Schoch (The Secrets of Happiness), a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast, pays affectionate tribute to the late composer Stephen Sondheim and the lessons his musicals offer. Covering the full span of Sondheim’s career on Broadway, Schoch posits that Louise’s break from her domineering mother to become a burlesque dancer in 1959’s Gypsy teaches audiences to live for themselves; that Bobby’s apparent victory over his fear of intimacy in the final minutes of 1970’s Company reminds viewers that “love isn’t there to make our lives less frightening... it’s there, if we can find it... to give us more life”; and that 1979’s Sweeney Todd forces spectators to grapple with the banality of evil. Here We Are, which was posthumously staged in 2023, reveals that beauty can be found in the unfinished or improvised—as in life itself, Schoch argues, since the “wild, wondrous mystery of ourselves won’t ever be fully revealed.” While some of Schoch’s interpretations can feel like a stretch, he illuminates with appealing and unbridled enthusiasm how Sondheim plumbed the depths of human experience. Musical theater lovers will be delighted. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

“I hope you’ll feel encouraged to try some new things—I think you’ll surprise yourself at how easy it really is,” writes fitness influencer Allibhai in her solid debut. Her Indo-East African heritage shines through a majority of the recipes, including East African biryani (a mixed rice dish and “the ultimate party food”), muthiya (veggie stew with dumplings), and kuku paka (coconut chicken curry with potatoes). She also includes an assortment of meals inspired by other parts of the world, notably one-pot pasta with chicken and sun-dried tomatoes, salmon teriyaki bowls, and roasted butternut squash and beet soup. Throughout, Allibhai makes modifications to her dishes to support a healthier lifestyle, incorporating sweet potatoes into brownies “to increase the fiber and nutrition content” and using cashews instead of dairy in tomato soup. Instructions are easy to follow and complete with helpful time-saving tips (marinated chicken tikka can be stored in the freezer for up to four months to be cooked another time). Muslim readers will especially appreciate Allibhai’s guide to a healthy Ramadan, where she notes that when breaking fast, eating slowly “will make such a huge difference in the way you feel for the rest of the night.” It’s an inviting collection of healthy and crowd-pleasing meals. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this well-researched debut, historian Arrington succeeds in “lift[ing] the veil of anonymity” that he argues has “long hidden” the civil rights gains achieved by residents of the small town of Laurel, Miss. Beginning in 1832 with the town’s establishment as a lumber camp and preceding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the 1960s civil rights movement to the present day, Arrington spotlights how Laurel’s Black community has come together to fight organized white supremacy (including a local Klan outpost established at the turn of the 20th century). These efforts included pushing for voting rights and the right to unionize in the 1950s and ’60s; battling for school desegregation, which extended well into the ’70s and ’80s; and challenging a corrupt legal system in the ’80s and ’90s. Arrington highlights how often Laurel was visited by national figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr., who saw the community as fertile ground for combatting segregation, and how the town saw many of its young people go on to leadership positions within the movement at the state and national levels. While the huge amount of minutiae might be difficult to sift through for outsiders, Mississippians will find this a thorough and enlightening overview of local civil rights history. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

A cunning “globalist vision” squares off against wrongheaded but earnest isolationism in this head-scratcher from historian Brands (American Colossus). Recapping how President Franklin Roosevelt, in order to support Britain against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, had to outmaneuver isolationist sentiment at home, Brands paints Roosevelt’s initiatives, which included calling for peace while playing up German plans for world domination, as patiently devious. Brands contrasts Roosevelt with Charles Lindbergh, the celebrated aviator, whose anti-war activism Brands depicts as principled if misguided; he even casts a speech Lindbergh gave that blamed Jews for warmongering as a matter of “willful political innocen[ce]” and not a sign of pro-Nazi sentiment. It was Roosevelt, Brands argues, who, in order to discredit isolationism, caricatured Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer. While Brands covers how Nazi cash clandestinely funded America’s isolationist politics, he downplays its significance—“The criminality involved was minor,” he pointlessly assures, when the money crime is clearly less at issue than the political influence. Similarly off-kilter and opaque assurances appear throughout (“One didn’t have to conjure conspiracy—though some people did—or assume political favoritism on the part of the network—though owners certainly had political opinions—to realize that certain views would be favored over others,” he writes, clearing up the matter of a radio network’s political leanings with such non-specificity that it arouses suspicion). Readers will come away with more questions than answers. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Chinese-American animator Tyrus Wong (1910–2016) “shaped some of America’s best-loved imagery,” according to this scrupulous reconsideration from Fang (Arresting Cinema), an English professor at the University of Houston. After arriving in the U.S. in 1920 under a false identity created to circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Fang joined his father in Los Angeles. He honed his artistic skills at California’s Otis Art Institute and painted murals for the Federal Art Project before starting at Disney as an “in-betweener”—an artist enlisted to reproduce “endless minor variations in imagery needed to create the illusion of movement.” Eventually, Wong became a lead artist on 1942’s Bambi, using “Chinese-style brushwork” to depict landscapes that were evocative yet subdued enough for the film’s “arduously developed” animal characters to stand out. Throughout, Fang reveals how Wong’s career—which included a stint at Warner Bros., where he worked on such films as 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima—reflected the tension between visibility and invisibility experienced by many of the era’s Asian immigrants, who shaped American culture in ways that were often overlooked or unseen (Wong was initially listed as a background artist in Bambi, for example). Nevertheless, Fang acknowledges that commercial art provided Wong with economic stability “well before” many of his Asian American contemporaries achieved it. The result is a worthy tribute to a groundbreaking artist. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

This revealing inquiry from Setoodeh (Ladies Who Punch), coeditor-in-chief of Variety, scrutinizes Trump’s run as host of The Apprentice from 2004 through 2015. Setoodeh describes producer Mark Burnett’s conception of the show as “Survivor set against the backdrop of corporate America,” the ill-fated spin-off hosted by Martha Stewart, and the flagship program’s struggle to recapture its first season’s ratings success. However, the author’s detailed accounts of six interviews he conducted with the former president between 2021 and 2023 arguably make this most valuable as an examination of Trump’s post-presidency mindset. Trump offered to talk on the record with Setoodeh before the author had even reached out, indicating how eager Trump was to “relive his TV glory days.” Other details are more expected, such as Trump’s overinflation of The Apprentice’s viewership. Setoodeh’s evocative reporting presents the former president as the star of his own Sunset Boulevard, secluded and desperate to reclaim the spotlight (“There is something about the quiet inside Trump Tower that feels like a department store past its prime”). The author also snatches some newsworthy tidbits from Trump, most notably catching him admitting he lost the 2020 election before he immediately backtracked. While not as essential as Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man, this earns its place in the ever-expanding pantheon of Trump reports. (June)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this transportive survey, literature professors and other contributors reflect on the treks undertaken by characters in literary works ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Amor Towles’s Lincoln Highway. Sam Jordison contends that though Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ostensibly chronicles a band of pilgrims’ trip from Southwark, London, to Canterbury Cathedral, the religion-inflected stories actually offer “a tour around the clerical and lay structures of late-fourteenth-century England.” John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, argues Susan Shillinglaw, charts the Joad family’s migration from Oklahoma to California alongside a cultural shift toward a working-class consciousness grounded in the shared destitution brought on by the Dust Bowl. Elsewhere, contributors discuss Robert Bolaño’s perspective on “poetry as a journey, a way of life” in The Savage Detectives, Yann Martel’s allegorical vision of “a civilization entrapped with everything wild it has sought to cage” in Life of Pi, and Colson Whitehead’s assertion that America owes its “economic might” to the stolen labor of enslaved African Americans in The Underground Railroad. The bite-size entries offer punchy takes on celebrated literature and are accompanied by plentiful photos of artwork inspired by the books or the locales discussed in them. The result is a trip well worth taking. Photos. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this savvy study, Buckton (The World Is Not Enough), an English professor at Florida Atlantic University, examines how British intelligence operations during WWII influenced postwar spy fiction. For example, Buckton describes how Ian Fleming based his third James Bond novel, Moonraker, around a reimagining of an operation he helped concoct during his tenure with British Naval Intelligence. It involved planting bogus invasion plans on a corpse and dumping it into the Mediterranean, where the phony intel could be picked up by Germans. Former MI6 agent Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a Bond satire following an incompetent British agent who invents a spy network so he can collect extra pay on behalf of the nonexistent agents, drew inspiration from a British double agent who pulled a similar ruse on the Nazis. Elsewhere, Buckton explores how John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy echoed the case of Russian double agent Kim Philby. The accounts of real-life espionage schemes entertain, and Buckton reveals how Britain’s shifting position in the global power structure shaped each author’s work (“Bond of course was created by Fleming... to fuel the myth that Britain was still a world power”). Readers of Fleming and le Carré will appreciate this perceptive take on their milieu. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Republican majority dominated by MAGA zealots has made the House of Representatives a cesspool of “incompetence,” “chaos,” savage infighting, and racism, according to this jaundiced history of the 118th Congress. Washington Post columnist Milbank (The Destructionists) calls the current House session “the most ineffective... in nearly a century,” with no significant legislative accomplishments but plenty of pernicious right-wing distractions. These include vicious battles over the House speakership that forced speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson to bend to the far-right’s demands, which brought the government close to defaulting on the national debt; a fixation on “culture war” issues like transgender athletes in women’s sports; efforts to impeach President Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas despite there being no crimes to charge them with; and endless investigations of trumped-up controversies from Hunter Biden’s laptop to allegations that the Pentagon is covering up the presence of extraterrestrials. Milbank paints a lurid group portrait of congressional Republicans as a menagerie of liars and reprobates (New York congressman George Santos is the champion here) and ably skewers the party’s crazy rhetoric, feckless wrangling, and sheer tawdriness. More invective than analysis, this recap of conservative absurdities and outrages will galvanize Milbank’s liberal readership. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this hit-or-miss memoir—written in the early 1960s and unearthed 60 years later by Hunter’s widow and literary executor—the late Grateful Dead lyricist recalls his early relationship with future band leader Jerry Garcia. The narrative unfolds in Menlo Park, Calif., where the aimless, college-age Hunter and Garcia soak in “the scene” at the local coffeehouse, go to parties, and regale each other with half-baked philosophizing (“You’re saying that the ultimate goal in life is to find another goal.... What happens when there are no more goals?”). Scattershot attempts are made to harness the scene’s energy: a friend tries to organize a commune called the Co-op, which fizzles before it starts; Garcia and Hunter form a folk-guitar duo that soon founders due to artistic differences. Hunter’s fond snapshot of an embryonic counterculture is richly observed and rife with vibrant character sketches, though retellings of his hallucinatory dreams and meandering prose (“There is waiting; waiting for you know not what... never certain that it will come, but waiting against the day when it might”) can slow the proceedings to a crawl. Deadheads will drink this in, but more casual fans may lack the patience. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink