Tag: Books

The Exvangelicals Searching for Political Change

In an evangelical upbringing, McCammon notes, there is an overwhelming emphasis on what a person truly believes. Of her sister’s infant dedication, she writes, “In our belief system, while my sister’s dedication was important, it was only a symbol. For us, the central question was what we believed in our hearts, not whether we’d participated […]

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The Workplace Novel Comes to the Big Box Store

Before Help Wanted’s plot lurches into motion, Waldman lavishes attention on the details of warehouse work. The novel’s opening scene provides an immensely satisfying overview of the labor and machinery required to unload a truck containing close to two thousand boxes in a single hour (even a minute longer will trigger a “failure report”), as […]

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Percival Everett Is Messing With You

Everett’s revisionist approach begins with the thick dialect Twain used for his Black characters, which along with that damnable N-word has been an impediment to contemporary readers’ appreciation of Huckleberry Finn. It turns out, in Everett’s telling, that the minstrel-show patois (“I doan’ hanker for no mo’ un um,” Twain’s Jim says to Huck, which […]

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Off the Shelf: Ghosts come alive in Kizzia’s ‘Cold Mountain Path’

Whoever coined the saying about real life being stranger than fiction may have had the town of McCarthy, Alaska, in mind. That was my opinion several chapters into Tom Kizzia’s “Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska,” which I bought recently in the Anchorage airport. I haven’t read Kizzia’s 2013 true crime […]

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Frantz Fanon’s Conflicted Vision for Decolonization

One of the more provocative elements of Shatz’s account is the suggestion that a residue of republican universalism, overlaid with existential and Marxist universalisms, left Fanon with a lasting “defiance of identity’s claims.” Fanon was, of course, well aware of the hypocrisies lurking within high-flown rhetoric of equality, and disdainful of naïvely color-blind ideologies that […]

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Amitav Ghosh’s Reckoning With Opium

Former poppy-growing areas “have had significantly worse long-term social and economic outcomes” than nearby districts. A comparison of these two opium economies forms the heart of the book’s compelling development thesis. Before the imposition of wide-scale opium production, the east was relatively prosperous, as evidenced by the nickname “Golden Bengal.” Following the infliction of opium, […]

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5 thought-provoking books to read in March

It’s March already, which means we’re almost a quarter of the way through this year’s book releases. (Where does the time go?) If you’re prepping your spring reading list, consider bringing these March releases along to enjoy the warming weather. ‘Anita de Monte Laughs Last’ by Xochitl Gonzalez (March 5) (Image credit: Flatiron Books) Author […]

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An Immigration Journalist Makes the Case for Open Borders

For several months beginning late last year, Senate Democrats and Republicans came together to negotiate a bipartisan border bill that, if passed, would have represented an unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigration. President Joe Biden championed the bill, vowing to wield the new authority it would give him to “shut down the border.” What happened next? […]

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Why We Should Open U.S. Borders

For several months beginning late last year, Senate Democrats and Republicans came together to negotiate a bipartisan border bill that, if passed, would have represented an unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigration. President Joe Biden championed the bill, vowing to wield the new authority it would give him to “shut down the border.” What happened next? […]

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The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image

Even as Prohibition failed, President Herbert Hoover stubbornly applied the same approach to the trade in narcotics, which soon became a robust source of income for organized crime, as bootlegging had been. In June 1930, Hoover appointed former railroad detective and Prohibition agent Harry Anslinger commissioner of a new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This as […]

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Harriet Tubman and the Most Important, Understudied Battle of the Civil War

To tell this story, Fields-Black relies on an underutilized archive. The pension files of former Union soldiers, housed at the National Archives, contain, Fields-Black tell us, thousands of pages of testimony from the dependents of Black Civil War veterans, of which there were 186,000, 75 percent of whom were formerly enslaved. Because dependents had to […]

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Harriet Tubman and the Most Important, Understudied Battle of the Civil War

To tell this story, Fields-Black relies on an underutilized archive. The pension files of former Union soldiers, housed at the National Archives, contain, Fields-Black tell us, thousands of pages of testimony from the dependents of Black Civil War veterans, of which there were 186,000, 75 percent of whom were formerly enslaved. Because dependents had to […]

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In Remembrance Of Malcolm X: Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Sekou Odinga’s Forthcoming Memoir

NewsOne Featured Video Source: Estate of Sekou Odinga Sekou Odinga, who co-founded both the Harlem-Bronx Chapter and the Algeria-based International Section of the Black Panther Party, was in the process of writing his biography with his goddaughter, asha bandele, when he passed away on January 12, 2024. The excerpt below about Malcolm X is taken […]

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Romantasies are steaming up the publishing world

While children’s books have long dominated the fantasy genre, a more adult spin — combining romantic tropes and steamy sex scenes — is now taking over. Romantasy is a genre that has become so popular, it is pushing the publishing industry in a  new direction. Background Romantasy is a portmanteau combining “romance” and “fantasy,” a […]

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Try To Keep Up With Ed Park’s Conspiracy-Laced Epic

The second chapter leaves behind the high-concept science fiction of the first, and we enter an entirely different story stylistically, set in another world and time and with another set of fonts. The man who will turn out to be the novel’s main character, Soon Sheen, is Park’s most likely alter ego in the sort […]

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Ed Park’s Korean-American Epic Blends Conspiracy and History

The second chapter leaves behind the high-concept science fiction of the first, and we enter an entirely different story stylistically, set in another world and time and with another set of fonts. The man who will turn out to be the novel’s main character, Soon Sheen, is Park’s most likely alter ego in the sort […]

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Ron “Never Back Down” DeSantis Backs Down on Disastrous Book Ban Law

“I can tell you from everything I know about it, he’s going to be found guilty,” Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, said during The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit in October. “This is the Al Capone theory,” he added. “They didn’t get him on murder, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, etc., they got him on tax evasion. […]

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Ron DeSantis Finally Admits War on Books Has Been a Total Disaster

“I can tell you from everything I know about it, he’s going to be found guilty,” Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, said during The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit in October. “This is the Al Capone theory,” he added. “They didn’t get him on murder, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, etc., they got him on tax evasion. […]

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White Author Caught ‘Review Bombing’ Books By People Of Color Claims She’s Not Racist, Blames Autism

NewsOne Featured Video Last December, we reported the story of Cait Corrain, a debut author who threw away her bag like no one before by creating several fake Goodreads accounts, which she used to “review bomb” other new authors while up-voting her own book, Crown of Starlight—until she got caught. Not only did internet sleuths […]

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Gen Z is bringing back reading

Here’s a tip for older folks looking to keep up with the latest trends among young people: Go to the library. It’s a “surprising Gen Z plot twist,” The Guardian said. Young adults and adolescents — folks born between 1997 and 2012 — are really into reading. Real books, the kind you find on paper. […]

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The Messy Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In Albee, strong emotions and dissatisfactions emerged from the marrow of intelligent, passionate, sometimes monstrous (and very often hilarious) men and women. Albee’s upbringing made him the perfect person to write about the deep pathological weirdness of American family relationships. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1928, Albee never knew the identity of his biological parents […]

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The Drama of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Spilled Into Real Life

In Albee, strong emotions and dissatisfactions emerged from the marrow of intelligent, passionate, sometimes monstrous (and very often hilarious) men and women. Albee’s upbringing made him the perfect person to write about the deep pathological weirdness of American family relationships. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1928, Albee never knew the identity of his biological parents […]

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Why Do We Know So Little About the Womb?

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard Buy on Bookshop Ecco, 336 pp., $29.99 Of course, there were downsides, too. Internal gestation didn’t just reshape our reproductive organs, but pulled in the immune system and the metabolic system, too. As we became placental mammals, Bohannon writes, “the entire female body […]

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