EDEN AT DAWN, queer love between Palestinian men...nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

EDEN AT DAWN
KARIM KATTAN (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-wrenching love story between two young Palestinian men in a land swept by sandstorms, burdened by occupation, and haunted by spirits.

In the labyrinthine city of Jerusalem, where poets woo their lovers with tales of jinns, lions, and warriors, Isaac and Gabriel pass in the streets, unaware of one another until a fifty-day wind brings enough sand to blot out the heavens. From their first meeting, desire blooms, hesitates, withdraws, and returns in a heady romance recounted by the sky itself, who cranes past rooftops and through windows to glimpse the pair. Defying checkpoints, desert squalls, and blazing heat, Gabriel and Isaac embark on a road trip through Jericho and past the Dead Sea to a storied village in the West Bank—a daring act in a divided country.

Lyrical and languorous, shattering and profound, Eden at Dawn is a feast of love in the midst of war. With this North American debut, lauded author Karim Kattan proves that storytelling is the ultimate act of devotion.

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My Review: As omniscient narrators go, it'd be quite a feat to go bigger than the actual sky itself. I'm impressed at the bold claim Author Kattan stakes with that choice. "I'm telling you about 'forbidden love' from the one PoV that literally everyone on Earth cannot escape from, that sees literally ALL from one or another angle."

I love that the sky sees all, but doesn't always catch little details, like who someone is based on what they look like. Perfect...omniscient, inattentive, fallible, so we-the-reader are never spoonfed too much of the story.

Grace notes like this abound but the entire story centers love between men who live on a patch of Earth where their essential selves are rejected by some people all of the time and all people some of the time...Palestinian, male, queer...SOMEone is mad at you 100% of the time. Love for a man is BAD in this motherland of two religions that shriek their LOVE for ALL MANKIND out of mouths stained red with the blood of the men they've ripped the throats out of for daring to speak their love for each other.

Isaac and Gabriel (you can look up the cultural relevance of choosing those two names yourselves) speak to each other in...heightened...language. They're hella eloquent and very willing to put it on display at the drop of their briefs. A lot of the discussion of their love and their plight taking place in this supernatural, seemingly eternal khamsin felt on-the-nose. A sad truth is, the more eloquent about love, being in love (the genitive case of the verb), the characters wax, the more...artificial...this external obscuration feels. It started out with this being the sky's omniscience failing, but became a labored device as its qualities were belabored.

I was charmed and entertained by the read, I genuinely wanted Gabriel and Isaac to strengthen their loving bond. It was very much about the feels, the emotional frisson, the men's illusions of Love, but that's how the first fifty days of every love affair I've ever had felt, too. I'm sure the read will come across as passionate, fervent, to Anglophones, which is certainly how it ought to be received. I suspect, based on long acquaintance, that there was a great musicality in the original French; I do not know how to explain it better than to say that I heard ringing church bells in the background as I read.

It is a beautiful way to feel, being in love; Love feels marvelous...full of and creating simultaneously marvels, its a drug so potent that it convinces you others will feel its power and accede to Love's demands, willingly.

I think my readers will all be old and scarred enough to know what Life does to love.

But we go back, but we go on, but we love and Love by this means conquer (us) All.

WAR IS A RACKET: And Other Essential Truths from General Smedley Butler, brutal, frank, determined to tell the truth he saw

WAR IS A RACKET: And Other Essential Truths from General Smedley Butler
SMEDLEY BUTLER (foreword by Kristofer Goldsmith)
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Includes a new introduction by Kristofer Goldsmith, the nation’s most recognized authority on the targeting of American troops and veterans with disinformation and extremist recruiting efforts.

Updated with fresh material, this edition brings the prophetic warnings of the 2-time Medal of Honor recipient to a new generation.

"A short, blunt, and extremely vigorous blast." —The New York Times

Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general and the most decorated combat veteran of his era, is best known today for War is a Racket (1935), a searing anti-war, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism critique of U.S. military interventionism that has remained perennially in-print and is as relevant today as ever.

This new collection features additional writings that underscore Butler’s role as a staunch advocate for veterans' rights and a fearless defender of democracy. In addition to his 1933 call-to-action, "You've Got to Get Mad," this volume includes his explosive 1934 testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. There, Butler exposed "The Business Plot"—a conspiracy by a group of Wall Street and other powerful figures that sought to convince Butler to use his influence over disgruntled veterans to seize control of the federal government and install a fascist regime.

With America’s present day military activity more closely tied to corporate profits and the enrichment of its leaders than ever, Butler’s insightful breakdown of the military-industrial complex remains highly resonant. Featuring a new introduction from combat veteran and advocate Kristofer Goldsmith, this edition is an essential resource for anyone looking to build their antifascist toolkit.

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

My Review: War is a racket. It's just true. In these chapters, a career Marine with the most stellar service record, a reputation as a straight-shootin' sunuvabitch tells it like it is:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

Written after his retiremet from the position as head of US-occupied Haïti's police force as a speech, turned into a bestselling, Reader's Digest-distributed short book...isn't it telling that almost a hundred years ago peace was a right-wing talking point?...and renowned until the US joined the hugely profitable-for-business world war made its message...awkward.

This new edition of the book is contextualized for modern audiences by Iraq veteran, military-family-descended Kristofer Goldsmith. His clarity and honesty about the personal costs, most of a century after this book's appearance, and thus the consequences of the war machine were know and deliberately ignored.
Smedley Darlington Butler was also the whistleblower that saved the US from the success of the Wall Street Putsch in 1933. The fascists who made that attempt chose the wrong figurehead. They've been quietly designing the next one since then. We're living through it.

Read a moral man's account of what "They" want. It should tell you why it is imperative to #Resist.

IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris, by socialist and artist Nick Thorkelson

IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris
NICK THORKELSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, full-colour graphic biography of the celebrated 19th-century designer and socialist William Morris (1834–1896), the celebrated designer, driven polymath and radical socialist.

Acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson moves through the events of Morris’s life weaving a rich tapestry of the major artistic, social and political questions which animated him.

He explores Morris’s politics and art, and how his hatred of class tyranny and love of humanity shaped his poetry, design and relationships.

The book brings to life the tension of Morris’s efforts to democratise art while creating pieces for the wealthy, his critique of Britain’s Empire, and his central place in socialist culture and propaganda.

Thorkelson’s striking and idiosyncratic drawings chime with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the humanising power of the handmade.

The book also features fourteen pages of immersive and dazzling illustrations by Sharon Rudahl, pioneer of women’s comics, honouring the literary work for which William Morris was best known during his lifetime.

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

My Review: If there has ever been an illustrated biography of socialist artist, poet, and capitalism-fleecer William Morris, I did not hear about it. Now that I have it's hard for me to see why this is the first one (if it is). Morris's role in reviving and revamping Gothic architecture in the newly rich Victorian era, using the English hunger to memorialize their ill-got gains to redistribute huge sums of money from the kleptocrats to honest craftworkers.

Like Josiah Wedgwood a century earlier, Morris used the design and manufacture of gorgeous luxury goods to redress the income imbalance he saw plaguing and ruining his society as it turned from the United Kingdom into the British Empire.

a graphic synopsis

chapter opening art in the Master's style

In a clear and concise telling of the events and the beliefs that animated the events of his life, Author Thorkelson does something I both enjoy and admire: he uses the technique of Morris's métier to give we-the-reader extra, surprising insight into the forces Morris was so contemptuous of and adept at harnessing to the economic betterment of the craftworkers he employed, and the aesthetic improvement of the people who paid for it all.

Morris thinking and scheming and designing

It's only 128pp so you know how very much heavy lifting the illustrations are doing. Much time is saved, in a sense, by leaving us to look in the corners and backgrounds for the rest of the story. In a time where sequential-art storytelling is so very prevalent, finding it deployed well on a major culture-shaping visual artist and designer of built living environments is deeply refreshing.

Morris out in his world

And lo, behold! Morris made over a world that was not heading anywhere beautiful into a world that included public and private spaces with gravitas and grandeur...handcrafted by well-paid workers in an increasingly mass-produced, uninspired, enslaved by machines ethos. He made it possible for aesthetics to last into our own age.

It might not be to your personal taste but it for sure and certain could not have been created by a LLM.

NOW I SURRENDER, La Frontera's history told very differently...on the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

NOW I SURRENDER
ÁLVARO ENRIGUE (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
Riverhead Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A visionary novelist imagines the fiercely fought end of an epoch of almost unimaginable freedom and radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.”

In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republica, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction. Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.

Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, their storylines playing out in multiple eras, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

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

My Review: Yes, it felt to me like the narrator was a self-insert, was a bit showoffy in a story that honestly was not in need of ornamentation; just add footnotes and this is a non-fiction corrective to settler colonialism's lying mythmaking. Funny how when a rotten to the core politico needs a way to juice his polling before a rough election battle it's always at the cost of a darker skinned man being sold a bunch of bullshit about making peace and meaning murder (his, not the politico's) and it's frankly weird how often Florida is involved either directly like Alligator Alcatraz or indirectly like Geronimo learned. I'm stunned by how little imagination it takes to dupe people who don't learn even the lies and half-truths they're sold. Reuse threats even names and the audience is inclined to shrug at most, lap it up at least.

The violence of the events of how the West was "won" is breathtaking. Author Enrigue does not soft-pedal its stomach churning reality. It was the stuff of public record at the time, why lie about what "They" were clearly proud of? And speaking of "Them," it is one of Author Enrigue's narrative tactics to reduce characters to labels, the colonel or the warrior or suchlike in paragraphs lacking quotation marks or certain kinds of line breaks...heads up. I know many of y'all really hate when authors do that. It's in service of a teaching. It's not really important to have a family or personal name for a cog in the machine of treachery theft and genocide, and equally unhelpful to present a victim's personal data like that because it's not how their murderers victimizers abusers see them. They're not even important enough to the thieves to merit numbers tattooed on their arms.

When names are give it is to reinforce what is lost in their extermination. Otherwise it's cultural extirpation's great success to use labels. The terrible cost, the awful price, the nightmare of depersonalization and dehumanization...all, at every turn, reinforced and durable in its suffocating rage-baiting cruelty and pointless judgment.

The 2026 longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is *stacked* with good reading. Start here.

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED, what a great title!

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED
EMILY ZINNIKAS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: TIME ONLY MAKES THE NIGHTMARE MORE REAL.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

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

My Review: Willa's desire to bury her trauma, not make theater of it, is at the heart of this creepy, atmospheric story of dread. It's impossible to decouple one's existence as a survivor of an unsolved mass murder from the event but Willa's kept her profile as low as is possible.

The exigencies of storytelling make that impossible. Willa's goin' in. Not willingly, not graciously, but in she's going. Into the past, into reckoning with her...odd...beginnings, into what one hopes can be a laying-to-rest of the horrifying truths of childhood sexual assault.

It's the season for uneasy-making reads. Based on the synopsis I rather thought this story would be more about supernatural unease, dealing with hauntings and entities and so on. Instead it's about the awful reality that some kids are not safe even in their own beds. It's very uneasy-making but all too corporeal. I was surprised to feel so compelled to keep reading. It's not exciting writing on a sentence level but it kept my eyes engaged for an entire day, difficult to achieve at this late date in my reading career, as Willa's return to the site of her trauma brings her sporadically, almost haphazardly, into contact with her unresolved pain. Normally I would be complaining that was disorganized, or lacked narrative thrust. Instead of feeling that intellectual response I felt it was me being in Willa's fragmented, damaged emotions with her, processing with her as she had to do and I was along to witness so I could stand in fellowship with her in her hours of need.

It was not the experience I'd expected to have in the read. It was in most ways a better, more real, more involving one. It was dark, and dangerous, and deliberately frightening at times; it was always Othering, intensely alienating to be with Willa in the recovered moments. They were not numerous or extended in ways that felt prurient to me-the-reader.

Horror that gets dressed in supernatural drag doesn't often work that well for me. I usually dismiss the supernatural elements, where this time I had a context for them that made them make sense to me. I won't recommend the read to all readers...check the CWs...and I suspect the truest devotees to horror reading won't get as much out of the read as I, with my self-supplied remapping of the story, did.

It was a successful, pleasurable read for me. I hope y'all will consider giving it a shot at your time and treasure.

HALF LIGHT, subcontinental queerness interrogated pre-decriminalization

HALF LIGHT
MAHESH RAO
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An affair between two men in India changes the course of both their lives forever in this searing queer love story about shame, hope, and identity.

“Rao sheds light without judgement…Thoughtful, tender storytelling at its finest.” —Marie Claire

High up in the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide cuts off a crumbling hillside hotel from the outside world. Trapped together with other guests and staff, two men begin to exchange lingering glances. For Neville, a charismatic student, such encounters are nothing new—urgent kisses in stairwells, fleeting encounters in parked cars. But for Pavan, a shy hotel employee accustomed to hiding in plain sight, their growing connection threatens to upend the careful life he has built in secrecy.

Years later, the men meet again by chance, this time surrounded by the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Neville is now a restless graduate, trying to find his footing in the city. Pavan has long since fled the hills and begun a new life for himself working in a luxurious city hotel. As their renewed flirtation quickly turns fraught, long-buried secrets from their shared past threaten to tumble into the light.

Set on the cusp of India's landmark ruling to decriminalize homosexuality, Half Light is an atmospheric, elegantly wry story of outlawed desire and the fragile hope for a life beyond concealment. From literary powerhouse Mahesh Rao, this tender exploration of the struggle for acceptance and understanding will appeal to readers of Douglas Stuart and Tom Crewe.

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

My Review: In this year of our lord twenty-twenty six, the World has decided to valorize the ineffable experience of Yearning. Longing purposefully for someone, usually in its most effective iterations someone forbidden to you. I liked Heated Rivalry the book; I adored Heated Rivalry the TV series, because it yearned more obviously for me to invest in, cry over, relate to than in the text version.

I think this story would be even better filmed, too. Its couple aren't as charismatic, or even as much of a couple, as Shane and Ilya; but they have similarly disparate beginnings. Pavan is lower in class, and from a national minority:

𝐏𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐲. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞, 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐮𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐟𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. 𝐇𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐠𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐨 𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫. 𝐀𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐦𝐞-𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫'𝐬 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐥𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝. 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐥𝐞.

...and Neville is far better educated and insulated from Pavan's existential risks in acting on his gayness, in pre-decriminalization times, by being richer. Not that much happens in the story but they do a lot of soul-searching in gorgeously evoked scenery. They are existing as gay in a country with even farther to go towards QUILTBAG equality than the US.

It makes their interest in each other more difficult, of course, and it sharpens their desire to be in relationship. It's very much a story that foregrounds their interiority, which makes me feel the Yearn all the more. It is not a romance, though, don't hear me tell you that! It's a story of two gay guys who notice each other and wonder, separately, if it's even okay to yearn for the lovingkindness they see and can imagine in each other. Neville is able to shut down the desire for more by seeking casual sex with nobody-bodies. Pavan is more constrained in his sexual expression without the money and class position; their ideas of each other are thus similar: I can't get what I want but I want what I thought I had with him.

It's powerful, the yearning, it's cruel in the extreme to criminalize a person's identity over something as trivial as sexuality, and Author Rao doesn't let us forget the men's struggles are not simple or internally resolvable. I'll be honest: I didn't like either man much. I was never rooting for them to get past their fears and be together. I was fully invested in their yearning, for a just and fair world, for a life they could feel validated them as men, for a way to seek someone who loves them for themselves and they might love in return. Their differing repressive forces are equally unfair. Their ultimate fates aren't vouchsafed to us, exactly, but decriminalization does push Pavan into making some steps into a future under his control. Neville is a rich boy from start to finish, not inclined to be otherwise, so his course is merely more openly itself.

I had to take a star off the beautifully evocative rale set in vividly realized places because the men were so constructed as to make their didactic positions as catalysts for Pavan's growth and Neville's stasis their only real relationship. It makes the experience of reading Neville's arc feel as though I was voyeurizing vapidity. On the whole, though, I found so much enjoyment in the settings and societal developments feeling so real to me that I hope you'll send a copy to your local filmmaker!

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, sobering and timely

AMERICAN CAESAR: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy
BRADLEY B. ONISHI
St. Martin's Essentials (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling and urgently needed exposé on the forces pushing American politics and religion toward a post-constitutional autocracy

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural pulpits, from Catholic monasteries to Beltway think tanks and Project 2025, a convergence is underway. Reactionary Catholics dream of a new Christendom. Protestant pastors invoke divine right over democratic rule. Tech billionaires, led by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, argue that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Their solution? A singular ruler to bring “order” out of what they see as liberal chaos.

With a theologian’s sensibility, a journalist’s touch, and a historian’s eye for how movements evolve and adapt, Dr. Bradley B. Onishi traces the strange alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism. At the center of it all is the desire for an unbound executive—one man, beyond checks, beyond balance, beyond democracy. This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s an organized attempt to abandon the American experiment altogether. A former insider turned academic expert, Onishi brings unmatched depth to this investigation—tracing his own path from evangelical pastor to co-host of Straight White American Jesus, the nation’s leading religion and politics podcast.

As the 2024 election fades into history and a new political order takes shape, American Caesar is not just a warning. It’s a map of how we got here—and a call to act before the Republic as we know it becomes just another chapter in a forgotten history book.

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

My Review: I'm highly suspicious of the notion that "order" is a Good Thing because who decides this for other people is generally who wants to control those other people's lives in close detail. Those kinds of people are almost always puritans of one or another sort, who believe "They" should not be thinking those thoughts/doing those things (usually, though not always, sexual) because *eeewww*.

Author Onishi adds in the tech industry's "thinkers" to the usual suspects but stops short of using the slurs I myownself hurl at them. Author Onishi is tendentious as hell, shouting and waving his arms at the public, determinedly pointing the fingers of both hands at sometimes strained parallels with a past distant enough to make comparisons very very broad. Human nature does not change from what I can see; the same playbooks are still effective because our psychology is much the same.

"Much the same" does not mean we're always going to succumb to the same ruses. Look at the demonization of immigrants that's largely limited to haters and shouters, who are always in every era a minority; how many more people did what Minneapolis did and showed up to disrupt ICEstapo raids? California's honking warners of imminent danger are not getting hate outside the small bubble of the haters and screamers or there would be giant crowds of people helping ICE instead of huge shortages of recruits.

I'm not trying to put you off the read, it says what I think and explains what I fear; it brings the receipts for its bases of argument; it's going a bit further into the "it's inevitable, prepare to suffer" direction than I suspect is fully supported by developments. I think its tone is alarmist in a time when alarm is not only justified, but required; however presenting the grim facts ought to serve, not presenting deterministic conclusions. Those tend to dishearten the ordinary person, not rile them into the resistance and non-compliance we so urgently need to support and spread as a mindset.

Flawed by an overly emotional tone or not, this book can and should be part of your pre-election reading.