Identity politics and social justice are on the menu in this hit-or-miss installment of Mariner’s annual anthology of the year’s best culinary and travel writing. Noting that “any discussion of food (or travel) that ignores power is incomplete,” editor Terry (Black Food) highlights themes of resistance, survival, queerness, and “the politics of pleasure.” Some of the essays explore sociocultural material with aplomb, including John Paul Brammer’s memoir of eating rattlesnake as part of his raucous coming of age as a gay boy in Oklahoma, and Henry Wismayer’s withering, incisive critique of the banality of modern tourism. Others amount to stolid soapboxing; Ayurella Horn-Muller, for example, hammers home the irony that some American farmworkers are food insecure, proving mostly that poorly paid people are poor without revealing much more. Some of the best essays focus raptly on the food, among them Giri Nathan’s shell-shocked homage to Ugly Baby, a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn known for its bizarre, searingly hot dishes. (“In Ugly Baby’s strange crucible, all my rules are suspended: I ate brain, and would probably eat human if it were wrapped in a banana leaf and sold to me with deceitful slivers of lemongrass, kra pow, and kaffir lime leaves.”) The result is a hodgepodge of the delectable and the dreary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Radio producer Long debuts with a serviceable recap of the career of singer Perry Como (1912–2001). Born to Italian immigrants in small-town Canonsburg, Pa., Como grew up influenced by the crooning styles of Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby. His career got off to a rocky start; after he joined the Ted Weems Orchestra as a vocalist in 1936, record executives found his style too similar to that of fellow crooner Crosby, though with time Como abandoned the “vocal fluctuations of his early efforts” for a “more consistent and rounded tone.” Long carefully traces Perry’s solo career after he left the Weems band in 1942, his hosting of numerous radio shows, and his career in television. Long also frames Como’s career against the backdrop of a rapidly changing entertainment industry, though the discussions of advances in record technology and the genesis of color TV sometimes preclude more complex insights into the subject’s character. It’s a solid overview of Como’s professional milestones, but readers seeking a deeper understanding of the man himself will be left wanting. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this evocative account, Velikonja (The Chosen Few), a Slovenian cultural studies scholar who has served as a visiting professor in Ukraine several times since the 2022 Russian invasion, provides snapshots of everyday life in the country while analyzing the protest art and rhetoric that has emerged in response to the war. “Not for a moment do I imagine encapsulating it in all its immensely complex and painful reality,” he writes. “These are more its fragments, chips that rolled toward me as much as I rolled toward them.” Some of the vignettes and photographs are especially resonant and eye-opening, including an exploration of how patriotic imagery has worked its way into the design of packaged foods, and a graffito of a fierce but adorable kitten getting ready for combat. Velikonja also reflects on how the war has shaped spoken language in Ukraine, including the ongoing minimization of the Russian language, which he relates to similarly heated linguistic politics in Slovenia. Velikonja manages to address some of the nuances of the conflict without straying from an overall condemnation of Russia (“There is no excuse for a full military attack”). With an eye for poignant detail and an urgent sense of the larger historical questions at hand, this makes for an immersive and unpredictable examination of war’s reverberations throughout society. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books, debuts with a comprehensive biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886–1973), founder of the early-20th-century avant-garde magazine The Little Review. Following her privileged upbringing in Indiana, Anderson’s drive for “self-expression” took her to Chicago, where she immersed herself in the burgeoning literary scene. Launched in 1914, The Little Review was initially intended as “a monthly magazine of criticism,” but it eventually published some of the era’s biggest experimental writers, including Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Moving to New York and later Paris, Anderson remained staunchly dedicated to her editorial vision, even when it risked alienating her readership, such as with editorials in support of anarchist Emma Goldman and the serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The latter, deemed obscene, led to criminal charges against Anderson and the U.S. Post Office burning issues of The Little Review. While tracking Anderson’s involvement with the more famous Ulysses obscenity trial, Morgan still keeps the story centered on her intriguing life story, including numerous creative and romantic relationships with women and her fascinatingly bizarre involvement with a commune that practiced the “Fourth Way,” a “labyrinthine system of manual labor, performance art, physical exercise, and psychological examination.” Readers will savor this enlightening depiction of a little-discussed but influential figure of both modernism and queer history. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This rollicking account from historian Gardner (The Earth Is All That Lasts) revisits the Wild West exploits of Wyatt Earp, an itinerant policeman known for his coolheadedness, and Doc Holliday, a part-time dentist and full-time gambling addict. Holliday saved Wyatt from getting jumped in Dodge City in 1878, and later became a regular in the Earp posse in Tombstone, Ariz., where Wyatt and his brothers Virgil and Morgan became lawmen. There they squared off against a gang known as the Cowboys, eventually precipitating the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday prevailed, but the Cowboys later assassinated Morgan, provoking the Earps and Holliday to a monthlong vengeance campaign that made national headlines. Gardner’s retelling of this famous incident paints a colorful, atmospheric panorama of the Wild West as an archipelago of saloons, gambling dens, and whorehouses where brutal violence was status quo. Gardner conveys it all in two-fisted prose that smacks of a Hollywood western; while he brings some nuance to the tale—highlighting, for instance, that Wyatt pivoted easily between lawbreaker and lawman—he still finds a lot to admire about the duo (“Their odd but endearing friendship [is] a bona fide saga if there ever was one”). The result is a raucous and entertaining slice of Americana. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this offbeat debut survey, paranormal historian Blanch details 13 deaths in cemeteries across his home state of Arizona, many of which he purports have become hot spots for supernatural activity. The most engrossing chapters concern grief-stricken Phoenix real estate agent Julian Holmes’s 1954 suicide at his wife, Margaret’s, grave; Holmes shot himself after laying flowers beside her headstone. Blanch also describes victims of freak accidents on cemetery grounds and graveyard employees who died of natural causes on the job, including security guard Barry Brutchey, who was found dead in his truck less than an hour after completing a patrol of the Glendale Memorial Park Cemetery. As Blanch runs through his list of cases in brief, photo-heavy chapters, he occasionally details efforts by amateur ghost hunters to communicate with the deceased at the sites of their death, but the book’s ghost hunting through line is thin. Still, Blanch’s concise recollections of human tragedies are affecting. For true crime obsessives, this is worth a look. Photos. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Philosopher Rowlands (The Philosopher and the Wolf) weaves together philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and personal anecdote for an expansive look at how memory shapes identity. Memories are made, preserved, and recalled in ways that imbue them with inaccuracies, Rowland notes, explaining that each time a memory’s called up, it must be repackaged for long-term storage, a process wherein links are drawn between previously unconnected neurons; over time, repeated reconsolidations can warp the memory. Such edits may be a flaw of the human brain—or, as Rowlands suggests, an intentional means of ensuring memories are retained by tailoring them to better fit one’s current context. (The author describes a childhood memory in which his father now looks like an “old man”—a way of retaining the memory in the absence of a ready image of his father’s younger face.) He also explores how memories can be passed from one person to another, with children, for example, sometimes absorbing their parents’ memories. Throughout, Rowlands provides perceptive insights into how the brain negotiates the past, how memory shapes the self, and how identity is therefore best understood as a complex, shifting entity that exists beyond “the spatial boundaries of your body” and experience. (“The question of when and where you begin and when and where you end has no straightforward answer,” he observes.) The result is a mind-expanding meditation on what humans recall and why. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Hwang (Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop) illuminates her ardent relationship with literature with this affable memoir in essays. In each entry, Hwang offers readers advice for interacting with books while reflecting on her own history with reading and writing. Subjects range from the lighthearted, as when Hwang advises on how to fit snippets of reading time into a busy day, to the profound, as in the essay “Read Books That Preserve Your Sense of Self,” in which she considers how to use literature to protect one’s individuality in a consumerist age. “The moment we welcome books into ourselves, we’re bravely opening the door to our hearts,” Hwang writes, making an earnest and convincing argument that the best antidote to cynicism is time spent inside someone else’s mind. She illustrates her point in the book’s penultimate chapter, in which she describes the vast array of books her family and friends are reading, highlighting how each one is quietly expanding their perspectives. Dedicated bibliophiles and casual readers alike will adore this. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Swift (The Bughouse), an English professor at Northeastern University London, spotlights the Theatre, the London playhouse that gave William Shakespeare his start, in this smart mix of history and literary criticism. After detailing the building of the Theatre by former actor James Burbage in 1576, Swift widens his lens, exploring how playhouses created tension with churches in Elizabethan London—preachers viewed them as a corrupting influence—and how the economics of livery companies, in which men typically spent seven years as an apprentice learning a trade from a master, shaped local culture, including the way playhouses worked. Swift suggests Shakespeare underwent a sort of writing apprenticeship at the Theatre, studying plays and collaborating with older, more accomplished playwrights, like George Peele. Two of Shakespeare’s most well-known works, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were written during his tenure at the Theatre and contain references to trades, demonstrating the centrality of livery companies at the time, Swift posits. The author’s arguments don’t always land—his suggestion that the actor Richard Burbage named his children after Shakespeare’s characters, for instance, doesn’t completely convince—but he succeeds in elucidating the economics and culture that gave rise to a literary icon. Readers will be reminded that even a writer as highly regarded as Shakespeare once needed to learn and practice his craft. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This expansive debut survey showcases the visual work of Rick Fröberg (1968–2023), an artist and musician best known for his fliers, posters, and other artwork promoting the Southern California punk scene. Fröberg’s experimental offset printing techniques, parodies of animation art and corporate logos, and frantic compositions graced posters for bands like Rocket from the Crypt and the New Pornographers, and labels like Headhunter Records and Sub Pop. But this volume goes well beyond Fröberg’s rock art, devoting chapters to his fine art prints, sketches, paintings, digital art, and more. Despite his embrace of imperfection and “direct stokes, not masterstrokes,” Fröberg was an exceptional craftsman, the collection shows, equally capable of startlingly realistic traditional illustration, Cubism-inspired abstract art, and outlandish cartoon pastiches in the style of 1960s underground comix. The only disappointment is the book’s lack of text; aside from a foreword, an afterword, and a brief artist’s statement, there’s no commentary on the art, not even labels explaining when or why a piece was produced. It’s a vivid retrospective of an eclectic artist that will leave some fans itching to know more. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink