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…
Category: Politics
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…
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…
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…
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…
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Scribner Essay by Brian Tanguay When the conservative supermajority of the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, it overturned a…
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
Viking Review by David Starkey “It was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the aide to the great man, “how this guy could spread the bunk and make the…
Dinner with the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House by Alex Prud’homme
Knopf Review by George Yatchisin Freedom Fries—the bogus re-naming bestowed by right-wingers requiring simple-minded revenge during the Iraq War when France was a hesitant ally to the US—weren’t the first…
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond
(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay What Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is to racial inequality in the criminal justice system in America,…
The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph
(Basic Books) Review by Brian Tanguay Like many Americans, I saw the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a long awaited turning point in race relations in this country.…