WITHOUT PREJUDICE: My Life as a Gay Judge, a memoir of living the curse "May you live an interesting life in interesting times"

WITHOUT PREJUDICE: My Life as a Gay Judge
HARVEY BROWNSTONE
ECW Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Harvey Brownstone’s story is a tumultuous, sometimes hilarious, and uplifting journey from bullied child to outcast after coming out to his parents, to trailblazing lawyer, to distinguished judge.

Brownstone colorfully details his momentous and inventive judicial career marked by his numerous innovations of the justice system, particularly revolutionizing Ontario’s child support enforcement program.

In retirement, he is no longer shackled by the restraints traditionally imposed on the judiciary, and thus Brownstone provides a frank, unfiltered, and refreshing glimpse into the inner workings of the justice system, boldly delineating the strengths and weaknesses of criminal and family courts, both of which he claims are sorely in need of comprehensive reform. His remarkable story, reinventing himself from high-profile judge to highly acclaimed talk show host, is a testament to the resilience and triumph of the human spirit.

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My Review: An unusual man's memoir of being unabashedly unusual and unapologetically opinionated.

Judges are not often public figures while still sitting on the bench. Harvey Brownstone got that memo, looked it over for legal penalties, saw there were specific things he was never to speak of so he didnt, and then quietly spoke up for the powerless his entire career. A fluently bilingual judge in an Anglophone province, he was in demand to hear cases involving Francophone participants; he was always active in criminal and family law; he was always, as a good judge ought to be, aware of how his decisions were going to impact all the parties' futures.

A lot of Justice Brownstone's empathy for people enduring trouble, as by definition all those in the legal system are, comes from his parents' surprising rejection of him when he came out to them as gay. It was the 1970s! They were sophisticated people, not from some lunatic religious-nut group...just quite homophobic. This disappointed me, as well as made me empathetically upset on his behalf. Fiive years of no contact made me cringe for him.

As he transitions his narrative to the legal career he self-financed (imagine trying *that* in 2026!) the tenor shifts from personal suffering to compassion for the suffering of other as they wend their way through a system he knows is stacked against them. Defendant or plaintiff, the Canadian legal system is as labyrinthine and intentionally complicated as that anywhere in the world. Justice Brownstone does not hold back in this memoir from expressing his anger at the cruelty baked into the system as it is...most especially the capricious, arbitrary "family" courts.

Justice Brownstone wrote of that system in a 2009 book entitled Tug of War: A Judge's Verdict on Separation, Custody Battles and the Bitter Realities of Family Court in 2009, published by the same house this book comes from. I don't think my blood pressure would remain safely controlled were I to read that book. This one, with its wider focus, challenged me, so I'll be avoiding his earlier book. No more hospital visits for TIAs if I can help it!

I suspect Canadian readers will be more involved in the nuts-and-boltsness of Justice Brownstone's policy agenda for legal-system reform. I'm totally with him in the spirit of his reforms; I can't see anyone in the US who holds a comparable position writing so openly and passionately in favor of redressing the balance of the system. It makes me a bit jealous, like having Mark Carney as their head of government does. Still leaves me with an overall positive impression of Justice Brownstone, and a hearty supportive push for any and all Canadians reading these words to go get themselves involved in his crusades.

I'm hoping the US readers will see what an honest, person-centered, effective and responsible progressive looks like and will start looking for more of them here.

STEVEN ROWLEY'S PAGE: a novel about testing your experience of love and a novella about being tested by love's lies

TAKE ME WITH YOU
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A poignant, hilarious, and wholly original love story, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband Norman get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were longing for something, both feeling stuck. But had Norman been so stuck that his only option was to leave Jesse behind?

As Jesse struggles to understand Norman’s disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you’ve always been one half of a whole?

When Norman’s sister Lally lands on Jesse’s doorstep with an urgent request, Norman’s absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse’s grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a strange man following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman’s disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.

In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story—an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.

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My Review: Being left as a subject for comedy makes more sense to me now that I've left and been left often enough to really *get* why people leave. Jesse and Norman, after a lifetime together, are...ordinary. They don't have the most exciting life but they're...contented. A perfect meet-cute sets them off on a long voyage of comfortable ordinariness. The voyage ends when Norman debarks their cruise ship in a spectacular way.

What follows is Jesse's journey through grief. Where'd he go...why'd he go...is he coming back....

Reckoning up a lifetime's happy domesticity in the ruins of abandonment shouldn't be funny. Often enough it's not. Often enough it is...this is Steven Rowley, after all...but it's muted, it's in the brightly lit pastels of these men's Joshua Tree homeplace. I got to the ending and thought, "if anyone says 'don't panic' I will riot" but no, no indeed, just a very endearing flashback and some rollerblades.

It's not the same as Author Rowley has given us in tje past, it's maybe not his tippy-top form, at least for my taste; but I am happier, I am more at one with my contentment than I was before I read it.

I call that an excellent return on time invested.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE DOGS OF VENICE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebok, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and The Guncle, a heartwarming story about finding oneself in one of the most romantic cities on Earth.

After months of planning a romantic holiday getaway in Venice, Paul is blindsided when his five-year marriage suddenly unravels. Fueled by heartbreak, Paul endeavors to take the trip alone.

Soon after arriving in Italy, he notices a small, scruffy, self-assured dog trotting alongside a canal with the confidence he so desperately wants for himself. When their paths cross again, Paul feels compelled to learn how his new four-legged friend thrives on his own. Amid the food, sights, and welcoming people of Venice, Paul’s journey culminates in a magical encounter that leads him to feel real connection—to a dog, to a foreign city and, most importantly, to himself.

Capturing Steven Rowley's signature wit, insight, and indelible characters, The Dogs of Venice offers another timeless story of love lost, and independence found—a holiday tonic for the soul.

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My Review: What an awful December Paul is having: the collapse of his love; the need to hide from his lovely supportive friends while the wounds that Christastime-dealt betrayal gave flensed him to the bone start to heal; because let's be so real here...he has to go on the not-romantic-anymore trip to Venice that he planned to take with Darren, the now-ex, at a some expense so he's not around as Darren moves out, which...acceptable. He's rented a cool apartment though it turns out his landlady's got zero English and this presents some amusing miscommunications.

Also, as ways to re-enter singlehood go, a trip to Venice is fire. Most romantic sinking ruin since Atlantis, plus hot Italian guys? Sign me up for the broken-heart tour. Paul even succumbs to the sensualty of Venice by having a fling. I was glad it was just that, a fling, and at the end of the story Paul takes home some lonely introspective walks with one of Venice's stray dogs, some fairly basic grief-processing that gave me very mild hope for his post-Darren future, and a real sadness that there's such a homeless-hound problem in Venice.

I don't think this is peak Rowley, but I do think it was 93 minutes very well spent. It took me away from my deeply grouchy mood that's hung over since yesterday. For that alone, I'd give it four stars; it deserves them more for the way a slightly co-dependent man starts facing up to the cost of couplehood über alles and starting out on the path of learning how much alone gives and how little loneliness is actually in it.

THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel, excellent fifteen years ago, moderately fun now

THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel
PAUL RUDNICK
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: If Guy Ritchie directed an episode of Queer Eye, it might look something like this hilarious and action-packed spy thriller by Paul Rudnick, acclaimed screenwriter and author of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, that blends espionage and social commentary, with an elite, gay secret society.

They are fierce patriots. They are licensed to kill. And they are really, really gay. Welcome to democracy’s secret weapon, the Tuxedo Society.

When Andrew Birnbaum, a struggling actor making ends meet by working in a candle shop, gets invited to have dinner with the exclusive Tuxedo Society by his best friend, Brock, his life takes an unexpected turn. What seems like a group of wealthy socialites gathering for gossip and cocktails quickly spirals into a world of espionage, danger, and hilarity.

Andrew soon meets Reggie O’Malley, a Navy SEAL with a penchant for black tie, who recruits Andrew to join the society’s covert mission to protect national security. Armed with gadgets like an inflatable life raft backpack, a yoga mat that doubles as an assault rifle, and, of course, an AMEX Black Card, Andrew quickly finds himself tackling spies, thwarting assassinations, and facing a host of unexpected threats in settings from the White House to the Vatican to the Summer Olympic Games.

The stakes escalate when Andrew and his comrades are sent on a jet-setting mission to uncover the truth about an ancient artifact. Along the way, they clash with oligarchs, crooked senators, and a smarmy televangelist with sinister plans for world domination.

Packed with Paul Rudnick’s signature wit, The Tuxedo Society is a wild ride through decadence, danger, and unexpected heroism, as Andrew discovers that saving the world might just be the role he’s been waiting for.

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My Review: Take all the silliness of a Bond flick and sprinkle fairy-dust on it, detomate a glitter bomb in a 1979 bath house, pipe in Bette Midler and Streisand and Cher interspersed with Romanovsky and Phillips, and...for the five of you still reading...and here's you a read. The trappings of the twenty-first century feel like they're set dressing. Like, this cisqueer white man cabal of queens sounds like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Pastiche of the ways and words of the Good Old Days, fun for a while but...wears thin.

I'm the target audience for this book. I liked it. I really laughed, in pleasure, at the jokes. It gave me the happy nostalgia of knowing someone out there still remembers my heyday.

But it's twenty-fuckin'-twenty-six, y'all. Plug your hearing aid into the charger. Suicide bombers are fiendishly hard to track down using modern data analysis...gaydar shit-sure got no chance. I think we're past this kind of spying being used for humor because we're past this kind of spying being usable in real-world settings, which is always the fun of an espionage novel. It's not realistic or the CIA/NSA/MI{numeral} folk would be on the publisher, the writer, and the writer's mama with every resource they possess; but we-the-reader need to feel it *could* be and that it *could* happen like this.

But there are some lines that truly glitter like well-cut diamonds. Can't quote them because no really good examples don't also spoil stuff, annd if you don't live in fear of the Spoiler Stasi, you haven't been nastygrammed by any of 'em yet. Spoiled things.

Still a fun read, but one I'll send you to the library to check out, not your Bookshop.org cart.

CALLUM McSORLEY'S PAGE: DCI Alison McCoist, honest to a fault, leads two exciting stories

SQUEAKY CLEAN (DCI Alison McCoist #1)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Half the Glasgow polis think DI Alison McCoist is bent. The other half just think she's a fuck-up.

No one thinks very much at all about car wash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer's motor for a ride. One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow's criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like 'Keep Yer Kneecaps' with any poor bastard who crosses him.

Can Davey escape from the gang's clutches with his kneecaps and life intact? Perhaps this polis Ally McCoist who keeps nosing around the car wash could help. That's if she doesn't get herself killed first.

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My Review: Did Trainspotting or Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, those dialect stories, defeat you? Are you a bit on the squeamish side? Did The Wolf and the Watchman series' borderline body horror keep you grossed out and/or sleepless? Horseman, pass by.

Ready for inappropriate Scottish-inflected law-enforcement humor that you can't quote publicly to lodge in the folds of your brain, then, so let's us go.

DI Ally McCoist is in limbo, or maybe better to say purgatory. She really, really screwed up. She waited to unleash this screw-up until the stakes could not have been higher. Her colleagues are...not inclined to forgive, and unable to forget...so she's not allowed to forget and thoroughly ostracized. It's not like they can fire her (in the UK people have actual rights to employment security, amazing thought) so she's still a Detective Inspector, she's still a pair of hands, there are thinngs her bosses can assign her to do that no one else wants to do.

Or everyone else is scared to do.

Paulo McGuigan is the diametric opposite of DI McCoist. A criminal overlord with stunning amounts of influence over Glasgow's workings, he's been reputationally wronged by Davey, a nobody, a hapless loser; so he must save face by revenging himself on the perpetrator of the lèse majesté. a bloody beating; followed by indentured servitude in McGuigan's bloody underworld follows for dumb, hapless Davey. Who, logically enough, gets sick of it because he's sickened by it. How this loser intersects with McCoist, his equal in loserhood, is the point of the read.

What debut Author McSorley achieves in this pretty bog-standard mystery plot's confines is to bring cringe comedy into violent police procedural by way of social commentary. It's couched in thick dialect (why it gets less than four full stars) as its dialogue so it feels hyperlocal. That's most likely why it won the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year in 2023. It's not like these voices would be heard outside Glasgow. Structurally everyone in the story wants something, always a very simple device but one that when missing is really missed. Readers may not *like* Ally, or Davey, or of course the Big Bad Paulo McGuigan (it'd be a little weird if you liked Paulo!) but they all want something and the others in the story either want it too or want to keep it themselves. It's easy to invest in characters whose wants one can readily grasp.

What happens when these separate wants collide is the reason to read the story. Author McSorley makes sure these collisions are quite...decorative, as in they're easy (if squirmy) to envision. I repeat: gore is your kryptonite, then go elsewhere. Adrian McGinty writes Enid Blyton pastiches compared to Author McSorley.

Ally and Davey and Paulo arrive at the plot's culmination with great finality. What is the set-up for another story, as this is a series? The concept of "failing upward" and of the adhesiveness of failure are great drivers of human activity. Ally is a character who's failed in multiple ways. She needs to figure out how to shed her failures, which we-the-reader all know is impossible but is lots of fun to watch.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAPERBOY (DCI Alison McCoist #2)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, raw, and comic Glaswegian detective thriller: the follow-up to Squeaky Clean, winner of the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime book of the year.

DCI Alison McCoist is back in action, and her promotion hasn’t earned her any friends. In fact, it’s made her even more unpopular. Struggling to balance her new responsibilities with the growing pressure to prove herself, McCoist finds herself tangled in a web of crime and corruption.

Chuck Gardner owns a confidential paper-shredding business, but his addiction to gambling has left him deeply in debt. When he stumbles across some incriminating documents, Chuck becomes unwittingly caught in a deadly game of power and deceit.

Meanwhile, McCoist is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery—a rat-nibbled corpse under a flyover. As she investigates, both Chuck and McCoist are sucked into a deadly stramash of gangland wars and police corruption.

Can Chuck solve his gambling and gangster problems before some heed-banger feeds him into his own shredder? And can McCoist claw herself out of this latest shitemire without her own shady dealings coming to light? It might depend on how far she’s prepared to go…

Paperboy is the darkly comic follow-up to the McIlvanney Prize winner, Squeaky Clean. The author, Callum McSorley, has been hailed as one of the most exciting new voices in crime writing, and has been praised by authors like Chris Brookmyre and Kevin Bridges.

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My Review: Praise from Chris Brookmyre is a gift to be treasured in a writer's career. Callum McSorley earned it with DCI McCoist's (mis)adventures. Author McSorley's creation is a person who screws up without bumbling. She fails upwards by seeing the problem that needs solving and unerringly choosing the less effective means of dealing with it; yet it's always, in the story-logic Author McSorley's set up, not instantly obviously a bad choice. Doing this multiple times in a series of stories is impressive. Doing it better the second time, well...that's mastery.

The cringe-comedy body-horror ("rat-nibbled corpse" anyone?) procedural mystery told in Glaswegian niche is now established and further developed by Author McSorley. In this follow-up story, the lineaments of the first story (Squeaky Clean, above) are reused. It's more like the stagecraft tradition of reuse of scenery and props than it is making a control-C copy and using control-F to find and replace the names, though.

I'm sure many will still find the Glaswegian voices impenetrable, adding to the increased use of very local humor in making the read a hillclimbing experience. It's going to keep these dark and funny stories abou the screw-ups of relatably clueless, naïve people out of many readers' hands. I'm sad about that because learning, by way of reading, just what it is that makes other people laugh, what worries them enough to need to tell stories that work it through, and what words can do in their clutches is a fast track to cultural amity. Or its opposite of course, some people don't get on with each other. But at least you know from experience, not simply rumor and report.

Newly-minted DCI McCoist got her promotion...was kicked upstairs...but she's no more respected in this story than she was when we met her. Still, she achieved something, she fixed a problem for her higher-ups that needed fixing and that means a promotion within that work culture. And it means another opportunity to fail as nearly everyone around her is just *waiting* to occur.

Most especially the corrupt cops Ally now has reason to know the identities of.

Fuck-up that she is, her luck *has* to run out sooner or later, and these dirty cops/bastards are fully prepared to give her the rope she meeds to hang herself and hope she trips over it before she ties the noose. Either way, they win, she fails, and status quo ante.

Not today, Satan(s).

With the necessary narrative pressure to act on the results that define the end of book one applied by Paulo McGuigan's widow, the PTB can't really say no to Ally poking the embers of that fire despite their...and her own...reluctance to expose the embers to more oxygen. Because middle-school science class taught you what happens next: it's hot, destructive, and really dangerous for everybody around.

And that's the fun of reading about it. I was really invested in Ally before I started this read. I met Lottie, the widow, and formed a fondness for her scary-tough self. Chuck, well, really can anyone care about Chuck the cuck? Like Davey from . he's an extra in the movie of his own life, lacking rizz or main-character energy or whatever you want to call it. See? I can't even muster the investment to choose a single word for the smear that is Chuck.

I get that most of my readers, based in the US, won't want to do the work of reading in a dialect of English they don't hear on the regular. I wish y'all would try harder. Honestly though I kiinda like being a lone weirdo in my immediate peer group because I liked feeling I inhabited a place I don't think I'll ever see IRL. It's the power of intentional storytelling informed by a real passion for the way he's telling it in Author McSorley's capable hands.

Start with Squeaky Clean for sure, nothing will make sense if you don't, but please start.

A BIRD'S IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World

A BIRD'S IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World
LOUIS LEFEBVRE (tr. Pablo Strauss)
Greystone Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Jennifer Ackerman comes a captivating exploration of avian intelligence that challenges traditional wisdom about animal cognition.

Surveying a wide variety of birds, including crows, finches, tits, and parrots, Louis Lefebvre, a world-renowned expert in animal behaviour, describes the remarkable innovations and problem-solving abilities of species often dismissed as ‘featherbrains’. From crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools, Lefebvre reveals how birds exhibit creativity, social learning, and even cultural transmission — traits once thought to be exclusive to humans and other primates.

Blending his decades of scientific research with engaging anecdotes, Lefebvre examines the evolutionary forces that have shaped avian intelligence. He explores how birds adapt to urban environments, innovate in response to challenges, and pass down knowledge across generations. This goldmine of bird behaviour yields an ‘innovation quotient’ widely used by researchers to measure and rank how innovative a bird species is. Using his encyclopaedic knowledge, Lefebvre answers questions such as:

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread?

Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots?

What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviors?

When a bird species learns a new technique, how do their innovations spread? Why is research on bird cognition being used to train AI models and even robots? What makes certain birds endlessly innovative while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours? With vivid storytelling and groundbreaking insights, A A Bird’s IQ invites readers to reconsider their perceptions, celebrating the ingenuity of birds and highlighting the interconnectedness of all intelligent life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I loved this read. I am, as I think those familiar with my writing over the years will know, a corvidophile...crows particularly but ravens and magpies as well...as I find their intelligence palpable. It is obvious to me that I am in the presence of a sentient being when I'm around corvids, there's that recognition of fellowship that really can't be denied. Or I can't deny it anyway.

Author Lefebvre seems to have had a similar experience though not specifically with corvids. His research into the intelligence of birds is built on a much longer tradition of inquiry into the subject than I ever suspected. It's a big part of my pleasure in reading this book to learn as much as I did about the history of research into avian intelligence. It felt as though I was sitting in an armchair next to him, having a wide-ranging conversation about science and its history wherein he answered my questions without my actually vocalizing them. It sounds fanciful, I know, but it was my emotional experience of this kind of intimacy that made the read so different from other popularizations of important scientific study.

It really isn't a bit surprising that I'd have this experience while reading A Bird’s IQ when you learn that Author Lefebvre is also a novelist...one nominated twice for Canada's Governor General's Award for French-language fiction, so clearly possessed of solid narrative-creation chops. I liked the experience I had learning about the intelligence of dinosaurs which is where I'm clearly going to go since I'm still an eight-year-old when it comes to dinosaurs. (And yes, birds are unquestionably dinosaurs.) It can, however, lead to a bit of prolixity about what the kids (ie anyone under fifty) seem to like calling "side quests" into matters like a scientist's name-change, or the challenges of gathering usable data from birding-centered magazines published in England between the World Wars. Fascinating, but better left in the source notes.

If I have a moment of...hesitation, let's call it, about some of Author Lefebvre's contentious assertions about cultural transmission of knowledge in bird populations, it's one that Author Lefebvre foresaw and forestalled by couching his contention of this fact in careful terms. The anecdotal evidence for this method of learning in bird populations is voluminous. It's not rigorous scientific data, and Author Lefebvre, to his credit, never tries to present it as such. He also very specifically states he does not share Rupert Sheldrake's more controversial ideas about how that kind of knowledge transmission could take place. As I am a bit uncomfortable with presenting that body of knowledge as scientific myownself, I am in harmony with Author Lefebvre on this point.

As I am very much a satisfied reader of this book, I want to assure all who read this review that it's not perfect in my eyes, or in the author's. It is an interim progress report on a career's-worth of experience, knowledge-gathering, and synthesis. It's well presented. It's well sourced. It's mae to bring fundamentals of the topic to broad attention, and couched in language that does this unintimidatingly well. It also affords the author's scientific peers access to his resources and his thinking leadiing to the conclusions presented...all in the same sentences and style. And, of the greatest value to both audiences, Author Lefebvre does not present his case as closed, does not claim a unique and conversation-ending breakthrough is in the text.

He is too sensible of work needing to be done and too respectful of the contributors to the overall field of research into intelligence. I was never more surprised in the read than when I learned how much two-way influence into robotics and "AI" there was. A story of how we got to where we are, and how much where we are has resonances beyond the obvious, in using our own intelligence to understand intelligence, expand its impact, and...I hope...gain humility about ourselves by learning about and from those unlike us.

VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull

VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull
TOM CLAVIN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dramatic new look at Custer's last stand in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, by the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is.

On June 25–26, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was fought between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, the battle resulted in the devastating defeat of U.S. forces and was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Now, for the 150th anniversary of this famous engagement, #1 New York Times bestseller and coauthor of the biography of Sioux warrior Red Cloud, The Heart of Everything That Is, Tom Clavin takes a fresh look at Custer's Last Stand.

This dramatic look at the Little Bighorn battle has to not only include the Native American point of view―with two dynamic Native figures, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on prominent display―but also the impact it had on the Plains Indians. It turned out to be their last stand too because a vengeful nation quashed any remaining resistance, with a conclusive massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, almost simultaneous with the murder of Sitting Bull.

In addition, Custer’s character by June 1876 is at the heart of this world-famous disaster. For all his celebrated bravery, especially at Gettysburg 13 years earlier, Custer became a devout media hound, desperate to gain fame. Even, some say, his own demise was a misguided attempt at grabbing national headlines: He envisioned a massacre – just not his own. As both the camera and the tabloid came of age, George Armstrong Custer became America’s first bona fide celebrity.

Vengeance is a thrilling read, filled with action, legendary characters, and poignance for the impact this had on Native Americans and the shape of the American West.

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My Review: I wondered what the hell there could be left to say about this military engagement that could illuminate the events in a light, through a lens and filter, that could deepen the focus and increase the contrast. "Hold my beer" said Author Clavin.

I know there are full biographies of all the men at the center of the story being told, excellent ones that delve into psychology, racism, nationalistic myth-making and resistance to it. The short chapters and broad focus of this historical analysis of causes and effects can't offer that depth or completeness. It can, and does, offer more accessible takes on the dramatis personae and thus that much more context for the pyrrhic victory won at the Little Bighorn River.

It's not a story where breaking news is likely to occur...the souces cited in the notes tell you we're not hot on the trail of some newly discovered textual evidence breaking open some of the enduring mysteries of Custer's uncharacteristically stupid actions. It's not that book; it's very much a useful primer, broadening its intended white, history-buff audience's awareness of how the battle looked from its different combatants' eyes. I enjoyed the quick-hit chapters because I'm only very slightly interested in the battle bits, more in the people bits. The carnage is not stinted herein. But we're not *immersed* in it because no piece of the story as retold here lasts long enough to make the reader feel he's going to need to scrub blood off his footgear after the read.

It's a popularization of more scholarly, and a contextualization of more white-triumphalist, works that have come before it. As I do not care to subject myself to the dizzying heights/depths od historiographic work done on Manifest Destiny and its concomitant Native American genocide, it's a work that suited my reading needs.

THE SUMMER BOY, Philippe Besson's récit of coming of age during tragedy's aftermath

THE SUMMER BOY
PHILIPPE BESSON (tr. Sam Taylor)
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99, preorder now for delivery on 26 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On an island off the coast of France, six teenagers come together for a summer of desire and discovery until one of them vanishes forever, leaving the rest with an enduring mystery.

Tell me, do you know why the most beautiful love stories must always end badly?

In the summer of 1985, on a scruffy resort island off the coast of France, six teenagers—five boys and one girl—band together for a final golden season before adulthood. Their days are drenched in sun and freedom, and their nights simmer with secrets, jealousy, and longing. Philippe is drawn to Nicolas, the quiet new boy who sees him in a way that no one else does. As their bond deepens, part of Nicolas remains unreachable—until a sudden tragedy brings their summer to a brutal end.

The Summer Boy is a lush and unforgettable autobiographical tale, capturing the ineffable summers of youth in amber. Celebrated novelist Philippe Besson has shaped his memories into an aching meditation on how one summer night—and one fierce connection—can echo across a lifetime.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Besson, a mere stripling of fifty-nine, recalls That One Summer. We've all had it: the moment when all the boundaries and all the relationships change, whether at eighteen or forty-two or in winter, in Louisville, Kentucky, on vacation, or waiting for your bus to come. Falling in love often does the trick. Getting a crush can, too, but so can the ordinary murkiness of passing time in good company. It's a defining moment. It can, usually does in my own lived experience, change you and your thinking about the whole rest of your life.

Where Lie With Me was a récit about Philippe's very first true love, this is a récit about how love is not plot armor and no matter how it ends, love is always going to wind bonds and webs and fetters around among between the people in your life. Philippe, as in Lie With Me, is both author and character in equal measure. Here he is eighteen and having that magical last summer of childhood freedom before adulthood tightens around him. François is a close friend whom Philippe is a rival of without being in any way deliberate about it; Alice, a new friend of both boys, is enamored of Phillipe and by François, in that eternal tangle that (depressingly enough) persists in happening over and over during one's lifetime. Nicolas, a friend of François', is fascinating to Philippe, but he's sexually interested by Alice's brother Marc. And that soap opera is where we stay all story long as events unfold.

That sounds more kinetic than this story is. Events are, in this context, mostly off-screen/page; we're here for the feels or else we're in the wrong book. As it's Philippe's récit the feelings are all his but he's astute so he reports on others' lives and feelings with acuity and compassion. Of course Author Philippe is discussing the past so it's the adult who evokes those feelings for his long-ago companions, but I felt as though character-Philippe was empathetic enough to have experienced his friends' feelings with interest and compassion.

Regret for things ill-done or, worse, un-done is one of the most maturing experiences in a person's life. It's truly a before-and-after moment to realize you have seen signs of a looming disaster but done nothing to affect its outcome. Philippe did not understand that he *could* impact Nicolas' fate. He, as Author Philippe, is coming to terms with the emotional scars and the unbearably sad realization that we possess the power to alter history...if we choose to.

It sobers a person up to know for certain that another person has their life altered because of our own in/action. No wonder Author Philippe is working this seam in the story-mine of gay coming-of-age stories. He does it beautifully and with palpable emotional honesty. In under two hundred pages he brings we-the-reader into full contact with the summer everything changed for him. It was a wrenching thing that changed his life. It's not sensationalized but it's not like there was room to do that in this page count...yet I got the impression there was little self-protecting editing of his personal memories. He was honest, our author, and gave us true biz about his life.

It made for a very good story to start my #PrideMonth reviewing with.