In this sterling debut, painter Aijazuddin combines blazing wit with heartbreaking candor as he recounts his path toward self-acceptance as a gay Pakistani. Growing up in 1990s Lahore, Aijazuddin took an early shine to musicals, Disney princesses, and Barbie dolls, all while battling schoolyard insults about his weight and resulting “moon-tits.” As he realized he was gay, experimenting sexually with a friend and growing close with another closeted teen, Aijazuddin dreamed of escaping to comparatively liberal North America. Much of the memoir sees him ping-ponging between Pakistan, Canada, and the U.S.: he attended college in Montreal shortly after 9/11, where he faced xenophobia and struggled to come out of the closet, then returned to Pakistan, where his shame compounded. After obtaining a U.S. visa in 2015, he moved to New York City, where a series of relationships helped him learn to “stop loving in the shadows.” Aijazuddin’s prose is playful but sincere, marrying quips (“I was always a bird of paradise in a nest of sparrows”) with powerful insights (“Hyphens are the price of my admission through the gates of the American dream”). The result is a stirring account of coming-of-age and coming out. Agent: Sam Chidley, Karpfinger Agency. (Aug.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misspelled the author’s last name.

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Corporations are taking advantage of sclerotic government to skim money off anti-poverty initiatives, according to this stinging exposé. Lawyer and journalist Kim (Abandoned) probes a raft of ill-designed and poorly supervised federal and state programs that are run or mediated by private businesses that jack up prices and deliver substandard services. They include tax preparers that charge low-income taxpayers exorbitant fees to calculate the tax credits they are due, private prisons that charge inmates hundreds of dollars per day for their accommodations, slumlords who make a mint off of low-income housing vouchers, food service companies that sell junk food to kids in school cafeterias, and dental clinic franchises that squeeze profits out of Medicaid reimbursements by subjecting poor kids to painful and unnecessary treatments. (Kim spotlights one three-year-old who was subjected to 17 root canals and caps on his baby teeth.) Kim finds plenty of culprits to blame beyond the sleazy corporations: conservatives who insist that business does everything better than government, politicians on the right and the left who cut sweetheart deals with capitalist cronies, a Congress that lurches from one ungainly social-service scheme to the next. Kim’s writing is sharp-eyed and two-fisted—“The goal should be to expunge the parasitic industries dragging down U.S. antipoverty efforts”—as she untangles these knots of incompetence and fraud. It’s an electrifying unmasking of appalling violations of public trust. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Schmuhl (The Glory and the Burden) takes a novel approach to exploring mid-20th-century diplomatic relations between America and Britain in this winning history of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s many visits with presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. These frequent, weeks-long stays are without historical parallel, especially the 113 total number of days Churchill and FDR spent under the same roof. Schmuhl tracks how Churchill’s relentless but charming advocacy for America to align itself with British interests forged intimate, if complicated, friendships between the leaders that brought the two nations together into a “special relationship” (a phrase coined by Churchill, which he was also relentless in promulgating). The character portraits Schmuhl draws are vivid and transfixing as the leaders by turns cozy up and butt heads, especially FDR and Churchill, whom Schmuhl describes as each “a star of brightness which needed its own unimpeded orbit.” Both were storytellers (Churchill’s daughter Mary observed that this quality made FDR a perplexing combo of fun and tedious: “I must confess he makes me laugh & he rather bores me”), and Schmuhl effectively shows how yarn-spinning between friends and political myth-making blurred together in their relationship (both men particularly enjoyed recounting an anecdote about how FDR burst in on Churchill in the bath to tell him he’d come up with a name for the “United Nations”). WWII history buffs will be delighted. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Auslander (Mother for Dinner) delivers a poignant if scattered study of the religious guilt he incurred while growing up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, N.Y. Titled after the Yiddish word for disgust, the book hinges on Auslander’s attempts to shake the conviction, drilled into him from childhood, that human beings are “totally, irredeemably feh.” That sense of divine judgment, which plagued him through marital problems with his wife, Orli, financial struggles, and professional disappointments, culminated in a recent suicide attempt that Auslander dispassionately recounts near the beginning of the memoir. After he recovered, Auslander attempted to shed his fatalistic worldview on behalf of Orli and his two sons. In episodic chapters, he recounts trying to smile through Super Bowl parties, revisits guilty memories of watching porn as an adolescent, and talks with a Christian pastor in L.A. about God’s judgment. Though he never quite manages to come out the other side of his shame, he learns to coexist with it, and realizes that a “constant refrain of self-contempt and derision becomes self-fulfilling at some point.”Auslander’s gallows humor won’t be for everyone, and the account’s lack of resolution undercuts some of its impact, but the glimmer of hope coursing through the narrative keeps it alive. The result is an often-brutal, sometimes-rewarding journey out of the darkness. Agent: Jody Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss & Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Art historian Hodge (Architecture in Minutes) falls short of her aim to “make looking at and understanding art more compelling” in a primer that’s more prescriptive than perceptive. She begins by overviewing 10 crucial elements of a work of art, including scale, color, light, movement, medium,technique, location (where the piece is exhibited), and artist (their “background, culture, nationality and life experience”). In the book’s second section, she uses these elements to scrutinize 30 famous artworks, exploring how the “broken brushstrokes” in Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night convey “movement and immediacy,” how the gold leaf featured in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss “recalls medieval paintings... and Byzantine mosaics,” and how the silkscreen method used for Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans created a “mass-produced” look that served as commentary on American consumerism. Unfortunately, most of the selected artworks draw from the Western canon, contributing to a dearth of South American and African art, and Hodge’s analyses tend toward the flattened and didactic, often ascribing simplified emotional reactions to all viewers (of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa, she writes, “The enormity and strength of the wave and the vulnerability of the men in the three boats... inspires feelings of awe and fear in the viewer”). The result is a well-intentioned but one-dimensional attempt at making art more accessible. Illus. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Bird (Last Dance in the Starlight) digs into the history of Black rodeo in this kinetic collection of photos she took in 1970s Texas. Capturing the “final days of a time when the sport was still rooted in the business of actual ranching,” Bird documents the “multisensory experience” of rodeos during Juneteenth celebrations in shots of pit masters smoking food, children playing, and patrons relaxing in honky-tonks. There are also photos of cowboys and cowgirls—a man posing with a lasso rope in hand; a striking action shot of a rider and his horse kicking up dust. Writing that these gatherings offered “a modicum of peace and solace in the midst of often difficult lives,” Bird recovers the legacy of the Black Americans who shaped the West, from enslaved people who “learned the art of herding on horseback from Mexican vaqueros and charros” to the Black westerners who helped to power the cattle industry (about one-quarter of all the hands on the cattle drives of the 19th century were Black, Bird points out). It’s a jubilant celebration of a fascinating corner of American history. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

“The current, conventional narrative for evolution... is outdated,” according to this eye-opening analysis. Mindell (The Evolving World), a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, contrasts “vertical evolution,” or the traditional Darwinian account in which species differentiate and branch off from each other, with “horizontal evolution,” which emphasizes how species sometimes “coevolve” in tandem with other organisms, transfer genes through means other than reproduction, or merge by producing distinct hybrids. Highlighting surprising examples of each, Mindell explains that certain kinds of bacteria can affect the DNA of their hosts and notes that some insects and slime molds “have picked up bacterial genes allowing them to synthesize vitamins and sequester iron.” Species mergers have played a pivotal role in evolution, Mindell contends, describing how the joining of two kinds of bacteria 1.8 billion years ago gave rise to mitochondria, whose ability to metabolize oxygen enabled the emergence of all animals, plants, and fungi. Mindell argues that these findings raise questions about where one organism ends and another begins, discussing how humans rely on microbes in the gut that “produce vital nutrients, regulate the immune system,” and perform other essential tasks. The heady ideas will change how readers understand some of biology’s most fundamental concepts. This mesmerizes. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Critic Lopate (A Year and a Day) opines on the films of Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer, and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, in this splendid collection. The commentary is uniformly celebratory, as when Lopate lauds Dreyer’s “gliding camera movements” in Gertrud and Tarkovsky’s ability to “crash through the surface of ordinary life” with long, unbroken takes that capture “deeper truths underlying the ephemeral moment.” Elsewhere, Lopate recounts how he found Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort “thin and insubstantial” upon the film’s release but came to appreciate its value “as a painful fairy tale about yearning” after rewatching the musical decades later. Though there’s disappointingly few female filmmakers featured, Lopate does praise Lena Dunham’s debut, Tiny Furniture, for its realistic portrayal of young adulthood, as well as Chantal Akerman’s documentary No Home Movie for its tender portrait of the director’s relationship with her elderly mother. Elsewhere, Lopate expounds on Bergman’s “muzzy affection for human frailty” in Scenes from a Marriage, David Lynch’s surrealist flourishes in Mulholland Drive, and Yasujirō Ozu’s dramatization of parent-child conflict in Late Spring. The essays breeze by, enlivened by Lopate’s punchy prose and palpable love of cinema. Cinephiles will cherish this. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Elton John granted journalist Preston (Fall) access to his personal archives for this stirring chronicle of how the musician turned the Watford Football Club’s fortunes around after buying the team in 1976. Watford was languishing in the Fourth Division at the time, but John used his deep pockets to hire up-and-coming manager Graham Taylor. A buttoned-up traditionalist who didn’t care for rock music, Taylor appeared to be John’s polar opposite, but the two developed a close friendship grounded in their shared conviction that soccer should be above all entertaining. This led Taylor to favor an aggressive style of play that pushed Watford to “attack the whole time... running the opposition ragged and harrying them into making mistakes.” By 1982, the club had fought their way to the First Division, where they remained until Taylor left in 1987. Feeling that “things just weren’t the same,” John sold Watford by the end of the year. Preston skillfully spins Watford’s ascent into a rousing underdog story, and his access to John reveals a more intimate side of the pop star (John recalls envying Taylor’s domestic life, which was more stable than his turbulent upbringing or his globe-trotting adulthood). This will have readers cheering. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Translators Costa and Patterson sharpen the bite of Machado de Assis’s delightful 1891 satire of a social climber entering Brazilian society. Before eccentric philospher Quincas Borba died, he entrusted the care of his dog, also named Quincas Borba, to his ingenuous friend Rubiao as a condition for inheriting his fortune. After receiving this unexpected bequest, Rubiao leaves his provincial Brazilian town for Rio, with the canine Quincas Borba in tow. The city’s shrewd denizens soon lure Rubiao into such dubious schemes as an importing venture, a political newspaper, and a fund reassuringly called the Union of Honest Investors. As “gaping holes” form in his finances, the ever-sanguine Rubiao develops an infatuation with Sofia, the wife of one of his friends and business partners, who’s initially so turned off that she senses an “epidermal incompatibility.” Eventually, she is moved by his courtly attentions, a Don Quixote–like fixation that portends his descent into more incapacitating delusions. Rubiao’s fantasies are irresistible, and Machado de Assis periodically intrudes with expressions of authorial anxiety, wishing for instance that he could write in a style as straightforward as novelist Henry Fielding’s. This shaggy dog story remains one for the ages. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink