In this tantalizing account, BBC documentary producer Shepherd (A History of Delusions) revisits the mystery of the Cheapside Hoard, the largest collection of Tudor and Stuart treasures ever uncovered. The trove of gemstones and gold jewelry was unearthed in June 1912 by Central London workmen, who took their haul to antiquarian George Fabian Lawrence (known as Stony Jack due to his reputation for paying “good money for any old stone”). Lawrence promptly sold much of the Hoard to the newly established London Museum. The mystery of the Hoard’s original owner captivated the British public, who spread stories of a “tall thin man in Elizabethan costume who looked very angry” putting in spectral appearances near the jewels’ display. Shepherd meticulously examines the Hoard’s possible origins and its murky fate—over time, many pieces slipped away. Her account revolves around a profile of Lawrence, revealing him to be a complexly influential agent of the building up of London’s vaunted museum collections. She finds that Lawrence’s willingness to let paperwork go unfinished and to acquire artifacts through underhanded but efficient means made him popular with museum officials as well as royals, who may have surreptitiously acquired some of the Hoard for themselves. Full of fascinating asides, including a tangent on the similar fate of artifacts later recovered from Tutankhamun’s Tomb, this rivets. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Henry VIII marries a teenager, an 11-year-old sends unsolicited beauty tips to Abraham Lincoln, and a surgeon performs Britain’s first nose job in this witty debut. Kennedy adapts her popular TikTok account of the same name into a calendar commemorating sensational historical events on every day of the year, including scandalous births and deaths, posthumous beheadings, and drunken disasters like the man who in 1845 threw “a sculpted stone exhibit at a glass cabinet” containing a Roman vase at the British Museum (“He spends the next two months in prison with a severe hangover”). Kennedy’s overview not only reaches back to ancient times with incidents like Cleopatra’s suicide but delves into more recent episodes, including Liz Truss’s 2022 stint as “the shortest-serving prime minister of the UK.” Kennedy combines bizarre facts—the ancient Greeks used “shards of pottery” as toilet paper—with droll and occasionally fabulist asides, such as Henry VIII calling “Pope Clement VII slurs on Playstation” after being forbidden to remarry. Some of the most laugh out loud sections depart from the book’s overarching structure with playful lists like “beauty tips for the modern flapper” that include such lethal advice as “spic[e] up that mud mask with some radium-based Kemolite mud.” It makes for a joyful journey through some of history’s most cringeworthy moments. (May)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Belle Époque Paris was seen by Americans as permissive, temptation-laden, and dangerous, but also, after a disastrous U.S. showing at the 1867 World’s Exposition, as the only place worth going to learn about modern art, according to this evocative account. Dasal (ArtCurious; also the name of her podcast) unearths how the American Girls’ Club, a Parisian boarding house, emerged as an avenue by which ambitious American women could access the city’s cutting-edge arts scene. Free from the squalor and, more significantly, the mingling of the sexes commonplace in Parisian society, the Club helped (mostly wealthy, but some quite poor) young women make the sojourn seem more palatable to concerned families. Dasal begins by profiling philanthropist Elisabeth Mills Reid, who in 1893 founded the Club as a “respectable” alternative to the Latin Quarter’s raucous American “Colony.” Subsequent profiles of the Club’s denizens bring the era to vivid life, enumerating their chance encounters with Gertrude Stein and lessons with Rodin. Dasal’s almost forensic analysis of the students’ trajectories demonstrates how the Club, though largely forgotten today despite having produced notable artists like Marguerite Thompson Zorach and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, was a significant engine of the era’s artistic creation and also an important landmark in women’s history, as its students were among the earliest American women professionals, with many returning home to work as commercial artists. Readers will be engrossed. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

“The AI project has always been more fantasy than reality,” according to this scathing takedown. Bender (Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing), a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, and Hanna, research director at the Distributed AI Research Institute, argue that AI is often less capable than its promoters let on, pointing out that “driverless” robotaxis, for example, usually require the assistance of remote drivers. That hasn’t stopped corporations from using AI to undermine human workers, the authors contend, discussing how the Writer’s Guild of America went on strike in 2023 to protest film studios’ plans to pay screenwriters a lower rate for “rewriting” AI scripts even when the changes were so extensive that the scripts were effectively new. The authors are as skeptical of “AI doomers” as they are of “AI boosters,” positing that while large language models are incapable of harboring any intent to wage war on humanity, the real threat lies in how they’re cheapening the quality of human labor, normalizing data theft, and subjecting individuals to ever more sophisticated surveillance. Though the narrative sometimes risks devolving into an undigested series of anecdotes about AI’s ills, the authors nonetheless drive home the troubling ways in which the technology is transforming society. AI skeptics will find plenty of fodder for their critiques. Agent: Ian Bonaparte, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Female bodies are far stronger and more capable than most of us have been taught,” according to this myth-busting report. Science writer Vartan (The Eco-Chick Guide to Life) argues that understanding strength as moving “the heaviest weight one can manage in a single effort” valorizes activities at which men excel while downplaying the endurance feats in which women often outperform men. She explains that estrogen helps women store fat that’s later transformed into long-lasting energy while men rely on relatively inefficient carbohydrates, giving women an edge in many endurance sports. For instance, she notes that the 10 fastest women to swim around Manhattan were about 13% faster than the top 10 men. Vartan skillfully debunks outdated beliefs, as when she points out that contrary to long-standing medical guidance to “minimize exercise and exertion while pregnant,” research has shown that pregnant people who worked out regularly enjoyed shorter labors. Bringing a thought-provoking outlook to debates around segregating sports by gender, Vartan wonders why testosterone is considered an unfair advantage, but Usain Bolt’s unusually long legs, for example, aren’t, and suggests that separating individuals by height and weight would be more logical. This brings valuable perspective to a much debated topic. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this captivating account, Pulitzer finalist Baker (The Last Englishman) brings a historian’s insight to bear on a minute-by-minute report of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists rioted against a city council vote to relocate a statue of Robert E. Lee. Baker begins by profiling Zyahna Bryant, a Black high school student whose school paper set in motion the series of events that led to the vote to remove the statue. Baker follows Bryant as she organizes protests and stands up to the neo-Confederate Army of Northern Virginia Mechanized Cavalry, so named “for their fondness for high end pickups.” The group undertook a harassment campaign against Bryant that Baker points out merged old-school Southern racial intimidation with a new online style of attack forged during 2014’s Gamergate. Later, Baker narrates the harrowing events of August 12 in exacting detail. As it progresses, her account becomes, fittingly, a description of battle: anti-fascists create a “corridor” in the crowd; advancing columns of Nationalist Front militia outflank members of the far-left Industrial Workers of the World with “furled flags and locked arms.” Throughout, Baker offers historical context, from an analysis of the “Lost Cause” myth to a particularly fascinating tangent on John Kasper, a Greenwich Village bohemian turned vociferous segregationist who traveled to Charlottesville in the 1960s to oppose school integration, armed with speeches “all provided to him” by his mentor Ezra Pound. This brings history and current events into illuminating dialogue. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Despite “lazy media framing” that presents Trump-era populism as a backlash against capitalism, many of the movement’s “supposed disruptors of the status quo” are in fact agents of a new capitalist vanguard, according to this incisive account. Historian Slobodian (Crack-Up Capitalism) explores a new right-wing capitalism that emerged around the turn of the millennium—a “fusion” of populism and free market ideology undergirded by “appeals to nature” wherein neoliberal policies are defended “through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral and evolutionary psychology.” This thinking developed in the 1990s as the “solution to [the] problem” that “communism was dead” but “public spending continued to expand.” Eager to stem the flow of funds, conservative thinkers turned to the natural sciences, birthing a new kind of “evolutionary libertarianism” that sought to establish a scientific basis for inequality (and thus for dismantling the welfare state) by reviving long-taboo topics like race science and eugenics, as in Charles Murray’s infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve. Such thinking merged with a neoliberal embrace a new kind of “big government” in which the state itself would act to “restrict democracy” in order to “save capitalism,” and with destabilizing calls for a return to the gold standard and, later, a devotion to cryptocurrency. Quinn’s robust analysis snaps many disparate lines of questioning into place. It’s a bravura performance of intellectual inquiry. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian, playwright, and activist Schulman (Let the Record Show) offers a timely if somewhat unfocused meditation on the fraught nature of solidarity. Dismissing the “fantasy” version of solidarity—“a magical combination of pure motive [and] clean action”—Schulman instead embraces the on-the-ground reality as messy and imperfect. She argues that waiting for a “saintly” ideal of solidarity is fruitless, and advocates for “big tent politics” that “includes many different kinds of people.” Schulman reveals how she came to these conclusions through a plethora of personal examples from her lifetime of activism, including her 1970s participation in an underground Spanish abortion network and her longtime support of Palestine. (The recent campus anti-war movement looms large throughout, as Schulman connects it to her own experiences, such as being “charged and brought before the CUNY task force on antisemitism” in 2016 as the faculty adviser to Jewish Voice for Peace.) She also highlights creative figures who were personally “far from saints” but made significant political contributions, like Jean Genet and his early advocacy for Palestine. This glut of examples can be whiplash-inducing, with big leaps between topics, time spent on pettier frustrations like dealing with small-minded theatrical producers, and such contextless inclusions as an extended transcript of a group conversation. Such twists and turns are nonetheless worth sticking out for what is otherwise a powerful resource for activists. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Dickinson debuts with an admiring biography of American fashion designer Claire McCardell (1905–1958). After graduating from Parsons design school in New York City, McCardell apprenticed at male-owned Seventh Avenue design studios before eventually becoming the head designer at Townley Frocks, a mid-level sportswear manufacturer. An advocate for function over fashion—what “Paris unleashed every few months to keep a woman agitated and hungry and buying new clothes,” Dickinson writes—she drew inspiration from everyday life to pioneer ballet flats; ready-to-wear separates; and the wrap dress. She also nearly single-handedly brought sportswear—previously restricted to “private, female-only spaces”—into public spaces. During WWII, when the New York fashion scene was cut off from French influences, McCardell seized the opportunity to design slacks for the influx of women entering factory jobs, and to provide demonstrations for women on how to repurpose fabrics that were in short supply. Throughout, Dickinson illustrates how fashion served as a mirror for sociopolitical change, with the suffragist ideals of the 19th century that influenced McCardell (the notion that “a women’s freedom began with her clothes... Unencumbered bodies meant unencumbered lives”) giving way to postwar conservatism as women returned to the home and Christian Dior put forth a hyperfeminized look that emphasized cinched waists and structured shoulders. Fashion aficionados won’t want to miss this. (June)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Gopnik (Warhol) draws on extensive research for this textured and energetic biography of Albert Barnes, the collector who founded the Barnes Foundation museum and helped reshape notions of American art. Born into a poor family in late-19th-century Pennsylvania, Barnes grew up with a “ferocious... rejection of elites and elitism.” After earning a medical degree, he began a career in the growing pharmaceuticals field, co-developing the antiseptic on which he built his fortune and implementing such progressive reforms as offering educational opportunities to employees. He used his fortune to buy art that became the basis for the Barnes Foundation museum, seeking out Renoirs and Cezannes (which, while “safe” by European standards, were still considered avant-garde in the U.S.), North American ironwork, and African sculpture. Gopnik emphasizes how Barnes championed African art not as “the product of some exotic Other” but high art in its own right. In so doing, he helped to make fine art a front in the fight for egalitarianism and the eradication of “old hierarchical ways.” Gopnik remains clear-eyed, however, about Barnes’s less than savory attributes, including a tendency to attack art world rivals, occasionally in the kind of racist or antisemitic language that he purported to despise. The result is a vibrant and comprehensive portrait of an influential figure in American art history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink