Weill (In Marcy’s Shadow) and Feigel recount the latter’s Vietnam War story in this by-the-numbers memoir. Feigel was drafted into the Army in February 1969 at 21, and, following basic training, went through advanced training in helicopter repair. In November, he reported to the 336th Assault Helicopter Company in the Mekong Delta, where he worked repairing and maintaining helicopters. Two months later, Feigel volunteered to fly a maintenance mission and subsequently decided he preferred being in the air to working as a “hangar rat.” Going on to serve the rest of his tour of duty as a crew chief, he took part in scores of missions, many of them dangerous and more than a few of them lethal. The authors recount many details about those flights and just about every other aspect of Fiegel’s tour of duty; evocative descriptions of helicopter-related battle action are complemented by largely unrevealing accounts of everyday life in the warzone. Novelistic in its presentation, with many reconstructed quotes and a few sidebars and flash-forwards (including a brief overview of Feigel’s post-war struggles with PTSD), this tells a familiar Vietnam War story solidly enough. It’s best suited for completists. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

The “very existence of public schools” is being threatened, according to this essential overview of recent right-wing attacks on the teaching of material concerning race, gender identity, and sexuality. Journalist Berkshire and education policy scholar Schneider (co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door) contend that such attacks are merely the latest iteration of the right’s longstanding agenda to privatize public education. By slandering public schools as radically left-wing, activists hope to siphon off students into charter schools and private Christian academies, starving the public education system of funding, according to the authors. Emphasizing that a common education is crucial to a healthy democracy, Berkshire and Schneider argue that broad resistance to what can otherwise seem like a niche culture war issue is necessary. Treating education as a public good critical to society’s well-being is also the best resistance strategy, suggest the authors; by pushing back against individual parents asserting overweening authority in the classroom as undemocratic, leftists can effectively counter right-wing bluster over “parental rights.” Berkshire and Schneider do a fabulous job highlighting hypocrisy (e.g., right-wingers harp on public schools’ subpar test scores as a means of pushing more students into private schools—where many states don’t track test results at all) while concisely cataloging the billionaires and think tanks funding this fight. It’s an invaluable primer on what’s motivating the public education culture wars. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

This vivid collection traces the creative evolution of Quiñones, who’s best known for his political graffiti in 1970s and ’80s New York City. In an introductory section, visual artist William Cordova notes that Quiñones saw subways and other public spaces as “platform[s] for ‘public address,’ ” where he could track people’s real-time reactions to his art. The collection showcases his 1979 “Stop the Bomb” subway car graffiti, such early drawings as 1977’s Jesus Christ Superstar (Heaven is Life Earth is Hell), and later gallery work that melded political messaging with futurist themes. Despite the hit-or-miss commentary from other artists interspersed throughout (Quiñones’s paintings “will forever ride high in the skyways like a shooting star racing as quick as a flash across the misty blanket of a New York night,” rhapsodizes Odili Donald Odita), the collection offers both an up-close view of the artist’s career and a window into a vibrant period of New York City art history. This captivates. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Coulson, a zoology professor at Oxford University, debuts with an expansive if overly digressive chronicle of how billions of years of cosmic history set the stage for the emergence of humans. He explains that “13.77 billion years ago, the universe was a ball of hot energy” that transformed into electrons and quarks, the latter of which joined together to form the first protons and neutrons. Some nine billion years later, the planet Theia collided with Earth and kicked up debris that consolidated into the moon, which created tidal conditions crucial to the development of the first life forms. He details the extraordinary sequence of events that had to happen for life to appear on Earth; for instance, if Jupiter hadn’t moved around the solar system before settling into its current orbit, the space debris it absorbed would have been pulled to Earth, making it too heavy to stay in the habitable zone. Elsewhere, Coulson explores the origins of DNA and how consciousness emerged to organize the five senses. Unfortunately, tedious tangents about Coulson’s love for Australia’s Bungle Bungle mountain range and life in academia distract. Intrusive personal commentary drags down an otherwise enlightening whistle-stop scientific history. Agent: Rebeca Carter, Rebecca Carter Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

This impenetrable primer from science writer Ananthaswamy (Through Two Doors at Once) unsuccessfully attempts to elucidate how AI works. He explains that it learns by scanning data for patterns and then makes predictions about what kinds of data are likely to appear in sequence. Unfortunately, the excruciatingly detailed breakdown of the roles played by probability, principal component analysis (“projecting high-dimensional data onto a much smaller number of axes to find the dimensions along which the data vary the most”), and eigenvectors (which are never satisfactorily defined) will sail over the heads of anyone without an advanced math degree. Biographical background on physicist John Hopfield, electrical engineer Bernhard Boser, and other pioneering contributors to machine learning does little to alleviate the labyrinthine discussions of their advances. There are some bright spots—as when Ananthaswamy discusses how statisticians deduced the authorship of the contested Federalist Papers by analyzing whether the writing more closely reflected the vocabulary of James Madison or Alexander Hamilton—but these highlights are few and far between, surrounded by bewildering equations and dense proofs for mathematical theorems. General readers will struggle to follow this. Agent: Peter Tallack, Curious Minds Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pediatrician Hendrickson debuts with an affecting report on climate change’s dire effects on young people. Hendrickson—who practices in Reno, Nev., the “fastest-warming city in the United States”—recounts such heartbreaking stories as watching a mother struggle to comfort her four-year-old son, who was hospitalized after wildfire smoke gave him respiratory problems, as he squirmed with discomfort caused by the nasal cannula feeding him oxygen. Profiles of young people across the country underscore the climate crisis’s devastating scope. For instance, Hendrickson shares the stories of a boy from Houston, Tex., who was traumatized after barely escaping severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey when he was five, and a sixth grader from Phoenix, Ariz., who died of heatstroke after going on a hike on a 112-degree day in 2016. Such accounts are harrowing, and Hendrickson describes in disturbing detail how the body is affected by air pollution and extreme heat (the latter, she explains, leads to reductions in blood volume as the body dehydrates, reducing the regularity of heart rhythm due to low blood flow and causing the breakdown of muscle, which releases toxic proteins). This visceral study is not easily forgotten. Agent: AmandaUrban, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Composer Gordon’s ungainly debut autobiography teeters unsteadily between illuminating and off-putting. Beginning with his birth on Long Island in 1956 and plodding forward to 2024, Gordon provides an exhaustive and often lurid look at the art and experiences that shaped him. Early sections focus on Gordon’s sexually tangled youth, during which he developed an incestuous attraction to his father (never acted upon) and, by 15, equated “older heterosexual men... having sex with me” with affection. A love of music, and opera in particular, grounded him. Admitted to Carnegie Mellon at age 16, he studied piano, composition, and acting. While discussing the intricacies of his own compositions, Gordon touches on how artists including Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim influenced him. After he graduates from Carnegie Mellon and makes a name for himself, the book dishes on these and other legendary figures, sharing uncomfortable anecdotes about “sitting with a... clearly jonesing Liza Minelli” and developing tense rivalries with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Adam Guettel. The effect is overstimulating and undernourishing, with affecting threads about addiction and AIDS-era New York crowded out before they can be fully developed. Gordon’s rationale—that other artists might benefit from knowing about his “messy, disgusting, glorious, shameful” evolution—fails to justify this undisciplined ramble. It’s a disappointment. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Ohio police detective Mager’s chilling true crime debut recounts her 2016 interrogation of serial killer Shawn Grate. Arrested after a woman escaped from his home in Ashland, Ohio, Grate was initially booked for rape and kidnapping. But as the hours ticked by and Mager began to question Grate, she realized she might have stumbled on the most consequential case of her career. Over the course of a week, Mager convinced Grate to open up to her, offering him cigarettes and coffee as he confessed to kidnapping and torturing one woman, then two, then five. As their conversations progressed, Grate shared details of his difficult childhood and his lifelong interest in serial killers, and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to confess to Mager. The interviews ended abruptly after a jailhouse informant came forward to warn Mager that Grate was planning to kill her, but she’d gotten enough to convict him; he was sentenced to death in June 2018. Drawing on her interviews with Grate, his escaped victim, and his half-sister, Mager delivers an unflinching study of a killer. This hums with the intensity of a real-life Silence of the Lambs. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Political scientist Brettschneider (The Oath and the Office) provides an essential survey of crises of democracy provoked by American presidents. He opens the account by describing anti-democratic activities and attitudes commonly associated with former president Trump—including plotting to undermine the certification of an upcoming election’s results, considering journalists enemies, using the attorney general against political foes, and making common cause with white nationalists—then reveals that the actions he’s summarizing were actually committed by five previous presidents. In chapters vividly recreating those crisis points, Brettschneider profiles the presidents—John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon—and the people who opposed them. Adams persecuted journalists and likely formulated a plot to steal the 1800 election; Buchanan, Johnson, and Wilson all used federal power to roll back African Americans’ civil rights. Though Brettschneider contends that those four presidents were meaningfully opposed by an informed and politically active citizenry “galvanized on behalf of democracy,” he suggests that Nixon, who consistently acted as if above the law, offers a different lesson—“that the recovery of democratic principles is not inevitable.” Brettschneider savvily articulates how the structures that enabled Nixon remain largely in place today, and also offers captivating insight into how subsequent administrations recovered from each crisis. The result is an invaluable breakdown of present-day concerns in an illuminating historical context. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this ambitious study, historian Sinha (The Slave’s Cause) traces Reconstruction’s ramifications beyond its span as official government policy from 1865 to 1877. She proposes that the 60-year period between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the ratification of the 19th Amendment comprised a singular and continuous battle between the forces of “interracial democracy” and “reactionary authoritarianism.” After emphasizing what a triumph for the democratic side of this battle the federal Reconstruction policy was—it secured civil rights for the formerly enslaved and enacted programs of land redistribution and public education—Sinha uncovers a fascinating array of the policy’s ideological ripple effects. Not only did Reconstruction inspire demands for more rights from early populist political movements—including the women’s movement and the labor movement—but it also provoked those opposed to these movements to adopt an “anti-government” political playbook similar to the one that eventually overthrew Reconstruction. For example, Sinha shows that activist homesteaders in Wisconsin, who wanted to seize Native land, used the same language to denigrate Native people as “dependent” on the government that was used to deride freedmen in the South. By 1920, Sinha writes, this anti-government ideology had become ascendent, forming the backbone of laissez-faire, anti-welfare federal policy. Her shrewdly argued study ties together many loose ends while providing propulsively narrated accounts of on-the-ground political violence and activism. It’s an all-encompassing new perspective on American history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink