Spanish forger and revolutionary Urtubia (1930–2020) recounts his life and crimes in this enthralling autobiography. Beginning with his early years growing up in Basque country, where poverty was a “spur to creativity,” Urtubia makes clear that his own political commitments as an anarchist are grounded in his youthful experiences of working alongside his family and community (“The keystone of existence is doing right by one’s neighbor”). Urtubia’s early life seems a whirlwind: conscripted into Franco’s army but discharged for his involvement in a smuggling scheme, Urtubia ended up in Paris, working as a stonemason by day (he worked on “the magnificent Gallimard Bookshop”), and printing pamphlets and documents for radical left-wing organizations by night. He transitioned to forging paychecks for striking workers, and, eventually, to a large-scale counterfeiting operation. As much a craftsman as a revolutionary, Urtubia describes his processes in evocative terms: he worked overnight teaching himself to produce “top quality photoengraving” while “making sure no evidence was left behind.” Soon Urtubia’s outfit was producing books of checks by the hundreds of kilos: “Without violence... we had come across a source of funding for all revolutionary... movements across the globe.” Urtubia was eventually caught and arrested, but released due to lack of evidence. The author’s unique voice, irascible and wise, adds a great deal of charm to this meandering memoir. It’s a wonder. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this intricate, sumptuously written account, Pulitzer winner Lewis (W.E.B. Du Bois) offers a unique version of the American rags-to-riches story that shows how Black strivers had to navigate the nearly insurmountable obstacles and moral quandaries of slavery and Jim Crow in order to prosper. Delving into his own family history, Lewis uncovers a great-grandmother who bore children to her enslaver and inherited real estate from him, and, on another branch of his family tree, a great-great-grandmother who, as a free Black woman, worked as a plantation overseer and bore children to the plantation’s owner. As he follows these women’s descendants—a line of businesspeople, ministers, and educators—from Reconstruction through the civil rights era, Lewis intertwines their story with Atlanta’s history of resistance to white supremacy, often exerted through the power of the city’s Black bourgeoisie. An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect, Lewis ties in many other threads, including an illuminating study of the Black bourgeoisie’s evolving relationship to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who posited that separate but equal prosperity was possible through economic uplift (Lewis bears a sharp and amusing disdain for the thinker, repeatedly insinuating, in arch and ironic prose, that he was somewhat annoying: “Some of the... students probably found Booker Washington’s antebellum similes cringeworthy”). The result is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

This spirited debut report from journalist Grayson traces the history of livestreaming platform Twitch alongside profiles of its content creators. He recounts how enterprising recent college graduate Justin Kan founded the company that would become Twitch in 2007 as a website to livestream his life, and how Amazon’s 2014 acquisition of the company pressured employees to prioritize profit over creators’ needs. The creator profiles attest to the platform’s best and worst qualities. For instance, Grayson illustrates the site’s potential for creating online communities by describing how Tanya DePass’s calls for more diverse representation in video games brought together inclusivity-minded gamers on her channel. On the other hand, Grayson notes that incentives to boost engagement with incendiary content led political commentator Clara Sorrenti to start esoteric disputes with increasingly obscure fellow streamers. Grayson captures the multitudes contained within Twitch while offering a captivating window into content creators’ lives, including the dispiriting frequency of “swatting” (making false police reports so that a SWAT team will raid a target’s home during a livestream) and the fleeting nature of success (Kaitlyn Siragusa uses the millions she makes from her risqué antics to invest in traditional businesses, anticipating that her following could evaporate at any moment). Readers will want to tune in to this. Agent: William LoTurco, LoTurco Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this excellent biography, Chakkalakal (Novel Bondage), an American literature professor at Bowdoin College, chronicles the life of groundbreaking novelist Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932). Born to free Black parents who fled the South for Cleveland, Chesnutt became a teacher at age 16—it was one of the few professions open to ambitious young Black men. Aspiring to a more literary line of work, Chesnutt took a stenography job in 1883 and spent his nights writing short stories and novels, becoming in 1887 the first Black author to publish fiction in The Atlantic. Though Chesnutt’s day job put his writing on the back burner for nearly a decade, he secured a publishing deal with Houghton Mifflin and in 1899 published the short story collection The Conjure Woman, which marked the first time a major American publisher printed a fictional work by a nonwhite writer. Chakkalakal makes clear the enraging difficulties Chesnutt faced as a Black author in a white publishing industry, noting, for example, that Houghton misleadingly marketed The Conjure Woman as sentimental plantation fiction. She presents Chesnutt as something of a tragic figure for clawing his way to the upper echelon of American letters only to quit amid lackluster sales well over a decade before the Harlem Renaissance renewed interest in his work. An overdue celebration of an unjustly forgotten author, this enthralls. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Aevitas Creative Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this raw but uneven account, Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) presents diary entries that others transcribed for him while he was recovering from a debilitating fall. The author was at his girlfriend’s Rome apartment in 2022 when a dizzy spell left him in a “grotesquely twisted position” on the floor, leading the 67-year-old to believe he was dying. “It wasn’t the past but the future I thought I about,” he writes. “Everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do.” As Kureishi recouped in the hospital from the spinal injury he sustained in his fall, the existential reckonings continued. His diary entries ricochet between his fears that he’ll never return home, reflections on his career, and memories of his childhood as the son of a Pakistani immigrant with his own thwarted literary ambitions. Angry, needy, and desperate for company, Kureishi finds occasional silver linings in more time with his busy sons and new opportunities to practice vulnerability. The author’s rambling thoughts are by turns insightful and irritating; breakthroughs about the value of family brush up against tiresome name-dropping and crude “finger up my arse” descriptions of life in rehab. Inconsistency mars this otherwise pointed and moving narrative about the loss of bodily autonomy. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this soulful account, Inaba (1950–2014) recounts her 20-year relationship with her cat, Mii. After finding an abandoned kitten on a Tokyo fence one evening, Inaba impulsively decided to take it home with her. “Maybe it was because my defenses were down,” she writes. “I set off walking without a second thought.” As financial stresses started to fracture Inaba’s marriage, the author took solace in her pet, pulling herself through drunken nights of self-loathing with “the sight of Mii waiting patiently for me in the dark.” The book’s middle section rapturously recounts Inaba and Mii’s evening walks, their afternoons spent admiring the Tokyo skyline, and, as Mii started to fall ill, their meditative trips to the countryside. As Mii’s life comes to an end, Inaba avoids cliché, cataloging her newfound spiritual resilience instead of wallowing in grief: “My mornings without Mii would start tomorrow,” Inaba writes. “I might weep, but I wouldn’t mourn.” This is a must-read for pet lovers with sturdy hearts. Agent: Bruno Onuki Reynell, New River Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Verkaik (The Traitor of Colditz) uncovers a startling new dimension to a well-known story of betrayal in this riveting account. Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 British-led invasion of the Netherlands by Allied paratroopers, was famously a failure—one usually chalked up to the revelation of the plan to the Nazis by Dutch partisan Christiaan Lindemans. While researching Lindemans, Verkaik stumbled upon allegations by his Nazi handler that Lindemans had been working for the Soviets. The Soviets, Verkaik theorizes, had sought to pass information about the invasion to the Nazis in order to halt the Allies’ western advance, giving the Soviets time to reach Berlin first. Discovering that the intelligence Lindemans gave to the Nazis wasn’t their earliest warning about the invasion, Verkaik turns his focus to MI5 and the Soviet spy ring within its ranks. He homes in on spy Anthony Blunt, whose reputation after the war Verkaik alleges was whitewashed as a noble communist merely helping an Allied nation, when in reality, according to Verkaik, Blunt betrayed Operation Market Garden to the Nazis at the Soviets’ behest, leading to thousands of British deaths. Verkaik offers fine-grained accountings of both Blunt’s and Lindemans’s actions that make his thesis add up—including Blunt’s ironic role as leader of the high-stakes hunt for a mole whom Verkaik posits was Blunt himself. It’s an explosive and paradigm-shifting account. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

This diverting collection of concert reviews, essays, and other writings by Toronto Star music critic Goddard (The Great Gould), who died in 2022, covers more than 50 years of music history, though the bulk of the pieces were written in the 1960s and ’70s. Goddard contends that saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s rock-inflected jazz proves that the two genres grow “from the same set of musical roots,” and frames Fats Domino’s “boisterous, raw” sound as an emblem of “an age when rock ’n’ roll was simple and unpretentious... with none of the air of impotent and static rage it has today.” Goddard also shows how perceptions of rock bands shifted as they became mainstream. For example, his 1969 concert review praises a “lack of polish” in Led Zeppelin’s music that, by 1971, had become almost a caricature of itself (their songs are “always loud, always wham-bag, always overbearing,” he wrote). Goddard shines with surprisingly intimate portraits of some of music’s most famous personalities: Johnny Cash was “tough, a bit crude, direct, and unambiguous as a bullet,” while an introspective, reverential Bruce Springsteen observes that rock is “like a pact. A vow. And you have to honor it.” It adds up to an illuminating record of rock’s coming-of-age. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pearson (Why Marianne Faithfull Matters), founder of the Women in Rock Oral History Project, provides a vibrant account of the golden age of women’s rock music and the forces that capsized it. She traces how the growth of independent record labels, college radio, and an “inclusive” grunge movement in the 1990s set the stage for the rise of Liz Phair, Veruca Salt, and others who took ownership of their sexuality with provocative lyrics, and who used their platforms to further feminist causes. Yet by the end of the decade, the advent of corporate radio and political conservatism sparked by 9/11 spurred a return to traditional gender norms, with the “transgressive” feminism of ’90s music replaced by a more “commercially viable” feminism that lent itself to banal pop and scantily clad stars. This type of nonthreatening feminism persists in today’s popular music, Pearson argues, describing how it aligns with the interests of the music industry’s “corporate overlords” to create a succession of interchangeable pop princesses. Pearson concludes with a hopeful call for a new generation of fans and musicians to revive the transgressive spirit of the ’90s, and her stirring blend of oral history and sharp cultural insight opens a fascinating window into a dynamic chapter in music history. It’s a valuable complement to Alison Fensterstock’s How Women Made Music. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this humorous and tender memoir, Honour (There’s Some Place Like Home) recounts her life as a reluctant expat in Europe. New York City and “my personality were so co-dependent that I had no idea where it ended and I began,” Honour writes, recalling her shock at her husband’s proposal that they move with their two kids from Brooklyn to Cyprus for his work in 2008. At the time, Honour had lived in New York for 20 years, and she feared what she’d find if she had to reexamine her sense of self. But the offer was a “career unicorn” for her husband, so she agreed to pack up. Honour writes with quick wit and bruised candor about her rocky first few months in Cyprus, during which she moped and struggled to adapt to the relaxed pace of life. Then, with equal panache, Honour illustrates how, as her husband’s work whisked them to Copenhagen and then Berlin, she learned to extricate her self-worth from being a “New Yorker” or an “expat,” and came to appreciate the resilience that the family’s new lifestyle fostered in her and her children. This will resonate with anyone who’s had to redefine themselves under unexpected circumstances. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink