Category Archives: political science

Longstreet, by Elizabeth Varon*****

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Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South is a biography that focuses on Longstreet’s military service in the American Civil War, and his political life thereafter. It’s meticulously researched, and the documentation is among the best I’ve seen anywhere. Students, Civil War buffs, and other interested readers won’t want to miss it.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

James Longstreet was one of the most able and respected generals for the Confederacy, serving as General Robert E. Lee’s right hand officer. Lee called him “my old war horse.” However, a disagreement between them about strategy at Gettysburg has made Longstreet a convenient scapegoat for Lost Cause types that accuse him of treachery, of deliberately sabotaging the deadly three day fight, and thereby causing the rebels to lose a key battle. Varon sets the record straight, and then goes on to explain what he did following Lee’s surrender and the Confederacy’s failure.

When I saw the subscript in the title, I wondered whether Varon might be overstating Longstreet’s postwar behavior in order to draw readers. Having read it, I can say that she has not overstated one single thing. This is a fair and balanced account. In essence, Longstreet recognized that, while the Confederate Army fought long and hard, it had in fact lost, and there was no good to be gained from further destruction at a time when reconciliation was more important. He basically said that having lost the war, the best thing for the South to do is recognize that the war is done, and proceed to obey the laws of the United States and rebuild the ruined Southern states.

I was unaware, before reading this biography, how extensively defeated Caucasian Southerners were inclined to sabotage the U.S. government. Guerilla actions were common, along with the passage of local laws that directly conflicted with Federal ones. Acts of terror against African American former slaves, as well as free Black Southerners, were frequent whenever Federal troops or other peacekeepers were not present to see to their safety and their rights. And though I had not realized it, Longstreet hailed from Louisiana, which seems to have had the ugliest resistance of all, with the White League and the Knights of the White Camelia wreaking havoc against Blacks that occupied governmental posts, became too prosperous for the liking of local Whites, or that in any way displeased any White person of any social standing. Longstreet did his best to shut that down; he failed.

Varon discusses the role played by Longstreet’s personal friendship with U.S. Grant, one which predated the war; he was best man at Grant’s wedding to Julia. She suggests that although the friendship was important, Longstreet was also acting on principle.

Varon doesn’t overstate her case, and is measured and fair in her assessment. She points to the occasions when Longstreet folded and cooperated with the local racists in that well-traveled road of U.S. politicians: I have to do this terrible thing in order to get elected, or I can’t do any good for the former slaves or anything else. This habit, both past and present, sets my teeth on edge, but she doesn’t defend it. She also points out that had the Confederacy won the war, Longstreet would have remained a Dixie racist for the rest of his life, more likely than not.

Those looking at the length of this book—over 500 pages—should be aware that about the last twenty-five percent of it is endnotes, with documentation, bibliography, etc. And while it may be more than a general reader that simply enjoys a good biography might appreciate, those interested in the Civil War should get this book and read it.

What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz****

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Ian Fritz was an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist who served with the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan for five years. Trained in both Dari and Pashto, he became one of only two people that could understand what was being said by all of the people on the ground before and during battle. Following his service, he became a physician and writer. This is his memoir.

My thanks go to Simon and Schuster Publishing and NetGalley for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Fritz was in many ways the perfect recruit; his family didn’t have any money, and he was brilliant, which meant that if he was going to have any opportunities, they would most likely come from the U.S. armed forces. He blew through his public school years, as gifted students that aren’t challenged often do.

This is where I long to stand on a big box and yell through a bullhorn: gifted students are at risk children! We must provide them with challenging, interesting curriculum, or they will stop bothering with school. I’ve been saying so for decades, and I’m saying it again right now. So many times educators and school districts assume these kids will automatically be fine. If the student is bored, they use them as unpaid tutors for their peers, which distorts relationships among the students and does nothing to provide the highly capable student with new, interesting material. These kids need different educations from those in the mainstream. Ian’s story is a powerful example of why this is so.

Ian was sent to an elite language training program, and then he was deployed. Initially, the successful flights in which targets were found, identified, and killed—often partly or solely because of his contribution—were exhilarating, but as time went on, he began to feel conflicted. On the one hand, the Taliban were responsible for the horrific, cowardly attacks on American civilians on 9/11, and were therefore a legitimate target. On the other hand, being able to understand what enemy soldiers were saying to one another made him aware that these were normal people, attempting to live their lives and repel the U.S. invaders. It’s hard to hate someone, or to be indifferent to them, when you overhear them discussing their plans for after the day’s fighting is done, or declaring that it’s just plain “too hot for Jihad today.” Sometimes a threat on the ground would be identified, and the Americans wouldn’t realize that this was an error until after the person they’d targeted was dead. And he knew the names of the dead, sometimes hear the survivors below desperately trying to get their comrade to a medic, but then…oh. Too late.

Then there was this culture among others he served with, those not trained in the language and who were therefore able to demonize the targets, howling with laughter at the way a body on the ground could be made to bounce if you shot it at just the right angle. He realized that “no one else had heard, and no one else ever would hear, the simultaneous screams of the JTAC [U.S. officer on the ground] and the Talibs. Or the sudden quiet when the Talibs died.”

Ultimately, he learned that Afghanistan was actually a lot safer without U.S. forces than with them.

As Fritz began to internalize his despair, he grew suicidal, and he knew he had to get out. It’s at this point that he was charged with malingering and cowardice; he would later learn that it was a trend among the linguists serving in this theater.

Fritz is one hell of a fine writer, and the narrative flows smoothly. I was surprised to find that this was a quick read, despite the intensity of the material. Surely there must be other military memoirs relating to Afghanistan, but as he points out, nobody else is writing about this experience, because almost nobody else has done what he has.

For those with the interest and the courage, this memoir is recommended.

Charlie Chaplin vs. America, by Scott Eyman*****

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Charlie Chaplin rose to fame over 100 years ago, but his fame hasn’t faded over the years. One of the most visionary movie makers in modern history, he rose from desperate poverty and homelessness during his childhood to become one of the wealthiest and most respected men in his chosen profession. And yet, for some odd reason, the U.S. government relentlessly pursued him as if he were an enemy agent, eventually forcing him to retire abroad. It’s a bizarre episode in U.S. history, and a fascinating one.

When I saw that Scott Eyman, an author whose biographies of actors I have previously enjoyed—John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda—had written about this case, I had to read it. My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Charlie was born in 1889 in London. His mother Hannah was an actress, a loving mother whose health was dreadful. In addition to more conventional illnesses, she was sent repeatedly, and for longer stretches each time, to mental hospitals; it has been speculated that she suffered from syphilis, which eventually had devastating effects on her brain. Charlie’s father was a businessman who left the family and refused to pay a single shilling of child support because one of Charlie’s brothers was conceived with another man. And as an aside, if there is an afterlife, I sincerely hope that Charles Chaplin, Senior is roasting eternally in the flames of hell.

For a while, Hannah’s relatives cared for Charlie and his older brother, Syd, but eventually the boys found themselves in a workhouse, beaten, abused, sickened, and barely fed. It was his brother Syd who first discovered that acting could keep him out of the workhouse and put food on the table, and once he was so employed, Syd took his pale, sickly little brother to the theater and persuaded his boss to use Charlie, too. Thus was a star born.

His tremendous suffering during his childhood gave Charlie a lifelong sympathy with the working class, the impoverished, and the down and out. Early in his career, a director gave Charlie a costume and told him to come up with a character, and this was when he invented The Little Tramp.

I’ve known for most of my life about Charlie’s expulsion from the U.S., but I’ve never been sure whether he was a Communist. I’ve known people brought up in Communist households in America, and for many years, they existed strictly underground, so I wondered, did Chaplin deny his affiliation because he wasn’t a Communist, or because he was? Eyman’s meticulous research demonstrates once and for all that Charlie was not political. He told the truth about himself: “I am not a Communist. I am a peace monger.”

Nevertheless, once he gained prominence in the American movie industry, he had a target on his back. It’s difficult to understand why politicians and bureaucrats in California and in Washington, D.C. hated him so fiercely.

“A month after the revocation of [Chaplin’s] reentry permit, the FBI issued a massive internal report documenting more than thirty years of investigations focused on Chaplin, a copy of which was dispatched to the attorney general. The report revealed that, besides the FBI, Army and Navy Intelligence, the Internal Revenue Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and the U.S. Postal Service had all been surveilling Chaplin at one time or another. In short, the entire security apparatus of the United States had descended upon a motion picture comedian.”

Eyman has done a wonderful job here. Because I had fallen behind, I checked out the audio version of this book from Seattle Bibliocommons, and I alternately listened to it and read the digital review copy. Of course, anyone reading this book for the purpose of academic research should get a physical copy, but those reading for pleasure may enjoy the audio, which is well done; this is a through, and a lengthy biography, and the audio makes it go by more quickly.

I confess I haven’t read any other Chaplin biographies, so I cannot say for certain whether this one is the best, but it’s hard to imagine a better one. For those sufficiently interested to take on a full length biography, this book is highly recommended.

On the Line, by Daisy Pitkin*****

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On the Line, a labor memoir by Daisy Pitkin, tells the true story of a grassroots struggle to organize a nonunion laundry in Arizona as part of an industry-wide unionizing campaign. My thanks go to NetGalley and Algonquin for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Daisy is an organizer for UNITE, a labor union that organizes textiles, laundries, transportation, service workers, and some others, created by the merger of ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) and ACTWU, the American Clothing and Textile Workers Union (of which this reviewer was once a member and union activist.)  She is working at the ground level, approaching workers in the parking lot, partnering with a woman named Alma that worked there and could talk to other workers inside the factory.

The memoir is written in the second person to Alma, and at first this seems odd, but as I read, I realize this is an effective and intelligent choice. By addressing Alma and the things that Alma has said and done during this fight, as well as the things the author did, along with what they did together, and the occasional differences of opinion they had and how they resolved them, she avoids making herself sound like a martyr to the cause. It would not read nearly so well in the first person, with the reader as audience.

The tasks of the workers all revolve around the commercial laundering process. Immense bags of dirty linens weighing up to 300 pounds are pushed off of the delivery trucks in rolling carts.

“The linen moves down the belt, you said, and then you flicked your arms back and forth to demonstrate how you and the other sorters toss sheets into one bin, towels to another, gowns to a third, and so on. You said, Sometimes they speed up the conveyor, and we don’t have time to be careful. There is a lot of blood and puke and feces. You said, We don’t get shoe covers, so some of us take off our shoes and drive home in our socks. You said, Our gloves are too big—they slip off our hands. Sometimes when they tear open, we have to handle the soiled linen with exposed skin…you were demanding a seemingly simple thing: to work your eight-or-ten-hour shift and come home unharmed. You wanted gloves that hospital needles cannot puncture. You wanted face masks to keep the blood and fluids from other bodies from entering your bodies. You wanted safety guards put back on machines where they had been removed. You wanted linen dust cleaned from the rafters to prevent fires.”

Safety rules are routinely flouted. Dirty linens land on the belt, and the belt feeds them into the mouth of a tunnel washer. When the washer jams, workers sometimes have to crawl through hot, bleachy, contaminated water to clear it and get it working. The supervisors are supposed to cut power when someone is in there, but they don’t. Ultimately it’s a choice for the owners to risk a possible, but unlikely fine from the government, or frequent decreases in production, which cut into profits. The workers are expendable; they can always find more. The wash and dry departments of industrial laundries are the most fatal of all industries, according to U.S. government statistics.

Daisy and Alma are working on a shoestring. When they have to be away from home overnight in order to meet workers as they go in or come out, they sleep in the car. Their signs are made by hand with posterboard and Sharpies. Initially, all of the workers sign cards, but then management begins a campaign of threats and intimidation. Not all of the workers are in the States legally, and most of them don’t know their legal rights. Most of them rescind their votes, and then it’s an uphill climb to get them to sign again.

This is a topic that is of great interest to me, and I was supposed to have read and reviewed this book in April of 2023, but my stomach twisted as I read of the horrific obstacles encountered by workers and by Daisy, and halfway through I had to put it down. Only recently did I slap myself upside the head and resume reading.

In any labor union, there are two sets of obstacles. The first, the one that is obvious, is the company, the bosses. Unions cut into profits, so the owners or boards of directors nearly always fight unionization. The second, and lesser known, is the union officialdom at the top. These people spend more time around the bosses and other highly paid union officers than they do around the workers, and they become jaded, sometimes contemptuous of those that they are supposed to represent, whose dues pay their salaries. When Daisy is eventually promoted, she discovers it’s harder to do anything that is in the interests of the clientele.

The book also includes a fair amount of union history, and it’s clearly explained, well woven throughout the narrative.

For those that are interested in unions and labor history, this is an excellent resource. But don’t read it at bedtime; it will do things to your dreams.

The Meth Lunches, by Kim Foster****

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Kim Foster and her husband, David, create a food pantry in front of their house—and later, inside it—during the pandemic. It begins with the employment of one hungry handyman who’s also an addict, and from there, it mushrooms. This is her memoir of that time, and also a philosophical treatise on poverty and hunger in the United States.

My thanks go to Net Galley, RB Media, and St. Martin’s Press for the review copies. This book is for sale now.

When Foster’s family moves from New York to Las Vegas, one of the first thing she notices is the meth. It’s everywhere. Perhaps it is the milder weather; addicts in New York have to find a spot out of the weather during much of the year, but Vegas is in the desert, mild enough for the unhoused to sleep just about anywhere, warm enough that addicts don’t have to hide themselves away to get high.

The pandemic hits Vegas hard. So many people make their living from some aspect of the entertainment business, and for a while, it is a dead industry. And so, after hiring a man with an obvious dependency to do work on their property—work that he never completes—and hearing his story, the Fosters decide to convert the little free library in front of their home to a little free pantry. And from there, it mushrooms.

The pantry begins small, but Foster is a chef, and she can’t stand the notion of just putting out pre-packaged crap when she can cook food with fresh ingredients that will make others feel better. And as the book takes off, I momentarily regret taking this galley, because I generally hate stories that drop recipes into the middle of the plot. If I want cooking information, I’d rather go to a cookbook, or to a recipe website. And it was right there in the title, after all: The Meth Lunches. It’s pretty obvious from the get go that lunch is going to be juxtaposed with social issues.

But as the story continues, I don’t hate it after all. For one thing, this whole book is nonfiction. There’s no plot that is sidelined by a recipe. The whole point is that that Foster considers food, and the act of feeding others, to be a sort of therapy. She makes the point well.

Eventually, the scale of the operation becomes mind boggling. Multiple freezers to hold meat; trucks that deliver food. The pantry begins as an out-of-pocket gift from the Fosters to the down and out of Las Vegas, occasionally supplemented via Venmo from friends, when they are able to help. Inevitably, the pantry finds its way into the local media, and networks form with other food banks and nonprofits.

In between all of this, Foster develops relationships with some of the people that come by. She and her husband are foster parents—ironic, given their name, right? And we hear not only about what the children they house and love have experienced, but also about the children’s biological families. Because although it’s officially discouraged, Kim strongly feels that the children heal best if their biological parents are in their lives in whatever limited way is possible. So before we know it, she is deeply involved with some horribly dysfunctional adults as well. And it is the stories she tells about interacting with them and the children, two of whom she and David eventually adopt, that make this story so riveting.

At the outset, she intends for the pantry to be a resource for local families that have homes and kitchens, but whose finances have taken a huge hit due to the pandemic. The very poor already have resources, she reasons. But of course, the homeless find her, and she doesn’t turn them away.

And here is the rub, the only aspect of this book that I dislike. She tells us that one unhoused person in four is mentally ill, and she believes that this official figure is low, at least in Las Vegas. And then she talks about those with addiction issues.

But what she never gets around to discussing at all—unless she does it so briefly that I miss it—is the unhoused people that are not chemically dependent on anything, whose mental health is stable, but who don’t have a permanent residence because they straight-up ran out of money. To hear her tell it, you’d think they don’t exist, and you know that’s not so. So many American families live from paycheck to paycheck, even when the economy is said to be booming. And I feel that she has left these people without faces or voices. And that, in turn, perpetuates a stereotype, the one that suggests that everyone that is homeless is there because they’re either crazy or junkies or both. I use the offensive terms intentionally, because that’s how the stereotype works. 

And the stereotype in turn begets a lie, the insinuation that nobody has to be unhoused. Don’t use drugs. Get mental health care. Get over yourself. And whereas I can see that Foster doesn’t intend to promote such thinking, and in fact takes a hard line over poverty existing at all in such a wealthy nation, when she doesn’t give space to the many, many individuals and families that are out there because the wage earner was laid off, or because they were just squeaking by but then the rent increased, it does distort her overall picture. I don’t come away from this book thinking that most of the homeless are not using meth or any other dangerous, life-altering street drugs, even though it’s true.

Nevertheless, this is a poignant, stirring tale that won’t be told by anyone else, because it can’t be, and bearing in mind the caveats above, I recommend it to you, both as audio and print.

The Old Lion, by Jeff Shaara****

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There are a good many books that have been written about President Theodore Roosevelt, and no two are exactly alike. That said, the two I’ve read—this one, and a biography by Clay Risen—could not be more different. In fact, you would never know they were writing about the same man.

My thanks go to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the invitation to read and review. This book was published in May, but it took me some time to push my way through it.  I started out not knowing what tack Shaara would take here, and it is this introductory note that caused me to sit back a bit:

“Few, very few, would disagree that Theodore Roosevelt ranks high among the most revered, most respected, and most admired presidents in history.”

I guess it’s time for me to change my name to Few.

Because I had signed on for it—on the strength of my admiration for its author, whose books I always read without regard to topic—I hunted down the audio version at Seattle Bibliocommons. The voice actor that reads it is second to none, and does a remarkable TR impression. But I also have to say that the various thoughts and conversations which the historical fiction genre permits its author to create seem a bit on the rosy side. Where is the TR that not only organized volunteers, himself included, to fight in Cuba, but used vast amounts of his family’s connections and wealth to advocate for it? Where is the braggard that crowed to his friends about how much he enjoyed shooting an enemy soldier from just a few feet away “like a jackrabbit,” and called his 45 days of combat the ultimate hunting trip?

This is one more reminder that all history is political. Nobody will, or should, write a book about a public figure that uses every single fact available, but it is when the author chooses what to include, and what to leave out, that bias shows. There’s no way around it, even for the most objective of writers.

I cannot deny that there were positive aspects of TR’s tenure in the White House (which he named,) the birth of the nation’s park system, beginning with Yellowstone; he also gets points for having seen, ultimately, that these are not meant to be preserved as hunters’ playgrounds, but rather to preserve the natural life, including animals, that are native to the park. His attitude toward women and Black peoples’ suffrage is laudatory, compared with other politicians of his time, but Shaara doesn’t comment on the ugly racist attitude Roosevelt displayed toward other races and ethnicities, most notably those from Central and South America.

This is a four star read because no matter what he chooses to write about, Shaara spins a tremendously entertaining tale. If you choose to read this one, I recommend you obtain the audio version, and take the dialogue and in particular, Roosevelt’s innermost thoughts with a larger than usual grain of salt, and also read a second, nonfiction work for balance.

If It Sounds Like a Quack, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling*****

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Pulitzer Prize finalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling takes on the weird world of alternative medicine and the medical freedom movement in his new book, If It Sounds Like a Quack. My thanks go to Net Galley and PublicAffairs for the review copy. This book is available to the public right now.

The fact is, I have—or I had—no particular interest in alternative medicine, but I had read Hongoltz-Hetling’s last book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, which was well researched, well written, and most importantly, completely hilarious. I have reviewed over 800 books, but the number of those that I later purchased is smaller than 10; yet I bought that book to give as a Christmas gift. So when I saw that he had another book available, I didn’t hesitate. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The book describes the bizarre programs and treatments espoused by six individuals: Larry Lytle, Toby McAdam, Robert O. Young, Alicja Kolyszko, Dale and Leilani Neumann, and The Alien. The seventh player in each section is America, and that’s where we see what U.S. laws say, and what enforcement, if any, comes down on these snake oil salesmen.

The opening section, the first of four, introduces each of these players and explains what led to them going into the businesses they have chosen. Among the various One True Cures are a laser salesman, a leech peddler, faith healers, a supplement seller, and a Mormon missionary that resurrects a long-dead theory about germs. There’s also a pair that develops a health drink; one of them is human, and one is not.

The author suggests that the success of these characters—and some of them have become wealthy beyond belief—has a good deal to do with the state of standard medical care in America. Nobody trusts Big Pharma. The disparity of what treatments we can expect is so great that in one New York hospital, there’s a wait time in the ER of nearly 6 hours for most people, whereas the wealthy can get a private room with high thread count sheets and a butler. One can see why many people conclude that anything must be better than this; yet, they are mistaken.

Apart from his sterling research and documentation, and his clear, conversational tone that at times caused me to forget, momentarily, that I was reading nonfiction, the thing that sets Hongoltz-Hetling apart from others is his ability to shift seamlessly from prose that is falling-down-funny, to that which is not only serious, but tragic, without ever breaking the boundaries of good taste. Because he did it so brilliantly in his last book, I watched for it this time—and I still couldn’t catch the segue way from one to the other.

Because I had fallen behind in my nonfiction reviews, I checked out the audio version from Seattle Bibliocommons and listened to it while I watered my plants. It is very well done, and I had no problem following the thread. The only downside is that the printed version has some humorous puns by way of spelling that the listener misses.

One way or the other, get this book and read it, even if the topic isn’t inside your usual field of interest. Highly recommended to everyone.

Biting the Hand, by Julia Lee****

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Julia Lee is not amused, and she’s decided to say the things nobody else is saying. In this deeply analytical, provocative memoir, she tells us about her own experiences growing up, and the issues faced by Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the United States, where “we are critical to the pyramid scheme of the American Dream.”

My thanks go to Net Galley, Henry Holt Publishers, and Macmillan Audio for the review copies. This book is for sale now.

In some ways, I feel as though I am reading someone else’s mail as I read this, because it is clearly intended for an audience of people of color. However, I did read it, and I’m going to review it.

When the discussion of race in the U.S. comes about, it is, as Lee states, almost always a conversation about Black people and Caucasians. Those that don’t fit into either group are sidelined. Perhaps more harmful is the way that people of Asian descent are presumed to be sympathetic to the status quo. Ever since a major news periodical dubbed Asians as “the model minority” back in the early 1960s, expectations and assumptions have leaned in that direction. And the roots of this division—Black versus Asian—make this a particularly thorny assumption to untangle. After all, a large percentage of African-Americans can trace their lineage to slavery; their ancestors weren’t born in the States, nor did they choose to come here, but were kidnapped and brought by force. Angry? You bet! But Asian immigrants came of their own accord, oftentimes fleeing untenable circumstances in their countries of origin. And so, their children, and those that have come after, have largely been indoctrinated to be appreciative. If things don’t go well, they tell them, then we must work harder!

This Caucasian reviewer comes to you without the Asian background, appearance, or experience that Lee speaks of; yet I live in a city that has one of the largest Asian populations in the U.S., and am married to an Asian immigrant, and parent to a child that is half-Japanese. So many of the stories—strangers that ask where you’re from, and won’t accept the truth of “California,” where Lee was born, or “Seattle,” my daughter’s hometown, are familiar ones.

Lee is fed up with the mainstream news stories that endeavor to pit Asian and Black people against each other. Her parents were small business owners in a mostly Black part of Los Angeles during the riots of 1992, and her experiences inform her conclusion, that there must be solidarity between all people of color in order to successfully fight for significant change.

The one bone I have to pick is the casual manner in which she dismisses the question of social class as a key factor. Her very brief note about this is that it’s a tomato and to-mah-to issue, not worth much discussion, because most people of color are working class. This is simply untrue, and it enforces a stereotype of Black people as being mostly poor and dispossessed, when in actuality, eighty percent of Black people in the US live above the poverty line. There are African-Americans that have far more money than I will ever see; some of the many Asian groups have a higher median income than Caucasians. So yes, social class is a huge factor here, one that Lee should examine more critically. There are working class Whites that can be allies; there are wealthy families of color that would shut down the struggle, given half a chance. The missing star in my rating reflects her failure to recognize this, and to offer concrete solutions to this problem.

The book’s title comes from Lee’s mentor at the otherwise very white-supremacist dominated Harvard—Jamaica Kinkaid. I actually gasped when I saw this. What a luminary she found to guide her!

Both the audio and print version of this book are equally readable, so go with whatever you usually prefer.

This is a fine resource for those seeking to examine Asian and Asian-American racial dynamics. Read it critically, but do read it. There’s a lot here that has needed to be said for a long, long time.

Poverty by America, by Matthew Desmond****

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“Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.”

Desmond is the author of Evicted, the Pulitzer winning examination of urban homelessness. Desmond himself grew up poor, and his family was forced out of their home when he was a child. These things give him a different and more authoritative perspective than most urban ethnographers.

 My thanks go to Net Galley and Crown Publishing for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public tomorrow, March 21, 2023.

This book is written for a general readership, and it’s more readable than any other nonfiction work I’ve seen on this subject. His tone is conversational, and his research is impeccable, drawing from a wide variety of sources, well integrated and organized. He addresses the past and present roles of racism, explaining how the overtly discriminatory statutes and policies of the past have morphed into more subtly framed, yet still ubiquitous ones of today. He tells us “why there is so much poverty in America and…how to eliminate it.” He speaks to an audience of middle and upper class readers, warning that we must “…each of us, in our own way, [must become] poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.”

In revealing the roots of American poverty, Desmond is thorough. He discusses the role played by medical costs, and the many workers that still cannot afford health care; the withering of unions, and the way that gig workers and independent contractors have replaced permanent employees; incarceration, and the debilitating effects it has, not only on the person sent away, but on their families for generations to come; the way that government assistance programs have been legally diverted to programs having nothing to do with the poor; the way that poor people are forced to pay more for the same goods and services that the better off pay. He discusses the ways that those living in poverty are cut off from political and economic opportunities. He does these things better than anyone else is doing them right now, and it makes me mad as hell, seeing millions of ruined lives all laid out so starkly.

It is when he approaches solutions that things become a little muddy. There are a few of his suggestions that I genuinely disagree with, but most of them are sound; the problem is that, despite his assurance that all of these changes can be made without much incursion into the lives of the wealthy and powerful, the chances of these people agreeing to implement such changes are somewhere between slim and none. He assures us that he is no Marxist (and that’s the truth, alas,) and that the rich can still have plenty; yet in reality, it’s clear to this reviewer that the kinds of changes that are needed are ones that working people will have to force from the tightly closed fists of the rich. This is where the fifth star falls off of my rating.

Nonetheless, Poverty by America is well worth your time and money, and I recommend it to you.

Waco Rising, by Kevin Cook*****

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Waco is a disaster that will be remembered for a very long time, one of the most egregious uses of excessive force against a group of people in the history of the United States. Kevin Cook’s new book, Waco Rising, is well researched and documented, yet is also written in a way that is accessible to a general audience. My thanks go to Net Galley and Henry Holt for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The religious compound at Waco was headed by the charismatic David Koresh, and Cook takes us there, through the evolution of this sect, various splits and skirmishes among the faithful, and its final structure. Unlike many cults and other religious offshoots, this one was largely middle class, and numerous members brought their assets into the group. But the most distinctive aspect of it, compared to other such oddball organizations, was its fondness for munitions. The compound at Waco was armed to the teeth.

Koresh’s organization drew the attention of the Federal government when a disaffected former member leaked the news that Koresh was practicing polygamy—nobody else, just him—and that many of his wives were children:

“One Davidian remembered [Koresh] ‘approaching Michele in the dead of night.’ The word “approaching” was a euphemism. Describing the encounter later as if he found it amusing, [Koresh] told some of the men that he’d invited Michele, who had recently celebrated her twelfth birthday, into his bed “to get warm.” When he tried to pull down her underwear, she resisted. He kept going, he said, because God told him to.”

Initially, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) saw this situation as an opportunity to redeem themselves after the debacle at Ruby Ridge. This time, they would get it right, rescue the little girls, and their reputation would be restored. It didn’t shake out that way. The ATF, and eventually the FBI and the armed forces were deployed, surrounding the Davidians from the land and even the air in a siege of fifty-one days. When it was over, the compound was a smoldering ruin, and seventy-six people, including twenty-five children, were dead.

I was initially unsure if I wanted to read this thing. I knew how it was going to end, after all, and did I want the details in my head? However, Cook paces the story expertly, punctuating the first two-thirds with the occasional darkly funny vignette. But the ending is nothing but grim, and that’s because there’s no other honest way to tell it.

The conversational way it’s written makes it a quick read, and there are a lot of excellent quotes. Cook uses material that hasn’t been reported previously, and he does a fine job. I highly recommend Waco Rising to anyone that is interested in this topic.