Review by Walter Cummins In her latest book, Shanda, Letty Cottin Pogrebin revisits the early and mid-twentieth century obsession with covering up family scandals that, if revealed, would destroy the…
Category: Genres
Home: A Story of Emigration by Anthony Stevens
Review by Linda Lappin In this lyrical, hybrid narrative combining novel, documentary, autobiography, and diary, British author, Anthony Stevens pieces together a chapter of his family history: his great grandparents’…
Vienna 1900, Edited by Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Review by David Starkey When I visited the Leopold Museum in Vienna this past spring, I must admit that I was wowed. I was familiar, of course, with the creepy…
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz
Review by George Yatchisin Forget about the butterfly effect, it seems the last 130 years of U.S. foreign involvement should be called the Butler Effect. By that I refer to…
Hidden Cargoes by Chris Arthur
Review by Walter Cummins Hidden Cargoes—like Chris Arthur’s previous eight essay collections—is a book that can change your life, not so much your behaviors and beliefs but how you relate…
The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees by Bill Lascher
Review by Brian Tanguay It’s tempting to think of history as a succession of recurring events and to look to the past to foretell what might happen in the future.…
A Storm in the Stars by Don Zancanella
Review by Walter Cummins The presence of Mary Godwin Shelley opens and closes Don Zancanella’s intimate portrayal of the circle around Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Storm in the Stars. The…
Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the System that Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle by Lise Olsen
Review by Walter Cummins The lengthy subtitle to Lise Olsen’s exposé explains what the book is all about but doesn’t reveal the outcome of the long process that followed the…
Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Review by Brian Tanguay When Daiyu, the protagonist of Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, is abducted from the fish market, she’s a desperately hungry thirteen-year-old…
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Review by David Starkey Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These was released just before Christmas of last year. Set in a small Irish town during Christmas 1985, the book…