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Nonfiction Views: This week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-04
Good evening, everyone. Just the publisher blurb-based capsule of the week’s notable new books this week. I didn’t have time to pull together a full book review of my own.
I was pleased to see that the New York Times Sunday Book Review featured on its front page the book I reviewed here last week, novelist/journalist Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Here is a link to the NYT’s review.
My Women’s History Month 20% off promotion is up, I’ve decided to keep my Black History Month 20% promo up and running, because this is no time to not keep diverse voices promoted, and of course my RESIST! 20% off promo continues as well.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America's Forgotten Origin Story, by Richard Parker. American history is almost always told from East to West. Yet a closer look at the past reveals the country’s start began not in the East, but in the West—at a Texan city situated in a natural shallow crossing of the Rio Grande River: El Paso. El Paso is the crossroads of Indigenous America, the nexus of a thousand-year-old Native American migration and trade route, linking MesoAmerican and Pueblo empires and beyond. It’s where the European conquest of North America began, and where the United States’ Manifest Destiny was later achieved. Here, East met West, where the consequential transatlantic route, the Southern Pacific, was completed in 1881. Here the West was “won”—the Indian Wars were not fought on the Great Plains, but in the Southwest, with a scorched-earth strategy that went on for decades. It’s where Immigrant America starts—more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island—and where crucial battles for Civil Rights were fought—the city smashing through racial and ethnic discrimination before anywhere else in the nation. “Richard Parker’s The Crossing is a grand tour of the Southwest, its people, culture, and history. The center of this sun-baked universe is El Paso, whose story Parker—who grew up there with roots in both Mexican and American cultures—is highly qualified to write.” — S. C. Gwynne, author Empire of the Summer Moon
Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women, by Vanda Krefft. It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.
Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "The Katharine Gibbs School trained tens of thousands of women—white gloves and all—to battle sexism and succeed in business, government, entertainment, politics, and more. The struggle for workplace equality continues."— Ellen Cassedy, author of Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie
Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, by Elaine Weiss. In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them. Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.” “Through elegant writing, masterful storytelling, and prodigious research, Weiss takes us on a journey for freedom and how that quest for liberation was grounded in the power of grassroots civic education and a belief in the people and democracy. Trials, troubles, triumphs, and tears are the mile markers on this engaging tale about the Highlander Folk School and those who willed it into being right at the very moment when it was needed.” —Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide
Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today, by Scott Spillman. In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ought to be taught, researched, and narrated. But since the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders, abolitionists, judges, scholars, and ordinary citizens have all struggled to explain and understand the peculiar institution.
In Making Sense of Slavery, historian Scott Spillman shows that the study of slavery was a vital catalyst for the broader development of American intellectual life and politics. In contexts ranging from the plantation fields to the university classroom, Americans interpreted slavery and its afterlives through many lenses, shaping the trajectory of disciplines from economics to sociology, from psychology to history. Spillman delves deeply into the archives, and into the pathbreaking work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Annette Gordon-Reed, to trace how generations of Americans have wrestled with the paradox of slavery in a country founded on principles of liberty and equality. “Simply amazing. A brilliant tour d'horizon of 250 years of American thinking and writing about slavery.”— James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages
Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare, by John Lechner. In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin's Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule.
Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over.
Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, by Russell Shorto. In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general. Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an invention, the result of creative negotiations that would blend the multiethnic, capitalistic society of New Amsterdam with the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. The book draws from newly translated materials and illuminates neglected histories—of religious refugees, Indigenous tribes, and free and enslaved Africans. "Taking Manhattan picks up where The Island at the Center of the World leaves off. Shorto’s masterful narrative brings the much-neglected stories of Native Americans and African Americans into a heady stew that is our real founding story. — Kevin Baker
Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War, by Jill Eicher. Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today. To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the daunting task of collecting the war debts from European governments still devastated by World War I and struggling to recover economically. Dealing with the U.S. Congress and the heads of foreign governments on the world stage became one of the great adventures of his life.
Winston Churchill is one of the best-known figures in history. Mellon vs. Churchill presents Churchill through a different lens, focusing on his service as Chancellor of the Exchequer when Great Britain was the largest debtor to the United States. That he became the most vocal critic of American foreign policy during that time is a scarcely told chapter of economic history—and his long and contentious debate with Mellon has seldom been explored. "Written by a former U.S. Treasury financial analyst, Mellon Vs. Churchill revisits a seminal moment in modern world affairs—the debate between Washington and London over the latter’s repayment of its World War I debts, which totaled 135 percent of the country’s GDP in 1919. Publicly, both leaders took extreme stances calculated to satisfy their respective constituents. Neither Churchill nor Mellon could foresee that the main beneficiary of a tottering world economy would eventually be Hitler." — Foreign Affairs
Meltdown: Greed, Scandal, and the Collapse of Credit Suisse, by Duncan Mavin. Credit Suisse was a 166-year-old bastion of global banking. But a veneer of high-class service disguised a darker, much dirtier reality. From its sterile Zurich headquarters, Credit Suisse banked dictators and drug dealers, hid stolen Nazi gold, and helped corrupt bankers fleece the firm's own clients of billions of dollars. Its top executives oversaw a global operation that laundered money for autocrats; they hired spies to track one another through the cobbled streets of the Swiss financial capital; and they helped clients hide their money from the world’s tax authorities. This is the story of a tawdry total meltdown of one of the biggest, most influential, and most scandal-ridden banks on the planet. “Full of petty, pointless squabbles, generally unfolding on the edge of legality, it’s not exactly an epic of corporate hubris, nor quite a morality play of corporate greed, but a procession of lazy grifts and dumb mistakes, repeated for decades." — New York Times Book Review
A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist, by Miles J. Unger. Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent's crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish. Theo, a successful art dealer at a prestigious Parisian firm, dismissed them as gloomy, unappealing, and, worst of all, unmarketable.
By the time Vincent left Paris, almost exactly two years later, he’d transformed himself into one of the most original artists of the age, turning out works of hallucinatory intensity in vivid hues and stamped with his own distinctive personality. A Fire in His Soul chronicles this remarkable transformation. It’s a tale filled with tragedy and triumph, personal anguish and creative fulfillment, as Vincent, through sheer force of will, reinvents himself as a painter of unparalleled expressive power. “A superb book that rescues Vincent from the isolation of his myth and reconnects him with family, friends, and the vital energy of bohemian Montmartre.” — John Higgs, author of William Blake vs the World
Firstborn Girls: A Memoir, by Bernice L. McFadden. On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar .
Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”
Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women's wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa's handmade quilt. A distinguished novelist explores the history that shaped her and the women in her family. . . . A powerful, richly tapestried book about race, history, love, and the healing power of the written word.” —Kirkus
The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human, by Sophie Strand. At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? "Full of arresting, luminous, and generative insight. Like a forest spirit gifted with a lyrical pen, Strand shows us the extraordinary connections among bodies, energies, metaphors, and ecologies. Her work brims with wisdom about health and illness, meaning and mystery. A must-read."— David George Haskell , Biologist and author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen
Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, by Joshua A. Miele. At the age of four, Joshua Miele was blinded and badly burned when a neighbor poured sulfuric acid over his head. It could have ended his life, but instead, Miele—naturally curious, and a born problem solver—not only recovered, but thrived. Throughout his life, Miele has found increasingly inventive ways to succeed in a world built for the sighted, and to help others to do the same. At first reluctant to even think of himself as blind, he eventually embraced his blindness and became a committed advocate for disability and accessibility. Along the way, he grappled with drugs and addiction, played bass in a rock band, worked for NASA, became a guerilla activist, and married the love of his life and had two children. He chronicles the evolution of a number of revolutionary accessible technologies and his role in shaping them, including screen readers, tactile maps, and audio description. “This is not a single book, but several wonderful books wrapped up into one. It’s a science book, a romance, a riveting history of the disability movement, a book about New York, an advice book. And, of course, it’s a memoir—fascinating, honest, and inspirational in a delightfully un-sappy way.”— A.J. Jacobs, author of The Know It All and The Year of Living Constitutionally
Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink, by Rick Jackson and Matthew McGough. In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck? Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King. In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly’s beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.
Clay: A Human History, by Jennifer Lucy Allan. This book is a love letter to clay, the material that is at the beginning, middle and end of all of our lives; that contains within it the eternal, the elemental, and the everyday.
People have been taking handfuls of earth and forming them into their own image since human history began. Human forms are found everywhere there was a ceramic tradition, and there is a ceramic tradition everywhere there was human activity. The clay these figures are made from was formed in deep geological time. It is the material that God, cast as the potter, uses to form Adam in Genesis. Tomb paintings in Egypt show the god Khum at a potter's wheel, throwing a human. Humans first recorded our own history on clay tablets, the shape of the characters influenced by the clay itself. The first love poem was inscribed in a clay tablet, from a Sumerian bride to her king more than 4000 years ago. "I thought I knew a lot about pottery, but I didn't, not as much as I do now. From the earliest earthenware to the history of porcelain, along with the author's own progress working with different clays and glazes, I have loved learning from every chapter in this beautiful and affecting book." — Vashti Bunyan, singer-songwriter
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