RaveThe New RepublicAan encyclopedic account of the history and impact of the town—feels like the culmination of [Harris\'] upbringing and career. It’s a stunning, Technicolor anvil of a book ... Palo Alto is far from the first history of the town, its residents, or its influence, but it is among the most capacious. Its strength lies in this very broadness, in the book’s determination to cover art and crime and drugs and economics and eugenics and robots and attempt to tie it all together as the story of modernity ... If Palo Alto is an imperfect frame for understanding a history as gargantuan as the one that Harris recounts, Palo Alto nonetheless manages to tell a story that is grand in its scope, startling in its specifics, and ingenious in the connections it draws.
Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... provocative ... an estimable project, with a great title and a great premise and a highly readable, often rollicking, occasionally heartbreaking narrative. That, in some ways, it falls short of proving its broad thesis hardly matters in light of its many triumphs, perhaps most of all its relentless commitment to cutting through complacent liberal bromides about the arc of queer history. To ignore history’s \'bad gays\' risks doing as the Hillcrest business owners have done — celebrating an idealized vision of the queer past while ignoring a desperate queer present ... Because Bad Gays (like its podcast forebear) is far more concerned with biography than with consistent argumentation, its assertion that homosexuality itself be jettisoned in favor of \'something else, something better, instead,\' mostly stops at the level of provocative suggestion. The book is more a series of essays than a laser-focused monograph, and as a result the reader is largely left wondering what this \'something else, something better\' might be ... Nonetheless, as a bold and eminently readable counterhistory of homosexuality, Bad Gays is a triumph. To their credit, Lemmey and Miller have not lost the podcaster’s informality ... Even more significantly, Lemmey and Miller have brilliantly revealed the human construction of queer history ... In providing a pantheon of antiheroes, in reveling in complexity and contradiction, and in doing so for a popular audience, Lemmey and Miller have constructed their own narrative of queer history, one in which the \'bad gays\' take center stage. Their construction is, like all histories, selective, but it is a fresh and fascinating one at that.
Stacey Abrams
RaveThe New RepublicPoliticians writing fiction may be familiar at this point, but Abrams’s novel merits deeper reading ... a thriller, an \'airport novel\' in the very best sense of the term—it’s fun, fast-paced, absurd, designed to be inhaled in the space of a single flight. It’s also a revealing window into its author’s political imagination—what she wants, what she believes, what she’d do in a position of power ... Abrams’s novel, by contrast, engages very little with the internal dynamics of the Supreme Court or the White House. While Justice Sleeps is, by design, more of a fantasia, so full of twists, turns, and murderous reveals that it is genuinely difficult to summarize without giving too much away ... The whole thing is, again, very fun, culminating in a charmingly ludicrous showdown in the Supreme Court itself, with Avery standing alone, doing (legal) battle against the sinister forces intent on destroying her.
Gabriel Winant
RaveThe New Republic... trenchant ... Winant—a prolific essayist and historian at the University of Chicago—has delved deep into the region’s archives and made excellent use of oral history collections and original interviews ... a deeply upsetting book. It meticulously charts the transformation of the working class to show how the destruction of workers’ unions and bodies occurred in a feedback loop, with capitalist exploitation demanding care, demanding more exploitation, demanding still more care ... Although sometimes dense, Winant’s language often feels imbued with a sort of restrained, righteous fury. And while a lesser historian might have overlooked or given short shrift to the gendered and racialized aspects of the transition from steel to health care, Winant ably blends social and political history with conventional labor history to construct a remarkably comprehensive narrative with clear contemporary implications. In light of such careful, comprehensive accounting, it almost feels nitpicking to focus on an apparent omission, but it is a shame Winant devotes so little space to environmental history ... Despite this omission, Winant’s book is a stunning achievement, sure to become a classic in the field of labor history, a study of the denial of care constructed with, well, admirable care.
Andreas Malm
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn his latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm draws on both his academic and activist experience to make the case that the climate movement should escalate its tactics. It’s a passionate, powerful, deeply flawed, and profoundly necessary book, by turns exclaim-aloud satisfying and hurl-it-across-the-room frustrating. It’s a book that may excite some readers, anger others, convince still others, and alienate many, but it is unlikely to be forgotten by a single one.
Lauren Oyler
PositiveThe New Republic[A] smart and dark and confounding debut novel ... Oyler, a prolific critic and reviewer, has written a novel that is a pleasure to read and easy to inhale. The writing is brilliant, bringing to life a narrator with a penetrating gaze and a mordant, misanthropic voice. And yet Fake Accounts is a strange and difficult book, one in which the writer takes a dazzling premise and does little with it beyond making a string of wry comments. That this review is critical of Fake Accounts should be taken as a sign of my respect for the novel. I loved it. But even a great novel can also be fairly inexplicable ... Oyler’s first-person narration is nothing if not a vehicle for funny and trenchant observations. Her narrator is ostensibly a writer, but one who seems to think quite little about writing, much less do it with any frequency ... Indeed, Fake Accounts has essentially no characters other than the protagonist—certainly, there are none with any interiority. Instead, there is the protagonist and her witty, deadpan musings ... To be sure, Oyler has not reproduced all of the trends she has interrogated as a book critic ... The narrator is hilarious. It’s just a shame that she says so much and means so little.
Talia Lavin
RaveThe New Republic\"Culture Warlords is not truly a history or an ethnography or a memoir or even really a travelogue from racist site to racist site. It belongs, rather, to an older model of writing. It is a jeremiad, in the very best sense. There may be deeper, more comprehensive studies of the far right, but the value of Culture Warlords is its anger ... Much of the anthropological information Lavin conveys about these white supremacist online communities is, sadly, no longer surprising ... But Lavin also reveals less well-known information, which shines a light on the profound unreality of modern racist communities ... As Lavin shows, a vital tool in the anti-fascist arsenal is unmasking white supremacists in public, denying them respectability and anonymity.\
Andy Horowitz
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... brilliant ... his book is more than just an indictment of the disaster readiness of his precarious hometown, or a meditation on what it’s like to live in constant fear of biblical catastrophe. More than just a recounting of the history and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it is an argument for the relevance of history itself ... If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one ... Horowitz shows—patiently and damningly—how the decisions made by Louisiana’s political and business elite systematically rendered the region vulnerable to disaster ... Horowitz...muster[s] considerable evidence to argue that the \'pain\' that came from Katrina was not \'fair, or natural, or inevitable,\' or the \'consequence of some external disaster. It is the disaster itself.\'
Anne Nelson
MixedThe New RepublicNelson paints an utterly damning portrait of the rise of the modern right, of ostensibly Christian political activists partnering with fabulously wealthy industrialists to effectively take over the country. She identifies the owners, purveyors, and funders of right-wing media, and delves into the political donations of right-wing millionaires and billionaires, which have been enormously effective at lowering taxes and eliminating regulations. While this occasionally descends into what feels like a numbing list of names and organizations, Nelson largely succeeds in throwing light on the vast power of her cast of antagonists ... But if her goal was to identify what she called the \'nerve center\' or \'secret hub\' of the conservative movement, she largely fails. This is because, even after several hundred pages, it’s unclear what exactly the CNP actually does ... Nelson presents no evidence to suggest that the CNP is pivotal to—or even particularly incidental to—its members’ political activities. Their membership seems, rather, more like a stamp of conservative approval, the establishment’s imprimatur for worthy plutocrats ... Perhaps because Nelson herself is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she believes in the influence of exclusive think tanks with glittering memberships, but her conspiratorial framing significantly undermines the impact of her otherwise trenchant journalism ... Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Nelson lets her antagonists off the hook at the end. In seeking to impart some lesson to her readers, she descends into the mire of both-sides-ism ... Although Shadow Network does vitally important work exposing the inner workings of secretive, influential groups, it’s hard to hope for more books in this genre. If we can rebuild democratic institutions and reestablish the conditions that enable them to function, there will be far fewer shadow networks to read about.
Sarah Milov
RaveThe New Republic...a nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism. The Cigarette looks beyond individual consumers and their choices and aims its penetrating gaze straight at the larger phenomena shaping all of our lives: the exigencies of war, the rise of organized interest groups, the fall of government regulators, and the immense, unseen influence of big business ...The Cigarette, while excellent, is far from the first book to document the harm wrought by Big Tobacco ... But Milov has provided the premier account of the government’s complicity with the exacting of this human cost, of the way Big Tobacco has evolved and adapted and neutralized lawmakers and regulators—and thrived. And of a billion needlessly lost lives. The lessons of her book remain stunningly relevant today.
Scott W. Stern
RaveThe New RepublicThe end result [of Stern\'s research] is this meticulously researched, utterly damning work that lays out just what measures the United States government took to control women’s sexuality and autonomy—and how perfectly happy local officials and law enforcement were to go along with it ... The truths revealed in this book are truly shocking, and even more so because they are so little known. The culture of silence that has impacted sex workers for so long has finally begun to dissipate, but potent dangers remain ... One hopes the fact that more authors are now working to tell those stories means that more people will fight back.
