METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, lefties like sports too!

METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
A.M. GITTLITZ
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending June 23, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending April 5, 2026

The Publisher Says: A wide-reaching, revolutionary narrative history of the Team of Destiny (da Mets, for anyone not keeping score), that takes us from their 19th century inception to their 1962 resurrection to the present day.

A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City history, Metropolitans brilliantly shows us that sports have long been a site of political struggle, rousing class consciousness, and animating fights for racial equality. From purportedly calming riots in ’69 through the quality of their play to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against millionaire and billionaire franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets—and why it should be not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but anyone with a beating heart.

Gittlitz leads us through baseball’s amateur beginnings to the Mets’ first heady World Series on the heels of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements that many Mets players participated in to the bad boy years, the exploitative development of farm academies in developing nations, and their inglorious purchase by a new breed of capitalist—even after which they remained lovable losers.

But this is a book not only for Mets fans, or New York partisans, but anyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball a middle-class game owned by billionaires, in which the players—like the spectators—look to traverse the diamond and ultimately safely escape its many dangers.

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

My Review: I'm giving this book five stars because the Miracle Mets defeating the Orioles in 1969 was the first time I understood why my grandmother wanted to live to see the Cubs win the Series again (she didn't), and why my dad took me to freezyfrosty cold Candlestick Park to see the Giants play, and lose.

I can't not love anything about baseball, even as I get more and more uneasy with the concept of these gladiatorial games organized to give people some outlet for their desire to hate that is not threatening to "Them"—the capitalist class that very, very badly does not want you to expend that energy in political action.

Carefully entwined into the history of the US, the story of the Metropolitans and of team sports in general is told here with acuity and concision. It's a purpose and a point expressed best in this quote:

From this communal vantage, the abstractions of statistics and standings are confronted by the reality of what we are really seeing—not a game between two opposing teams, but a common human struggle, within and against the economic, legalistic, and mechanical structure of the game itself, and its role as opiate for the physical and existential pain of wage labor.

I can't really add anything to that statement except to say "+1" to it.

I'm old, so I remember when baseball mattered to lots and lots of Americans, held a real place in our cultural conversation. Football and basketball have that centrality now. But for those of us still loving the sound of a snapped bat connecting on a fastball, this book is catnip. Leftist social critique and economic analysis are seldom more appealingly presented than when entwined with a cultural mainstay of generations-long standing.

I hope I live long enough to see my Mets win the Series again.

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING: One Man's Quest to Speak the Truth about the Global Gig Economy, deeply saddening, all too common story

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING: One Man's Quest to Speak the Truth about the Global Gig Economy
HU ANYAN (tr. Jack Hargreaves)
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became the literary sensation of the year in China. Hu Anyan’s story, about short-term jobs in various anonymous megacities, hit a nerve with a generation of young people who feel at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed.

Hu started posting essays about his experiences online during COVID lockdowns. His recollection of night shifts in a huge logistics center in the south of China went viral: his nights were so hot that he could drink three liters of water without taking a toilet break; his days were spent searching for affordable rooms with proper air-conditioning; and his few moments of leisure were consumed by calculations of the amount of alcohol needed to sleep but not feel drowsy a few hours later.

Hu Anyan tells us about brutal work, where there is no real future in sight. But Hu is armed with deadpan humor and a strong idea of self. He moves on when he feels stuck—from logistics in the south, to parcel delivery in Beijing, to other impossible jobs. Along the way, he turns to reading and writing for strength and companionship.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is an honest and startling first-person portrait of Hu Anyan's struggle against the dehumanizing nature of our contemporary global work system—and his discovery of the power of sharing a story.

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

My Review: I see why this was a literary sensation in China. It's a real telling-truth-to-power story of how labor exploitation functions; it's an honest appraisal of the personal costs of the gig economy in a country where that is fresh ground to be broken.

It isn't so new a topic here. We have many books about the gig economy and the evils of end-stage capitalism taking over our lives. But Author Hu is a man possessed of a self-deprecating streak, as well as personal humility, coupled with self-awareness. It makes his take on economic exploitation broadly relevant as well as personally centered. He is a worker, a man who feels the need to do the job he has taken to the best of his ability. Not for him the do-the-minimum slacking life! That has the downside of making him susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous bosses whose desire to extract ever more labor from him he has trouble coming to terms with.

It's a struggle he becomes aware of as he realizes what this character trait he is lauded and exploited for is causing him real harm.

promotional art from the publisher

It's a sad truth that hustle culture is a sharp knife in the ribs of any kind of satisfying social life. Author Hu learns this early...and sadly often. It is mildly frustrating to follow the man as he grows into realizing he has only acquaintances instead of friends yet not see him really take steps to deepen his non-work connections with others. I can see the issue, of course; he's leading the same life as the people he meets.

Author Hu does say, as the end of the book approaches, that he is no longer the pushover he was. I wonder...I saw no sign of it because he told me this as a fact, in a kind of summing-up of his working (and only) life, and ended the story. He's quite young. It makes a kind of sense. It does make one want to yell, "AnYan! stop telling, start showing," until realization hits: He can't, there hasn't been time yet. It's a story in progress. I think it made the read more urgent for me after I really internalized that fact.

A book you might be tempted to read down, to think of as an incomplete memoir, that is really a call to Author Hu's age cohort to recognize and correct course on their own iterations of his behaviors. A very honest look at a very dark side of global labor exploitation that does so much to enable our spoiled, luxurious lifestyles.

Worth your time and treasure to get for your TBR.

DUSK, fourth Tasmania-set novel by Tasmanian author extraordinaire Robbie Arnott

DUSK
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED for 2026's The Climate Fiction Prize.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of North Woods and The Vaster Wilds, Dusk is a propulsive, moody, and atmospheric take on the Western.

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined.

And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.

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

My Review: Do you remember my review of Flames? The debut novel from this author, I gave it all five stars six years ago. I'm still amazed how few people look at the tabs on the top bar, so it seems most of y'all missed my reviews of Limberlost and The Rain Heron, so I'm reposting them tomorrow as regular-blog posts. I'll carry on warbling about Author Arnott's prose and his evocations of a natural world I wish to hell I saw and felt as keenly as he does when I went outside, eg "They left at dawn, heading north-west, the steam of their horses cutting through the harshly cold air as they rode across frosted paddocks that soon gave way to plains of soft, snow-dusted buttongrass. The sun slanted onto their backs but did not warm them," from this story.

I badly want you to join me in the world of Arnott stans because he really puts in the work to make wonderful stories, in the older and current senses of that word. I think that merits our time and our treasure. The rewards for spending a bit of both in his quiet, unshowy company are many.

So, this latest novel: It's a Western, in the US sense, that follows twin brother and sister as they make a desperate attempt to eke out survival in a world harsher and less tolerant than we privileged computer-users have ever known. Offspring of a pair transported to distant Tasmania for absurdly trivial "crimes" (efforts to remain alive, really), the Renshaw twins had no chance of an "honest" start in life. They were trained up to thievery. Their long-since executed parents left them to fend for themselves and so they have.

Now, though, the life they were bred to lead has finally snapped shut the social trap of antisocial activity. Rob and cheat your neighbors long enough, they'll stop affording you the chance to do it. This is where we meet Iris and Floyd.

The desperation of hunger drives these parasites on the Body Politic to pursue a cockamamie plan to kill for a bounty a puma that's attacking shepherds in Tasmania's wild back-of-beyond meadows. How these very urban people will accomplish this...let's say I was never convinced it was a *good* plan, but everyone needs a plan, and some hope, for how to survive.

The fully risen sun built a morning of cold colour, of ripped clouds, sharp light washing onto wet wool and frosted fields. It afforded the twins a confidence that they hadn’t felt the previous day. With the sun unshielded, the mist absent, the land was robbed of menace. The river was no longer haunting but placid; the twisted trees appeared graceful and stoic in their contortions; the listless shepherds now seemed merely apathetic, rather than mysterious or threatening.

What strikes me in that passage is how one can read it as beautiful sentences; as simile on several levels; as Western-genre foreshadowing of developments. I always love writing that lets me in, that is roomy enough for my imagination to work on the beautiful imagery and its story direction. Like Cormac McCarthy before him, Author Arnott's playing an old instrument in a different way (though not a nihilistic one, I'll hasten to reassure those not fond of ol' Cormac's grimfests).

Iris and Dusk, the female protagonists of this story, and each driven by the actions of men to fight for their very survival against those men simply to sustain their lives. If that's not a metaphor for late-stage capitalism's effects on feminism, I do not know what is. It was not until I finished the book and sat mulling it over that I found this in its substance. Of course, I rest atop a Himalaya of old white male privilege so no tellin' how much faster women will see it...but there it is, Iris needs to survive, Dusk does too, they have to protect those unable to do so for themselves (Floyd's got what I expect is scoliosis and is crippled by it).

Their collision is inevitable. It is primal, cataclysmic. It is the conflict of colonials in a country that they've taken as their own (pumas are placental mammals, not one of which is native to Australia), and Author Arnott makes sure to give us this stonking clue in the form of Lydia's Aboriginal voice. It should be no surprise to anyone that Lydia, the bosslady of a crew of peat-cutters, is our voice given to those still more denied a place than colonializers' women are.

And yet, and yet...read through a US lens, this story's incongruities with actual Tasmanian colonial history (Outback cattle barons become sheep barons and never, for all I know, crudesced into the place) are all in service of Author Arnott's career-long cutting of Tasmania's story-cloth to suit the pattern of story he wants to tell. I myownself think he does a truly wonderful job of it; he tells his wonderful story, simple survival of females in a world colonized and exploited by men, with the enhancements and alterations of a talented imagination.

I'd argue it starts too slowly for its eventual pace, and permaybehaps the ending is "too open" for many readers (though not for me, I like the story to head off into the sunset without me when there's as much to think over as there is here), so I'm not quit at the full-five point.

Damn close, though. It's another exercise in superior storytelling by an established superior storyteller.

KLAXON READS: THE BIG CON: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America, & LIMITARIANISM: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

LIMITARIANISM: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
INGRID ROBEYNS
Astra House
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Ahead of the paperback release on 23 September 2025, listen to the author on The Grey Area podcast. Necessary reading and listening in 2025.

The Publisher Says: "A powerful case for limitarianism – the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read!" —Thomas Piketty, bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

An original, bold, and convincing argument for a cap on wealth by the philosopher who coined the term "limitarianism."

How much money is too much? Is it ethical, and democratic, for an individual to amass a limitless amount of wealth, and then spend it however they choose? Many of us feel that the answer to that is no—but what can we do about it?

Ingrid Robeyns has long written and argued for the principle she calls "limitarianism"—or the need to limit extreme wealth. This idea is gaining momentum in the mainstream – with calls to "tax the rich" and slogans like "every billionaire is a policy failure"—but what does it mean in practice?

Robeyns explains the key reasons to support the case against extreme wealth:

It keeps the poor poor and inequalities growing

It’s often dirty money

It undermines democracy

It’s one of the leading causes of climate change

Nobody actually deserves to be a millionaire

There are better things to do with excess money

The rich will benefit, too

This will be the first authoritative trade book to unpack the concept of a cap on wealth, where to draw the line, how to collect the excess and what to do with the money. In the process, Robeyns will ignite an urgent debate about wealth, one that calls into question the very forces we live by (capitalism and neoliberalism) and invites us to a radical reimagining of our world.

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

My Review: Using moral arguments against massive wealth accumulation is like using moral arguments against porn: You could be right, probably aren't, and the target audience for your suasions could not possibly care less about them.

All the bullet list items above? The very wealthy know those to be true and could not possibly care less about them. "Every billionaire a policy failure" is way more effective because it simply states the people's case against the perpetrators of the crimes (moral and/or legal) that must be committed to become a billionaire.

What to do with the proceeds of the confiscation of excessive wealth is always going to be the weak point of any scheme to disempower the richest. The current Congress, like all its predecessors, is made up of people beholden to the moneymen. They will not confiscate and redistribute more than those who pay them...the people offer a token salary, the real money is in the campaign warchests they pay no tax on and use as they please...will allow.

Author Robeyns is firing an opening salvo in the next campaign against greed. It will persuade a few groundlings to talk it up and try to get it onto the agenda of more meetings.

Absolutely no billionaire will acquiesce to her suggestions. Therefore nothing will change as radically as she proposes.

That is not, in my view, the purpose of this read, any more than Marx or Mao delivered revolutions in human social or economic organization with their books. In fact both delivered fig leaves for the vilest and most destructive totalitarians to operate on their ostensible behalf while in fact defrauding their true believers and, often as not, killing the ones who said "stop" because the inconveniently moral could be labeled "counterrevolutionary" therefore beyond the social pale to the supporting masses.

What Author Robeyns offers here is a chance for you to examine your beliefs and your conscience. She doesn't have a prayer of impacting the lowlife, amoral Nerd-Reichers and the humanoid wallets enabling them. She *does* have a chance to elucidate some ugly facts about the accumulation of great wealth. A philosopher who has read, studied, and thought very deeply about human nature, she comes to conclusions you and I would do well to evaluate for ourselves. The only way I know of to do that is to read her words, and decide how much you resonate with them. The work this book represents is impressive. No one gets to these stages of argument absent a long, intense program of study.

Do you feel in your water that someone possessing a billion currency units is also possessed of a character flaw? You'll find some comfort in knowing that you're not first to reach, or alone in reaching, this conviction. Is the spectacle of inconceivably rich foreigners using their hoards to manipulate the US electorate and thus the outcome of our elections very angering to your patriot's soul? You'll resonate to the ways and means of removing that power from them.

Thomas Piketty praises this book as a "must-read" on its central argument of limitarianism. As he has done more than anyone else to yank the horribly uncomfortable, thick wool of "neoliberalism" from the world's eyes, I'd say heed him and get this book into your head before casting your 2024 votes up and down the ticket.

Why have I given it a surprisingly limitarian four stars, if I set out to warble my fool lungs out about its virtues? Because, by the tendentious nature of books setting forth cases for action, it's a bit repetitive. It's not academic in purpose so it's not footnoted to a fare-thee-well. It is, in short, a beast with two faces: one faces the congregation and lectures for change; one faces the choir and seeks approval for its message.

Speaking from the choir, I approve.

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


THE BIG CON: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America
JONATHAN CHAIT
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The scam of supply-side economics is clearly and convincingly explained in “a classic of political journalism” (Michael Lewis).

Jonathan Chait has written for a range of publications, from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, and considers himself a moderate. But he’s convinced that American politics has been hijacked.

Over the past three decades, a fringe group of economic hucksters has corrupted and perverted our nation’s policies, Chait argues, revealing in The Big Con how these canny zealots first took over the Republican Party, and then gamed the political system and the media so that once-unthinkable policies—without a shred of academic, expert, or even popular support—now drive the political agenda, regardless of which party is in power. The principle is supposedly “small government”—but as he demonstrates, the government is no smaller than it was in the days of Ronald Reagan; it’s simply more debt-ridden and beholden to wealthy elites.

Why have these ideas succeeded in Washington even as the majority of the country recognizes them for the nonsense they are? How did a clique of extremists gain control of American economic policy and sell short the country’s future? And why do their outlandish ideas still determine policy despite repeated electoral setbacks? Explaining just how things work in Washington, DC, and distinguishing between short-term volatility in the “political weather” and the long-term, radical shift in the “political climate,” Chait presents a riveting drama of greed and deceit that should be read by every concerned citizen.

“Chait is both very serious and seriously funny as he traces the rise of conservatism over the past thirty years.” —Michael Kinsley

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK AS A GIFT. THANKS!

My Review: We knew the 1980 election was stolen. We knew why, too. Milton Friedman told us why it had to be in Free to Choose, book and TV show. He operated in the libertarian/laissez-faire world of F.A. Hayek. The men behind Reagan were supply-side radicals who wanted more than anything to cripple the Federal government's ability to act against the businesses polluting out planet, and "taking their money." Instead the Federal government would need to borrow money...at interest...from the banks; enriching the bankers and hobbling the politicians who could enforce change on the reactionary elite.

What tendentious Author Chait does in this seventeen-year-old book is detail the ways this brazen theft (my words, not his) has resonated down the decades to the present moment of radicalized fascist terrorism meeting economic royalism in an ongoing enshittification of the world's social fabric. And it's being done to us all under the name "supply-side economics."

Call it whatever you like. We're forty-four years into the world's first experiment in this snake-oil system of not taxing the rich and not acting to protect the poor and the needy, after seeing the huge economic and societal gains of the Keynesian interventionist years. The promises of economic growth and technological innovation, of booming investment by those untaxed billionaires, etc etc ad nauseam, have not materialized. There's never been a glimmer of benefit to anyone except the untaxed wealthy.

Yet the entire conversation about the economy is still framed in terms that comport with this failed-in-practice theory.

The essence of insanity is doing the same thing repetitively and expecting different results to come of it.

Author Chait isn't kidding around with this takedown of the naked emperors of the economic establishment. It is refreshing to see a commonsensical moderate-to-conservative poloitical thinker confront orthodoxy, hold it to the test of results-versus-promises, and report honestly on his findings. Reading this book before the 2024 election would be wise. Reading it, and considering deeply its message and its implications, is something I'd call a civic duty.

MY MEN, #WITMonth translation of Norwegian novel about first known US female serial killer

MY MEN
VICTORIA KIELLAND (tr. Damion Searls)
Astra House
$25.00 hardcover, available now
Trade paper AVAILABLE 13 AUGUST 2024 for $16.00
Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Based on the true story of Norwegian maid turned Midwestern farmwife Belle Gunness, the first female serial killer in American history. My Men is a fictional account of one broken woman's descent into inescapable madness.

Among thousands of other Norwegian immigrants seeking freedom, Brynhild Størset emigrated to the American Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century, changing her name and her life. As Bella, later Belle Gunness, she came in search of not only fortune and true faith but, most of all, love.

From Victoria Kielland, a rising star of Norwegian literature, comes My Men , a literary reimagining of the harrowing true story of Belle Gunness, who slowly but irreversibly turned to senseless murder for release from her pain, becoming America’s first known female serial killer. In pursuit of her American Dream, Kielland’s Belle grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and perversely compelling.

Raw, visceral, and altogether hypnotic, My Men is a brutal yet radically empathetic glimpse into the world of a woman consumed by desire.

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

My Review: When a writer sets their talent to the task of fictionalizing evil, there are choices to make that will determine the level of suspension of disbelief the reader's being asked to invest. Is the evil inherent (readily believable), evoked (sympathetically believable), or situational (tough to justify or invest in)? Is the perpetrator the victim lashing out, taking power back, or simply looking to survive in hard conditions? All of these ask us, as readers, to put aside our judgments of the bad actor to some extent and to come to a fuller understanding of what really happened (in the cases where evil is factually based, as this one is).

I'll say that I understood Belle Gunness a lot differently after this read than before it.

A more-or-less stream of consciousness, loosely structured narrative style suits the apparent purpose of humanizing a murdering, remorseless killer of many people. What the author seems to want me to do is to think of Belle as a person, in hard circumstances, not as just a killing machine. That didn't happen. As I followed her increasingly disordered thoughts and feelings, as I saw what she saw and worked back from there to her probable outside stimulus, I felt sympathy drain away from me. This is the situationally evil character, one who just does what she (in this case) does because she can. This person was a killer who liked killing for the power it conferred on her. The inner thoughts of such a person, as ficionalized, left me thinking how very easy it seemed to be for her to untether her blunted, stunted moral sense from anything that was outside her own mind. I'd assumed Gunness was existentially threatened herself and then enacted that on others. Before this read, what I saw was a need to redress her powerless victim state. After, she came through these pages as a narcissistic bundle of insecurities with a grossly overblown sense of what the world owed her.

If, like me, you thought we'd get a retelling of the life Belle Gunness led that made her what she was, get that out of your head. We're inside Belle's mind, arguably a more interesting place to be. It's going to put some readers off, because it's 100% conjecture. You're not tethered to the facts of Belle's life. You're asked to put aside that readerly need. Your disbelief buys you, however, the strange and deeply interesting view of a murdering sociopath's thought processes.

I hope like hell someone at the publisher's end made more than a cursory check on the author's background because she's very, very good...chillingly good...at making this horrifying person's inner life accessible to a casual reader.

I don't think everyone will appreciate this read. I know I expected something other than what I got. I liked the actual book better than the one I thought I'd be reading in the end.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, coming-of-(middle)-age story set in familiar suburbia

THE TOWN OF BABYLON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Astra House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction! Awards will be presented on 16 November 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.