When I first stumbling upon the forthcoming (April 22nd) book I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column, by Mary Beth Norton, I of course thought of the many of my Dear Readers of Nonfiction Views who are proud and strong proponents of the Romance genre. The publication which it explores is the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, which started in 1691. How interesting, I thought: real-life Regency Romance that predated the world of the literary genre by a century. Interesting as well was how these advice-seekers fit into the ever-evolving debate over when modern romance truly began. Was it only in the 18th Century that marriage became linked to love rather than what had been more a mechanism for families to cement their power and wealth? How romantic was medieval ‘courtly romance’? What or Romeo and Juliet? What of the snippets of romantic advice that have been found in the writings of ancient Greece, Egypt and more?
As I started the book, I was pulled abruptly into the present day by the fact that the Athenian Gazette was started by what seemed to be the equivalent of the ‘tech bros’ like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, whose technology now shapes so much of our social existence. A printer, the 31-year-old John Dunton, was walking in the park in the early spring of 1691 when he was struck with the idea of a weekly broadsheet, a single page printed on both sides, which would offer answers to questions sent by its readers. His conceit was to proclaim that there was a large team of experts on hand to answer the questions, but in truth it was just three guys: Dunton and his brothers-in-law Richard Sault, a part-time mathematician, and Samuel Wesley, a struggling clergyman.
The expectation was that the readership and the questions would come from the world of men who spent their days holding forth in the hot new hangouts known as coffeehouses. But the Athenian Gazette soon caught on beyond their wildest dreams. It soon was appearing twice weekly, with each edition taking on eight to twelve questions. Individual editions sold for a penny, and each set of twenty editions was collected into a bound volume that coffeehouse owners would buy for two schilling sixpence, around 35 dollars in today’s money.
The questions submitted went beyond their wildest dreams as well. There were at first plenty of academic and philosophical questions like : “Who was Cain’s wife?”, “Why does a dolphin follow a ship until frightened away?”, and “Can a crooked person be made straight again?” But within the first weeks the relationship questions began to pour in. More surprising to Dunton and company was an inquiry that came from a woman who asked if it would be permissible for her sex to submit questions as well as men. Dunton was at first taken aback, fully expecting that his readers would be an entirely male audience, but quickly responded that they would “answer all manner of questions sent to us by either sex.”
The questions, whether accurately representing the correspondents’ own experiences or not (some said they were writing on behalf of a “friend,” which the Athenians often explicitly recognized as a fiction), open a remarkable window into the private lives of men and women in an era long before our own. Even though the queries often formally referred to the problems of “gentlemen” and “ladies,” their content reveals that the authors were not for the most part drawn from the ranks of the very wealthy but instead of middling status or aspired to upward mobility. Many, though by no means all, were young, just starting out in marriage or a trade. They confronted all the problems common to that stage of life, including conducting courtships, acquiring property, and engaging in premarital negotiations. In an era in which literacy was increasing significantly, especially in the ranks of urban tradesmen and tradeswomen, reading and writing were no longer optional but required skills for those who hoped to improve their lot in life.
The introduction to the book provides this history and the context within which the Athenian Gazette arose. We then get into the letters, divided into six thematic chapters, including “Kissing is a Luscious Diet,” “Both Sides Must Make Allowances,” and “A Very Amorous Disposition.” The author offers dozens of examples, some very rooted in the era in which they were posed, and others seem delightfully contemporary, showing that humans and their desires have a long history. The questions are bracketed by commentary from the author, so the book is both an interesting academic history and a delightful romantic romp. Let’s take a peek at ten examples, shall we…
Q. When we are in love and the men won’t or can’t understand our signs and motions, what in modesty can we do more to open their eyes?
A. Alas, poor lady! Your case is very hard. Why, pull them by the nose, write to them, or if neither of these will do...show them this question in the Athenian Mercury. [Q.20, 3:4, 8 August 1691]
This Week’s notable new nonfiction
- Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis. The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.
Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers, including Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, to join him in finding someone doing an interesting job for the government and writing about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.
- Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, by John Green. John Green may be best known for his hugely popular YA novels such as Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, but he is also a passionate activist in public health. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
- Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished. “Their goals are broad. This group of policies, which they call the abundance agenda, offers, Klein and Thompson believe, ‘a path out of the morass we’re in. A new political order’ . . . Abundance is a fair-minded book, and it recognizes some of the trade-offs that come with redesigning government for dynamism.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker
- The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, by Henry Gee. Or, if Ezra Klein’s optimistic take isn't your cup of tea, try Henry Gee.
We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline - fast.
In this provocative book, award-winning science writer Henry Gee offers a concise, brilliantly-told history of our species--and argues that we are on a rapid, one-way trip to extinction. The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire narrates the dramatic rise of humanity, how a scattered range of small groups across several continents eventually inbred, interacted, fought, established stable communities and food supplies, and began the process of dominating the planet. The human story is relatively brief—the oldest fossils of H. Sapiens date to approximately 300,000 years ago—yet the spread of our species has been unstoppable…until recently. "The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire is hugely informative and entertaining ... I can't think of another author who could pull off Gee's straight-talking, detached-yet-jovial style. He is such an amiable guide to our doom." - Rowan Hooper, The New Scientist "Like Jared Diamond meets Arthur C. Clarke with a dash of Douglas Adams, this deserves to be widely read and debated." --Philip Ball, author of How Life Works and Critical Mass
- Antisemitism in America: A Warning, by Senator Chuck Schumer. Here’s a classic case of bad timing. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
“In an urgent and personal new book, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sheds light on the Jewish American experience and sounds the alarm about the troubling resurgence of antisemitism….
By placing antisemitism in its proper historical context, and drawing from Senator Schumer's own life, the book informs Americans' understanding of the causes of the recent swell of antisemitic rhetoric and violence in our country. In very personal terms, it will engage with debates over the purpose and meaning of Israel, and help draw a line between legitimate criticism of its government and when criticism of Israel as a Jewish homeland verges into antisemitism. This book is a warning, informed by the lessons of history, about what can happen when the “world's oldest hatred” is allowed to rise, unchecked.” An important issue, absolutely. Alas, Schumer’s own inability to fight against the accelerating authoritarianism under Musk/Trump, and his hedging about the legality of deporting Palestinian student protesters, kind of undermines his message. He had a book tour planned, but cancelled at the last minute because he didn’t want to face angry voters. I call it Anti-constituentism in America.
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Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, by Noliwe Rooks. Award-winning interdisciplinary scholar of education and Black history Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data and cultural history to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. She tells the story of her grandparents, who were among the thousands of Black teachers fired following the Brown decision; her father, who was traumatized by his experiences at an almost exclusively-white school; her own experiences moving from a flourishing, racially diverse school to an underserved inner-city one; and finally her son and his Black peers, who over half-century after Brown still struggle with hostility and prejudice from white teachers and students alike. She also shows how present-day discrimination lawsuits directly stem from the mistakes made during integration.
At once assiduously researched and deeply engaging, Integrated tells the story of how education has remained both a tool for community progress and a seemingly inscrutable cultural puzzle. Rooks' deft hand turns the story of integration's past and future on its head, and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come. “With so much uncertainty facing education today, Integrated is a book that must find its way into the hands of every teacher, parent, and high school student, as it reminds us that the failures of the past do not have to become the permanent reality of our future.” —Bettina Love, New York Times bestselling author of Punished for Dreaming
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Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen. For the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies. An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment. "Risen’s fluent narrative…goes beyond the familiar Hollywood blacklists to reveal how conspiracy stories touched educators and people in various civil rights movements and led to the 'canceling' of individuals in business, government, and any sphere influential to the prevailing culture.” —Foreign Affairs
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China, by Emily Feng.
The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there – and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression.
In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back. They include a Uyghur family, separated as China detains hundreds of thousands of their fellow Uyghurs in camps; human rights lawyers fighting to defend civil liberties in the face of mammoth odds; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to make hard choices because of his support of his mother tongue; and a Hong Kong fugitive trying to find a new home and live in freedom.
Reporting despite the personal risks, journalist Emily Feng reveals dramatic human stories of resistance and survival in a country that is increasingly closing itself off to the world. Feng illustrates what it is like to run against the grain in China, and the myriad ways people are trying to survive, with dignity. “Through a dozen finely told stories, [Emily Feng] captures the breadth of China and the dilemma that many Chinese feel today: how to get ahead in a country where political conformity is once again stifling some of the country’s most creative young minds.”—Ian Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winner, author of Sparks
- The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, by Benjamin Wallace. In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought. Nakamoto’s Bitcoin at first seemed destined to fulfill the dreams of fringe 1990s utopians for a currency set free from governments and big banks. Yet after he disappeared, his creation took on a strange new life in the financial markets, where rampant speculation fueled a vision of crypto as a potential windfall, inviting charlatans and scammers and opening a vast gulf between Bitcoin’s idealistic origins and its troubled reputation. “Benjamin Wallace’s astonishingly obsessive deep dive into the financial world’s greatest modern mystery will leave you amazed, enlightened, and utterly breathless.”—Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road
- The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America, by William Geroux. During World War 2, the American government was faced with an unprecedented challenge: where to house the nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war plucked from the battlefield and shipped across the Atlantic. On orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of War hastily built hundreds of POW camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States.
Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives. "Geroux has brought to light a sweeping story from the homefront that was not just forgotten—most Americans never knew it even happened to begin with. A dynamic, high-stakes tale that will leave readers questioning not only their loyalties and beliefs but the value of life itself.”—Bradford Pearson, National Magazine Award winning author of The Eagles of Heart Mountain
- Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War, by Michael Vorenberg. One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace. Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.
To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.
- The Maverick's Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, by Blake Gopnik.
From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America’s first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs. His vast art collection—181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos—was dedicated to enriching their cultural lives. A miner was more likely to get access than a mine owner.
Gopnik’s meticulous research reveals Barnes as a fierce advocate for the egalitarian ideals of his era’s progressive movement. But while his friends in the movement worked to reshape American society, Barnes wanted to transform the nation’s aesthetic life, taking art out of the hands of the elite and making it available to the average American.
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The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, by Alexis Madrigal. Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities—all personified in this changing landscape for the city’s lifelong inhabitants.
The Pacific Circuit holds a magnifying glass to the scars etched by generations of systemic segregation and the ceaseless march of technological advancement. These are not just abstract concepts; they are embedded in the very fabric of Oakland and its people, from dockworkers and community organizers to real estate developers and businesspeople chasing the highest possible profits. “A dazzlingly imaginative (and surprisingly hopeful) telling of how everything—our cities, our globalized economy, our planet—ended up this way—and how it all started in Oakland. The Pacific Circuit is a marvel of real-life storytelling, making the world around us feel vast and magical, full of casual treachery as well as spaces of hope." —Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Stay True
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The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing, by Joshua Hammer. Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up. Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before. "An archeological triumph receives the history it deserves. Readers who enjoyed the fictional adventures of Indiana Jones might imagine that real-life archeologists aren’t so exciting, but journalist Hammer, author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, may change their minds." —Kirkus Reviews
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Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, by Christine Wenc. In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True reveals how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.
- White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus-in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World, by Jack Lohmann. In 1842, when the naturalist John Stevens Henslow, Darwin’s beloved botany professor, discovered the potential of that rock as a fertilizer, little did he know his countrymen would soon be grinding up the bones of dead soldiers and mummified Egyptian cats to exploit their phosphate content. Little did he know he’d spawn a global mining industry that would change our diets, our lifestyles, and the face of the planet.
Lohmann guides us from Henslow’s Suffolk, where the phosphate fertilizer industry took root, to Bone Valley in Central Florida, where it has boomed alongside big ag—leaving wreckage like the Piney Point disaster in its wake—to far-flung Nauru, an island stripped of its life force by the ravenous young industry. We sift through the earth’s geological layers and eras, speak in depth with experts and locals, and explore our past relationship with sustainable farming—including in seventeenth-century Japan, when one could pay rent with their excrement—before we started wasting just as much phosphate as we mine. “Last week, I had no interest in phosphorus; now, thanks to Jack Lohmann’s ground-breaking book, I find life and death—the whole universe—within it. Every sentence in this deeply original work sparkles with astonishing facts, prodigious research, crystal clarity. White Light is a conscience-driven tour de force.” —Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life
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Heartbreaker: A Memoir, by Mike Campbell. Mike Campbell was the lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from the band’s inception in 1976 to Petty’s tragic death in 2017. His iconic, melodic playing helped form the foundation of the band’s sound, as heard on definitive classics like “American Girl,” “Breakdown,” “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” “Learning to Fly” and “Into the Great Wide Open.” But few know of the less-than-glamorous background from which Campbell emerged—a hardscrabble childhood on the north side of Jacksonville, often just days ahead of homelessness, raised by a single mother struggling on minimum wage. After months of saving, his mother bought him a $15 pawnshop acoustic guitar for his sixteenth birthday. With a chord book and a transistor radio, Campbell painstakingly taught himself to play.
When a chance encounter with a guidance counselor inspired him to enroll in the University of Florida, Campbell—broke, with nowhere else to go and the Vietnam draft looming—moved into a rundown farmhouse in Gainesville, where he met a 20-year-old Tom Petty. They were soon inseparable. Together they chased their shared dream all the way to Los Angeles, where Campbell would meet his destiny, and the love of his life, Marcie.
It was an at-times grueling dream come true that took Campbell from the very bottom to the absolute top, where Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would remain for decades, creating an astonishing body of work.
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