Once upon a time, and even in recent times, I would get a kick out of April Fool’s’ Day (sorry, I couldn’t decide between Fool’s or Fools’, so I went with both.) I enjoyed the silliness, the frequent brillance of the jokes. Even here on Daily Kos there were some great times. Any of you remember that April 1st early on in the reign of Daily Kos when the site was turned into an endless stream of Rick Astley videos? I forget the details...was it every embedded picture or every comment that was for a brief period transformed into a rickroll? Ah, April Fool’s’, I thought I was never gonna let you go, but now, when the daily news is filled with headlines that you think must be a hoax but are in fact cruel reality, I just don’t have the taste for it.
It’s been an amazing day dropping in on Senator Cory Booker’s amazing marathon speech, and not awaiting election results. On to this week’s notable new nonfiction…
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
This first book is the one I was hoping to review this week on its publication day, but I just couldn’t pull the reading, digesting and writing tasks together in time. Next week! But I can say it is wonderful, and has had me choking back tears of multiple emotions many times. Highly recommended.
- The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, by Sarah Kendzior. It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland -- and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road -- again and again.
Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events –- the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic –- reshape American life. Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future –- even though at times she struggles to believe it herself. "Kendzior is an absolutely terrific writer—a preeminent voice of her generation—and her love for this troubled country flows like a kind of lifeblood through her work....Every American, whatever their politics, will recognize a country that they love, that they miss—and that they might be able to reclaim." —Sebastian Junger
- Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. you know, I am a political junkie, but aat this point I have no interest in reading this book. I just want to know how we can stop Trump, get him out of politics, and rebuild what he has destroyed. I just don’t have the heart or the desire to rehash what went wrong.
- Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure, by Jennie Erin Smith. In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains of Colombia seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries, residents of certain villages near Medellín had suffered memory loss as they reached middle age, going on to die in their fifties. Lopera discovered that a unique genetic mutation was causing their rare hereditary form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Over the next forty years of working with the “paisa mutation” kindred, he went on to build a world-class research program in a region beset by violence and poverty.
In Valley of Forgetting, Jennie Erin Smith brings readers into the clinic, the laboratories, and the Medellín trial center where Lopera’s patients receive an experimental drug to see if Alzheimer’s can be averted. Findings from this unprecedented effort could hold the key to understanding and treating the disease, though it is unclear what, if anything, the families will receive in return. A fascinating book, and more relevant than ever in a time when the US government is slashing medical research funding into Alzheimer's.
- The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate's Quest to Die with Dignity, by Gianna Toboni. When Scott Dozier was sent to Nevada’s death row in 2007, convicted of a pair of grisly murders, he didn’t cry foul or embark upon a protracted innocence campaign. He sought instead to expedite his execution—to hasten his inevitable death. He decided he would rather face his end swiftly than die slowly in solitary confinement. In volunteering for execution, Dozier may have been unusual. But in the tortuous events that led his death date to be scheduled and rescheduled, planned and then stayed, his time on death row was anything but. “The death penalty has proven itself cruel, inequitable, and inconsistent with basic human values. With The Volunteer, Gianna Toboni offers an absorbing, essential, and deeply investigated look at a shameful and dysfunctional system. Through Scott Dozier's story, she shows us how even those who've been convicted of violent acts deserve our humanity.” —Sister Helen Prejean, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Man Walking
- Boat Baby: A Memoir, by Vicky Nguyen. Starting in 1975, Vietnam’s “boat people”—desperate families seeking freedom—fled the Communist government and violence in their country any way they could, usually by boat across the South China Sea. NBC news anchor Vicky Nguyen and her family were among them. Attacked at sea by pirates before reaching a refugee camp in Malaysia, Vicky’s family survived on rations and waited months until they were sponsored to go to America.
But deciding to leave and start a new life in a new country is half the story…figuring out how to be American is the other. Boat Baby is Vicky’s memoir of growing up in America with unconventional Vietnamese parents who didn’t always know how to bridge the cultural gaps. It’s a childhood filled with misadventures and misunderstandings, from almost stabbing the neighborhood racist with a butter knife to getting caught stealing Cosmo in the hope of learning Do You Really Think You Know Everything About Sex? “A love letter to all immigrant families. Vicky’s storytelling reels you in and leaves an unforgettable imprint. She honors her family, illustrates the power of grit and inspires us to keep our faith, especially in the face of adversity. A must read!”— Olivia Munn
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Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance, by Joe Dunthorne. When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.
Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory’s director, helping the Nazis to “improve” their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.” “Unburying family secrets—especially secrets this big, this profound—is painstaking and heartbreaking work. In the hands of a lesser writer, a story like this would collapse, become just a mush of uncertainty. But Dunthorne is a masterful guide, surefooted and diligent and honest and funny. We are with him, enthralled, every step of the way." —Menachem Kaiser, author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
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Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, by Richard Kreitner. Since ancient times, the Jewish people have recalled the story of Exodus and reflected on the implications of having been slaves. Did the tradition teach that Jews should speak out against slavery and oppression everywhere, or act cautiously to protect themselves in a hostile world?
In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.” “Fear No Pharaoh breaks new ground in Civil War history. A superb detective and storyteller, Kreitner not only illuminates the complex lives of nineteenth-century American Jews but also challenges his readers to reflect on the enduring intersection of faith, ethics, and national identity.” —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
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Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War, by John Ferling. On its 250th anniversary, a bold, comprehensive rendering of the world war that erupted out of America's battle for independence. Ferling highlights underestimated pivotal moments to reveal why the British should have put down the rebellion within a couple years of fighting. As European rivals France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic entered the fray, Britain's problems grew, but after seven long years, the war's outcome remained very much in doubt. Ferling assesses military and civilian leaders, the choices they faced, and the political, tactical, and strategic decisions they made as the war raged in North America, the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Asia, and on the high seas, affecting peoples and countries miles from American soil. “An eloquent and sweeping introduction to the world war that was the American Revolution. I cannot imagine a better opening shot to the 250th anniversaries of its key events.” —Kathleen DuVal, Cundill Prize-winning author of NATIVE NATIONS
- Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí, by Michele Gerber Klein. This long-awaited, definitive biography of Gala Dalí unmasks this famous yet little-known queen of the twentieth-century art world, who graced the canvases, inspired the poetry, and influenced the careers of her illustrious lovers and husbands with tenderness, courage, and agency.
Using previously undiscovered material, Surreal tells the riveting story of Gala Dalí, (1894-1982) who broke away from her cultured but penurious background in pre-Revolutionary Russia to live in Paris with both France’s most famous poet Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. By the time she met the budding artist Salvador Dalí in 1929, Gala was known as the Mother of Surrealism. She rapidly became his mentor and protector, marrying him in 1934 and subsequently engineering their vast fortune. Gala was a heroine whose originality captivated people wherever she went, and her life story has everything: size; glamour; drama; true love, twisted love; ambition; money; art; defiance; daring and sweeping social unrest. "Surreal takes us backstage at the endless performance piece that was the couple’s life’s work and life’s play—a salient ingredient—and reshuffles art history along the way. Pour a stiff Pernod or Absinthe, kick back, and enjoy this delightfully sparking read." — Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
- The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground, by Menno Schilthuizen. Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that’s exactly what Dutch scientist Menno Schilthuizen did. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat—and maybe in the process do the natural world some good.
Thanks to the open science revolution, real biological discoveries can now be made by anyone right where they live. Schilthuizen shows readers just how to go about making those discoveries, introducing them to the tools of the trade of the urban community scientist, from the tried and tested (the field notebook, the butterfly net, and the hand lens) to the newfangled (internet resources, low-tech gadgets, and off-the-shelf gizmos). But beyond technology, his book holds the promise of reviving the lost tradition of the citizen scientist—rekindling the spirit of the Victorian naturalist for the modern world.
- I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein, by Kieran Fox. Albert Einstein remains renowned around the world for revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, but very few realize that the celebrated scientist had a deep spiritual side. Einstein believed that one wondrous force was woven through all things everywhere—and this sense of the pervasive sacred influenced every aspect of his existence, from his marvelous science to his passionate pacifism.
I Am a Part of Infinity offers the first in-depth exploration of Einstein’s spirituality, showing how he drew on a dazzling diversity of thinkers—from Pythagoras to Plato, Schopenhauer to Spinoza, the Upanishads to Mahatma Gandhi—to create a novel system where mysticism met mathematics, reality was revered, and the human mind was honored as a mirror of the infinite. “In this meticulously researched book, Fox shows us a long-ignored and misunderstood side of Einstein: his spiritual conviction that we are entwined with the universe. Fox delves deep to reveal the hidden influences, from Pythagoras to Jainism, that inspired Einstein’s epic quest to create a ‘cosmic religion’ in which mind and matter would be melded into one intricate, all-encompassing whole.”—Jo Marchant, PhD, author of The Human Cosmos
- Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum, by Elaine Sciolino. The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.
Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure. Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.
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Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest, by Melissa Arnot Reid. At twenty-seven, when Melissa Arnot Reid accepted a tank of oxygen just short of the summit of Mount Everest, she felt ravaged by defeat. Driven by a relentless, lifelong quest to prove to herself, her family, and the world that she was enough, she had set herself an incredible goal—to become the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. The failure battered her spirit and left her struggling to keep her tenuous grip on hope.
In the candid and adventurous spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Enough is a story of a life in which the most dangerous mountain faces became a refuge—until suddenly they, too, no longer seemed safe. From a childhood marked by conflict, betrayal, and predation, Reid propelled herself to the top of the mountain climbing world, summiting and guiding on the world’s most challenging peaks and establishing herself as a woman unafraid to throw elbows in a milieu dominated by men. And yet for every summit she reached, her valleys of inner turmoil—over her estrangement with the family she believed she’d destroyed as a child; over relationships that cycled through deception and infidelity—grew deeper and more self-destructive. Eventually, she could not keep these worlds from colliding, especially after a series of tragedies at dangerous elevations took the lives of her mentors and friends. Forced at last to face herself, Reid made her most perilous climb yet—toward the uncertain promise of forgiveness and self-acceptance. “This brave, fascinating memoir documents the tormented life of an elite professional mountain guide. It derives much of its considerable power from the author’s ruthless honesty. Melissa Arnot Reid provides an understated first-hand account of her pivotal role in preventing a mob of angry Sherpas from murdering three famous European climbers who’d insulted and disrespected them on Mt. Everest, bears witness to the two deadliest mass-casualty events in the mountain’s history, and describes her agonizing ascent of the peak without supplemental oxygen. Enough is the best ‘Everest book’ I’ve read in a long time.”—Jon Krakauer
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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