Historian Ramirez debuts with an eye-opening revisitation of a little remembered and ignominious episode in U.S. history—the Hoover administration’s attempt to “cure” the Great Depression by expelling ethnic Mexicans from the Southwest. Many of those caught in the dragnet were U.S. citizens and descendants of families present since the territory was acquired during the Mexican American War. Ramirez unravels the legal and semantic fictions that were created to enable this mass expulsion of over a million people, especially the process the government invented to expel women and children with U.S. citizenship. Central to this project was the now defunct legal doctrine of “coverture” through which “US citizen minors and women were expected to follow the male head of household out of the country.” The male head could be expelled for a variety of reasons, from losing employment to being “liable to become a public charge.” Women who were not expelled outright through coverture were coerced into leaving by immigration officials who falsely promised they could later return. The most chilling aspect of this extraordinary book is the revelation that much of the legal overreach and anti-immigrant zeal of the present moment has very specific precedent in the past. This offers critical and timely insight into America’s long history of scapegoating ethnic minorities for economic woes. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers) offers a haunting, meditative exploration of the atrocities Indigenous people faced for generations in Canada and the U.S. at the hands of both church and state institutions. Talaga juxtaposes centuries’ worth of history with a more personal story: her own efforts to learn about her great-great-grandmother Annie—“the first of five generations of Anishinaabe and Ininiw women in my family to live under [the] yoke” of Canada’s Indian Act of 1876. The array of abuses makes for harrowing reading, but Talaga has a graceful sense of when to pull back and give the reader time to process. Throughout, she reckons with the difficulty of revisiting the past through official records—“a State that is set on destroying you does not keep accurate records with proper spellings of names”—and uses photographs to express ineluctable gaps in the archive (one particularly chilling image is a photo taken by Talaga of the word “HELP” carved into a brick wall behind the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Ontario). In later chapters, Talaga chronicles efforts by the Catholic Church to make amends with Indigenous communities, but also unsettlingly finds that several U.S. residential schools remain operational to this day (a discovery that “shocks” but “does not surprise” the author). The result is a searing rumination on a still unresolved historical trauma. (July)

Corrction: An earlier version of this review included the wrong title for the author’s previous book.

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Wright (The Human Scale) surveys his own wide-ranging journalistic career in this enticing collection of pieces from the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. The earliest, from 1980, is a profile of an aging Texas baseball player; the most recent, from 2024, is a remembrance of Jimmy Carter. In between, the book touches on the space program, Jonestown, and literary heavyweights Richard Brautigan and Denis Johnson, among other diverse subjects, showing off the writer’s extraordinary versatility. Wright can be hard-boiled—“there was scarcely anything left after the .44 magnum and five weeks of maggots had done their work,” he writes of the aftermath of Brautigan’s suicide—but he’s also a master of the illuminating character detail; consider the volumes communicated about the couple’s long relationship when former first lady Rosalynn Carter expresses surprise that her husband reads the New Yorker (“‘I read it every week!’ he protested”). Readers occasionally get more personal glimpses of the reporter, especially in “No City Limits,” Wright’s lyrical paean to Austin, Tex., his longtime home, and in his introduction, where he reflects on his writing process. “What rounds out a character,” Wright explains, “is his capacity for surprise,” and in that sense, it’s Wright himself who emerges as the fascinating protagonist of this book. These are charming, empathetic dispatches from a probing writer who always allows himself space for astonishment. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this mundane history, Dear (Revolutionizing the Sciences), a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, unpacks the origins of major scientific achievements between the 17th and 20th centuries, arguing science is not a free-floating “’thing’ waiting to be discovered” but rather an enterprise molded by people, culture, and institutions. Dear explains how the immediate success of Isaac Newton’s writings about the laws of motion and gravitation was due to their religious value; soon after Newton’s Principia was published in England in 1687, Anglican presbyters began citing it as proof of “God and His rule over Creation.” Similarly, the system of classifying and naming organisms developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century gained its hold, according to Dear, not only because it was easy to use but because both church and state saw that it reflected “God’s blueprint for creation.” Even Charles Darwin’s controversial ideas on evolution won acceptance in Victorian society, not necessarily on their own merit, but because anthropologists could use them, erroneously, to show how far down the evolutionary ladder non-European folk were from their Victorian kin. Dear goes on to explore later milestones in thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and astronomy. Unfortunately, his technical summaries are dry and sometimes stylistically awkward. Even with some interesting insights, this ends up reading like a rather bland expansion of the history prologues found in science textbooks. Illus. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Georgetown University environmental history professor Degroot (The Frigid Golden Age), offers a captivating examination of how humans’ developing understanding of the solar system has shaped public affairs on Earth. Outer space, he explains, is an ever-changing arena; the sun spews plasma, and asteroids and comets zoom past planets, sometimes colliding at immense speeds. Changes in the cosmos have had wide-ranging effects here on Earth, Degroot argues. They’ve spurred new technology to study and perhaps communicate with other planets, influenced culture, shaped geopolitics, and awakened humanity to existential threats. Changes in Venus’s atmosphere, for example, led scientists to investigate whether climate change and ozone depletion were happening on Earth, while dust storms on Mars prompted studies concluding that nuclear war on Earth would be detrimental to the planet. The resulting publicity campaigns reduced nuclear tensions during the Cold War. Now, Degroot notes that humans are increasingly making their own “ripples” in the cosmos, as the current space race presents the possibility of settling elsewhere in the solar system or exploiting other planets’ resources. Adroitly integrating science and history, Degroot effectively demonstrates that Earth is entangled in a dynamic “cosmic mosaic.” This accessible and eloquent volume both entertains and educates. Photos. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Rock Lobster” hit music writer Crighton (The Vinyl Diaries) “like an electric jolt” when he first heard it at age 10, in 1979, leading to a lifelong love for the B-52’s “cool” and “campy” music, and culminating in this breathless paean to the band. The author speeds through the B-52’s early output before focusing on their fifth full-length album, Cosmic Thing, released in 1989 after “everyone had pretty much forgotten” about them (the band’s output between 1981 and 1988 garnered little attention, and they’d shrunk to four members after Ricky Wilson’s 1985 death). Despite this, Cosmic Thing was their most commercially successful album, and, Crighton argues, can be read as a celebration of “queer joy” amid the ongoing AIDS crisis, thanks to its utopic references to a “better place, a place where change is possible”—not to mention its innuendos and mentions of “glitter on the mattress.” Crighton movingly describes how the band served as the “soundtrack to my coming out.... Their music and their outrageousness helped me understand the... kind of gay man I wanted to be” and makes an affectionate case for the lyrics’ queer coding while encouraging readers to find their own ways to resist establishments that marginalize them. The result is a nostalgic love letter to the band and its influence well beyond the world of music. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Nasaw (The Last Million) provides a lucid investigation into the cultural impact WWII had on the U.S., primarily via returned veterans, who came home as deeply changed men. With “nearly 32 percent of males between eighteen and forty-five” serving in the armed forces, as well as millions of women working outside the home, the cultural shift was unmistakable, Nasaw writes. PTSD was little understood, and Nasaw extensively examines the impact experiences of violence, deprivation, and horror had on returned soldiers, but he also digs far beyond the untreated trauma. Most fascinatingly—and contrary to the more popular images of the Greatest Generation’s stoicism—he surfaces a liberatory strain of thought and feeling that permeated the veterans’ worldview. Many of them had experienced idleness and freedom of a type that permanently altered their expectations—having smoked, drunk, and indulged “near insatiable sexual appetites,” they were now skyrocketing the divorce rate. Black veterans, meanwhile, having experienced life without Jim Crow, returned with liberated mindsets that contributed to the growth of the nascent civil rights movement. With the country facing shortages of food and housing—soldiers were chafing in cramped conditions, often living with parents—the GI Bill was, in Nasaw’s telling, a means to contain the restless energy of returned soldiers, and its calcified inequities of race and gender defined the century to come. It’s an expansive redefining of a generation. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer finalist Witt (American Contagions) unearths the nearly forgotten history of the American Fund for Public Service, an endowment that, for roughly two decades, brought together a network of activists united in their belief that “American institutions needed to be radically remade.” In November 1920, on the heels of the election victory of Warren Harding (who promised to “restore” American “greatness”), a young Charles Garland, heir to a Wall Street banking fortune, decided to “take a stand” by using his inheritance to fund radical causes. While Garland’s gift “paled by comparison” to the endowed foundations already being administered by American titans like the Rockefellers—who gave away the equivalent of Garland’s foundation nearly “every day”—Garland’s fund was the one supporting the most historically important causes, Witt finds. It financed the NAACP’s push for “anti-lynching legislation,” contributed to the legal defense of “aliens caught up in the Justice department’s indiscriminate postwar raids” and Clarence Darrow’s 1925 defense of John Scopes, and supported the likes of Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Profiling this exhilarating range of figures, Witt finds that Garland’s pan-left project, which funded both “anti-communist liberals” and “leading socialists,” allowed for a robust exchange of ideas and tactics. Making stark the parallels he sees with the present (Harding railed against mass immigration as society reeled from the flu pandemic), Witt excavates an invigorating counter-history of the American left defined by its scrappy collegiality. It’s an immense and essential achievement. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Women of the founding generation cope with war, infidelity, and catastrophic duels while claiming their own agency in this luxuriant dual biography of Alexander Hamilton’s wife Elizabeth Schuyler and her sister Angelica. Journalist Vaill (Hotel Florida) paints the Hamilton marriage as a love match between a smart, forthright Elizabeth and a charming but prickly Hamilton, whose sharp tongue touched off several challenges before the duel with Aaron Burr that killed him. Elizabeth dutifully served as sounding board and amanuensis for Hamilton, but it wasn’t until her 50-year widowhood that she came into her own, clawing her way to financial stability and curating Hamilton’s papers. Angelica cuts a more glamorous figure: she infuriated her father by eloping with John Church, a shady English war profiteer, and enjoyed decades as a prominent socialite until Church went bankrupt; along the way she enchanted Thomas Jefferson and hatched a plot to rescue the Marquis de Lafayette from an Austrian prison. Vaill insistently suggests that Angelica had a romance with Hamilton, citing their flirtatious letters, but since Elizabeth herself was party to the banter, the claim seems like an overreading. Still, Vaill’s richly textured portrait convincingly styles the Schuyler sisters as quiet revolutionaries: while holding down the domestic sphere, they led significant public lives and defied male authority. It’s an elegant and entertaining account of the surprisingly modern lives of founding women. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Marks (Japanese Woodblock Prints), curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, presents a lavishly illustrated survey of three centuries of art that shaped Japanese comics. He begins in the 17th century, when painted handscrolls brought alive classic works of literature and charming animal allegories; after printing become widespread in Japan during the 17th century, illustrated books rendered in ink offered illuminated poetry, funny art (one charming 1720 title from an unknown author is Comical Pictures to Stop You from Yawning), and bawdy tell-alls. Adult picture books called kibyōshi (“yellow covers”) popularized in the last few decades of the 18th century provided pulpy thrills through historical epics, adventure tales, and horror stories, and drew a wide audience for their relative accessibility (they were generally written in vernacular and could be cheaply purchased). The book ends with the earliest sequential comic strips in Japan, stopping just short of the country’s first serial comics and graphic novels. Marks dives into the material without much introduction, which may be disorienting to readers new to the subject, but provides plenty of information about individual works and a treasure trove of extraordinary art to pore over, much of it by artists who will be new to most Westerners. Readers curious about the historical roots of contemporary pop culture will find plenty to explore. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink