German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882–1935) deserves to be remembered alongside Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger for her contributions to physics, according to this persuasive study. Journalist Phillips (Practical Julia) explains that Noether published a groundbreaking 1918 paper that elevated the law of energy conservation “from semi-empirical observation to a mathematical truth” and proved that Isaac Newton’s laws of physics remain constant regardless of location and time. It’s hard to overstate the significance of these findings, Phillips argues, chronicling how they were combined with quantum mechanics to form the standard model of physics in the mid-20th century and how Noether’s correspondence with Albert Einstein helped the latter fill a gap in his theory of general relativity. Examining why Noether has received little credit for her work, Phillips suggests that while prejudice is partly to blame (Nazis forced her out of her academic appointment at the University of Göttingen in 1933 for being Jewish and a woman), Noether was uninterested in promoting her accomplishments, and frequently gifted unpublished work to colleagues and students to put out under their own names. Phillips makes a strong case that Noether is the most important mathematician most people have never heard of, though his valiant efforts to present her breakthroughs in accessible terms can still be tough going. Nonetheless, this gives an overlooked innovator her due. Agent: Susan Rabiner, Susan Rabiner Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

The Kartemquin production company “was an early trend-setter in the genre of socially engaged... documentary narrative films,” according to this perceptive analysis. Aufderheide (Documentary Film), a communications professor at American University, discusses how former college classmates Gordon Quinn and Jerry Temaner founded the company in 1966 to tell stories “with and about working people and members of movements for social justice.” Aufderheide is more interested in the issues undergirding Kartemquin’s films than what went on behind the scenes, explaining that 1974’s Trick Bag aimed to push back against “stereotypes about white, working-class bigotry,” that 1983’s The Last Pullman Car offered a snapshot of a labor movement in decline, and that 1994’s Hoop Dreams sought to highlight the persistence of poverty beneath the gloss of neoliberalism. Historical background on the political developments documented in Kartemquin’s films sheds light on the New Left’s waning after the 1960s, and Aufderheide offers edifying insight into Kartemquin’s intellectual underpinnings. For instance, she explains that Quinn and Temaner were influenced by philosopher John Dewey’s belief that democracy depends on civilians uniting to address shared problems, and that their films might provide focal points around which such groups could organize. Documentary buffs will want to seek this out. Photos. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Physician Clarke (Breathtaking) offers a profoundly moving account of how a pediatric heart transplant changed organ donation laws in Britain. In 2017, nine-year-old Keira Ball suffered a “catastrophic brain injury” as the result of a car crash. At her older sister’s insistence, Keira’s heart was donated to Max Johnson, a nine-year-old whose heart had been weakened by illness. The families eventually struck up a correspondence and successfully campaigned together to make organ donation an opt-out system in the U.K. Clarke’s impressive reporting offers a fly-on-the-wall account of how Keira’s heart made its way to Max (“Gloved hands cranked at stainless steel—it takes brute force to prize a rib cage apart. Max’s heart, once exposed, was slack and gargantuan”). Clarke also weaves in fascinating medical history, chronicling the development of ventilators during the 1950s polio epidemic and the first heart transplant, which was performed by an ill-prepared South African surgeon in 1967. However, the main draw is the heartrending story of how two families forged a path through tragedy (a particularly affecting scene describes how at the families’ first meeting, the Johnsons brought a stethoscope so the Balls could listen to Keira’s heart). A tearjerker that doubles as a first-rate medical history, this is a marvel. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Nerve-wracking menace, unlikely sympathies, and a daring rescue mark this rousing saga of a notorious terrorist incident. Bestseller Macintyre (Agent Sonya) revisits the May 1980 occupation of the Iranian embassy in London by six Iranian Arab terrorists championing the nationalist cause of Iran’s ethnic Arab minority. Led by a charismatic, volatile man named Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, the militants took 26 hostages, demanding the release of 91 Iranian Arab prisoners being held in Iran and an escape plane out of Britain. As negotiations with British police (who never intended to comply) dragged on, al-Rashidi grew increasingly agitated. On the sixth day, after the terrorists executed a hostage, Britain’s elite Special Air Service unit staged a spectacular rescue (it was broadcast live), with commandos rappelling down from the roof and smashing through windows. Macintyre’s narrative is cinematic in its bloody climax—“He... spray[ed] the group indiscriminately, firing in short bursts, back and forth”—and even more so in its tense buildup. He paints the embassy occupation as a psychological pressure cooker, with al-Rashidi veering between solicitude toward the hostages and threats to kill them, while the hostages’ attempts to mollify him led to an outbreak of Stockholm syndrome (after the standoff ended, female hostages pretended he was a hostage to protect him). Without demonizing those involved, Macintyre provides a nuanced, perceptive analysis of the intense emotions roiling a high-stakes standoff. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Nagle reports in her brilliant, kaleidoscopic debut on the legal battles leading up to Sharp v. Murphy, the startling 2020 Supreme Court decision that upheld the terms of a 19th-century treaty granting the Muscogee Nation land for resettlement in Oklahoma. “I wrote this book because I wanted the story of this historic Supreme Court decision to be well documented,” but also “to catalog the cruelty of what [was] brushed aside” in popular discussion of the case, Nagle explains. She interweaves the complex courtroom drama with an empathetic, harrowing recap of the 1999 murder of George Jacobs by Patrick Murphy, the case which revealed that the Muscogee Nation’s reservation had never officially been dissolved. Another strand traces the history of the 19th-century forced removal of Native peoples from the Southeast to Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own ancestor, Cherokee Nation leader Major Ridge, who was among those who signed away the Cherokee homeland and was murdered for the perceived betrayal. This family saga is the most complex and rewarding part of the story; Major Ridge hoped the relocation would save his people’s lives, as President Andrew Jackson (a nefarious presence in Nagle’s story) had threatened to chase them “into the sea.” Nagle’s narrative is lucid and moving, especially as she uses archival sources to recreate the mounting terror experienced by Native peoples in the Southeast as violent mobs of outsiders swarmed onto their land. It’s a showstopper. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel)shares an entrancing collection of stories and essays celebrating visual art. The author, who flirted with painting in college before “plung[ing] into the etheric realm of language,” opens the volume with 12 short stories informed by artists and artworks, including a trippy meditation inspired by an abstract painting by Julian Hoeber, in which Lethem personifies a “Subjective Fog”—loosely, a liminal space “where one margin encounters another.” Another story, which draws from the work of multimedia artist Fred Tomaselli, examines the frenetic impulse, and inherent impossibility, of collection (“A ‘real’ collector tolerated the slippage, the loose and therefore implicitly temporary nature of his hoard... [but] You glued shit to backgrounds like a maniac,” says the unnamed narrator). Elsewhere, Lethem pays tribute to the graffiti of his 1970s and ’80s New York City youth and sings the praises of comics artist Chester Brown. Combining mind-bending intellectual meditations with a visceral delight in his subject, Lethem’s electric prose animates the proceedings (of artist Katie Merz, he notes that she paints on buildings, “though it might appear more as though she’s peeled off their skin, to reveal networks of information agitating beneath”). The result is a transfixing look at what it means to make, and admire, art. Illus. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Anderson draws on his tenacious rise to rap fame in this openhearted debut guide to personal growth. During a period of depression after college, the author embarked on what became a lifelong journey of “self-reflection” to become his “best self.” Boiling down what he’s learned, he outlines five general principles—accept, strategize, try, trust, and manifest—through stories from his career. Examples include how, as a teen, he “strategized” to grow his network by performing on a weekly program for young rappers at a local radio station (where he met Kanye West, who’d go on to sign Anderson to his label), and “manifested” success by learning to meditate, which allowed him to gain the “positive energy” to attract business opportunities. While the suggested practices (meditation, journaling, therapy) aren’t groundbreaking, the unpretentious tone and candid anecdotes make Anderson a surprisingly relatable guide, offering especially solid wisdom on forgiveness and how to use discomfort as fuel for growth. Readers need not be hip-hop fans to find inspiration here. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

High school need not be a de facto pipeline to college, according to this illuminating outing from journalist Klein (50 Hikes in Orange County). Outlining how the national obsession with higher education took hold, she traces how well-meaning initiatives in the early 2000s to send kids to four-year colleges led to high schools becoming reliant on strict curricula and being evaluated for the number of college-bound grads they churned out. This, in turn, fueled a cultural focus on higher education that made college degrees standard for jobs that had never before required them and left those whose “natural talents [lie] outside the classroom” unfulfilled and, often, mired in student loan debt. Klein encourages young people to consider whether college aligns with their interests, work habits, and desired careers, then details alternative paths, including apprenticeships and entrepreneurship. More broadly, she calls for such reforms as eliminating college degree requirements for certain government jobs and creating apprenticeship opportunities in white-collar fields like banking. The author’s reconsideration of what professional success means is thought-provoking, and while readers might raise their eyebrows at some of the career paths outlined here (including social media influencing), they’ll be inspired by the colorful and often fascinating interviews with those who skipped the college degree yet found fulfillment in jobs ranging from sound design to PR. It’s a valuable reassessment of America’s educational system. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Financial Times art critic Wullschläger (Chagall) delivers a scrupulous biography of impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926). Beginning with his childhood in Paris and Le Havre, she touches on his family (“Resourcefulness, adaptability, robust health, and a resolutely urban outlook were the legacy of [his] grandparents”), his teenage stint as a caricaturist, his military service, and the genesis of his artistic career. But the focus lies in how the women he loved shaped his creative life. According to Wullschläger, Monet “made his reputation” painting his future wife Camille Doncieux in such works as The Woman in a Green Dress, in which he simultaneously showed off and “disguised” his subject by depicting her as she walked away. Also explored are the period of “intense introspection” during Camille’s illness leading up her 1879 death that fueled Monet’s obsessive work on pastorals, and the new productivity he harnessed during his courtship with and eventual marriage to Alice Hoschedé, who inspired Monet with her “strength” and “her faith in him and ambition for him.” Refreshingly, Wullschläger doesn’t shy away from Monet’s less savory characteristics, including his rage, emotional manipulation, and profligate spending, bringing to life a man whose creative genius was inseparable from his flawed humanity. Even readers well-versed in Monet’s life story will learn something new from this thorough and original reappraisal. (Sept.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the years of Monet’s birth and death.

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

The horrifying labor violations of meatpacking behemoth Tyson and the harrowing ordeal of the undocumented immigrant workforce that fought back are revealed in this shocking exposé from journalist Driver (More or Less Dead). The company’s ill-treatment of workers at a plant in Springdale, Ark., included startlingly unsafe conditions leading to accidents and subsequent cover-ups. In one incident, a toxic gas leak resulted in the hospitalization of 173 workers (managers insisted workers remain at their stations, even as some began to faint; afterward, the company forced workers to sign liability waivers). One of those workers, Plácido Leopoldo Arrue—whose story Driver follows closely—became seriously disabled by the exposure; he died of Covid in July 2020, likely made more vulnerable by the lung damage. Covid was the initial impetus for Driver’s project—in 2020, as meatpacking workers in cramped conditions fell ill, Driver began investigating. Her subjects were reluctant to communicate by phone, and so her story takes her on road trips across the South to conduct in-person interviews, an intrepid effort of gumshoe journalism resulting in an intimate, unprecedented glimpse of the lives of America’s undocumented workforce during the pandemic—which includes efforts by some workers to organize with a union and file lawsuits against Tyson. Throughout, Driver’s prose is sumptuous and empathetic (“Looking down... they see their faces reflected in a pool of blood,” she writes of workers on the assembly line). This is a tour de force. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink