BOOK NEWS
More than four months after a ransomware attack shut down the Toronto Public Library's computer systems, staff are finally putting a million stranded books back on the shelves.
At the library's distribution centre in the east end of the city, Domenic Lollino wheeled pallet after pallet of library books off a tractor-trailer — one of 15 such vehicles storing those books that were returned while the electronic cataloguing system was down.
At age 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts was tried as an adult and sentenced to prison. After surviving solitary confinement, he is now a poet, lawyer and award-winning MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. He’s also a man on a mission: in 2020, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, he founded Freedom Reads, a first-of-its-kind initiative that provides books to those incarcerated via 500-book libraries installed in prison housing units and dormitories.
THIS WEEK”S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, by Carlos Lozada. As a long-time book critic and columnist in Washington, Carlos Lozada dissects all manner of texts: commission reports, political reporting, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional inquiries to understand the controversies animating life in the capital. He also reads copious books by politicians and top officials: tell-all accounts by administration insiders, campaign biographies by candidates longing for high office, revisionist memoirs by those leaving those offices behind. With this provocative essay collection, Lozada argues that no matter how carefully political figures sanitize their experiences, positions, and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest and most electable light, they almost always let slip the truth. They show us their faults and blind spots, their ambitions and compromises, their underlying motives and insecurities. Whether they mean to or not, they tell us who they really are.“Carlos Lozada is a triple threat: imaginative thinker, uncompromising critic, impeccable writer line for line. Also? Does his homework and plays fair.”
– Jennifer Senior
- Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barbara McQuade. American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility. "A great public servant and one of the most acute observers of our time shares insightful views about the menace of disinformation—its history, its dangers, how it threatens America in particular and how we fix the problem. This is a compelling work about a challenge that—left unexamined and left unchecked—could undermine our democracy."
—Eric H. Holder Jr
- White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions. Their rage—stoked daily by Republican politicians and the conservative media—now poses an existential threat to the United States. “With White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have the guts to ask a crucial question: Why do so many white Americans fall for the authoritarian demagoguery now being peddled by the GOP? “— David Corn
- The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Coll. The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America’s disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America’s fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam’s rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam’s motives by way of his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members, and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader—a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies—even when the stakes were incredibly high. “Though the events of The Achilles Trap concluded 20 years ago, there are few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today.” —BookPage
- American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, by Katie Rogers. Since the Clinton era, shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have often remained anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces the evolution of the role of the twenty-first-century First Lady from a ceremonial figurehead to a powerful political operator, which culminates in the tenure of First Lady Jill Biden. From the reviews, it seems the main focus of the book seems to be on Jill Biden. Not so many mentions of Melania Trump, but I really don’t care, do u?
- Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, by Philippa Gregory. Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. “Gregory has the novelist’s eye for the quirky and the vivid; the wryness of a confident narrator. [Normal Women] is a lasting work of social history.”
— The Times (UK)
- Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, by Gretchen Sisson. Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.
With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. "Contributes to our national understanding of what reproductive justice really means." —Gloria Steinem
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Whiskey Tender: A Memoir, by Deborah Taffa.The author was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.” Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
- The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America, by James L. Swanson. Once it was one of the most infamous events in early American history: the deadly confrontation between Indians and colonists in Massachusetts in 1704 and the tragic saga that unfolded. Today, it has been nearly forgotten. “It is easy to forget that America’s eastern frontiers were once just as savage as the more celebrated lands of the west. Call it the Wild East—the subject of James L. Swanson’s engaging new book The Deerfield Massacre. From a single horrific event Swanson builds an epic, violent portrait of a world most of us have forgotten.” —S. C. Gwynne. “Swanson resurrects the long-forgotten massacre: the fate of the white captives as they fight to survive; and the plight of Native Americans as they struggle to preserve their ancestral lands. Swanson gives both sides their rightful place at the forefront of early American history." —Peter Cozzens
- Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, by Kara Swisher. Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world. "Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley and its denizens (almost all of them male because, well, tech world), takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world. . . Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles."
—BOOKLIST
- Birding to Change the World: A Memoir, by Trish O'Kane. The author is an accidental ornithologist. In her nearly two decades writing about justice as an investigative journalist, she'd never paid attention to nature. But then Hurricane Katrine destroyed her New Orleans home, sending her into an emotional tailspin. Enter a scrappy cast of feathered characters—first a cardinal, urban parrots, and sparrows, then a catbird, owls, a bittern, and a woodcock—that cheered her up and showed her a new path. Inspired, O'Kane moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to pursue an environmental studies PhD. There she became a full-on bird obsessive—logging hours in a stunningly biodiverse urban park, filling field notebooks with bird doings and dramas, and teaching ornithology to college students and middle-school kids. "With vivid lessons about the marvel of migration, the hope of nesting—and the peril of our changing climate—Birding to Change the World will do more than just change the way you view the planet. It will show you how to make it better, too." — Mark Obmascik
- Carson McCullers: A Life, by Mary V. Dearborn. The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals. While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.
- The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano. You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.
With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller, former Voice writer Tricia Romano pays homage to the most famous alt-weekly of all time. “This book reads like a garrulous night at the bar with the most brilliant, quarrelsome, passionate, and funny writers and editors of the Golden Age of insurgent media....These collective voices and tales remind us not only of what writers once did, but what they can and should do RIGHT NOW.” —Joe Hagan
- Four Thousand Paws: Caring for the Dogs of the Iditarod: A Veterinarian's Story, by Lee Morgan. While many veterinarians apply, only a small number are approved to examine the elite canine athletes who, using solely their muscle and an innate drive to race, carry handlers between frozen outposts each year, risking injury, illness, and fatigue along the way. In Four Thousand Paws, award-winning veterinarian Lee Morgan—a member of the Iditarod’s expert veterinary corps—tells the story of these heroic dogs, following the teams as they traverse deep spruce forests, climb steep mountain slopes, and navigate over ice-bound rivers toward Nome, on the coast of the Bering Sea, where the famed Burled Arch awaits. “Readers will leave with a huge appreciation for huskies, the landscape that bred them, and the humans who care for them . . . a captivating, fast-paced, eclectic memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews
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