THE NINETIES: A BOOK By Chuck Klosterman Sometimes an author surprises you. In 2005 I reviewed Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and was unimpressed. To be more specific, my review began like this: “It’s hard to imagine a worse book than Killing Yourself to Live, or one that says so much about the deplorable state of journalism, criticism, and even writing today.” Despite that, I gave Klosterman another shot eight years later with a review of I Wear the Black Hat, which I also didn’t like but that I thought showed that he was “on the road to recovery,” judging that in that book he “d ..read more

THE HITLER CONSPIRACIES By Richard J. Evans There have been alternative histories surrounding key events in the rise and fall of the Third Reich since those events first occurred, from the myth of a “stab in the back” that led to Germany’s collapse in the First World War to the escape of Hitler from his bunker and his retirement to Argentina. In some cases these myths were born of political calculations, while others were produced by a mix of ignorance and paranoia. Pulling back a bit more, historian Richard J. Evans finds that “common to many conspiracy theories is a counterfactual suggestion ..read more

NETWORK OF LIES: THE EPIC SAGA OF FOX NEWS, DONALD TRUMP, AND THE BATTLE FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY By Brian Stelter One of my ongoing issues with the media analysis of Noam Chomsky is the emphasis he places on how the public is manipulated, misinformed, and brainwashed by the powers-that-be. It is his propaganda model of manufactured consent, and while I think there’s a lot of truth in it I don’t think it tells the whole story. Nearly twenty years ago, in my review of Failed States, I spoke of how the public shares a lot of the blame: “whether you call it faith, wilful blindness, or simply the ab ..read more

Jesus, Interrupted Bart Ehrman I wouldn’t call this Bart Ehrman’s best book of historical-critical Bible criticism meant for a general audience, and it certainly has the worst title of any of them, but Jesus, Interrupted is probably the best starting point into the rest of Ehrman’s stuff. A lot of different topics are brought up that he digs into more deeply in other books, like the question of whether Jesus thought he was God, and the invention of heaven and hell. Here we get these matters and more introduced and briefly discussed in a wide-ranging survey of the basics of Bible scholarship. W ..read more

THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott The title sets off a pair of echoes, starting with Allan Bloom’s now canonical 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, and leading up to 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Addressing the state of the American mind, all three books are primarily focused on the authors’ observations on what’s been happening to American higher education. As a result, they tend to see the broader currents of American culture, business, and politics as being downstream from the classroom. “It’s no ..read more

THE UNDERTOW: SCENES FROM A SLOW CIVIL WAR By Jeff Sharlett The presidency, and thus far the post-presidency of Donald Trump has been an irresistible target for journalists seeking to understand what ails America. In The Undertow Jeff Sharlett offers up yet another example of a particular sub-genre of books on what he calls the Trumpocene: the attempt to understand the “Trump voter.” Like an anthropologist investigating the Trobriand Islanders he heads across the country looking for MAGA folk in their native environment. They aren’t that hard to find, as by their red caps, lawn signs, flags, a ..read more

The Heat Will Kill You First Jeff Goodell One thing we’ll never be able to say is that we didn’t have full and fair  warning of climate change – why it was happening and what the effects were likely to be. Indeed, that’s a point I flagged in a review I wrote ten years ago. Jeff Goodell’s book is now only one among whole shelves of similar alarms being sounded, and more frightening than most. This is because Goodell effectively brings the crisis home: looking at the deaths regularly being caused by heat waves around the world, and the spread of what were tropical diseases ever further nort ..read more

Cicero Anthony Everitt The subtitle of this biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero calls him “Rome’s greatest politician,” but I don’t think that can be right. Even accepting that “greatest” might not translate to “most successful,” though it probably should, I wouldn’t rate Cicero as highly in terms of his daring, vision, and ability to understand and shape events as, for example, the future Augustus (whose bio Everitt would go on to write). He was, however, a central player in the next-to-final act of the Roman Revolution, and his front-row account of the same is invaluable even if his actions ..read more

ON CLASS By Deborah Dundas In his witty 1992 exploration of and “guide through the American class system,” Paul Fussell makes reference to class being America’s “forbidden subject,” meaning that its effects are felt everywhere even while no one wants to talk about it. In part, this silence has come about because the idea of a class-bound society goes against the American dream of being able to rise from rags to riches, and the belief that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the swankiness of their address. But I think it’s also the case that the reality of cla ..read more

THE HUMAN SCALE: MURDER, MISCHIEF AND OTHER SELECTED MAYHEMS By Michael Lista The popularity of the true crime genre, in print, documentary films, and podcasts, has exploded over the last decade, a period in which Michael Lista made a name for himself as one of Canada’s leading practitioners. The Human Scale is a collection of ten pieces that originally appeared in Toronto Life and The Walrus, with lengthy postscripts added that both bring the stories up to date and reflect on his writing process. Why are we drawn to true crime? Part of it might just be rubbernecking. Some think it might help ..read more