THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence, damning indictment using evidence seldom seen by the public

THE CORONER'S SILENCE: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
TERENCE KEEL
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of His Name Is George Floyd and Under the Skin

A landmark investigation into forensic medicine that exposes the systematic concealment of state-sanctioned violence through death investigations

Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research—including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families—this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner’s Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

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

My Review: Starting with an acknowledgment of the demands we place on the police, "...we have asked police in America to maintain law and order in addition to managing the problems of poverty, the unhoused, the mentally unwell, and people suffering with substance abuse," Author Keel peels back the layers of denial, obfuscation, and lying that enshroud the deaths of people in law-enforcement custody. Coroners, tasked with the responsibility of reporting on the condition of the deceased's body after their death, often use terminology that clouds what would be interpreted as signs of violence lest police be accused of criminal conduct.

The obvious problem arises when there has been criminal police conduct. It is not always the case, nor is it unknown; the system is intended to hold bad actors accountable for their actions; so how are victims' families, members of the public, to feel confident when principal figures are left to perform their role largely under the radar and so in practical terms unaccountably?

Author Keel studied the problem, saw the tensions in the system up close, and presents us this honest report with all its uneasy conclusions. I'm particularly taken with the concept of "second death," the erasure of the deceased's violent death at the hands of public safety professionals; men and women who collude to prevent the truth of the deceased's time in custody leading to their death is enacting a different sort of violence on them and their survivors, whether family or society at large, by shielding violent offenders from responsibility because they are the police.

It should surprise no one that racialized and marginalized victims disproportionately suffer fatal consequences on entering police custody. It is almost impossible for members of those groups to receive posthumous justice due to the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand defeating open and transparent accountability for deaths in custody. Medical jargon, grammatical skulduggery...much can be hidden by using bureaucracy's beloved passive voice, and ameliorative jargon eg, "shots were fired" by anyone in particular, or just impelled by hard breezes?, or "an officer-involved conflict" of what sort? initiated by whom?, etc etc.

Narratives constructed in this pettifogging fashion are not rigorous, and should be challenged at every turn. That they are not indicates the true purpose of coroners' reports by whatever name: exculpation by obfuscation.

It is infuriating that this is widespread, nay ubiquitous, and goes largely unchallenged. In bringing the abuse of public trust this behavior represents, Author Keel does his best to prevent as many "second death"s as he possibly can. I pray for his ongoing success and for this cultural poltroonery to be held up for public ridicule.

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, truth told, action called for

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides
SAUL WILLIAMS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, avaiable now

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

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

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

My Review: What does poetry have to do with anything, demands my inner poetry-averse Philistine. What all art has to do with politics, answers reasonable me.

Everything. Just as Reverend Jedidiah, here, says it does.

I was inclined to listen to the words of the Reverend from Sinners because everything he's saying in these barely-200 pages is so exactly what I'd like you to hear...art matters or "They" would not try to censor it, take it away from you, hide it if "They" don't approve of it...search engine enshittification is more complicated than a ban, but also flies under your radar and has built-in plausible deniability.

You are what you consume. Go light on the empty, sweet-tasting, pretty but pointless stuff for a healthy mind/body/spirit (health is the enemy of bullshit on every measurable axis). Reverend Jedidiah says so too, out of his complicated mind and mouth. I'm very impressed by Author Saul's meditations on the promises and beauties in spirituality being bait (my word) for the hook of obedience and deference to authority. It's deeply saddening, but true as even a brief glance at the world shows you. Taking sides in the culture wars is often hardest for people who see the misuse of their source of joy and consolaion in the world. So much of the noise in the world is, and always has been, intended to make it hard for you to focus for very long. Breaking through the noise is best done by listening to it, looking for what it's pushing you to accept. Advertising, for example, is pushing you to accept the "blessing" of capitalism...look at this maginificent abundance of stuff! see what an amazing life you can have!...without looking at the wages no one can live on, the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in, the fact that it's flimsy and will break. Begin your journey at church...why would Jesus say it's fine to rip kids away from parents, to take fathers from their families to be shipped away not even where they came from and might have needed to escape, when a huge part of the christian message is "love thy neighbor?" All very obvious. But the noise, the shouting, the struggle to afford all the brummagem gauds makes the obvious recede into shadows so it won't bother you with its obviousness.

"They" don't need to lie to you if "They" can distract you from the stone-cold obvious truth.

Author Saul follows in the footsteps of truly great souls, from Paul Robeson to his mother. He distills into readable, relatable prose the truths that can feel threatening to acknowledge, accept, and act on: You, no matter how "small" or "insignificant" you think you are, must take sides. You can't afford not to. There is too much at stake, too much happening that we can not let go on as it is.

Take comfort in reading Author Saul's wisdom. No, it's not easy. It never is.

It's necessary instead.

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC, two halves make a funny-shaped whole

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC
ARUNI KASHYAP
HarperVia (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

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

My Review: India's right-wing horrible human beings are enough like our US versions that I was stressed for Rohit from the get-go; I was also reminded that au fond, humans are not different anywhere on this globe. The same insatiable desire to control others in every way, the same pressure to conform or else, the same kinds of violent resistance and repression, for reasons only cosmetically different.

The reason I'm not offering perfect ratings and warbles of delight for this clear-sighted takedown of the repression and conformity machine is simple: Dhruv's a bastard. Rohit needs to get over his addiction to an emotionally unavailable man, and that story is *uncomfortably* close to home. It's all on Rohit, of course, Dhruv's uninterest could've been more kindly expressed but that is not incumbent on any of us to come up with in the moment. Rohit losing himself in the pursuit of distraction is deeply relatable. His choices are very interesting to me because they're further evidence of human nature being consistent across cultures.

Where the mess that is the authoritarian horror India lives under (and the US seems to be rushing to emulate) takes hold of the narrative, the second half becomes more a political argument against authoritarianism while backgrounding Rohit's emotional life. The shift in tome is always going to be tricky to navigate; I didn't feel it was all that well handled. I was taken from one focus, on the intimate life and choices of Rohit, into another, the violent and vicious reactionary response of a right-wing regime to gay men.

Both were very involving, though a reader looking for more of the first story might not like being catapulted into the second much. Readers interested in the second stiry might have preferred it to be more than just lightly foreshadowed from the beginning. It's this dichotomy between the (roughly) halves that stalled me out at four stars. There are that many because I really liked and invested in Rohit and his happiness. Sure, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand he get on with finding someone who deserves his love. But he really deserves that kind of happy ending. (Other kinds too but permaybehaps on the page in my imagined other story...not this unsteamy one.)

A successful read for all my quibbly niggles, a story I'd enjoy seeing more of, should a follow-on tale eventuate. That ain't the most common end to a review I write about a book that frustrated me!

LIVING, TOGETHER: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, exactly what it says on the label

LIVING, TOGETHER: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection
SAMANTHA PAIGE ROSEN (editor)
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: 21 writers and organizers on found family, hacking adulthood, and other lessons communal living can teach us about the future of housing in America

Featuring Kristen Arnett, Rhaina Cohen, Kim Stanley Robinson, and more

At age 29, when Samantha Paige Rosen made an unexpected move back home, she was surprised to find how much she loved living with her parents again. Inspired and curious, she began searching for others who had redefined home and community.

The essays and Q&As in Living, Together are about carving out spaces of communal connection and joy in our 3-bed, 2-bath starter home culture. Although they recount life at different stages and in different regions, these stories showcase the delights and tradeoffs of more dynamic shapes of “home.” AAcross sections on family, intentional community, and what lies beyond housing, readers will hear from voices like:

Kristen Arnett, whose found family kept her afloat, from weddings to hurricane season and everything in between

Kim Stanley Robinson, who describes the magic of communities that are led by everyone

Sarah Thankam Mathews, who founded a pandemic mutual aid group and discovered, like so many of us, how essential connection and care are in times of crisis

Rodney M. Bordeaux, who explores how strength and unity are inextricably tied to life on First Nations reservations

Communal living isn’t just for cults or millennials with a pipe dream. Amidst the climate crisis, a hostile housing market, and the loneliness epidemic, Living, Together opens a window into how people in the US are thriving through collective care. This book invites us to imagine what new opportunities for connection exist when we push through the walls society has built for us.

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

My Review: I live alone. I have always loved living alone. Company suits me only when I can't hear, see, or smell them (smokers need to be treated for their addiction!) when I don't want to. (Which is almost always.) However, age and disability require I compromise by living in congregate care so the things I genuinely can no longer do but that need doing are still done.

Because I live in New York City, that is not an impossible dream, and I wake up each and every day happy and comfortable...and very aware of my extreme good fortune.

So there's my essay for this collection of them on the topic of living in and among others. It is a fascinating topic, living arrangements always are. The essays within the collection are going to appeal in varying degrees. Different writers approach the topic differently, and sometimes unexpectedly based on their larger bodies of work.

I'm convinced the topic of housing all of us is never going to be less than contentious. Capitalism's deep, invasive weed roots are going to wrap around everyone involved in its systems' minds. I hope reading this collection of essays will convince a few to stand outside the building their lives have been spent within to take a fresh, sunlit view of the needs, the wants, and the realities of fair, just, reasonable access to housing.

*snort* Not bloody likely in a world where healthcare is rationed by money, but a boy can dream.

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES, don't delay learning about them

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES
FAHMIDA RIAZ (tr. Sana R. Chaudhry)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation

In Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, Fahmida Riaz transports readers to fifth-century Ctesiphon, the zenith of the Sassanian Empire, in a brilliant historical novel that blends rich cultural memory with striking political relevance. Set against the backdrop of fire worshippers, Parsi kings, and the ancient Avesta, this ambitious tale follows Mazdak, the first socialist revolutionary in history, as he challenges the power structures of his time.

With vivid depictions of the Great Palace of King Qobad, the lands of the White Huns, and the impoverished masses, Riaz delves deep into the forces of history that shaped Mazdak’s quest for social justice. A masterpiece of historical fiction, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones is a powerful meditation on erasure, cultural identity, and the fight for justice that resonates with our contemporary world.

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

My Review: What a fascinating read! I was constantly intrigued by the strangeness of the settings, and eager to get the next interesting tidbit of knowledge.

And that's where my problem lies. I genuinely could not wait for my lessons in history to commence but I was never empathetically crushed when the history was dark. I am still not sure who the characters are, but I am very clear on what happened to them. Ctesiphon is no longer a name on a map of archaeological sites, it's a place. It vibrates with events so huge their echoing claps of collapse, of rupture, their crackling roars of inflammation, reverberate (I now see) in 2026's tragedies.

That's heady stuff. It's why there are four stars up top. There'd be six if I could remember anyone's name. Events occur...curiously impersonally. Power vanishes...but no one lost it. It's a narrative choice that other authors have made over time, and more particularly when telling sweeping historical stories. If one isn't willing to create a doorstopper like War & Peace, Jean-Cristophe, or their ilk, a narrower focus on facts and events will keep pages turning.

It worked on me. It would most likely have worked on me with many more pages, too. As things stand I'm a happy reader, sated in my desire to be presented with a very interesting story about places and events completely new to me in a landscape foreign to my eyes.

I missed the portraits that could've showed me the people is all.

THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, your words aside Religion is not a good answer to Society's ills

THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion
LUKE BURGIS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: How to become yourself without losing everyone else.

We’re living in a time when it’s harder than ever to become a whole person—and to stay in authentic community. Some people dissolve into their group identities and lose themselves entirely. Others withdraw into ephemeral, online collectives they can float into and out of without consequence. Both are symptoms of the same a fragmented sense of self in an age of social contagion. This fragmentation is more than a personal crisis—it’s the soil in which hollow and often dangerous mass movements take root, offering counterfeit belonging to those desperate for meaning.

The One and the Ninety-Nine is a timely and inspiring exploration of what it means to forge a stable identity in the face of coercion, conformity, and the contagious desires of the crowd. Through compelling and original insights drawn from philosophy, psychology, and personal experience, author Luke Burgis examines how our lives are shaped by the groups we belong to—and how we, in turn, shape those groups. He offers a roadmap for engaging with modern society without losing our unique sense of personhood, and reveals the essential rites of passage and personal challenges that differentiate a life of meaning from one dictated by societal expectations.

People who are able to find their solid self and thrive in the space between the one and the many—who can act with integrity while being part of a community—live freer and more comfortable lives and become models for others. The One and the Ninety-Nine is a call to reject passive conformity, rediscover the depth of personality, and choose a life that is both truly personal and deeply connected.

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

My Review: I don't approve of religion in general; I have an abiding bone-deep dislike for christians in particular, as a gay man with no interest in "overcoming my sinful nature" or whatever other nonsense "They" spew at me to coerce me into feeling a need to placate "Them" by behaving in a way comfortable to "Them." So when the author admitted to being a christian in the first few pages of the book, I set it aside with no intention of finishing the DRC.

I'm very worried about the undesigned social experiment we as a society are running in the form of algorithmically-mediated social media. I don't trust the tech scum to design the algorithms with the betterment of a person, but a bottom line, as its goal. Ample evidence of the role greed plays in the industry makes me all but positive no attention is paid to human needs when designing systems used by all of us.

Those two prior things are causally linked. I finished reading The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (qv) and got more urgently agitated by what I read there; I recalled the DRC of this book, dealing with forming an authentic self. I opened it back up to see what I could glean.

Lots of christian nonsense. Parables and Bible quotes galore. Stating that (in his opinion, to be fair stated as such) people are more selfish now after *heavily*implying* the reason is we're more secular/less christian. Which...well...who's selfish, my dude? the people doing their best to navigate the world in ways you don't like, or you for saying your religion has The Answers to making people better and more empathetic? (Leave aside The Troubles, in the Ireland where you start your book, were an intra-christian spat that's half a millennium old.)

So no, I'm no big fan of his, nor did I think his shepherd/sheep needing rescue framing was anything other than seriously condescending.

But.

He's correct. The education system carefully indoctrinates us to accept Authority and seek conformity. It's a real thing, intentionally designed to do what we see around us: create sheeple. It's been done by his co-religionists for millennia now, to equally destructive effect, not ever acknowledged or examined by him. It's a giant problem for every society throughout time. Cohesion good, public morality good, conformity and scapegoating bad. Since christianity is a major source of both pressure to conform and assigning blame onto Others (those who don't pray like you, sexual-behavioral minorities, the Devil) I think it takes big brass ones not to examine *that* in great detail while quietly assuming the adding-back of religion will go a long way to fixing the very real problem he's identified.

I admire you, Brother Luke, for being so vulnerable and forthcoming about your experiences with your father's dementia. It was very moving. It was a long struggle, of course, and from the inside must've felt interminable. I do not think it was quite the connective tissue you intended it to be. It was rather more confessional than professional.

I did not, in other words, find solutions I want to support or even effect to the very real, well-stated societal stressors I'm eager to address. It's not likely to fix things by doing yet again things that helped society fracture before now.

ANDREA WULF'S PAGE: THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World; and THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris

THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
ANDREA WULF
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.

From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.

The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.

Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.

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

My Review: A man as astonishing as Author Wulf's previous science-biography topic, Alexander von Humboldt (see below). Forster has been brought out of obscurity at a time when his delighted curiosity in the world is curdling die to the way we as a species ignored the warnings of imbalance von Humboldt was observing and reporting on. Forster is still known to us today because he wrote of his travels extensively. He was unusual for his attention to the contributions of women and his respect for the contributions of non-whites in many fields around the world. He died before he was fifty; it's a sadness to me personally that he and Alexander von Humboldt never traveled together. As Forster was two decades older than von Humboldt, I can only dream of what the synergy in these men's inclusive, broad views might have gifted us.

A man born in 1754 writing passionately about the flimsiness and dishinesty of white supremacy, and the idiocy of the idea of dominionism deserves a wide audience in the twenty-first century. If we're going to lionize dead white men, let's lionize George Forster the proponent of equality, the supporter of women's rights, the spreader of Enlightenment values. Here's a British man worthy of our respect and deserving of emulation.

Forster's travels broadened his mind and his spirit. He was a person who saw, as his private papers show, the connections among people in a time when colonialism and sexism were drawing ever thicker lines between us. I am saddened that his first-hand observations of the idiocy and evil that Othering (in today's terminology) colonized people was exacting never gained traction. I dream of a Forster who lived to lift up Mary Wollestonecraft, who worked effectively with Revolutionary Parisians to moderate the evils inherent in destroying systems to rebuild them fairly.

Author Wulf has, as is her wont, seen past History's battlefied fog to choose another target of worth and merit to remind us how long the world has been falling from Grace.

And how many before us saw it.

Honoring their legacies by taking action seems appropriate to me. I hope you'll read this dynamically written, thoroughly researched work on an unjustly underknown thinker, and feel inspired to do just that.

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

THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
ANDREA WULF
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75*of five

The Publisher Says: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.

Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden.

With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE.

My Review: Start your journey into Alexander von Humboldt's character and intellect here:

“The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’. Humboldt would see again and again how humankind unsettled the balance of nature.”

This man, born the year a crucial observation of a Transit of Venus was measured, and died the year of the Carrington Event, was tied to science at both ends.

It's probably down to the fact that he was gay that he's never been lionized in US scientific education the way Lord Kelvin, Sir Humphry Davy, Leibniz, or Pasteur have. Yes, German-language output isn't hugely well-represented in general US scientific awareness to this day; if ever someone deserves an exception, it's the man who has a bay in California, a current running up our Pacific coast, and a species of giant squid found in ever-northening parts of that coast, named for him.

He was a very good writer (seriously...read Cosmos, it was as big a bestseller as On the Origin of Species by his follower Darwin and is an excellent browsing book), which led to his excellent observational science influencing multiple generations of scientists who founded new fields of study by expanding his work. His way of seeing Earth as a system is now the dominant view, expressed thusly by Author Wulf: "He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world."

His writing skills were also useful in his later-life career as a diplomat, most enduringly to the Court of King Louis-Phillippe of France. I do not know of any English translations of his diplomatic correspondence, but I wager cash money they make for absorbing reading. His Prussian monarch did not compel von Humboldt to attend hid, perform diplomacy for him, because the guy was boring. He charmed his friends, he charmed the many people his scientific and diplomatic duties brought him into contact with, he charmed several younger men enough that one of them, a Peruvian aristocrat, got jealous enough when he was dumped...that's so unkind, let's say left behind when von Humboldt departed...that he leveled the accusation of our guy visiting a Quito brothel for men who like men. von Humboldt was known to be "like that" but, as always, exceptional talent...and a lack of a widely used "scientific" term for men romantically and sexually interested in other men like "homosexual"...gets judged by other rules. Author Wulf doesn't delve into this aspect of his life, though it's interstitially there; her focus is instead on the immensity, the Forrest-Gumpian breadth of his social circle, and drawing some conclusions about his influence that veer into Great Man Theory territory. I'm not all the way able to get past that discomfiting adulatory tone, despite feeling its pull very strongly. I'd give this read five or even six stars of five with some critical distance baked in; as it is four-and-three-quarters give me wiggle room fo work out my squeam.

It's a long read, it's an impactful resuscitation of a reputation very sadly in need of it among Anglophone readers, and if imperfect is still a very great pleasure to read.

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries, or "needs must when the devil drives"

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries
STEVEN SALAITA
Fordham University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academe

In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career to an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus–a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school–An Honest Living describes the author’s decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.

Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs–Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut {AUB}–ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.

Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

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

My Review: I have experienced being in the crosshairs of the True Believers. It was not as awful for me, old retiree and disabled, as it was for able-bodied new dad and advanced-degree having Steve. My career is an avocation, not a livelihood; I read books and write about them whether or not anyone pats attention to me. I do not do this for money so I am more insulated from that harm, which made me feel the nervousness of Author Steve's situation more sharply. If I'm this tense when piled on, dismissed in demeaning terms, then blocked by people I'd assumed were not judgmental, how must someone with a job he likes and wants to keep doing as well as a family to support feel?!

One thing is for sure, he felt the need to get a paycheck very quickly. Leaving a professorship for a seat at the front of a schoolbus was not the comedown I think his enemies within academia thought it would be. It certainly makes me understand Mao's cultural revolution more clearly...tell an academic he's now a "menial worker" and watch him wither like a salted slug. Not Author Steve. He did the "menial" job, thought about what principles and ethics are for, and came out of the situation with very cute anecdotes about his kid passengers, and a damn good job in Cairo working for the American University in Cairo. (I read a lot of their press's books.) I'm very glad for that because I think Author Steve belongs in the driver's seat of young peoples' education, always has but even moreso after his recent experiences. He can now speak with authority about the hypocrisy and the shabbiness of the Establishment's vaunted belief in the free exchange of ideas and the protection of the right to free speech within their institutions.

It's worthwhile to read a memoir by someone who's been victimized for standing up for his principles. It's fun to read the wry reflections of a man who's never lost his principles under pressure. It's deeply instructive to take the tour of modern cancel culture with one of the canceled. A book doing all of these things is a must-read in my never-remotely-humble opinion.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, Emily Jane's ruminations on end-stage capitalism and toxic masculinity

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
EMILY JANE
Hyperion Avenue (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel.

“It takes aliens (or an Emily Jane) to help us see our society for the bizarre, sugary, microplastic-poisoned dream it is.” —Edgar Cantero

From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, American Werewolves brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

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

My Review: I was really amused by On Earth as It Is on Television last year. It made me smile and chuckle in a year when those were not my first choices of response to the world and its shenanigans. I'd hoped for the same experience here.

Mostly got it, though entirely without humor. Toxic masculinity and predatory capitalism are worthy targets for Author Emily Jane's sharply observed snark. Told in two narrative strands, this story of modern-day Shane, an ordinary young man who's just found out he's now a partner in an equity-capital firm; modern-day Natasha, a downwardly mobile woman who is determined to find out how her bizarrely murdered roommate, Marie, died and why no one else seems to care; and, in the nineteenth century, a boy called Bit who wends his way West to make his fortune. There's a horrible animal attack on Shane, to bookend Marie's murder by an unknown creature; it's the first of many such events that Author Emily Jane presents in a dry, unsensationalized framework for us to, ermmm, chew over. Why this character? Why now? What really happened here, who's noticed, and why are we seeing the responses that Emily Jane shows us?

It's just incredible that these people are somehow existing in relation to each other. It does feel stretch-y, like the need of the storytelling trumped the need of the characters; none of them are ever going to be easy in each others' headspace. Which is the point. It just left me with a sad, uneasy emotional aftertaste. I'm clear that the rape-culture and misogyny elements are presented in a highly negative and critical light. I don't know for sure that they're necessary to foreground so much...put it down to my dislike of these themes, not the author's overuse of them in making your decision to read the story or not.

I suspect that, my quibbles above notwithstanding, it will be Author Emily Jane's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque urban fantasy elements regarding lycanthropy and its invented factual history that will cause most of y'all to give the read a pass. I get it...the technique can feel off-putting if over- or awkwardly done. I found these elements very well-chosen and did not find them out of place or obtrusive in the author's hands. Werewolves or aliens, from her previous book—makes no odds, each is as unlikely as the other to be objectively verifiably present among us.

Your taste in humor will matter a lot in your experience of the read, so get that sample under your belt. If you run across this: "Veronica tried to convince him that werewolves weren't supposed to cry, until her dad explained that werewolves could cry when they needed to and it didn't make them any less werewolvesy," and do not at least chuckle, this read will flop for you likely quite resoundingly.

Most of the rest of us will, however, get our grin on. I think it's worth the time and treasure it will take to get it read.

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change, essays about the one true constant

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending October 6, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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

My Review: Collections often draw from existing bodies of work. Author Solnit began drawing acclaim for her robust, tendentious writing in the early Aughts, and has never fallen out of the cultural conversation. She won't stop telling the truth, though, so her honesty wins her detractors and even enemies across the political spectrum.

One knows a thinker is doing it right when everybody is mad at them for something.

This essay collection breaks no new ground in her public thinking. It is, if I'm honest, a highlight reel with a bit more sameness than I wanted to read. It is also a collection drawn from decades of work. I found myself thinking, "I remember this, move on," and finding it necessary to recall in the moment that it's collected not commissioned to be written anew or afresh. Not every essay chosen was necessarily up to the highest standards in the book. Again, it's a function of a collection...it's not possible to be perfect, but it's possible, like Author Solnit, to be trenchant and to add value to the consideration of organizing theme of this particular project.

Progress is relative. In any consideration of the societal norms prevailing now that has even a modest degree of perspective, things are hugely better for women, queers, trans folk, and people of color. We're always being bombarded with messaging to the contrary, for reasons y'all need to read Paul Linebarger's book to really connect with. A collection of work like this one is a good corrective to the easy-to-internalize message of the world sucks always has always will. It's true; it's also wrong; both these things can and do coexist because, faithless to your entire life's training, almost nothing in the observable universe is a binary. All physical systems are spectrums and there's mounting evidence literally everything is in fact spectrum...look into quantum physics and certainty vanishes to be replaced by probabilities (aka spectra). Author Solnit stressing that each ending is also a beginning is very much in line with this mode of thinking.

It's new enough to most of her audience that repetition is probably a good idea to deploy in examining the topic. Like any new-to-you theory, perspective, or fact, it's going to need some hammering home to become part of one's mental structural supports. I'm ahead of this curve so it wore on my nerve a bit more than it will for others. I hope you'll pick it up and give it a try if you're sinking under the wight of the world's idiocies and evils.

We need the perspective of one who has been decades in the trenches, struggling against the dying order's loud and lousy distractions, to remind us we've come far. We need to keep moving ahead. It's easier to find the will to do that if we've got a stedy hand and an encouraging voice like Author solnit's telling us to remember it can be done.

Because it has been done. It's not finished, this work; it never really is. Now, get back to it!

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, Dr. Spock has a LOT to answer for

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
HELEN ZOE VEIT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An eye-opening investigation into why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren’t children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don’t parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?

But Americans in the past didn’t think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky shows how fussy eating came to define "children’s food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today.

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

My Review: I wasn't a picky eater because I was raised by parents who loved food. I'm so grateful to them for the lesson they each taught: "try it, if you don't like it you don't have to finish it."

I'm also old. This message was more common among the Depression-era denizens who raised me than postwar-boom kids who raised the picky eaters we're discussing in this book.

As "experts" got hold of the conversation around food (author's scare quotes), the wheels came off. We know from decades of research findings being reported and then challenged, the "experts" (remember, not my scare quotes!) have been tarred by the backlash that keeps growing against expertise in general. It feels kind of justified to me, in this case, because there are no real reasons that the advice the "experts" gave should have been heeded as none of them made any sense at all. But, well, expertise needs to be respected. It's the world now that does NOT respect expertise that's in terrible trouble.

Author Veit has researched the question "is a generation of US-born kids pickier in their food choices than earlier generations?" and presented findings and posited reasons for the findings. It is a fascinating topic. The sources are broad-based and wide-ranging; cited in line which I appreciate; and to the extent I randomly sampled credible. What they aren't, and what the book itself isn't, is prescriptive. Nowhere in the text is there a solution to a problem identified. It was not promised, it was not suggested in the research sources to be intended; I bring it up because I don't want to give the impression there is anywhere anything about addressing the behavior being studied.

I get the impression that the title led previous readers down that garden path. Don't be one of them! I'm interested in the subject of picky eating because it seems so absurd to allow it. I was glad to read Author Veit's study because I feel much less...superior...about the realities of the issue. I think there's a lot of value in this lens on our present social moment's roots and results. I felt there was genuine curiosity, a real "I need to know" on the author's part, and I resonated with that feeling. It gave me a four-star reading experience. I was impressed with her research, her cogitations on the research, and convinced by her conclusions based on them. I was perhaps less drawn in than I might have been by the shifts I felt between the presentation of her digests of research and the chattier tone of her presentation of her conclusions drawn from it...this was more like feeling some charming cocktail-party acquaintance was suddenly taking me into the lecture hall.

Entirely irrelevant to the value I received from the read. It was a factor that impacted me on a reading-pleasure level alone. You might feel entirely differently. I hope you will get the book to find out for yourself.

FIXING FAIRNESS: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All, well worth the short read

FIXING FAIRNESS: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All
LILY ZHENG
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: DEI needs a reset. Discover how to achieve real social change in the workplace that puts everyone ahead through the groundbreaking FAIR framework.

The demand for inclusive workplaces is stronger than ever, with most employees seeking a sense of belonging and fairness at work. Yet traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies have faced backlash and stagnation, leaving organizations at a crossroads.

Where common DEI initiatives have failed, this book instead offers a results-based, systems-focused, all-inclusive, and universally beneficial framework to help bring about real social change in the workplace. This can be achieved through the FAIR framework:

Fairness—Promote equitable treatment by addressing systemic barriers and ensuring transparent, just practices for all.

Access—Expand opportunities by removing obstacles and creating pathways for underserved and underrepresented groups.

Inclusion—Foster a sense of belonging where diverse voices are valued, heard, and integrated into decision-making.

Representation—Reflect the diversity of society at all levels, ensuring visibility and participation across demographics.

This book isn’t about the next acronym or rebranding; it’s a call to action for a more effective and resilient approach to social progress. The DEI industrial complex failed to make real change through unchecked growth and performative practices, and far-right antagonists only offer regressive “solutions.” With clarity, urgency, and practicality, Fixing Fairness offers a third option and charts a path forward for those committed to creating better outcomes for all.

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

My Review: Tight, compact, and rooted in the author's entire career's-worth of research and—more importantly—practice.

What I appreciated most was Author Zheng's ability to restate points without making me feel I was being given cold leftover oatmel, lumps and all; it is down to the approachable style of their writing. (Author Zheng uses they/them pronouns.) It's clear, from high-powered venues supporting their work with publications and endorsements...this was on Forbes's Best New 2026 Books On Workplace Inclusion And The Future Of DEI list and Author Zheng's work has appeared there, in the New York Times, and Harvard Business Review. Links are all on their website here.

A key realization in this read came from the not-subtle calling-out of the fabrication of noise and chaos surrounding the efforts, flawed and half-hearted as they were, to set up DEI initiatives, by hostile sources supporting an antiquated and no longer prevalent societal paradigm. It's a lot to pack into barely over 160pp. Author Zheng manages! There are notes, and all of them I tested, around half, link to vaild and apparently reputable venues. None were, for example, to weird little fringe outlets...except maybe directorsandboards.com, because what tinier fringe group is there than that...and perhaps tellingly, the author cited on that site was Ted Kennedy, Jr.

I don't think most general readers will care too much about the subject discussed here. It's too bad. After reading this book I understand the opponents of DEI much better, and disapprove of them and their actions even more...plus I've picked up some techniques for opposing their rhetoric effectively. I encourage y'all to go to Author Zheng's website, linked above, to see what their work is all about. Even if your budget is tight, you can always request your library get a copy. These ideas deserve room in your head, your awareness, and your actions.

TEJU COLE'S PAGE: KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS; TREMOR; EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF

KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS: Essays
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief

With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.”

Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.

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

My Review: Teju Cole says clearly and distinctly: "I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point." This is true; though he does not say a word about a novel not being pointed. All of his very much are; so are his essays collected here.

Fragments might be a better term for the shrapnel in this collection. None of them dig into their topic, develop a theme to a conclusion. It's more postmodern than that. I was "treated" to the horrors of mob justice in Nigeria; the fact of colorism, a strain of racism, in Brazil; the shame that's missing from the US's reckoning with its sin of racism and its ugly consequences; the horrors of Israeli apartheid (pre-2025):

The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.

An unsparing gaze, always roving, roaming wherever he is. Quite a bit of the shards are centered on the photographic, framed for visual images, moments and techniques. He is making himself Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," only adding the thinking back, more in the vein of James Baldwin.

It is, I suppose, unsurprising that Author Cole expends a lot of his energy on thinking about race in the US, as the Obama years were recent as this collection was taking shape. As those years radicalized the lowest of the low into the actions whose disgusting fruits we're being served now, his meditations on Obama's shortcomings as president feel...true, but not really the point. (He was, in my estimation, the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Measured as a Democrat, he was abysmal.) The fact that Author Cole lived half his life in Nigeria (at the point he was writing these pieces) meant he was looking at the US reaction to a Black man as our president with detached, slightly bemused, incomprehension.

More to my own personal taste was the selection of literarians Author Cole engaged with, eg Naipaul and Walcott. Both men were still living, both were being fêted, and both are now receding from the popular literary conversation into more academic renown. It is the course things take, so I can't say "boo hoo" very convincingly. It was a pleasure to re-engage with them through the author's intense, admiring (on balance) gaze.

I'm not that confident this is a collection of enough enduring insight to survive the long test of time. It was enjoyable to me, an adult in the Aughties, an Obama voter, a reader of Naipaul; it might not reach too much lower on the age ladder to find a large audience.

Erudite, pleasant reading, in a vein of early-internet pieces that don't go as deep as the old-fashioned word "essay" implies. Solidly four stars for me; maybe different for younger folk.

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

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject—and himself.

Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history.

Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK AS PART OF A PROMOTION. THANK YOU.

My Review: A personal story of alienation, of reckoning with social and societal change, and the shifting bonds of family, we're in Lagos in the Aughties. We're following an unnamed narrator as reacclimates to life in Lagos after years spent in New York City.

It's autobiographical, or I'll eat my hat. Details have likely been massaged...reality doesn't often lend itself to this level of dramatic tension...but it's a roman à clef for his scoobygroup and autofiction for us on the outside. The level of social critique involved in observing his homeland, for it still very much is that to him, is all-consuming. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is done in Lagos to benefit anyone but the self. It's a prescient, if unintentional, alarm klaxon for the world of 2026's kakistocratic enshittification of the US: "What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society". Everything old is new again....

Author Cole views this hypercapitalist dystopia with a level of humorous detachment that floats on a deeper pool of disillusionment. In many ways I felt I was reading a journalist's too-long think piece about homegoing, rejected by an editor who wanted 1000 words not 30,000. It's a novella-length work of self-analysis, working through the hurts inflicted by choosing outsiderhood over ill-fitting conformity. In no way is this Manhattanite going to submerge without a ripple back into the pool he climbed out of. Having experienced this myself, I was completely in tune with the narrative's driving force and direction.

I can't offer a fifth star because the double whammy of brevity, lack of space to develop the others in the story beyond foils for narrative reflection and amplification as outlines not rounded people, and an outsider-plus sense of superiority inherent in this return from a wealthier world.

It's an enjoyable story, if not a full novelistic reading experience.

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

TREMOR
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

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

My Review: Rejecting tradition..."{I} wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers—to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me"...is often risky, even when you work inside the established alternatives to "the 19th-century thing" like modernism and its cousins. Here Tunde, our PoV character, is followed through a format I'd call braided stories around a stream-of-consciousness heart. Tunde's PoV third-person narrative shifts to fourth-wall-breaking first person at times, then into the satanic-second person as he addresses someone over our shoulder somewhere.

It's a complex read. It does little heavy lifting for you. It's your job as The Reader to supply your own thoughts about the purpose of Tunde's telling us his stories, giving us a story-mooning of his ass as we decide how to feel about that..."Tunde is startled out of these thoughts by {his wife}'s's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading" tells its own punch of a story about intimacy's failures and his failings in an introductory moment...we're launched into Tunde's trenchant observations: "It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mystically confers monetary value to the object," on the eternal nexus of culture, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.

Without a guide.

Tunde tells you what's what. From his position inside the colonizer/appropriators' world. Is he aware he's not reckoning with his own foothill of privilege adjacent to and causally connected to the mountains of privilege he's commenting on? I don't know. We're not told.

If you're going to experiment with style, do it interestingly. Build the maze and trust me to find a way out. Notice: A not The. I think this sums up the experience of reading this novel:

On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.

You're going to think this is a more interesting read after you've developed the negative, the text on the page, in your mind's developer bath. You're participating in framing the shot, in selecting the size...north-south, east-west, all or nothing on these meanings for a city's future (this only makes sense after reading the book)...and saturation of the print.

It's not easy but it's involving, it's exciting in the right mood, and it's using the 19th-century thing to mold a 21st-century object, a European art to draw an African subject. Did it fail?

Only a little around the middle saggy bits. Overconfidence in the reader leads some parts to feel unsatisfyingly undeveloped; untrusting of the readers' cultural background leaves other a mucky slog through extremely specific details that were not mission critical.

So, no full-five from me; but a half-star above "good" is "very good" and my three-quarters star is "very good indeed." It will be a read you invest in or bounce hard off; make your acquisition decisions carefully, try a sample or use the library; I hope you'll at least give it a try.

THE DAY MOON AND EARTH HAD AN ARGUMENT, cogent, cute, helpful, and sneakily educational

THE DAY MOON AND EARTH HAD AN ARGUMENT
DAVID DUFF (illus. Noemi Vola)
Princeton Architectural Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Embark on an astronomical adventure through the solar system with this whimsical picture book that begins with a little rift in one of the most celebrated relationships in the universe.

All friends have disagreements. But when the friends are the Moon and planet Earth, the consequences are pretty cosmic!

After 4.5 billion years together, Moon has had enough of Earth. So, she packs her things and sets off to see what the solar system has to offer. On her galactic tour, Moon sweeps young readers along on a delightful and educational journey.

From scorching Venus to giant Jupiter, Moon encounters the oddities and charms of all the other planets on her journey. But as she reaches the cold and lonely edge of the solar system, she begins to wonder whether Earth is really so bad after all . . .

With vibrant illustrations, a dash of humor, and heartfelt explorations of emotions like anger and empathy, this children’s book about friendship beautifully conveys the value of connection and the invaluable lesson that sometimes what we’re looking for is closer than we think.

Offering a fun and practical review of the planets and their characteristics throughout, The Day Moon and Earth Had an Argument also includes two full spreads at the back of the book filled with fascinating facts about our solar system, information about gravity, how the moon was formed, and more.

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

My Review: I just can't with this book! It's so completely, beguilingly adorable. I love the art, which of course is utterly subjective. I'm also a big fan of sneaking two kinds of message into one story...astronomy lessons, emotional guidance, and the commonsensical way they're framed together. The farther away from each other Earth and Moon get, the less things are familiar, and that's scientifically accurate as well as a good thing to reinforce about friendship in this very young (four or so on the lap-reader end, maybe six or a slower seven independently reading) target group.

close neighbor or not Venus is no Earth!

In offering sneaky factual lessons while addressing a very real emotional problem lots of kids will face as they move outside the family circle. Friendship is a skill, one we're all wise to maintain with care. Anger, feeling hurt, not understanding what just happened or knowing what to do about it...all those things are dealt with (while sneaking in astronomy lessons).

all the way out, and still no one's like Earth

Making things right is hard, but it can be done, and it's a big accomplishment when it's done. Wonderful little tale delivering a big message (and sneaking in cool facts in its pretty illustrations).