Haymarket Review by George Yatchisin It’s not lost on me that I’m reading Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility as I take a fuel-guzzling flight…
Tag: California Review of Books
Passing for White
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo (Simon and Schuster), The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (Berkeley), “Passing” from…
Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder, trans. by Paulette Møller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Although Sophie’s World was first published in Norwegian more than thirty years ago and since then has been translated into close to…
The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In the Preface to The Pornography Wars, Kelsy Burke explains her methodology as a sociologist, writing that she doesn’t assume that others who hold beliefs…
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…
Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay A black boy, just young enough to walk through town alone, hears a truck rumbling down the dirt road near a cafe. The truck pulls…
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…
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann
Doubleday Review by George Yatchisin A study of skullduggery and heroism, vainglory and stiff-upper lips, the unbelievable odyssey that is David Gann’s latest nonfiction work The Wager also manages to…
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…