Estimated reading time: 4 minutes Aki Ito arrives in Chicago with her family in January 1944 expecting to find her glamorous big sister, Rose, waiting for them. Finally, the family is reuniting after two years in the desert concentration camp of Manzanar. But Rose is missing. And all too soon, Aki...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.” So writes S. A. Cosby at the outset of his disquieting new crime novel, All the Sinners Bleed....
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes James McBride won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird. It’s an often-hilarious novel about the abolitionist John Brown’s ill-conceived attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. That act is often...
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Some three million people of Indian origin live today in the nations of southeast Africa. Although trade and migration between India and Africa reach as far back as the first millennium, much larger numbers arrived there late in the nineteenth century as indentured laborers under the British. One...
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A Harris Poll released in November 2022 by U.S. News & World Report revealed just how deeply divided Americans are about race. Forty-seven percent of Americans—and 71 percent of White Americans—said they were “unconvinced that systemic racism exists in the U.S.” And in a YouGov...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Odds are strong that you first became fully aware of the term “Western Civilization” through an introductory survey course in college or AP history in high school. And you’ve lived your life since then believing that “the West” boasts...
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Many of the eighty percent of Americans who live in cities are unaware of the demographic revolution underway in the vast rural stretches of our country. The Immigration Act of 1965 ushered in a flood of racial or ethnic minorities to rural America over the past half-century. They now account for...
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Over the past decade, beginning with the police murders that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement, discussion of reparations for slavery has surfaced in public discourse across the United States. After all, some four million African-Americans were enslaved in 1860. And their descendants, the...
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Histories of the US role in World War II frequently mention the famous Tuskegee Airmen, a segregated African-American fighter squadron that distinguished itself in the European Theater. Sometimes they also cite the 92nd Infantry Division (“Buffalo Soldiers”), which breached the Gothic...
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For the record, what follows is not a list of the best popular fiction published during the past year. Instead, I’ve rejected the practice of those reviewers who imply they’ve read and reviewed the many thousands of popular (or trade) novels published in any given...
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Most general American history texts give short shrift to the rise of organized labor. And when they do so, they tend to cite little more than a handful of large-scale clashes between labor and management in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Familiar examples include the Haymarket affair...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes For millions of White Americans, the 19th century was an era of expanding opportunities. Settlers steadily pushed back the Western frontier, and the Industrial Revolution gained momentum until, by century’s end, the United States boasted the world’s...
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Beginning in 2001, Australian-American historical novelist Geraldine Brooks brought out a new book every three or four years. Her fifth, a novel about the Biblical King David, appeared in 2015. But it was not until seven years later that Brooks’ sixth novel, appeared. (Her husband of 35...
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Far too few Americans acknowledge the ugliest aspects of our history. Slavery and Jim Crow. The genocide of Native Americans. The “Yellow Peril.” The U.S. conquest of Cuba and the Philippines. Typically, our history books treat these events as isolated and disconnected. Dig a little deeper into the sources, though, and it becomes unmistakably clear […]
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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes We’ve been taught that the modern world dawned when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 in search of a route to the riches of “India.” In fact, for centuries, historians have been telling us that everything changed because...
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This book is a work of fiction inspired by real events and real people.” So writes James McBride in an author’s note that precedes the text. He continues: “It draws upon the individual and collective experiences of black soldiers who served in the Serchio Valley and Apuane Alps...
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Before UNIVAC, before the IBM 650, computers were people. Nearly all of them were women, and many were Black. Employed by the thousand in the US war effort in World War II, they crunched the numbers and ran the equations to calculate the effects of wind on aircraft and the trajectory of artillery...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June.” So opens Colson Whitehead’s glorious recreation of the sights and sounds of the early 1960s in New York City. Grounded in Harlem, his crime novel offers up a colorful view of...
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On as many as a dozen occasions in the course of the twentieth century, the United States Congress attempted to write the rules for immigration. Twice the result was major legislation signed by the President. The first was in 1924, with the passage of a racist bill that strangled the flow of...
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The tides of otherism have ebbed and flowed throughout five centuries of American history. Racism. Antisemitism. Xenophobia. From the genocide of the continent’s native peoples, to the enslavement of millions of transplanted Africans, to the Know-Nothing fury toward Irish immigrants and...
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Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.