Good evening, all. It’s just straight to the books this week, with descriptions drawn from publisher publicity and reviewer blurbs.
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The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, by James Traub. America’s Founders placed great confidence in schools, which they believed would teach young people to understand our political system and to engage in reasoned political debate as adults. Yet today, when virtually all Americans graduate from high school, we remain stunningly ignorant of history and government. In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 13 percent of students scored a “proficient” level in history. Adults do no better: only 40 percent can name the three branches of government.
In The Cradle of Citizenship, James Traub chronicles his year of observing public schools across the country, talking to teachers, scholars, and curriculum designers. He finds teachers in Florida who are afraid of discussing topics that might be seen as “woke”; a profound disagreement over what exactly civic education means; and, most dismayingly, ever-diminishing expectations of students with ever-dwindling attention spans.
Yet The Cradle of Citizenship also finds sources of hope. Traub learns that, despite endless right-wing critiques, virtually all social studies teachers keep their personal views to themselves and encourage students to develop views of their own. “Stands out for its balance, generosity, and hope… [The Cradle of Citizenship] lays out a plan to return the schoolroom to being a place where students can trust in knowing something.” — Kirkus Reviews
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Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Andrew Burstein. Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery. “With a focus on who Jefferson hated as well as who he loved, Burstein foregrounds Jefferson's uncanny ability to rationalize his own behavior, and his unwillingness to judge himself. Burstein deftly interweaves the private and the public and thus vividly brings early American politics to life.” —Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
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A High Price for Freedom: Raising Hidden Voices from the African American Past, by Clyde W. Ford. History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.
What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?
In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver—a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.
Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, “Sister, isn’t this a high price for freedom?”
Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew. “A High Price for Freedom bravely excavates untold history that is not only important to the Black Freedom Struggle, but to American history at large.” - Susana Morris, Author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
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Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises, by Katie Benner and Erica L. Green. T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League university in the country. The spectacle of Landry students opening their acceptance letters to Harvard and Yale was broadcast on television and even celebrated by Michelle Obama. It became a national ritual to watch the miraculous success of these youngsters—miraculous because Breaux Bridge is one of the poorest counties in the country, ranked close to the bottom for test scores and high school graduation rates. T.M. Landry was said to be “minting prodigies,” and the prodigies were often black.
How did the school do it? It didn’t: It was a scam, pulled off with fake transcripts and personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse, Landry’s success concealed a nightmare of alleged abuse and coercion. In a yearslong investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the lives of the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why black teens were pressured to trade in racial stereotypes of hardship for opportunity. "Miracle Children is not just an exposé of a college scam, it's a keen dissection of our segregated schools and our segregated rewards, of a system so rigged that gaming it is the price of entrance. And it probes the mechanisms that Americans use to hide their own sins from themselves. In the chronicle of the American war on Black life, this book is essential reading."—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
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When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land, by W. Ralph Eubanks. Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.
Mississippi native and award-winning writer W. Ralph Eubanks unearths the region’s buried history, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality through vivid portraits of key figures. “When It’s Darkness on the Delta is as brilliant and necessary as the greatest books made by a Mississippian, but it is wholly singular in the way Ralph Eubanks nimbly, and profoundly, rides the voices of the folks making the Delta today. This book is not interested in representation; it is what happens when the responsible love of a people, a region, and an utterly legendary skill meet. Goodness gracious. We are thankful.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
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The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke. In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C.
Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. “Burke approaches his subjects with a tone of amused detachment, sketching militants less as disciplined ideologues than as odd, restless figures drawn as much by escapade as by doctrine. . . . The period detail is vivid: aviator sunglasses, sideburns, berets, cheap pistols. . . . Burke is attentive to the misogyny and brutality that ran alongside revolutionary rhetoric. . . . He never draws an explicit line to the present, and that restraint is part of his credibility. But the implication lingers."—Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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Carthage: A New History, by Eve MacDonald. Drawing on brand-new archaeological analysis to uncover the history behind the legend, MacDonald takes readers on a journey from the Phoenician Levant of the early Iron Age to the Atlantic and all along the shores of Africa. She reveals ancient Carthage as a cosmopolitan city not only of extraordinary wealth and brave warriors, but also of staggering beauty and technological sophistication. Home to Hannibal and Dido, to war elephants and vast fleets, at its height Carthage commanded one of the ancient world’s greatest navies and controlled territory spanning the coast of northwestern Africa to modern-day Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, and beyond. In gripping narrative, MacDonald shows how and why the Romans came to so fear Carthage, as one of the few rivals ever to inflict multiple defeats upon them—and what the world lost when it was finally gone. “An important and much-needed reorientation of the ‘familiar’ ancient historical narrative. Eve MacDonald persuasively demonstrates how North Africa was once a central node of civilization…and that there was nothing inevitable about the supremacy of Rome while the Carthaginians were around. This is not only history reclaimed; this is history at its best.” — Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author of Persians: The Age of the Great Kings
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The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter.
Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter—and the various “mattering projects” it inspires—is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.
Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn’t a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict—and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around. “In a world fractured by competing claims on what’s important, Goldstein offers a vision that is both intellectually resonant and humane, reminding us that the struggle to justify our existence is the very thing that makes our existence matter.”— John Kaag - The Atlantic
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99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them, by Ashely Alker, M.D. An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor. Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death escapologist—or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work outwitting the end has uniquely prepared her to write this book.
Dr. Alker manages to shock readers while making them laugh, educating them on how to outsmart a wide range of deadly situations and conditions. Many of the chapters include stories from her experiences in life and medicine, at times heartwarming, others heartbreaking. Sections include explorations of sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements, and much more. "Somehow this guide to many horrific ways to die (and to avoid dying) manages to be fascinating, informative, and tastefully witty. Alker shares her passion for public health and preventive care 'even though it’s bad for business.' This engagingly written medical primer should induce smiles and save lives." —Booklist
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Giving and Receiving: Memoirs of an Immigrant Curator and Philanthropist, by Marica Vilcek. Marica Vilcek was just twelve years old when the Communists took over her country. Her prospects were curtailed, as a result, and when her brother vanished, apparently escaping to Western Europe, her family became blacklisted, reducing her hope for a future career in the sciences and arts. But in spite of many obstacles to advancing, Marica was determined to earn a degree, and managed to find work at the Slovak National Gallery. She tiptoed around Party members, careful to never reveal her family name.
In 1962, Marica married Jan Vilcek, a virologist who shared her disdain of the Communist Party. The two became determined to escape the country. Their dangerous and harrowing journey eventually landed them in New York City where she began a thirty-year career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jan became a leading immunologist and faculty emeritus at the New York University School of Medicine.
In 2000, Marica and Jan established the Vilcek Foundation to raise awareness of immigrant contributions to the arts, sciences, and culture of the United States. The Vilceks have become leading philanthropists in the arts and humanities. Their foundation has awarded more than $15 million in prizes and grants in alignment with its mission. The Vilcek Foundation Prizes are awarded annually to celebrate immigrant artists, scientists, and leaders who advocate for immigrant rights.
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Mrs. Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists, by Franny Moyle. In the late autumn of 1789, two of Europe's most celebrated painters met in Rome. One, Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss-born prodigy who had conquered the art scenes of London and Italy. The other, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, a Parisienne portraitist and favourite of the ancien regime, had just fled revolutionary France under threat of violence and scandal. Both were feted in their time, both were trailblazers in a male-dominated world – visionaries who helped define eighteenth-century art and feminism before the term existed.
This dual biography, framed within a thrilling story, restores these two extraordinary but unjustly overlooked figures to their rightful place in history. Set against a backdrop of revolution, empire and Enlightenment, it traces the dramatic lives and remarkable careers of Vigée Le Brun and Kauffman: artists who not only achieved unparalleled success and influence, but did so while pushing the boundaries of what women could be, both on canvas and in society.
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Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, by Gayle Feldman. A biography of the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s who had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he’d signed Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce’s Ulysses.
With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more.
A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published “high,” “low,” and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way. “Gayle Feldman has crafted a sweeping intellectual history with a stunning cast of characters. . . . A scintillating biography that reveals the inner struggles of a great publishing house. Feldman’s is a stunning achievement.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus
“Few people know more about the publishing business than Gayle Feldman, whose analytic eye is tempered with a warm heart. This incisive but sympathetic portrait explains why Gertrude Stein (of all people) said that Cerf was ‘the only publisher I will ever love.’”—Amanda Vaill, bestselling author of Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
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Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future, by Caitlin Vincent. Drawing on interviews with dozens of opera insiders—as well as her own experience as an award-winning librettist, trained vocalist, opera company director, and arts commentator—Caitlin Vincent deftly unravels clichés and presumptions, exposing such debates as how much fidelity is owed to long-dead opera composers whose plots often stir racial and gender sensitivities, whether there’s any cure for typecasting that leaves talented performers out of work and other performers chained to the same roles, and what explains the bizarre kowtowing of opera companies to the demands of traditionalist patrons.
Vincent never shrinks from depicting the industry’s top-to-bottom messiness and its stubborn resistance to change. Yet, like a lover who can’t quite break away, she always comes back to her veneration for the artform and in these pages stirringly evokes those moments on stage that can be counted on to make ardent fans of the most skeptical.
