My wife has a comedy show this evening, so I’ll be checking in as I can on my phone. So much news these days, it is just dizzying. Here are a few author reactions to recent events on X/Twitter, followed by our usual list of notable new nonfiction.
Full text of the above tweet without having to click through:
If you think Trump is winning because another one of his compromised loyalists just enabled him, he’s really not
Jack Smith will appeal
Trump will still be sentenced in September
Judge Chutkan will still oversee the Jan 6th tribunal
There will still be more Trump trials
We are still going to show up to #VoteBlue in November to #StopProject2025
Try tweeting something positive just one time, Rob. We never give up on fighting for our democracy#TheResistance2024
And with a special nod to anotherdemocrat, from a couple weeks ago:
And don’t forget about our Blue Wave Special over at The Literate Lizard. The list is up to around one hundred books for all ages, discounted 20% through Election Day.
But I know we all need a little downtime as well, even as we work to create that Big Blue Wave, so we also are discounting some books for summertime vacay, when the reading is easy.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld, by Dan Slater. In the early 1900s, prior to World War I, New York City was a vortex of vice and corruption. On the Lower East Side, then the most crowded ghetto on earth, Eastern European Jews formed a dense web of crime syndicates. Gangs of horse poisoners and casino owners, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and thugs, jockeyed for dominance while their family members and neighbors toiled in the unregulated garment industry. But when the notorious murder of a gambler attracted global attention, a coterie of affluent German-Jewish uptowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Worried about the anti-immigration lobby and the uncertain future of Jewish Americans, the uptowners marshalled a strictly off-the-books vice squad led by an ambitious young reformer. The squad, known as the Incorruptibles, took the fight to the heart of crime in the city, waging war on the sin they saw as threatening the future of their community. Their efforts, however, led to unforeseen consequences in the form of a new mobster class who realized, in the country’s burgeoning reform efforts, unprecedented opportunities to amass power. “If you take your reading pleasures with a shot of unwholesome and a glass of irredeemable, then Dan Slater’s hurly burly new account of old-time New York fixers, bent pols, middle pocket cake eaters, East Side Joan of Arcs, rods, rummys, Abe the Just Rothstein and his racketeer son Arnold is just the pipe for you.”—Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Other Side of Prospect
- Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun, by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden. Behind the internet's viral "Universe 25" experiment and Robert C. O'Brien's iconic novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Secret of NIMH, was one scientist who set out to change the way we view our fellow man — using rats. After the Civil War and throughout the twentieth century, cities in northern American states absorbed a huge increase in populations, particularly of immigrants and African Americans from southern states. City governments responded by creating new regulations that were often segregationist — corralling black Americans, for example, into small, increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods, or into high-rise “projects.”
Enter John B. Calhoun, an ecologist employed by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of overcrowding on rats. From 1947 to 1977, Calhoun built a series of sprawling habitats in which a rat’s every need was met—except space. The results were cataclysmic. Did a similar fate await our own teeming cities? Rat City is the first book to tell the story of Calhoun’s experiments, and their extraordinary influence — an enthralling record of urban design and dystopian science. "John Calhoun epitomized the scientist in postwar America: ambitious, rigorous, and occasionally deluded, with lab mice at his feet and the weight of the world on his shoulders. Rat City deftly explores his vision and its reverberations on the social life of Americans, with our lonely crowds, empty skyscrapers, and psychotic incels. It's history that feels all too relevant." -Dan Piepenbring, co-author of NYT bestseller The Beautiful Ones
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The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, by Zack Beauchamp. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation’s birth. In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change. Brilliantly combining political history and reportage, Beauchamp reveals how the United States was the birthplace of this strange and harrowing authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in diverse nations including Hungary, Israel, and India. “A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the different stages of democracy’s life-threatening illness in Hungary, Israel, India, and the United States, along with a prescription for nursing democracy back to health.”—Heather Cox Richardson , author of Democracy Awakening
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The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA, by Jesse Katz. Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA’s most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the gang who drove him to do it. "With admirable clarity and compassion, Katz unravels a complex narrative that has no easy answers ... Abstaining from painting heroes or villains, Katz offers instead a plethora of thoughtful, nuanced profiles and a zoomed-out view of immigrant L.A., its street vendors, its gangs, and its intricacies. The result is relentless, multi-faceted, and incisive."
—Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
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Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, by Andrea Freeman. In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.
From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that U.S. food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target marginalized communities, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground nourishes readers with jaw-dropping stories and revelatory data about the use of food as a tool of oppression. This passionate book enlightens and enrages. A glass of milk will never be the same."—Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men
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Telltale Hearts: A Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story, by Dean-David Schillinger, MD. For over four decades, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger has been a witness to the evolution of public health in America. From his days as a young, bright eyed resident to the Chief of Internal Medicine at one of the country's largest public hospitals, Schillinger has seen thousands of patients and observed how our healthcare system can both work for and against them. Yet, it wasn't insurance or improved medical tests that mattered most; it was simply listening to his patients. In Telltale Hearts, Schillinger takes readers into the exam rooms of a public hospital as he recounts his various experiences he's had with patients and how listening to their stories, their backgrounds and more, revolutionized his own approach to medicine. In a hospital that serves mostly low income and marginalized populations, it was never just the injury or ailment that was the whole story but rather the social, political and racial circumstances that led patients to the hospital in the first place. A woman who refuses to take her pills actually cannot swallow them to begin with while another who seems to be skipping her insulin injections has a family member who is stealing them. A patient with Type 2 diabetes doesn't just suffer from high blood sugar but has consistently lived in a food desert where sugary beverages and unhealthy food were the only options. With each story and each patient, Schillinger urges us to look at how listening to patients not only can lead to better care in a hospital, but a more empathetic approach to public health in general. Written with compassion and introspection, Telltale Hearts is a moving portrait of modern medicine and an urgent call for change in how we, as a society, take care of our own.
- Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, by Rachel Kousser. By 330 B.C.E., Alexander the Great had reached the pinnacle of success. Or so it seemed. He had defeated the Persian ruler Darius III and seized the capital city of Persepolis. His exhausted and traumatized soldiers were ready to return home to Macedonia. Yet Alexander had other plans. Alexander’s unrelenting desire to press on resulted in a perilous seven-year journey through the unknown eastern borderlands of the Persian empire that would test the great conqueror’s physical and mental limits. He faced challenges from the natural world, moving through deadly monsoons and extreme temperatures; from a rotating cast of well-matched adversaries, who conspired against him at every turn; and even from his own men, who questioned his motives and distrusted the very beliefs on which Alexander built his empire. This incredible sweep of time, culminating with his death in 323 BC at the age of 32, would come to determine Alexander’s legacy and shape the empire he left behind. “An expert scholar and dramatic story-teller, she has woven ancient literary and archaeological sources into an exciting narrative that invites us into Alexander’s world and shows the significance of understanding that world today.” — Joy Connolly, President, American Council of Learned Societies
- Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, by Kathleen Sheppard. The history of Egyptology is often told as yet one more grand narrative of powerful men striving to seize the day and the precious artifacts for their competing homelands. But that is only half of the story. During the so-called Golden Age of Exploration, there were women working and exploring before Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Before men even conceived of claiming the story for themselves, women were working in Egypt to lay the groundwork for all future exploration. Kathleen Sheppard brings the untold stories of these women back into this narrative. "In this lively, absorbing revisionist account of the golden age of archaeology in Egypt, Kathleen Sheppard brings to brilliant life a now-forgotten network of remarkable women whose work enabled the headline-grabbing discoveries of their more celebrated male colleagues and changed Egyptology forever." - Lynne Olson, author of Empress of the Nile
- Antiracism as Daily Practice: Refuse Shame, Change White Communities, and Help Create a Just World, by Jennifer Harvey. Full of real life stories, this book shows how vital it is for white people to engage in and with our families, through our social networks, in our neighborhoods, and at our jobs to make antiracism a daily living commitment. We have real power in our relationships with other white people—and not enough of us have used it. Dr. Harvey explains why we white people struggle with knowing what to do about racism, and explores the significance of emotions like grief and anger (as well as the harmful role of shame) in really reckoning with the transformation and change needed in our communities to become the partners in justice that Black communities and other communities of color need and deserve. Not only is such transformation vital to the well-being of U.S. democracy. It’s vital to the freedom and wholeness of white people too. “Antiracism as Daily Practice calls us deeper into the joy of justice even as we face the hard tasks of loving ourselves and transforming our communities.... For all those seeking soul-nourishing strength to do justice daily this book is a must read!"—Dr. Melanie L. Harris, Professor of Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology at Wake Forest University
- The Lucky Ones: A Memoir, by Zara Chowdhary. In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India’s prime minister, sending the “world’s largest democracy” hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism. “Easily the best memoir coming out of South Asia in recent years, The Lucky Ones is essential reading for anyone who loves great writing, told true and straight as an arrow to the heart.”—Suketu Mehta, author of Pulitzer Finalist Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
- The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession, by Amy Stewart. When Amy Stewart discovered a community of tree collectors, she expected to meet horticultural fanatics driven to plant every species of oak or maple. But she also discovered that the urge to collect trees springs from something deeper and more profound: longing for community, a vision for the future, or a path to healing and reconciliation. In this slyly humorous, informative, often poignant volume, Stewart brings us captivating stories of fifty people who spend their lives in pursuit of rare and wonderful trees and are transformed in the process. Stewart populates this lively compendium with her own hand-drawn watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people and their trees, interspersed with side trips to investigate famous tree collections, arboreal glossaries, and even tips for “unauthorized” forestry. “Reading The Tree Collectors feels like sitting down and having the best kind of coffee date with one fascinating person after another.”—Kathryn Aalto, author of Writing Wild
- The Big Freeze: A Reporter's Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility, by Natalie Lampert. What was once science fiction is now simply science: Fertility can be frozen in time. Between 2009 and 2022, more than 100,000 women in the United States opted to freeze their eggs. Along with in vitro fertilization, egg freezing is touted as a way for women to “have it all” by conquering their biological clocks, in line with the global trend of delaying childbirth. A generation after the Pill, this revolutionary technology offers a new kind of freedom for women. But does egg freezing give women real agency or just the illusion of it? “Since reproductive freedom and choice cannot coexist with ignorance, The Big Freeze is a dream come true. The science, promise, emotion, commerce, culture, history, failings, future, personal, and political of the fertility industry: It’s all here in Lampert’s rigorous, generous, monumental work. I’m simply thrilled this book exists; no one even vaguely considering assisted reproduction should be without it.”—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth and Human Blues
- Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist, by Jasmin Graham. Sharks have been on this planet for over 400 million years, so there is a lot they can teach us about survival and adaptability. For example: how do sharks, which unlike other fish are denser than water, stay afloat? They keep moving. When Jasmin Graham, an award-winning young shark scientist, started to feel that the traditional path to becoming a marine biologist was pulling her under, she remembered this important lesson: keep moving forward.
If navigating the choppy waters of traditional academic study was no longer worth it, then that meant creating an ocean of her own. Jasmin became an independent researcher: a rogue shark scientist, and ultimately joined with three other Black women to form Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS), an organization dedicated to providing support and opportunities for other young women of color. “Sharks Don’t Sink is a compelling tale of resilience, passion, and the transformative power of empathy and knowledge. Through Graham’s eyes, we not only gain a newfound appreciation for these incredible creatures but also of Graham’s own journey to becoming a voice for the voiceless.”—Weike Wang, author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay
- Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion, by Michael Taylor. When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country’s southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the “first” ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years—as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures—everything changed. Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind’s place in the world. "In this stunning work of popular history, historian Michael Taylor shows how the discovery of dinosaurs triggered a domino effect that shook the foundations of Western culture. A most engrossing book of surprises and revelations."— Steve Brusatte, New York Times best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.
- The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, by Rachelle Bergstein. Everyone knows Judy Blume.
Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century?
In The Genius of Judy, her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular children with genuine thoughts and problems. But behind those deceptively simple tales, Blume explored the pillars of the growing women’s rights movement, in which girls and women were entitled to careers, bodily autonomy, fulfilling relationships, and even sexual pleasure. Blume wasn’t trying to be a revolutionary—she just wanted to tell honest stories—but in doing so, she created a cohesive, culture-altering vision of modern adolescence.
Blume’s bravery provoked backlash, making her the country’s most-banned author in the mid-1980s. Thankfully, her works withstood those culture wars and it’s no coincidence that Blume has resurfaced as a cultural touchstone now. “A timely appreciation of an author who indeed 'represent[ed] something much bigger than herself'—and still does.”—Kirkus Reviews
- Drop In: The Gender Rebels Who Changed the Face of Skateboarding, by Deborah Stoll.
Like the rest of the world, skateboarding has long been patriarchal. In the 70s, it personified the punk rock, lock-up-your-daughters, middle-finger-to-the-man ethos. In the 80s, it was Miami Vice soundtracks and parachute pants, neon graphics and fingerless gloves. In the 90s it was New York City—graffiti, hip-hop, and skating in the street. Rarely did you see a woman’s name in a skate video—either on a deck or behind the lens. The four skateboarders at the heart of Drop In defied expectations of gender, talent, physical ability, and mental capacity to fight the status quo....Drop In spotlights their paths from rebellious outsiders to recognized pioneers on the historic stage of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, where skateboarding made its debut. Their experiences reveal a side of skateboarding that’s never been recorded, amplifying voices that have, for too long, gone unheard. “Drop In is a must-read for anyone dedicated to fighting for equality; it’s a cultural road map about refusing to accept the status quo, no matter your gender, identity, or race." — Billie Jean King
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