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

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

An undocumented Harvard student faces an uncertain future in the scorching first novel from Villavicencio (The Undocumented Americans, a memoir). Catalina Ituralde, who was born in Ecuador and has lived in the U.S. since she was five, begins her senior year in fall 2010 with cautious hope, because the DREAM Act bill, which would offer her permanent protection from deportation, is expected to finally be taken up by Congress. Flashbacks reveal her painful life story and determination to succeed. When she’s a baby, her parents die in car crash in Cotopaxi and she’s eventually brought to her grandparents in Queens. As a student, she quickly becomes an overachiever, and by high school she’s a published journalist. While working at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, she meets legacy student Nathaniel Wheeler, who’s obsessed with his anthropological research on the Incas but struggles to understand the experience of contemporary Ecuadorians. When the DREAM Act fails in November, Catalina spirals into a mental health crisis (“All my body felt was a sinking tired dread”). Villavicencio expertly illuminates Catalina’s precarity and Nathaniel’s tokenizing of other cultures. The result is a moving coming-of-age novel that doubles as a no-holds-barred cultural critique. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Dineen’s exciting and unsettling dystopian debut, a mother strives to protect her children amid climate devastation and political violence. The story takes place in an unnamed English-speaking city, where Cass raises her 10-month-old daughter Daisy and two young stepchildren­­ while her doctor husband, Nathaniel, works abroad in a war zone. The city is terrorized by a group of male climate activists who ironically call themselves Gaia, and when they start murdering people at random in their twisted bid to save the planet, Cass makes her escape. Her controlling mother-in-law, Eden, convinces her and the children to settle with Eden’s family in a “special small” utopia called Eigleath. There, Nathaniel’s brother Arthur introduces Cass to a group of people who blame capitalism and monogamy for the planet’s woes and believe Earth can be healed only by “connect[ing] humankind back to the religion of the Great Mothers.” Then their idealistic community collapses and its members find themselves ruled by a drug cartel. Not all of the plot points are fully developed, but Dineen delivers plenty of bracing details of extreme heat and water shortages, making her portrait of Cass’s dedication to her family all the more wrenching. Readers will be eager to see what Dineen does next. Agent: Eleanor Birne, PEW Literary. (July)

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

The New York City neighborhood that nourished the 1960s folk explosion is celebrated—and its lapse into upscale sterility mourned—in this colorful account. Rolling Stone journalist Browne (So Many Roads) traces four decades of music-making in Greenwich Village, starting in the 1950s, when a modern folk style—pioneered by the likes of Dave Van Ronk—took shape in coffeehouses, nightclubs, and Washington Square Park’s informal concerts. From there, Browne explores the 1960s scene that incubated such superstars as Bob Dylan and Judy Collins and transformed the Village from a working-class enclave into a hippie tourist destination, and chronicles the scene’s decline in the 1980s as soaring rents displaced artists and musicians. The author paints a vivid portrait of infectious creativity and socioeconomic volatility, highlighting the neighborhood’s fashions (“Milling about outside of clubs like the Night Owl, the young men, with their long hair, flowered shirts, pinstriped bell bottoms, and chinos, wanted desperately to resemble a Beatle or a Rolling Stone”) and turf battles between white residents and the racially integrated crowds the folkies brought in. Evocative prose enlivens this captivating ode to a storied chapter of pop culture history. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and essayist Ugrešić (The Culture of Lies), who died in 2023, delivers an incisive critique of the nationalist and patriarchal literary establishment that arose in Croatia following the 1992 dissolution of Yugoslavia. Presented as an interview with critic Merima Omeragić , the treatise tackles such subjects as the subversiveness of children’s fiction. Ugrešić argues that the absurdity and irony found throughout young people’s literature undermine the “pomposity” and “imprimatur of the grand” associated with national literary canons. She excoriates former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman , who spearheaded the post-Yugoslav “cultural libricide” in which non-Croatian literature was purged from libraries, and refutes the belief held by “cultural conservatives” that “only through one’s national literature is it possible to come to world literature,” explaining how she instead paved her own path to the international stage through defiance and subversion. (Ugrešić ’s insistence on identifying as Yugoslav rather than Croatian, as well as her feminist novels, caused the media to brand her as a “witch.”) Ugrešić expresses a refreshing commitment to the “invisible” space of literature where the participation of one great reader is enough to provide fulfillment. Lovers of international literature will be energized by this bracing tonic. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Spicer debuts with a captivating memoir of her quest to uncover her mother’s wartime secrets. Agnes Spicer, who was born in 1922 Russia as Rosa Butorina, arrived in Canada in 1948, having married a soldier who freed her from Nazi internment. Spicer recalls how her mother’s adventuresome war stories (e.g., dodging mines while swimming across the Rhine) never jibed with darker memories (“Forced marches. Eating bark from the trees”) that came out during late-night vodka sessions with “the Red Army Choir on the hi-fi.” Spicer narrates her “journalistic effort to piece it all together,” which included a 1991 meetup with a Russian aunt who revealed Agnes had eloped to Ukraine in 1941 with an abusive secret police officer but quickly fled him to join the Red Army. Further research trips take a surprise turn, as Spicer discovers Agnes likely served as a translator in the Nazi camps where she was interred, and was sought for decades afterward by the KGB as a traitor. Spicer unravels her tale at a tantalizing pace, building a kaleidoscopic portrait of her enigmatic mother (who never sits with her back to the door and is revealed to be an expert knife-thrower during moments of PTSD-like hypervigilance). The result is both a wrenching depiction of a woman determined to bury her past and an eye-opening exploration of the fate of WWII’s Soviet POWs. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mathematician Gerhardssen’s intricately plotted if slightly undercooked latest Hammarby murder squad mystery (after Black Ice) finds Stockholm DCI Conny Sjøberg and his team investigating the killing of a man with a spotless reputation. After soccer coach Sven-Gunnar Erlendsson is shot in the neck, execution-style, while returning home from a poker club meeting, Sjøberg and his cohorts pursue a school of red herrings, before most of the investigators conclude that Erlendsson, who spent his free time handing out clothes and food to Stockholm’s homeless population, had no real enemies. That changes when math whiz Hedvig “Walleye” Wallin, an underestimated widow who regularly clashes with Sjøberg, starts to see through Erlendsson’s supposed sainthood while reviewing video evidence, then links him to the recent disappearance of two young girls. Gerhardssen gives each of her investigators room to shine, but her decision to reveal the killer two-thirds of the way through the novel doesn’t pay off, resulting in a somewhat flimsy finale. On a brighter note, the ending leaves plenty of intriguing loose ends for Gerhardssen to pick up in future installments. Series fans will enjoy themselves. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/02/2024 | Details & Permalink