WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, powerful alignment with anti-imperialism's historic chorus

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future
TAREQ BACONI
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

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

My Review: A grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa who were forced out of their homes in 1948, Author Tareq has lived in a diaspora much like the Jews have done since Rome evicted them in the first century CE. It is foundational to his identity as he's lived in foreign places like Ammann, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. It might just be that these foreign cities would not feel like home for a young queer man, regardless of his family origins; but an out queer Palestinian can expect to be an outsider.

A lifetime spent Othered has made Author Tareq an activist to his bones. I suspect that would always have been his fate, but his need to usher justice into the conversation and into the world is the driver behind the decolonial jeremiad of this book. It is simply incredible that, as the English were being forced out of India, they were setting up a Zionist settler-colonial state in Palestine as part of the world's attempt to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust. Why they didn't simply hand over Austria and Bavaria to the Jews, and shoo the Germans out, I have never understood. Those were the cradles of Nazism. The Palestinians did nothing to aid the Holocaust that I've ever heard of...why punish them?

Ahem. Back to the book.

Given Islamic polities were generally more accepting of Jewish populations in their midst, there is no reason to imagine the cohabitation of Jewish and Palestinian Muslim would not have worked fine apart from the rise of the apartheid state post-1948. I think Author Tareq is on to something when he says the return of Palestine to its original people is the opening salvo of a second wave of decolonization, contra the United States' hegemonic control of the world's economies and militaries. The recent war on Iran, and its startling evidence of the loss of that hegemony, makes this the perfect time for readers on all sides of the political argument to read about how the idea of fairness and justice can re-enter the convesation.

I guarantee you, the US reader, will not like everything in this book. It is entirely sure that you won't agree with all his poposals...I didn't either. But all of us in the world need to know what all sides of the questions facing us in the world think, feel, want...and how they came to those ideas...as we decide how to steer the world with our votes, our money, our time and attention.

Starting here is painless. Author Tareq writes, and thinks, at a high level.

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals, using Rilke's model to equally good effect

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
Cambridge University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections.

Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionate moderate and two young radicals, the book outlines the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation and makes a case for why we need this virtue today in America. Drawing on clearly written and compelling sources, Craiutu offers an opportunity to rethink moderation and participate in the important public debate on what kind of society we want to live in. His book reminds us that we cannot afford to bargain away the liberal civilization and open society we have inherited from our forefathers.

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

My Review: In our time of polarization and extremism, being "moderate" is seen as synonymous with being indecisive, wishy-washy, uncommitted or non-committal; likely to be an untrustyworthy ally against the Hated "Them." I'm guilty of seeing the moderate in this light myownself, so I get it. I chose to read this political version of Letters to a Young Poet for that reason.

It begins by outlining moderation as a state or condition of its own, not merely something that is not radical. Like its cousin "liberalism" that shares it desuetude, moderation is a central virtue of inclusivity. Author Aurelian makes the point in his tendentious letters to the imaginary young radicals that the society within which they exercise freedom of conscience safely was founded on principle of moderating passions through discussion.

Civil discourse is both senses of civil before it can be effective. In advocating for the benefits of moderation, Author Aurelian offers competing conflation/separation paradigms when each suits his purpose; he seems to conflate throughut the existence of moderation with the ability to compromise and creates straw men to suit the needs of the moment in his argument. I say this not because I disagree, but because I know some academic or another is going to point out the "structural deficiency" of the technique. That might well be relevant when a book is written for a panel of dissertation judges. This is much more a book meant to reach the recent graduate from either secondary (better) or college (good) education. I doubt it will do much to persuade radicalized people. It is a psychic vaccine against the seductive allure of being Right that is so extremely addictive.

I'd encourage my readers to think about gifting this book to grands/niblings/young people between sixteen and twenty-four or so. We need, as a society as well as in our office as Old Authority Figures, to damp down the terrible destructive misuse of young people's passionate feelings. Providing them with an alternative that is not the squishy bland tedious thing they're taught it is, we stand a chance of keeping the best of our present society.

When the alternative is clashing authoritarianisms, the urgency becomes clear to y'all...or so I hope, since it only just happened to me.

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?, Dench at her storytelling best

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?
JUDI DENCH with Brendan O'Hea
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea chat about her life on the stage, on the screen, and, above all, behind the scenes…

In Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea take us on a heartfelt and hilarious tour of her extraordinary life and career. From growing up in York and being miffed at not getting the part of Mary in the school Nativity play, to playing before sold-out houses on Broadway and in London’s West End, she’s done it all. She walked the red carpets of Hollywood, turned James Bond’s M into the most astute, unflinching Head of MI6 anyone could ever have imagined, and won an Oscar, a Tony, Golden Globes, Oliviers, and BAFTAs along the way.

Yet despite the accolades, she has been accompanied by doubt. From the movie producer who said she had “everything wrong” with her face, to the theatre director who advised her against doing sitcom. Is it any wonder she leaves a bag by the rehearsal room door in case she has to make a run for it?

But stepping out of her comfort zone has been Judi’s guiding principle and in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, she reveals all to Brendan - her friend and writing partner. She tells stories of pranks (both onstage and off), dissects her greatest screen roles, shares tales of her joyful marriage to actor Michael Williams, and talks about her passion for nature and animals.

As told to Brendan O’Hea, this is Judi Dench’s story—funny, honest, intimate, enlightening, surprising, moving, and deeply inspiring. Over ninety years in the making, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? is the story of the world’s most beloved actor.

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

My Review: The key word in the publisher's synopsis above is "chat"...it is a delight to be with Judi and Brendan as they sit at a comfy table, pretty flowers in the middle, an endlessly full teapot and cakestand between them, and reminisce, gossip, rehash, generally chat about Dame Judi's life and times. What times! Enough Oliviers to bowl into...BAFTAs galore...a Tony, an Oscar, some Golden Globes. Considering her career began seventy years ago, one would think she is living out her nineties in the comfort and quiet she's earned.

Nope. The lady says of that idea: "Don't retire, do not go gentle, and don't even think about going quietly."

Absolutely.

I'm extra impressed by this memoir's title because Dame Judi still suffers from performance anxiety, which leads to her keeping her bag by the rehearsal room door in case she is compelled to run! She puts it succinctly: "Every time I'm offered a new job it's like starting from scratch." That's a daunting thought for someone a lot younger, and with better eyesight, than Dame Judi has (macular degeneration takes more and more acuity as time passes). Nevertheless, she persists. It is so very heartening to me to hear this from a still-working ninety-one year old. While it is no longer safe for her to be on stages live or for films, she has transitioned into voice acting, with 2026's The Magic Faraway Tree's fridge being her latest role.

In going round the houses the structure of this memoir is more inviting, more personal than a chronological autobiography could ever be. It gives her space to discuss the late Michael Williams, husband for thirty years, partner to this day through fathering Finty (their daughter) and thus grandfathering Sam, her adored...adorable!...grandson. It's the best way for her to remember her departed friends like Maggie Smith, fellow actor and fellow Dame; her associations with renowned director Sam Mendes, musical legend Stephen Sondheim; her discomfort at doing a nude scene with Jeremy Irons in Langrishe, Go Down (though it doesn't keep her from discussing him!); all in an organic, messy, fun way.

Her sense of humor, bawdy and earthy and honest, has her reveling in how she's been able to have fun in her work by playing pranks on fellow cast and others. It's obvious she succeeds at life and at memoir for the same reasons: do it, go all-in, do the work and the fun with equal commitment. Her late-life partnership with a conservationist, David Mills, is less discussed, though as it is a current relationship with a living person this made sense to me; it isn't ignored or minimized, it's discreet. A classy way to behave as one would expect from Dame Judi.

Fellow actor Brendan O’Hea, in his role as catalyst of and amanuensis for her reminiscences, served the same function in 2023's Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent with the same aplomb and finesse. As a fellow actor, thus one familiar with the stage and the world of the theater, so it was predictable that their chats would go into details of theater life that might be of lesser interest for casual fans. His friendship with Dame Judi makes perfect sense given his lengthy involvement with Shakespeare's Globe, the theater and the acting company. They're very easy with each other because they love so much of the same cultural furniture...easy to find a nice place to sit and talk.

We're very lucky indeed they've invited us to join them again.

ARCHITECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right

ARCHIECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right
F. DARRELL MUNSELL
University Press of Kansas (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The eye-opening story of how a conservative think tank of political philosophers dedicated to the founding principles of the United States became the base of operations for Trump’s agenda of destroying civil rights and undoing American democracy.

From the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Federalist Society’s decades-long campaign to shape the judiciary, private think tanks have long been the shadowy intellectual engine driving conservative politics. But the Claremont Institute remains the most consequential organization in shaping the MAGA agenda. Founded in southern California in 1979, Claremont’s original mission was “to restore the principles of the American Founding to its rightful, preeminent authority” in American society. Now, historian Darrell Munsell uncovers how the Claremont Institute went from being a home for erudite political philosophers to serving as the base camp for the January 6 insurrection, Project 2025, and President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

The institute’s political activism began with its endorsement of Donald Trump for president in 2016, followed quickly by its entry into the cultural battles against Black Lives Matter, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public universities, government agencies, and commercial enterprises. By the end of Trump’s first term, Claremont believed that “wokeism” was an existential threat to the Founders’ Constitution and was fighting to win the culture war at any cost—including attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, Claremont lurched further rightward toward populism, Christian nationalism, and illiberalism. Led by John Eastman, Charles Kesler, Thomas D. Klingenstein, and a new generation of young, conservative activists—some from the furthest fringes of the far-right—the Claremont Institute is shaping the movement of National Conservatism with its devotion to replacing constitutional democracy with an authoritarian system of government. Claremont joined forces with the Heritage Foundation and other groups to draft Project 2025, the now-infamous blueprint for the second Trump administration.

Munsell’s revelatory history of the Claremont Institute pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential organizations in American politics and a driving force of the MAGA ascendency. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the hidden forces behind Trump’s agenda.

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

My Review: Founded in 1979, the Claremont Graduate University professor Harry Jaffa with four students from his tenure at Claremont Men's College. Shortly after the school became coeducational, he led the establishment of the think tank, naming it "Claremont" despite it having no official ties to the conservative school consortium he left; the name does not reflect the Institute's present headquarters location in Uplands, California. In fact neither the school he left not the city the Institute is located in make any mention in their Wikipedia pages of Jaffa himself or the Claremont Institute. Telling, no?

The Institute was founded to provide the burgeoning conservative movement of Reagan/Falwell/Dobson times with intellectual underpinnings rooted in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. I will leave you to slug your way through verbiage like "paleoconservative versus neoconservative" and a most rigororous discussion about how the 1980s and 1990s were watershed moments for conswervative political philosophy. The radical right was born in places like the Claremont Institute, perhaps even principally there; reading about them made every ounce of my intolerance for this brummagem "philosophy" peddled by this Institute awaken and roar in blood-pressure spiking rage.

I am not neutral on this subject, this entire topic of human endeavor, but virulently opposed to it, so I took over five weeks to read the book. I feared for my brain's health more than once. As Author Munsell details how the Institute's truly reprehensible prioritization of cultural issues particularly their obsession with dismantling the teaching of Black history, as well as other elements of educational policy it saw as "left-wing indoctrination in our schools", he pays careful attention to explaining the Institute's complete domination over mainstream Republican Party economic policy.

It is genuinely sick-making for me to read that.

I did not vet all 600+ endnotes, because why? This is Kansas' most respected intellectual institution publishing a book criticizing fellow conservatives. I trust their ducks are in a row. I did very much appreciate Author Munsell's calm and even tone as he catalogs things done, things taught and "supported, that would inspire me to revive the jeremiad.

The Institute was a big contributor to Project 2025, which apparently y'all didn't read carefully enough...they laid out the agenda that Trump's second administrationused to set policies. which, Author Munsell, an historian by trade, says these policies have taken an increasingly authoritarian turn, which is really really worrying coming from a guy who achieved emeritus status at West Texas A&M.

Author Munsell, then, is to be reliably considered a more conservative person than I am, so when he contends (with supporting examples and endnotes) that both Trump and the Claremont Institute have embraced the notion that "...extreme, even anti-democratic measures {are} needed to achieve their policy goals," I read between the lines and start to feel very afraid. It's clear Author Munsell's understanding of the historical context of modern conservatism that informs his worries for our country's future as a democracy. He's written a nuanced examination of an important player on the paleoconservative side. It is also an accessible text that's supported by the previously mentioned mountain of endnotes. Architects of Authoritarianism: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right is both an exhaustive, definitive history of the Claremont Institute, and damning indictment of the modern right (perhaps unintentionally) from within.

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, & WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises

WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises
MARJORIE KELLY (foreword by Edgar Villanueva)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful analysis of how the bias towards wealth that is woven into the very fabric of American capitalism is damaging people, the economy, and the planet, and what the foundations of a new economy could be.This bold manifesto exposes seven myths underlying wealth supremacy, the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth by and for the wealthy, and is the hidden force behind economic injustice, the climate crisis, and so many other problems of our day:

The Myth of Maximizing: No amount of wealth is ever enough.

The Myth of Fiduciary Duty: Corporate managers’ most sacred duty is to expand capital.

The Myth of Corporate Governance: Corporate membership must be reserved for capital alone.

The Myth of the Income Statement: Income to capital must always be increased, while income to labor must always be decreased.

The Myth of Materiality: Profit—material gain—alone is real, while social and environmental damages are not.

The Myth of Takings: The first duty of government must be the protection of private property.

The Myth of the Free Market: There should be no limits on the field of action of corporations and capital.

Kelly argues instead for the democratization of ownership: public ownership of vital services, worker-owned businesses, and more. And she sketches the outlines of a non-extractive capitalism that would be subordinate to the public interest. This is an ambitious reimagining of the very foundations of our economy and society.

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

My Review: My essential problem with the thinking about climate change in the world today...and a lot of thinking is taking place, including bolstering "it's inevitable, we're doomed, nothing can fix this"...is that it's successful at only one thing: obscuring the causal role untrammelled, unregulated capitalism has played in causing it in the first place.

Author Kelly rips that band-aid off, and then dismantles capitalism's supporting mythology. It's thorough. it's detailed, and it's endnoted. There are also resources given, so there is no lack of detail to feed your curiosity and bolster your ability to argue the topic with a friend of a differing opinion.

I suspect the prose will be a sticking point for many of y'all. The scholarly will want the tedious, excruciatingly boring details spelled out in Scholarspeak, dismissing this as written for a magazine; the magazine-reading folk will seriously exoerience MEGO on every page.

What I'll offer is this: If a reader in the MEGO population will read one chapter at a time, on one topic of pernicious misdirection or manipulation of your attention away from alternative modes of action, then sit to really *think* about it for a day, looking up stuff you need to, then move forward (or quit) you'll get more out of it. Worst-case reading ie picking up a sample and throwing up your hands because it's talking about stuff you've been told you don't understand, will short-change you. Author Kelly does a really good job of explaining the complicated ideas in an urgent way...communicating urgency, not sounding breathlessly upset, to be clear...and it's literally existential to our society to find new ways and new thoughts to guide us before the climate really gets weird.

We can't stop what's already in progress. We can and should and must act now to save millions, billions, of lives even at the expense of lifestyles.

Please, whenever you think "too hard" and walk away, imagine firing a gun into a crowd: You'll hit someone, no knowing who, and deliberately, negligently change or end their life.

The stakes are that high.

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

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
EDGAR VILLANUEVA (foreword by Bishop William J. Barber II)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.

Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.

With great compassion—because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing—Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

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

My Review: The US midterm elections are 3 November 2026, four days from now. No matter how they turn out...please, please turn out to vote!...there are issues now on blatant display that need to be addressed. Awareness of these issues, the extreme polarization of wealth centrally, is higher than it's been in over a generation.

You won't buy and read this book before the election. It's a topic that, now foregrounded in the awareness of many, needs thinking about as we head into the 2028 election without an incumbent. The old saying, "think before you speak; read before you think" has absolutely always been true. It is urgent now. What kind of world are you hoping to live in, from 2028 to your personal end? You should always vote with that in mind. The next few years are your chance to get ideas that resonate with you, then look for candidates running for office that best align with that world coming into being.

Edgar Villanueva, a charitable foundation consultant on Indigenous affairs and enrolled in the Lumbee tribe, offers a careful consideration of the manifold and manifest failings of a philanthropic solution to economic justice. As a Lumbee man he has seen philanthropies and social programs fail in their efforts to stem the submergence of Indigenous Americans into systemic poverty. Author Villanueva contends, with highly persuasive arguments, that this is all part of a system designed to support colonial, extractive economic activity. It is inherently racist, as it is controlled exclusively by white men, whether by birth or by training.

"If we are to escape the insidious hold racism has on our society, we must be intentional about truth and reconciliation. In Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar {Villanueva} lays a foundation that not only explains the history of wealth and racism but also provides a pathway to healing that we all need," reads Ibram X. Kendi's (National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist blurb for this read. It is a better distillation of Author Villanueva's purpose and intent than anything I could come up with. I know that I needed to see the techniques of wealth and resource extraction put into clear structures so I could perceive them as the problems for economic and social justice I want to live with for my remaining days.

It won't change my vote in 2026 because it changed me in 2022 when I read the book. I did not publish a review before the 2024 election because the fix was already in. Now is the time to buy or check out from the library this kind of reading. We need all hands on deck. We need informed, appalled, engaged citizens to *act* on their dissatisfaction, their offended sense of fairness and morality.

#ReadingIsResistance because and when it leads to actions. Like voting.

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
KERI LEIGH MERRITT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence.

Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.

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

My Review: We need another Lillian Smith after the upcoming midterms, regardless of the outcome. We need...have always needed...many Lillian Smiths, people willing to buck their systemic privilege to join the struggle for equity and equality.

She came by it honestly. Raised in a Methodist household that practiced (in theory) "love, acceptance, and understanding," Smith spent time doing missionary work in China where the actions of the white people often resembled their behaviors in her Georgia homeland. Awareness, once begun as a habit of mind, can not turn off or cease until death. Even a serious personal campaign to ignore awareness of injustice..."go along to get along"...is not turning awareness off, merely ignoring it. Lillian Smith remained fully aware of what she had seen, neither ignoring or avoiding her her perception guiding her actions in daily life. She was born into privilege, into a family whose wealth...in spite of their avowed christianity...was based on the exactions of slavery, and she was born with a voice.

Beginning at roughly the same moment as her forties, Lillian Smith began to pour out eloquent, cogent words against segregation and its legal and illegal rules, laws, customs. She and her lifelong partner, Paula Snelling, published a literary magazine called various things over its decade of issues. The women accepted submissions from Black writers, and submissions that quietly dealt with same-sex attraction. It became Lillian's conviction that she needed to write honestly about a miscegenous relationship. Thus was born her three-million-copy seller, Strange Fruit. (She insisted the title was unrelated to Billie Holiday's hit song {my favorite version from 1959 linked} but...)

Lillian Smith kept her romantic partnership with Paula Snelling masked until her death. It only made sense for them to do so in the Jim Crow South, riddled with hatred and violence as it was. They would've been in grave danger of death by mob. It was a worse time than any we've seen in the US until the invention of ICEstapo. It's been sixty years since Lillian Smith died of cancer. I like to think that her lesbian reincarnation was born on her centenary in 1997, and is preaparing to burst into outraged fury like Lillian Smith did, to goad decent but lazy or fearful people into action.

We need her. I think her biographer here has made a very good story out of Lillian Smith's life, filled with citations and with them, evidence of how important and inspiring Lillian Smith was to people across the spectrum of US society.

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It, BOO!!

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It
GARRISON LOVELY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The biggest companies in history are racing to build a machine that replaces human labor—all of it. And, as this provocative new book insists, the only thing that can stop them is us.

Many people today don’t get further than regarding AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny shareholding for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into. Obsolete sees something more sinister, not to say scream-out-loud alarming: A tiny group of people, backed by the richest companies in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete.

Their project is unimaginably vast in scope. What we previously thought of as big—the Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. Almost none of us want this vast transformation to succeed. Yet it is proceeding virtually unchallenged. Why? Because we don’t know it’s happening, we don’t believe it will work, or we don’t think we can stop it.

Obsolete investigates each of these reasons for inaction and brings together key information from top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders to show why we really can’t afford to sit this one out.

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

My Review: Pause your reflexive eyerolling at the topic of AI's existential hsrms for a moment. Before acting on your "I am SO.SICK. of this scare-tactic crap!" and scrolling away, look at the author's bio as provided by the publisher:

Garrison Lovely is an AI expert and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. In 2025, he was identified by the Pulitzer Center {on Crisis Reporting} as an AI journalist worth following. Lovely is known for his cover stories in The Nation ("Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower") and Jacobin ("Can Humanity Survive AI?"), as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.

This is a very serious person's resume. Author Lovely is, for my money, more credible on the subject at hand because of his "Road to Damascus" moment while working for McKinsey. His evident chops in journalistic thinking as applied to the social issues raised by new, fast-developing technologies mean that he puts topics into understandable combinations. He treats the reader as you would an intelligent non-expert, going to the trouble of explaining his parallelisms. It gives the anxious reader a chance to see unsensationally why the relationships of technology to humanity are developing the way they are.

When heading into a frontier area of science, technology, and culture, some degree of fuzziness is inevitable. Author Lovely distinguishes among who is being fuzzy of necessity (techologists,researchers on creating AI technology), who is using fuzziness to grift (banksters, CEOs), and who's using fuzziness to distract everyone else from a social-restructuring agenda (tech bros, Aynholes, fascists, et alii). It's a big part of this book just to explain who's got this technology in its sights to misuse it for appalling and unprecedented control over us, the ordinary people.

I was sobered, alarmed, and angered by the sheer scope of the latter group's ambitions for controlling us. It truly is unprecedented what AI by its mere existence as an attainable technology has elicited from the base of these people's very base personalities, and let's not shy away fro the calling it the darkness of their souls. It pays to remember, when contemplating this subject, that "They" are not all the way to true AI...yet. There are institutions and laws we can enact that will slow down application of AI in the real world, and that must be part of any concerned person's agenda when voting on Tuesday, 3 November 2026 in the US.

But the fight to save our literal freedom as human beings can't be thought of as complete until we come up with ways, enforceable, verifiable, visible ways to use this technology...we can't turn it off, as proved by the hugging-face incident, which Open AI itself (see article at link) thinks is a problem and admits to the validity of people's concerns, demonstrated. One of the most worrying yet most heartening sections of the book is "Too Big to Guardrail". It outlines the complexity of oversight on the frontiers of society and technology. Author Lovely proposes using US anti-trust laws to accomplish the purpose. I'll confess that I think y'all won't read the details, I had to force myself to because the amount of googling I had to do was breathtaking, so let me put it in a nutshell for you: I'm on his side, and following his note-links never took me to any weird, out-there places with fringe ideas. Everything Author Lovely proposes can be argued from serious establishment principles to be implemented in existing frameworks of law and precedent.

That means it could realistically be sold to the pooh-bahs of the world. No factor of this argument as he made it heartened me more. No hectoring, out-there (but correct IMO) newfangled thinking needed. The Economic Royalists will fight dirty, hard, and long to stop anything from getting in the way of their greed being primary to the world's societies running...but the way Author Lovely lays out to defeat them can work.

We need to gain power in US politics, yes; but we need to get people concerned about the actual survival of people, not only societal structures, to support this agenda. Author Lovely is sharp-tongued in his criticisms of both US political parties, with truth and justice on his side. I think, however, many readers on both sides of this divide will switch off because the tone he uses is strong. Advocating for change is never effective when done politely, far as I know. Please look past any hurt feelings to see what is presented, and decide if it is a solution you can support.

Then it's time to do the work of supporting it.

THE KOA KANE SERIES: 4 & 5 – Treachery Times Two & Retribution plus The Complete Koa Kane Hawaiʻian Mystery Series Books 1 - 5

TREACHERY TIMES TWO (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #4)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Secret military weapons, saboteurs, a volcanic eruption—and a probe of Chief Detective Koa Kane’s criminal past

On Hawaiʻi Island, a volcanic earthquake disrupts an abandoned cemetery—unearthing the body of a woman mutilated by her killer to conceal her identity.

The search for her identity leads Hilo, Hawaii’s Chief Detective Koa Kane to a mysterious defense contractor with a politically connected board of directors. Defying his chief of police, Koa pursues the killer, only to become entangled in an FBI espionage investigation of Deimos, a powerful secret military weapon. Is the FBI telling all it knows—or does it, too, have a duplicitous agenda?

At the same time, Koa—a cop who thirty years earlier killed his father’s nemesis and covered up the murder—faces exposure by the dead man’s grandson. Koa is forced to investigate his own homicide, and step by step, his cover-up unravels until another man is falsely accused.

Can Koa stand by and let an innocent man pay for his crime?

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

My Review: Chickens always come home to roost, the damned things. We've spent three stories getting to know Koa, getting to see his complete willingness to follow a trail to terrible destinations, awful and condign punishments meted out to guilty people who thought they'd got aqay with it, whatever "it" was in that case.

And now the decision to find the guilty is the easiest it will ever be.

Look in the mirror.

His murder of his father's enemy, covered up for decades and the guilt used to power his investigations that prevent others from escaping justice is now a bill come due, a debt to be settled. While investigating his regular job's latest murder...a woman who wanted to disappear, not die horribly, still less have her body clumsily disposed of, but you lie down with tech scum that serve the military death machine you don't always get back up. Her mad coding skills were ultimately a defense contractor's problem as her Hawaiian-sovereignty ties were most exceptionally sus. An ever-expanding, ever-intensifying ring of ripples has his Chief of Police getting pressure from above, from the sides, and now from Koa humself: he'll finish this investigation, he'll see justice served, and he won't take any steps to hide from his decades-old crime and its consequences any longer.

This would be disastrous, because it would pave the way to potentially letting Muskolini-in-all-but-name to oil his way out of taking the blame for the dead woman's demise. This would be disastrous because Koa is not a criminal despite having committed that murder.

At no time does the tension let up. At no time do we feel sure things will be all right...which means Koa gets away with literal murder. We're suspended with the Sword of Damocles on a thread growing far too thin and way too stressed under all the weight on it.

I'll just remind y'all there's a book five and slide on outta here.

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

RETRIBUTION (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #5)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As people around him come under attack, Chief Detective Koa Kāne wonders if he might be the real target

In the back alley of a bar on Hawaiʻi's Big Island, a young man is found stabbed to death. When Hilo Chief Detective Koa Kane begins investigating the crime, the murder weapon is recovered only a few feet away from the body. Crime scene technicians find fingerprints on the knife—they are a perfect match for Koa's younger brother, Ikaika.

As the brothers scramble to prove Ikaika's innocence, another crime sends shockwaves through the Hilo police force. A sniper tries to take out Makanui, Koa's closest colleague. As Koa tries to figure out whether these crimes are linked, the sinister force continues their killing spree, threatening Koa and his loved ones at every turn.

Could Koa be the real target? If so, who is behind this trail of retribution? With his own secret criminal past, Koa confronts an all-out offensive against those closest to him and his police force to which he has devoted his life. As the bodies pile up, Koa finds himself the ultimate target of a ruthless adversary and must risk it all to survive.

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

My Review: A more reflective tone animates this story, last in the series...to date. Koa's day job hands him some fairly sobering food for thought. First his reformed ex-con brother is implicated in a murder; then a close friend on the police force is targeted by a sniper. In very close succession.

It is, after recent events and a long and successful police detective career ("As was his habit at a crime scene, Koa let his eyes scan the corpse absorbing every detail, no matter how gruesome. He called it listening to the dead, trying to envision their last moments. It sometimes yielded important clues and always empowered Koa's empathy for the victims"), feeling as though more chickens might be on the way to the roost.

This is where I get off the bus, Driver McCaw. I won't let anyone have their ticket punched too soon at my hands. I very much hope y'all will get the Koa fever this #Deathtober.

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

THE COMPLETE KOA KĀNE HAWAIʻIAN MYSTERY SERIES: Books 1 – 5 ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing
$2.99 ebook, available now

All five in one epub file for $2.99 is the best deal of them all.

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

THE KOA KANE SERIES: 1 – 3...Death of a Messenger; Off the Grid; & Fire and Vengeance

DEATH OF A MESSENGER (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #1)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Someone’s found a body at Pohakuloa, the army’s live-fire training area. Bearing all the marks of ancient ritual sacrifice—the murder is the grisliest of Detective Koa Kane's career.

The bizarre case draws Koa deep into his own Hawaiian roots. As Koa probes the victim’s past, he must sort through a rich roster of suspects—grave robbers, native activists, thieves, and star gazers. Koa surmounts a host of obstacles as he pursues the murderer—an incompetent local medical examiner, hostility from haoles (Westerners) and sovereignty advocates, and myriad lies.

Did the victim stumble upon a gang of high-tech archaeological thieves? Or did he learn a secret so shocking it cost him his life and put others, too, in mortal danger? Will Hilo’s most respected native detective catch this fiend in time, or will the killer strike again—with even deadlier consequences?

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

My Review: Pohakuloa Live Firing Range near Hilo, Hawaiʻi, is a place men go to practice their killing techniques, but not a place where dead men are usually found. This day is the exception.

The dead man is not military, so the nearest civilian authority is called to the scene. Hilo detective Koa Kane gets the job, seniority demands it; after, of course, the Army certifies the crime scene is free of live munitions. Koa starts with the victim's identity...no mean feat, with the grotesque and detailed damage done to him. From there a truly vast web of interconnected lines of relationships, a cast of what feels like dozens but isn't quite, and a lot of the stuff of Koa's ordinary life get chucked at the reader's head. Every step of the way Hilo is a palpable presence ("Far off to the west, trails of vaporous mist played eerily over the deeply shadowed valley where night had already fallen bewtween the Hawaiian mountains. Across the channel, Haleakala on Maui seemed to rise from the mists of some unseen netherworld. Hues of red, orange, yellow and pink glorified the darkening sky"), enough description given to bring the reder to the place the action's happening but never enough to make us feel we could get off a plane, into a car, and drive there without a map app. (Thank goodness, as I was not in the mood for that!)

As book one in a series I expect as author's hobbyhorses to show up. I'd say they did: Hawaiʻian culture, history, and archaeology, astronomy, a strong focus on Native Hawaiʻian rights and political grievances, and to my disappointment a condescending attitude towards fragile, pretty "girls."

Exercise tolerance for that, and escape to a truly fascinating place is on tap. A decent mystery with a lot to say; more will be sought by me!

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

OFF THE GRID (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #2)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect for fans of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux

A scrap of cloth fluttering in the wind leads Hilo police Chief Detective Koa Kāne to the tortured remains of an unfortunate soul, left to burn in the path of an advancing lava flow. For Koa, it’s the second gruesome homicide of the day, and he soon discovers the murders are linked. These grisly crimes on Hawaiʻi’s Big Island could rewrite history—or cost Chief Detective Koa Kāne his career.

The dead, a reclusive couple living off the grid, turn out to be mysterious fugitives. The CIA, the Chinese government, and the Defense Intelligence Agency attempt to thwart Koa’s investigation and obscure the victims’ true identities. Undeterred by mounting political pressure, Koa pursues the truth only to find himself drawn into a web of international intrigue.

While Koa investigates, the Big Island scrambles to prepare for the biggest and most explosive political rally in its history. Despite police resources stretched to the breaking point, Koa uncovers a government conspiracy so shocking its exposure topples senior officials far beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores.

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

My Review: Koa Kāne is a grouchy mensch. He looks at the obstructive efforts of people enmeshed in concerns that a detective with compassion and justice as his moral poles and can't be bothered to respect their shibboleths. Two people are dead. Their deaths were not natural or kind. He feels it incumbent on himself to make the guilty parties in this dreadful death-fest accountable. What could the dead guy possibly have done to merit someone immersing him in Kilauea's ever-flowing lava?!

No one will make it easy, as he learns when visiting the scene of a woman's death for the first time and damn near dying as the truck that hit the victim's car seems to cause a nearby vehicle to explode out of nowhere. He survives but that will sure as hell get a man's undivided attention after the murder by lava.

Establishing the link between them accomplished it becomes clearer that these victims were in some giant, far-reaching trouble involving international espionage, political skulduggery, and a side helping of maybe terrorism? The sheer amount of overt discouragement applied to Koa by local poerbrokers and the various security conccerns surrounding a governor's race rally being held in Koa's patch means his signature stubborn refusal to stop when told to is high-risk behavior.

Hawaiʻian indigenous culture, language, and history are present in this story though, as expected, there are only tenuous links to the highly populated story for much of it. I can't give perfect scoring to the story because some characters came and went before I could even figure out what the heck they had to do with anything (not much) and most of those were among the Hawaiʻian characters...well...at least I felt less annoyed by the misogyny. Because there were fewer women.

Well worth considering in #Deathtober reading days.

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

FIRE AND VENGEANCE (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #3)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heinous conspiracy—a volcano exacting revenge—an island paradise in anguish Having killed his father's nemesis and gotten away with it, Hilo, Hawaiʻi Chief Detective Koa Kane, is not your ordinary cop. Estranged from his younger brother, who has been convicted of multiple crimes, he is not from a typical law enforcement family. Yet, Koa's secret demons fuel his unwavering drive to pursue justice.

Never has Koa's motivation been greater than when he learns that an elementary school was placed atop a volcanic vent, which has now exploded. The subsequent murders of the school's contractor and architect only add urgency to his search for the truth.

As Koa's investigation heats up, his brother collapses in jail from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor. Using his connections, Koa devises a risky plan to win his brother's freedom. As Koa gradually unravels the obscure connections between multiple suspects, he uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy. When he is about to apprehend the perpetrators, his investigation suddenly becomes entwined with his brother's future, forcing Koa to choose between justice for the victims and his brother's freedom.

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

My Review: I really did not find this plot remotely credible...a school built over a fumarole? in HAWAIʻI, world capital of active volcanoes amid populated areas? not buyin' it...but I decided to move ahead with my read accepting the premise with a snort.

Then, after the hideous tragedy occurs, Koa is going to have to make the perpetrators of the negligence publicly accountable for their crime's hideous loss of life. The fact that there is not, at present, Chief of Police in Hilo means the buck stops with Koa. All the Chief of Detectives has to do is follow back the trail of documents forty years and figure out where the lying and covering up started while there's major politicking and finger-pointing going on, and everyone who ever touched this land and construction faud is pretty shifty, pretty slimy, and looks really really guilty.

Another moment where Koa will fail to do the politic thing because it is decidedly not the right thing. Of course by book three we're not the least surprised by this. I know I wasn't anyway. But what surprised me a lot was Koa going to the finest knife edge of the law to help his obnoxious criminally guilty brother. I can understand it, given that it's literally life and death. But it was so extreme, so complete a shift from the troubled relationship of their shared past, that it caused me to pause and look over the story...something niggled at me. I'm not seeing something important, I said inside my head.

Then the boom got lowered, it was ugly, and set up one of the most fun endings in the series to date. Unbelievable like the rest of the story, but entirely self-consistent, and as mentioned fun. Just not credible.

And I do not care. Fun to be had, y'all, and whatever the publisher tells you, you need to read the books in order.

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS, sibling rivalry hurts the very fabric of one's being

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS
DARYL GREGORY
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A shy young woman and her deeply unpleasant—and literally porcelain—sister fight for their inheritance, taking on an impossible array of enemies: a chain-smoking demon crow, an unkillable assassin, and a secret clan of French sorceresses. In his newest adventure, Daryl Gregory (Spoonbenders) takes us on a dizzying romp through the horrors of sisterhood.

Ruth Winslow is trying to save up enough money to finish college while looking after her sister, Isabel—who happens to be a haunted doll. When an accident severely damages Isabel’s porcelain body, the sisters have to find the only woman who can fix her, the fearsome witch known as La Fabricante: the Dollmaker.

The sisters head to Marseille, where they take on Le Clan: Chiffon, a red-headed, unkillable assassin; a collection of angry, haunted dolls; plus a pair of demons—one a cigarette-smoking crow, the other a black cat—and their human familiars.

Along the way, the sisters learn that they’ve been lied to their entire lives. Their mother wasn’t just a homemaker who died in a car accident, she was a legendary enforcer in the Le Clan des Sorcières.

While Ruth has to come out of her shell and deal with her own latent powers, Isabel has to grow up in a body that can’t grow. Together they’ll have to outwit and outfight everyone to claim their birthright.

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

My Review: Ruth and Isabel are (unwillingly) close. Their sisterly bond has survived trying, testing circumstances like loss of their mother, growing up isolated, and Isabel being a haunted porcelain doll. Who is broken badly twice, once in a car accident, once in a fall. Now Ruth has to use her college savings to get them to France in order to find and then convince the original maker of Isabel's doll body to mend her. You can read the blurb, you see it as well as I do.

We're going on The Hero's Journey. Only with women at the center, distinctly different from the stereotypical boy/chosen one, since it's about fixing their loved one instead of leading The People, like Arthur. (Men keep doing that. Wonder why.)

It's a fun trip, full of great villains, exciting traps, and the unfolding weirdness of Isabel's...genesis. There's a reason Ruth has a porcelain doll as a sister. It's not a fantasy or a dream or a comforting lie told to a grieving child. Their father finally had had enough of Isabel's cruel words, snarky ways, and abusive personality, which separation is what set the sisters on course to a *real* bust-up. Both behave abominally...siblings often do...so each needs absolution and atonement.

Among the little they know about their vanished mother is that she was French and from Marseilles. It's enough to piece together an answer to what the initials "CdS" on Isabel's back mean...Clan des Sorcières, Witch Clan...mean and thus lead them to a source, an original maker: La Fabricante, the (Doll) Maker. None of this is easy, nor does it take a linear form like I'm telling it to you in. I am, as regular readers will know, a fan of corvids. I liked Shit Turd from The Hollow Kingdom a couple years back, partly for being a crow, mostly for having a "foul" (see the wordplay? hahaha) mouth. But S.T. was a fling compared to my true love, Monsieur Griezzel the chainsmoking music-hall-joking antagonist. Of a sort. He's a delight with a wicked (literally) line of patter.

I confess now to a surprising weakness: Dolls are second only to clowns in my Pantheon of Nightmares. I hate 'em. Why'd I request the story, then...look at the date, being scared's de rigueur. In reading this story of sororital rage and parental neglect, of love looking weird from some angles, of guilt moving mountains that love quails before, I was unable to do more than remember why dolls creep me out. It was not the story, it was me; I became so immersed in the story I absorbed uts frame of reference over my own. I even *got* their mother's actions as genuinely kindly motivated in the moment.

No perfect score for you, Daryl Gregory. Brevity may be the soul of wit and of lingerie, but it's the downfall of a satisfying connection between reader and main character. Ruth and Isavel's trajectories are show very much from the outside, which is part of the point of making one a literal doll, ojay I get it...but move more slowly, please, to tell me more about the titanic impact of this on the women. Bickering, fighting, being jealous are all symptoms...tell me of what in more than labels, please.

It's not a quibble but it's also not what I was promised in a book this short. I wasn't told I'd read Anna Karenina and suddenly got Valley of the Dolls. So a minor ding and only because I liked what I got so much I wanted more.

So: I want some more, please sir. Soon would be good.

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, hard disagree with author

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
ANN HARTLE
University of Notre Dame Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 1* of five

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches.

What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

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

My Review: If I ever needed an inoculation against conservatism, this under-200pp book was the full and complete spectrum version of it.

In looking for reviews of the book to see if I was crazy, reading it wrong, or simply bilious when I was reading it, I found my proof I was not here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/ann-hartle-what-happened-to-civility-the-promise-and-failure-of-montaignes-modern-project-notre-dame-in-university-of-notre-dame-press-2022-pp-ix-178/CE68BDF228EB95F3533F945414C7E785 The Review of Politics is paywalled, as one expects from conservative-leaning publications, but an excerpt is available at the link. It contains the words that "civility is inadequate to replace traditional moral virtues" and "{c}ivility is not self-sustaining: as a merely human invention, it lacks the kind of transcendent support possessed by the traditional moral virtues, which found their grounding and stability in their orientation towards the divine."

Of course the reviewer says a lot more about the book, but for my purposes (trying to see what it is I found appalling about the read) this was a showstopper. The divine is a human invention. My bedrock reality will not accommodate the assertion that y'all's god is real; one of us is wrong, and I'm quite sure it's you.

We're so far apart, Author Hartle, that all I can say is your writing on a sentence level is clear and your arguments to my non-expert mind is completely self-consistent.

And you're wrong.

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT, #Deathtober goes Gothic

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT: A Novel
CARRIE LEE SOUTH
Little, Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A park ranger in Devil’s Den becomes obsessed with the case of a missing child—a case that mirrors the disappearance of her own brother, whom she lost in the woods many years ago—and the possibility that both were taken by something vicious and unnatural that lives deep in the Ozarks.

From a powerful new voice, a story that's at once a haunting southern gothic and a satisfying page-turner, perfect for fans of Stephen King and Liz Moore alike.

Fifteen years ago, Audrey Figg's little brother, Benny, vanished on a family vacation to Devil's Den state park, a day that split her life in two. Now, Audrey is a park ranger in the very same woods with expertise in wilderness search and rescue. Audrey has found a rhythm to her days: training new rangers, tending to injured hikers, protecting the backcountry, and still, searching.

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

My Review: Moving between past and present timelines usually feels forced, like the author wants to create psychological tension but erroneously believes the straightforward linear approach can't do that well enough. Debut author Carrie Lee South thought the trauma Audrey, our PoV close-third-person character, is introduced in 2004 as she wander the woods of Devil's Den State Park...a real place, quite beautiful...with some lovely, meditative prose setting a mood that's soon enough shattered along with an essential part of Audrey that can't be fixed: She saw her little brother Benny walking too far away and did nothing, didn't follow him, made no attempt to care for his safety.

He's never been seen since. No body, nothing but absence.

Fifteen years later, Park Ranger Audrey's receiving a trainee, so clearly done the job well for some time now; no lovely meditative prose, though always with Author South's surprisingly assured touch with telling details observed. Audrey is all business because she can't let herself be anything resembling happy. I was here my interest in the story picked up. This is a grief response I've become familiar with. It betrays your loved one for you to feel normal human warmth or closeness or, perish forbid, love.

No wonder religion's tortures and misery disguised as "love" remain in the populace. We're wired for it. How grim a prospect is that.

The 2019 Audrey faces an existential crisis when young Ivy goes missing in an eerie echo of Benny's disappearance. Audrey's faced trouble in her time as a park ranger but this...so intimately familiar a situation, so closely similar people, feelings, circumstances...it's all perfectly designed to hook into Audrey's unfixable breakage as a human being.

And here I come back to my initial alternating-timelines argument from above: In a deft, assured way I associate with authors of considerable age and experience, Carrie Lee South uses the back-and-forth not solely to ratchet up tension (it does, though), but to introduce previously unrevealed details, a steady accumulation of new information surfacing in Audrey's mind that reveals important clues. They lead to major, perhaps incredibly in the original sense, helpful avenues of exploration in 2019 as well as resolutions to 2004's trauma.

So effective. So very convenient. I could've whacked stars off for it, feeling cheated; instead I sat back, impressed at the care and affection Author South lavished on Audrey, her survivor guilt, and the resolutions never available to Audrey before going through the forest fire.

Because it's true, the only way out...ever...is through.

ON RECONCILIATION: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda

ON RECONCILIATION: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda
MAYA SAVIR (foreword Aziz Abu Sarah; tr. Todd Hasak-Lowy)
Plough Publishing House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What Israelis and Palestinians – and everyone else – can learn from South Africans and Rwandans about ending conflict and healing and rebuilding in the aftermath.

All conflicts end. It’s in their nature. The only question is how much time and how many lives will be lost, and when the hard but necessary work of healing begins. Maya Savir, an Israeli professional in humanitarian and development work and peacebuilding, and a mother, spent years working in Rwanda and South Africa, countries that went through successful reconciliation processes many had thought impossible. In this book, she dares to ask whether what she observed and learned there can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Reconciliation is an artichoke. It’s not an onion, made up of layer upon layer you peel away until nothing is left. It has layers, yes, but at its center is a heart. This book peels away those characteristics that are not essential for reconciliation until all that is left is the heart. But before examining this heart, we take a close look at the outer layers in specific conflicts, because although they vary with context and may not all be necessary to bring about reconciliation, they are among the most noble and inspiring human expressions and can be part of the dynamics of reconciliation.

Savir invites readers to explore this process of reconciliation candidly and soberly, showing what it takes for peacemaking and restoration to unfold between peoples and within individuals after conflicts. She leads the reader on this journey with compassion, intellectual precision, literary skill, and conviction. Though healing is difficult to imagine in the wake of October 7 and the war in Gaza, On Reconciliation helps us to reconsider the limits of what is possible.

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

My Review: Extended in this translated edition by one chapter, "Reconciliation After October Seventh," dealing with the heinous crimes that figleafed the ongoing war against the Palestinians and thus addresses the biggest reason this book is so urgently needed. It is in Africa that Savir finds her models for a better way forward, one that begins the world's healing process by acknowledging harms done, presenting rational means of defining them, and maintaining a focus on achieving peace with ongoing dialogue within structured boundaries of behavior.

It will be a miracle if Savir's excellent words make the world better on their own, a miracle I myownself will herald as an Act of God with joyous tears should it occur. My more modest, more reality-based hope is that people will pick the book up to see what help they themselves can find for conflicts in their own lives. If it worked in South Africa and Rwanda it will work with your MAGAt cousin or your religious homophobe aunt.

This pull-quote is precisely and exactly correct about Maya Savir; it is for this reasn I want all y'all to read the work it's discussing to feel wistfully hopeful as well as to get real-world tested advice on managing conflict resolution.

PHANTOM LIMB, Last Days #2...back to teaching us needed lessons

PHANTOM LIMB (Last Days #2)
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After destroying the headquarters of an underground amputation cult, a burned and battered Kline finds himself in a holding cell. When he enlists the help of an ex-cop to commute his prison sentence, Kline inadvertently tangles with a schism of the very cult he sought to destroy. Can Kline investigate the sect’s ritualistic murder spree without getting lured into their ranks?

Frigid and precise, Phantom Limb interrogates our notions of wholeness, fate, and the lengths we are willing to go to connect with a higher power.

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

My Review: Kline's back! Oh joy. The christian lunatics, the "Brotherhood of Mutilation" (follow the link, I'm not going through *that* again), are serious about getting Kline the ex-cop who damn near destroyed the entire cult. And so it goes....

This is barely not a novella. It's short; it's not a "Calgon, take me away" read. Or, if it is, I'm very worried about you. There is a lot of body horror, a lot of symbolic anti-religious messaging in that body horror as well as conceptually anti-religious messaging in the entire witness protection element of the story. As we all know, their gawd, like organized crime, finds everybody in the end.

After five years of relative safety in prison that he serves on bullshit charges under a fake name, Kline isn't out five seconds before the schismatic from the Brotherhood of Mutilation cult who call themselves Paul (that bit of quiet calling-out was *chef's kiss*, Author Brian!) find Kline to finish the destruction he began in Last Days. It was not for nothing he served that sentence and hoped his trail went cold. Yet, like all things religious, you're never ever free of the pollution.

In returning to the mutilates doing their infighting in October 2026, it's my interpretation of Author Brian's purpose in piling up the bodies, causing harm with abandon, enshittifying the world to show the gore-seeking reader the real damage done by True Believers. It's not important what their zeal is directed towards, in support of, because it results in irreparable harms caused—including death—regardless of to whom the harms are caused. Zealotry has this way of overshooting any boundaries one thinks to set.

So here's Kline amid a welter of gore as always, trying to expunge a nightmarish hate group. It works, it doesn't, it causes harm on the way and creates new zealots if not today or tomorrow then soon. People love hate, rage, and being Right about stuff more than food and sex combined. This is human nature, visible in cultures throughout time in archaeology, then in writing, now in images. I see no reason to think there was ever a past of peaceful coexistence after there were enough people alive to form persistent families. It's why our cultural heritage is replete with myths, folktales, parables that show in grim, graphic detail the perils of transgressing The Order of Things℠...the selfish urge to do that is overwhelming at times. We all feel it, but the consequences after are the point of these kins of stories. Is this really the world you want? If yes, be ready for the coalition of the harmed to exact revenge.

And so it goes.

VENUS, VANISHING...queer love in late Weimar-era Berlin

VENUS, VANISHING
REBECCA BIRRELL
Henry Holt & Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A blisteringly passionate and page-turning story of desire, art, and the stories lost to the darkness of history—for readers of Sarah Waters, Yael van der Wouden, and Alice Winn

Berlin, 1928. Hannah is new to the pleasures and freedoms of the city. An artist, a runaway, she is building a new life, loving without boundaries and sketching with a cutting edge.

But the party is ending. Hannah begins a recklessly consuming affair with a powerful man’s wife and it soon threatens to do more than ruin both of their reputations. People are disappearing. The shadows of something unspeakable are growing darker. Her art could be the thing that secures her survival – or will deny her any chance of escape.

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

My Review: The relationship between a young striving creative and an older patron is fraught with tension. One way that plays out is the power play of status: "you need me to give you work, you pay me in humiliation," as in this story.

Hannah knows she is an artist, knows she has talent, knows she can't keep tailoring forever...knows she can't marry the older man who wants to buy her from her father with her mother's practically minded support or she will vanish to be replaced by no one she recognizes as herself. An age-old dilemma for women, exacerbated by Hannah's Jewishness thus ever-increasing vulnerability in late-Weimar Republic Germany. Elke, an Aryan to her manicured fingertips, takes Hannah under her protection with all the complexity of emotion that entails.

Hannah has a man, Saul, in similar circumstances of economic and social struggle as hers who provides guidance through Berlin's maze of modern art cliques, whose influence sets in train the developments for Elke and her circle to become famous in art circles (how titillating for older, bored wives!) in Hannah's risqué portraits of them...under an unambiguously Aryan male name. Elke sells the idea to Hannah as a way to be seen, and to be sold, in a world of increasing antisemitism as well as entrenched unchallenged misogyny.

History having already happened we know what Hannah and Saul have in store. Author Birrell is an art historian whose interests are in women and/or queer artists and their struggles to make art under the circumstances they find themselves. Hannah, Elke, Saul are all composites of artists and patrons whoes lives Author Birrell came to know in the course of her professional research. It was a surprise to me how deft the prose was for a debut, until I learned the author is not a debut writer but a debut novelist. I was deeply gruntled by Author Birrell's sumptuous and immersive evocations of Elke's world, of Hannah's art and specific paintings; it felt as though I should be able to see them on museum websites, buy a monograph about them, order a biography of her. That's a fantastic ability to have for a writer, that craft trick of making the craft feel as though it's entirely about something else. I was convinced I was reading non-fiction when art was our topic, still enjoying the story at other times. Tough to pull that off.

What I found less convincing was the ending Author Birrell crafted, as it felt to me not in keeping with the looming threats so carefully evoked. It was a niggle only; I was kind of dreading what I was sure was coming. A sentimental chunk of me was pleased she chose to do better by her characters than reality would have but it was a cheat in another sense.

I was repulsed by unworthy-of-her Elke's control of Hannah, and of her revolting freely expressed anti-semitism. Really I just disliked Elke and her ilk; the bored useless privileged "cultured elite." I grow less and less tolerant of bored people. There's a lot of work to do in the world, pick something and just go do it and make some effort to improve life for someone not you.

Ahem. My puritan ancestors speak.

Anyway, now you know why I didn't offer all five stars. On prose alone, it deserved it. Prose is not the sole axis of my own judgment. By every axis of judgment I hope this lovely artwork will land on your TBR.