Good evening, everyone, on this Election Day. My wife and I voted today. The ballot was nothing more than two bond questions, one for mental health assistance funding for Maricopa County, and one for the Tempe school district, yes or no on each. It’s the sort of minor election that one might be tempted to skip, but we made sure to vote.
Elections like this are decided by a small subset of people committed to an issue, and I was afraid the anti-tax rightwing, who hate the idea of funding health and education, would be the ones to get to the polls. I wanted to make sure our YES votes counted.
To my amazement, the polling place was VERY busy when we dropped our ballots off in the late afternoon (we could have mailed them in in October, but I’m a procrastinator.) There are two possible reasons for this. The prosaic one first: in big elections, there are multiple places to drop off your ballot, but in this two-question obscure election, there was only one nearby; therefore, everyone who wanted to vote had to come there.
Of all the shit that happened this week; it was the news about Condé Nast defanging the magazine Teen Vogue by firing Black and trans writers who wrote for them. Mixed in with their fashion and lifestyle articles, Teen Vogue has been at the forefront of presenting diverse voices and progressive politics for years, and an important source of news for young people. They might fly under the radar of many older people, but I have found many of their articles edifying over the years. This on the heel of MSNBC and CBS firing journalists which for the most part happened to be Black and/or female. The open outright racism that has been empowered by Trump and MAGA is sickening.
Now on to the books! This is a week when our elder authors bring us their wisdom and insights, and we have all of these wonderful new books for 20% off at The Literate Lizard. Anthony Hopkins is 87. Margaret Atwood is 86. Paul McCartney and John Irving are 83. Susan Cheever is 82. And Patti Smith is 78. (Yes, Susan Cheever’s book actually came out last week.)
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Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department, by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis. Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency, pressuring appointees to shield him, to target his enemies, and even to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. The department, pressed into a defensive crouch, has never fully recovered.
Injustice exposes not only the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the department at every turn but also how delays in investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the will of voters under Attorney General Merrick Garland helped prevent the country from holding Trump accountable and enabled his return to power. With never-before-told accounts, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis take readers inside as prosecutors convulsed over Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, and FBI agents, the department’s storied investigators, at times retreated in fear. They take you to the rooms where Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team set off on an all-but-impossible race to investigate Trump for absconding with classified documents and waging an assault on democracy—and inside his prosecution’s heroic and fateful choices that ultimately backfired.
Injustice is the jaw-dropping account of partisans and enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty and justice for all.
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Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, by Colin Woodard. Our democracy has been purposefully dismantled, first in the states and now at the federal level. With groundbreaking original data and historical insights, Nations Apart is an essential guide to understanding why Americans are so divided on many hot button issues, creating geographic fissures that have been exploited by authoritarians. Colin Woodard shows how colonial era settlement patterns and the cultural geography they left behind are at the root of our political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse. Drawing on quantitative research from Woodard’s university-based think tank project, Nations Apart exposes the true ideological and cultural divides behind today’s struggles. "An in-depth, nuanced look at the regional differences that influence values and belief systems within large geographical swaths of the U.S. . . . [Woodard's] in-depth but accessible arguments bring in elements of history, religion, philosophy, economics, international comparisons, and predictions for the future, all fully supported by data. . . . Considerable food for thought." —Booklist (STARRED review)
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Palace of Deception: Museum Men and the Rise of Scientific Racism, by Darrin Lunde. From 1908 to 1933, the American Museum of Natural History launched more scientific field expeditions than at any other time in its existence. Sponsoring lavish trips to Africa and Central Asia, the museum filled its halls with artifacts and an aura of adventure, supported by some of New York City’s most prominent men, including Theodore Roosevelt and J. P. Morgan. All the while, the museum’s then president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, attempted to use his adventurers’ expeditions to fulfill a personal agenda: to propagate his belief in racial hierarchy.
Palace of Deception uncovers the complicated legacy of three iconic figures of the American Museum: the preeminent explorer Roy Chapman Andrews; Carl Akeley, the pioneering taxidermist who created so many of the museum’s most memorable exhibits; and Osborn, the museum’s president, who was once considered an authority on everything from paleontology and evolution to race and eugenics. From Andrews’s ambitions searching for fossils in the Gobi Desert to the construction of Akeley’s artistic masterpiece, the Hall of African Mammals, Darrin Lunde tells the story of the American’s Museum foundational years. Lunde also shows how the achievements of the museum’s adventurers were used to introduce residents of New York to a version of the natural world—one full of strict natural laws and categories—endorsed by the museum’s powerful leader. It also traces the larger, racially infused milieu that underwrote the golden age of exploration, uncovering the simmering anxieties about race behind the era’s greatest adventures. It is a legacy that still haunts natural history institutions today.
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The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, by Tim Wu. Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?
Tim Wu—the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase “net neutrality”—explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. “[This book shows] how the monopolistic, extractive logic of the internet economy is invading the economy at large as more industries adopt (or are targeted by) new technologies. Examples include the housing market and, most startlingly, the medical industry, which is undergoing a wave of concentration under private equity firms that have implemented onerous new ‘practice platforms’ for doctors. Wu asserts that these industries’ capitulations to tech are canaries in the coal mine, signaling an emergent ‘platform capitalism’ that threatens to create a two-tiered economy with extractive platforms on top and everyone else below. Wu (the original coiner of ‘net neutrality’) outlines some canny legal means to avoid this bleak future.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset, by Mike Bird. Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly became the linchpin of the global banking system, driving everything from soaring housing prices to rising geopolitical tensisons. As governments wrestle with inequality and land grows ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a powerful new framework for understanding the hidden force behind today's most urgent challenges. This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the real game being played on a foundation as old as civilization itself. Timely, provocative, and essential, The Land Trap will change how you see the ground beneath your feet. “The Land Trap is a phenomenal tale of the original asset to beat all others. From America's wild frontier to the skyscrapers of today's Singapore and the ghost cities produced by China's wild real-estate boom, Mike Bird takes the reader on a wonderful exploration of how land remains at the heart of the global economy even today.” — Robin Wigglesworth, author of Trillions
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, by Michael Steinberger. Palantir builds data integration software: its technology ingests vast quantities of information and quickly identifies patterns, trends, and connections that might elude the human eye. Founded in 2003 to help the US government in the war on terrorism—an early investor was the CIA—Palantir is now a $400 billion global colossus whose software is used by major intelligence services (including the Mossad), the US military, dozens of federal agencies, and corporate giants like Airbus and BP. From AI to counterterrorism to climate change to immigration to financial fraud to the future of warfare, the company is at the nexus of the most critical issues of the twenty-first century.
Its CEO, Alex Karp, is a distinctive figure on the global business scene. A biracial Jew who is also severely dyslexic, Karp has built Palantir into a tech giant despite having no background in either business or computer science. Instead, he’s a trained philosopher who has become known for his strongly held views on a range of issues and for his willingness to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of Palantir’s work. Those questions have taken on added urgency during the Trump era, which has also brought attention to the political activism of Karp’s close friend and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel.
It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley’s most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state.
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Luigi: The Making and the Meaning, by John H. Richardson. The explosion of glee and sympathy for Luigi Mangione surprised everyone, but it was everywhere. Hours after the shooting of the United Healthcare executive, his company put out a message out on Facebook saying their “hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him.” People replied with laughing emojis and comments like this one: “No one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.” On TikTok, another commentator said, “Oh my god, y’all really raised the school shooter generation and now you’re asking us for sympathy?” she asks. “Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America.” In Seattle, someone reprogrammed a couple of electric highway signs so they flashed: “One CEO down…many more to go.”
So where is all this coming from? Richardson has tracked the building blocks of this widespread alienation for three decades, finding it across not only the environmental movement but among those who reject capitalism itself, including the rules that govern everything from insurance to healthcare. He has followed the men and women who have gone to extremes to express that alienation, and studied the inspirations they found in other outlaws, most especially Ted Kaczynski (Luigi had posted a review of Kaczynski’s manifesto on Goodreads). The result is a book that will put Luigi in context and even illuminate how his appeal is likely to play out in the future.
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The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, by Richard Bell. In this revelatory and enthralling book, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America’s founding event. The American Revolution was not only the colonies’ triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England; it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, Bell’s narrative ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As his lens widens, the “War of Independence” manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis. Bell conveys the impact of these developments at home and abroad by grounding the narrative in the gripping stories of individuals—including women, minorities, and other disenfranchised people.
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Sitting Bull's War: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains, by Paul L. Hedren. In this deeply affecting account of America’s greatest Indian war, readers are quickly immersed in the world of Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes and their struggle in the 1870s to retain their lives on the buffalo prairie. Those impassioned Northern Indians faced a succession of white invaders—railroaders, borderland surveyors, prospectors, and ultimately the United States Army.
In the best of days they turned back George Crook at the Rosebud and wiped out George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. But a dozen other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army’s endless hounding. Some fled to Canada to a luring if momentary exile, but in the end one and all faced starvation, submission, and, for some, death.
Personifying this traditional way of life was Sitting Bull, legendary Hunkpapa Lakota spiritualist. He was supported throughout by Crazy Horse, Spotted Eagle, Big Road, Little Wolf, and a host of other kindred traditional chiefs and headmen who, in turn, rallied thousands of like-minded men, women, and children. And yet, but for momentary glory against Crook and Custer, this was a war that could not be won. "Rather than retelling the story from the victors’ viewpoint, Hedren draws heavily on Indigenous accounts and pictographic renderings, giving voice to those so often left out of the narrative. A superb new history." --Library Journal, starred review
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Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into Everything They Do for Us and We Do to Them, by Rose George. Slippery, wet, and strange: Fish can be easier to think of as food than as fellow animals. But what do we know about these creatures we meet on our dinner table and how they got there? For the first time in history, humans are eating more farmed fish than wild, and our fish consumption is predicted to increase. But with warming oceans, diminishing fish stocks, and questions about fish farming practices, where will the fish come from?
In Every Last Fish, Rose George dives into these questions by exploring the vast industries that support our appetite for fish sticks and salmon burgers, and the colossal illegal fishing trade whose practices and standards are unmonitored and often dangerous. Journeying to the bottom of the ocean and back, she examines the machinations of this $200 billion food system—one that’s growing rapidly even as fish populations disappear.
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The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, by Lyse Doucet. When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolized a dream of a modernizing country connected to the world. More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.
Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.
It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021. “Lyse Doucet has turned bricks and mortar into flesh and blood and in so doing lifted this biography of a glittering hotel into a lyrical, devastating, powerful homage to the powerless. In The Finest Hotel in Kabul we follow the fortunes and misfortunes not of those making decisions, but of the cooks, the receptionists, the wedding guests, the servers. It is intimate, aching, tragic and inspiring.” —Louise Penny, bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series
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Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, by Margaret Atwood. “Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.”
Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: 'It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.
From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.
“Charming, interesting and witty . . . Packed with dishy tales . . . Scintillating portraits of major and minor characters are one of Atwood’s specialties.” —Marion Winik, The Minnesota Star Tribune
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Bread of Angels: A Memoir, by Patti Smith. A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids.
“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life.
The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan.
A series of profound losses mark her life. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again—the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope.
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Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, by Paul McCartney, edited by Ted Widmer. An engrossing oral history of a band that came to define a generation, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap story of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, Wings recounts—now with a half-century’s wisdom—the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. Soon joined by his wife - American photographer Linda McCartney - on keyboard and vocals; drummer Denny Seiwell; and guitarist Denny Laine, McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would later provide the soundtrack of the decade. “What is there left to know about Paul McCartney in 2025? Actually, quite a bit. . . .There is still much to be excavated from what is the most examined life in pop music history, especially when it comes from the horse’s mouth. . . . Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is a smooth, frictionless ride across the arc of McCartney’s ’70s career, when he continued to mint more hits, and secured a lock on a massive career that is presently in its 55th year. — Marc Weingarten - Los Angeles Times
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Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard, by Robert M. Dowling. Sam Shepard was a true American original. A theater and film icon who lived life on a mythic scale, Shepard became an embodiment of the fierce independence and wild freedom of the American West. In this authoritative and gripping biography, acclaimed biographer Robert M. Dowling dives into Shepard’s psyche, his imagination and his soul, to craft the most comprehensive and revelatory account yet of Shepard’s enduring work and tumultuous life. Ranging from Shepard’s romances with icons like Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange, to his groundbreaking artistic contributions to theater and film like True West, Buried Child, The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, and Paris, Texas, Dowling draws on previously untapped archival resources and the help of members of Shepard’s family, close friends, lovers, and collaborators to place this artistic legacy in the context of the historic upheavals that compelled this extraordinary writer to so vividly record the American zeitgeist. In this biography, we see Shepard’s life, and his era, in all its splendor and chaos, from the 1960s counterculture to the rise of Trumpism.
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The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, by Gerald Howard. Malcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard University, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris after the war—he became one of the few truly influential critics of the 1920s and ’30s, along with his close New Republic colleague Edmund Wilson. Cowley’s early support of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their set—and indeed for framing this group in generational terms in the first place—secured his place in literary history.
Most people are lucky to be part of a single game-changing era in their careers; for Cowley, it happened again and again. After emerging from the political fray of the thirties badly damaged, he retreated behind the scenes as a tastemaker whose import has awaited Gerald Howard to be brought into full view. The process of canon formation is a murky business, and Cowley was a prime mover in it for the better part of four decades, through the Lost Generation, the Beat Generation, and the counterculture of the sixties. Without him, the odds would be much longer that the names William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey, to name just three, would have ever echoed.
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We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir, by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Born and raised in Port Talbot—a small Welsh steelworks town—amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who were tough, to say the least, and eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favor of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed by his peers, his parents, and other adults as a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted.
With candor and a voice that is both arresting and vulnerable, Sir Anthony recounts his various career milestones and provides a once-in-a-lifetime look into the brilliance behind some of his most iconic roles.
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The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects, by Bee Wilson. Wilson’s best-selling Consider the Fork considered how kitchen items changed the way we eat; in The Heart-Shaped Tin, she delves into how these objects change the way we live. She meets people who open up about a favorite wooden spoon, a salt shaker inherited from a parent, and a vintage corkscrew collection. Our beloved items become powerful symbols of identity and memory, representing friendship, grief, love, superstition, safety, and even political resistance. Crossing continents, cultures, and time periods, Wilson deftly moves between a 5,000-year-old bottle for drinking chocolate and her children’s favorite melon baller; a metal spoon made by a Holocaust survivor and her mother’s silver-plated toast rack; a bombarded Ukrainian kitchen cabinet and her grandfather’s Wedgwood teapot. In telling these stories, she comes to terms with her grief over the dissolution of her marriage and the loss of her mother after a battle with dementia. The heart-shaped tin, in the end, becomes a moving reminder of the power of new beginnings. “Bee Wilson’s beautiful, melancholy book gave me permission to get out and enjoy the breadboard I took from my beloved late aunt’s kitchen. Her generous understanding of why stuff matters to us is a humane rebuke to the declutterers.” — Emma Smith, author of Portable Magic
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The Science of Pets, by Jay Ingram. More than one billion pets live in homes around the world, sleeping on dog beds, clawing at cat trees, swimming in bowls, crawling around in aquariums. Canada, the United States, Brazil, the EU, and China make up half of those households, with half of the world’s population owning a pet of some sort. Yet despite the ubiquitous animals that lick our faces and steal food off the counter, we really don’t know a lot about the scientific side of their existence: why do dogs spin around when excited, do our cats really love us, do lizards make good pets, can single-celled organisms be considered pets (you can cut the hydra in two and have two pets!), what are parrots thinking, and can a horse be considered a pet? Or pigs (even those sent to market)? Or praying mantises? Or how about robot pets in Japan, caring for the elderly? “From the origin of dogs to the robotic pets of the future, Ingram covers every aspect of our relationships with the animals that become beloved members of our families, seamlessly combining rich insights across the sciences, from evolution to the psychology of both humans and our furry (or feathered or scaly!) companions. A wonderful read!” — Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Downloaded
