In 1938, when the Federal Theater Project was accused of being subversive by the House Un-American Activities Committee, comments by its director—that the theater operated with “a certain Marlowesque madness”—prompted Alabama congressman Joe Starnes to inquire if “Marlowe” was a communist. Such is one of many ways that, as this whip-smart study from Shakespeare scholar Garber (Shakepeare in Bloomsbury) finds, literature and poetry unexpectedly reared their heads during HUAC proceedings. Garber explores how the durability of works by Shakespeare, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and others allows them to be taken up and used to exact “revenge” in the present. For example, Edward R. Murrow’s investigative reporting on McCarthy drew heavily from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, giving Murrow tools to critique McCarthy’s power. Elsewhere, the author spotlights contemporaries like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Paul Robeson, who wrote new lyrics to battle HUAC, and the bastardization of the Pledge of Allegiance, an originally rhyming poem from 1892 that was transformed by anticommunist Cold Warriors into a bulky mouthful at the height of HUAC persecution. Along the way, Garber herself exacts some poetic revenge against McCarthy, such as in a segment comparing his waffling on how many communists were employed by the federal government—first 205, later 57—with the blustering of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Though somewhat academic in its presentation, this densely woven analysis still packs a punch. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hideki Tojo, the Japanese general and wartime prime minister, embodied the self-delusions that drove Japan to catastrophe in WWII, according to this probing biography. Historian Mauch (Sailor Diplomat) paints Tojo as a canny political operator who was able to balance the insubordinate aggressiveness prevalent in the prewar Imperial Japanese Army with a near-religious reverence for Emperor Hirohito’s rule. For instance, Tojo had opposed coup attempts by right-wing officers who wanted Japan to go to war with China, but then as a commander he disobeyed orders himself, launching an unsanctioned invasion of China that precipitated the war. Similarly, as a mastermind behind Pearl Harbor, Tojo seemed to understand that mobilizing industrial power was the key to victory in a long war of attrition, but at the same time downplayed the U.S.’s greater industrial resources in favor of fanciful notions that Japan’s superior martial spirit, inspired by devotion to the emperor, would wear down the Americans. There’s drama in Mauch’s narrative as Tojo plots strategy, navigates intrigues—after a subordinate was assassinated by a rival army faction, he dressed himself in the victim’s bloodstained uniform and “vowed revenge”—and ends up, at his war crimes trial, as an almost tragic case of misguided soldierly virtue, acknowledging his atrocities but still defending his cause. It’s an insightful study of malignant ideology leading to disaster. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Oppenheimer (Squirrel Hill) contends in this impressive biography that Judy Blume “rewired the English-speaking world’s expectations of what literature for young people could be.” Born into a progressive, Jewish family in New Jersey in 1938, Blume followed a traditional path to college, marriage, and early motherhood. When her children were young, she decided to find work (“I had to do something, you know?”) and began writing. Her early attempts at children’s picture books and novels were rejected by publishers, but she continued writing and revising her work, and in 1970 published her breakthrough young adult novel, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, which dealt with menstruation and religion in a manner that aligned with the genre’s move to realism, Oppenheimer explains. Over the next five years, Blume published eight more books, including Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Deenie. Frankness without moralism or didacticism became her trademark, and she didn’t shy away from writing about sexuality and puberty. Her work was often targeted in book bans, prompting Blume to become an anti-censorship advocate. Along with her professional career, Oppenheimer provides insights into Blume’s personal life, including the dissonance she felt being seen as “a sage, a guru” by children and parents while simultaneously going through a divorce. Fans will be delighted. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Devoto (The Team) recalls seven years of running a book club in an Alabama women’s prison in this eye-opening memoir. Devoto’s initial goal was to “go into the facility once a month, teach a class about a particular book or author, and hopefully bring some relaxation and new knowledge to the women incarcerated there.” She soon realized, however, that her vision of jumping straight into discussions about prose style were unrealistic, and she focused instead on learning what put the women behind bars. Ms. Foley, who “looks like somebody’s grandmother, wisps of gray hair held back by wire-rimmed glasses,” was incarcerated for killing her abusive ex-husband; Val, the prison librarian, hit a woman while driving drunk. As the book club turned to discussions of high school standards like To Kill a Mockingbird and more complex fare including Middlesex, Devoto faced resistance from prison staff who arbitrarily barred her from bringing in certain books, magazines, and snacks. Her persistence, and her insistence on viewing club members as more than the worst thing they’d ever done, offers inspiration as well as a quiet critique of the U.S. carceral system. Readers will be moved. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Weingarten, the president of the AFT, America’s largest educators’ union, debuts with a rousing inquiry into “what teachers do” and “why those who are afraid of freedom... try to stop” them. The book focuses on the onslaught faced by public school teachers during the two Trump administrations—in 2023 alone, she notes, 110 bills were presented in state legislatures attempting to curtail what teachers can and cannot do. In New Hampshire, the state education commissioner even set up a website encouraging the public to report educators who were illegally teaching about racism. The book contains a wealth of such examples from around the country, which Weingarten presents as an effort not only to smash the foundations of the American public school system but to pave the way for fascism, which she defines as the abandonment of logic and empirical evidence in favor of fanciful truths that the “leader” invents and espouses to his acolytes, who parrot them back as a show of loyalty. Public school teachers, she astutely observes, do four things that make them the number one enemies of fascism and its aims: impart critical thinking skills, create welcoming communities, foster lower-class students’ ability to achieve economic success, and serves as anchors of the labor movement. It adds up to a galvanizing portrait of teachers as society’s best bulwarks against anti-intellectualism and retrograde thinking. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Could an airplane evacuate two American medical professionals with Ebola from West Africa without infecting the crew? That’s the dire question at the heart of this gripping real-life thriller from journalist and former paramedic Hazzard (American Sirens). The saga beings with an unexpected 2014 phone call from the State Department to Phoenix Air’s COO, inquiring if the company’s untested biocontainment tent could be used to fly a critically ill doctor, Kent Brantly, and a volunteer, Nancy Writebol, from the “epicenter of the deadliest Ebola outbreak in human history.” Despite the “huge, almost incalculable” risk, Phoenix Air, which first made its name flying explosives, including Muammar Gadhafi’s “suitcase nuke,” fulfilled its reputation of “saying yes when everybody else said no.” The author documents the astonishing week-and-a-half mission with tense velocity, as Phoenix Air rapidly develops and tests a protocol to prevent “the scariest death imaginable” using mostly PPE from Home Depot. Numerous roadblocks occur during the two rescue flights themselves, from the plane’s cabin not pressurizing to airports turning the jets away. Hazzard also spotlights the heroism of the doctors and volunteers in Liberia who found themselves caring for their own colleagues and the Emory University hospital staff who received the patients, juxtaposing this selfless determination to “save the saviors” with the concurrent “media shitstorm” that led to public hysteria and protests outside Emory. It’s an absolute nail-biter. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

University of Bristol comp lit lecturer Kosick (Material Poetics in Hemispheric America) delves in this comprehensive account into the history of the Alternative Press, a Detroit-based indie that from the 1960s to the 1990s published cutting-edge experimental art, poetry, and literature. It’s contributors—including Amiri Baraka, Robert Bly, Robert Creely, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginbsberg, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles—are a veritable who’s who of the late-20th-century American avant-garde, but in Kosick’s telling the press’s founding and early years are a story of local pride and tight-knit community. “We always wanted to publish our friends. Why would you want to publish your enemies?” quips Ken Mikolowski, who cofounded the press with his wife, Ann. It was over time, Kosick writes, that the Alternative Press built up trust with authors farther afield, becoming a flagship of the national and even the global avant garde. Kosick dedicates part of her account to highlighting the difficulty she encountered in her study of the press’s history, as much of its output has not been properly archived (a fact she chalks up partly to the underground press’s limited and idiosyncratic print runs, which ranged from bumper stickers to bookmarks, and partly to mainstream academia’s overlooking of broadsides printed in a city better known for churning out automobiles). It adds up to an evocative overview of a legendary publisher. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

A moral panic over a lurid sex scandal becomes culture war fodder for a polarized nation in this nuanced unearthing of a little-remembered episode in 1830s Prussia. Historian Clark (Revolutionary Spring) recaps how, in the sleepy university town of Königsberg, two Lutheran pastors, Johann Wilhelm Ebel and Heinrich Diestel, began to preach outlandish teachings, including that the universe emerged from the mixing of a “fire egg” with a “water egg.” Women from prominent families flocked to the “Ebelian” movement, and the attempts of “two female adherents... to eject their husbands from their house” over their newfound religious differences led to a torrent of public accusations against the group. Ebel in particular was singled out, accused of encouraging female followers to “engage in... sexual impropriety.” Rumors even circulated that two young women adherents had “died of exhaustion caused by excessive arousal.” What followed, Clark observes, was a remarkably modern “media storm.” The Ebelians became a flash point for a divided public that was easily riled about religion. The media, he explains, was built to cater to this appetite for controversy, and was rampant with disinformation. Clark astutely notes that, much like with today’s moral panics, concern about gender conformity seemed to be the panic’s prime motivator. (Ebel himself was described by one detractor as “a hermaphrodite.”) This meticulously researched history astonishes in its timeliness. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this ardent yet repetitive essay collection, author and activist Solnit (No Straight Road Takes You There) argues that social progress, while not always immediate or linear, is still occurring. Explaining that change is “invisible” over longer stretches of time, once the “baseline” has been forgotten, the author recaps the significant social advancements of the past several decades, including civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ equality, and the environmental movement. Along the way, she highlights the profound evolutions taking place within each issue. The fight for Indigenous rights and recognition, for example, has in recent years seen major strides forward, with federal lands being restored to tribal ownership and rapidly spreading public awareness that depicting Native Americans as “vanished, faded away, extinct” is offensive. The author’s optimism doesn’t cloud her ability to see the severity of today’s ongoing far-right backlash, but she does reinterpret it as a violent trashing of a dying old world that will lead to the birth of a new one—a world with a greater understanding of the “interconnection” between people, animals, and nature. While it’s a powerful idea, the author’s continual reworking of the phrase “beginnings are what come after endings” and constant reassertion that change will emerge “so subtly, so slowly” can come off like she’s trying to convince herself as much as readers. The result is a well-intentioned but faulty antidote against fatalism. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Larman (The Windsors at War) explores in this comprehensive account the critically overlooked second half of David Bowie’s career. The book opens in the late 1980s, when Bowie was recording albums and touring as a member of the rock band Tin Machine, before releasing a string of solo albums. Though none reached the heights of his 1970s and ’80s output, creative partnerships with such producers as Brian Eno helped Bowie go in new directions, from 1999’s heavily acoustic Hours to the industrial pop of 2002’s Heathens, and eventually return to critical and commercial relevance. After suffering a heart attack on stage in Prague in 2004, Bowie retired from touring and did not release a new album for 12 years; the critically lauded Blackstar came out only two days before his 2016 death. Drawing on a wealth of research, the author highlights the creative challenges faced by a star who was perceived to have “peaked long before... reach[ing] the age of forty,” and gives due to the “flawed but often brilliant moments” on Bowie’s path to reinventing himself. This casts fresh light on the rock star. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink