanguay One of the animating questions in the essays that comprise Fascism in America is whether or not our national political arrangement has reached…
The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric, Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future by Peter Gleick
Public Affairs Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge by Erica Gies Chicago Press Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate by David Sedlak…
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
Little, Brown Review by George Yatchisin Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography sold nearly 230K copies in its first eight weeks in stores and is currently at #47 in Books at…
Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia by Tobias Becker and The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym
Basic Books | Harvard Review by Walter Cummins Tobias Becker opens his new book with this epigraph from the Beatles’ song to explain the origin of his title: “Yesterday /…
California Review of Books – 10 Best Books of 2023
The following list was decided after much consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journals’ most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin.…
Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
Knopf Review by David Starkey I’ve refrained from watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary The American Buffalo to better assess its companion volume by Burns and Dayton Duncan, Blood…
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins First, a confession. I was not an objective reader of Sapolsky’s book because I was looking for evidence to undermine his thesis and find some…
Tyranny of the Minority: How American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Crown Review by Brian Tanguay The latest collaboration between Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is equal parts civics tutorial, history lesson, comparative analysis, warning and remedy. A…