To be clear, the title of this book by Alexander Langlands is Cræft, not “craft.” When we think of craft, we tend to think of expensive handmade objects, often considered anachronisms in a world of mass production and mass consumption. Cræft (pronounced “creft”) is the Anglo-Saxon root for the modern word “craft,” and it includes both the product and the process of crafting. But cræft has a more profound meaning: It is the wisdom, handed down from previous generations, that enables the crafter to create a perfectly useful object.

Langlands is an experimental archaeologist; he replicates ancient artifacts and processes to gain greater insights into the cultures that produced them. In Cræft, he explains how ancient craftsmen used their skill, available natural resources and especially cræft to solve the problems that life threw at them. Need temporary sheep pens? Use your weaving skills to create portable wicker fencing. Want a permanent solution for keeping sheep out of your grain fields? Forge tools that help you prune and manipulate trees to form hedgerows. No trees around? Use rocks to create dry stone walls of such cunning manufacture that they last for generations—without mortar.

Langlands is not merely describing the past; cræft has shaped our present and can enhance our future. Anyone who has walked in the English countryside can see how cræft molded the natural environment: Ancient burial mounds, weirs and dikes, even the barren moorlands that inspired the Brontë sisters testify to the human knack for devising ingenious solutions to difficult problems. The importance of cræft is demonstrated by the devastating effects its absence can have: The modern tendency to favor mechanization over cræft, Langlands posits, has resulted in flooding, soil degradation and global warming. In a world with diminishing resources, it might be wise to tap into cræft to ensure a sustainable future. Langlands has written an excellent introduction to guide us.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Unlike most histories of 16th-century England, which concentrate on the machinations and religious convulsions of the Tudor monarchy, London’s Triumph concerns itself with the capital city’s merchant class and what it did to launch the explorations and conquests that would ultimately result in the world-girdling British empire of the 19th century.

Founded by the Romans around 43 A.D., by 1500. London had grown into a city of about 50,000 residents. It bustled with the activities of “cloth workers, drapers, goldsmiths, skinners, tallow chandlers, vintners, butchers and so on,” but it still took a very distant backseat as a trading center to Antwerp. But by 1600, London had its own thriving financial hub, a reputation for opening new markets (Russia chief among them), merchant companies dedicated to sending trading expeditions into still-unmapped regions of the globe and a population of 200,000.

Stephen Alford’s descriptions of London and its growth are vivid. Tracing the footsteps of such larger-than-life personalities as the navigator Sebastian Cabot and the geographer Richard Hakluyt, he walks the reader down colorfully named streets and alleys, strides through the deafening clamor of trading stalls and peers curiously into the chapels and tombs of ancient churches. He also witnesses the city’s agonies as it is wrenched by plague, famine and an immigration crisis.

Of course, London wasn’t all about exploration and economic boil. Whether Catholic or Protestant, the rich, lavishly costumed merchants dutifully provided alms to the poor, worried that their business dealings might cross the line into usury and convinced themselves that bringing Christianity to distant lands was the fulfillment of God’s will. As the century came to a close, many were casting their missionary eyes on the alluring shores of America.

Poet and scholar Kevin Young offers a history of the hoax and a chilling indictment of our current moment in this ambitious book. Bunk opens in the 19th century—the days of P.T. Barnum, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe—as Young pulls back history’s curtain to reveal hoaxes, humbug and circus tents with a sideshow of spiritualism and sensationalism.

But Young is not content to remain in the sepia-toned past. “If all of this sounds familiar,” he writes, “it is because the transformative advent of the penny press most resembles the current change demonstrated, if not caused, by the internet.” Shifting effortlessly from the 19th century to the 21st, Young draws connections between words like swindler, diddling and confidence man and contemporary buzzwords like plagiarism, truthiness and fake news. In both eras, a disenfranchised racial other haunts the discourse.

“The exotic other, the dark double” is a key player in historical and contemporary hoaxes, from the colonialists who donned redface to confuse the British during the Boston Tea Party to Nasdijj, a white man who co-opted a Navajo identity in order to publish a variety of written work in 1999 and the early 2000s. Nasdijj was exposed the very month that James Frey admitted to grossly misrepresenting the facts of his life in his bestselling book A Million Little Pieces. More than simply recounting these incidents and dozens more, Young uses them to facilitate his larger goal: a theory of the hoax itself and the fantasies that it reveals. Like a joke that brings down the house, a hoax unites a cunning speaker with a crowd that wants to be fooled. And today the stakes are higher than ever. Young examines the effects of deception on American politics, literature and everyday life. Long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction, Bunk is a powerful, far-reaching read.

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As author and scholar Joanna Scutts writes in The Extra Woman, her provocative, in-depth look at 20th-century women and their historic struggle to find their place, “it’s easy to forget that exercising the right to live your life as you choose is still a political act, and a brave act—far braver for some people than for others.”

Among those brave women defying cultural expectations was Marjorie Hillis, a lifestyle guru whose self-help books, beginning in 1936 with the game-changing Live Alone and Like It, spanned the Depression, World War II and the reawakening of feminism in the 1960s. Dubbed “the queen of the Live-Aloners,” Hillis, a minister’s daughter and Vogue fashion editor, tackled the economic and social challenges for single women like herself (she married at 49). Her practical tips about decorating, dining, dressing and dating stayed clear of the soapbox, sparing her readers any moralizing about their lifestyle. No husband? No children? Make the most of what you have, Hillis advised, and do it all with style.

For Scutts, Hillis was a spark at the beginning of the rise of 20th-century feminism. Rosie the Riveter replaced the giddy flapper of the 1920s, becoming an icon for wartime women getting the job done. Sassy, sexy Mae West and spunky Kathryn Hepburn became, not without controversy, Hollywood idols. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, future editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan— and unmarried until 37— wrote Sex and the Single Girl, and the lid came off that topic. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, asked, “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?”

Scutts covers a lot of ground here, and she does it all so well that her readers may be inspired to dig further: the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History, where Scutts currently serves as a fellow, is a good start.

In her latest book, celebrated writer and BBC producer Deborah Cadbury (of the chocolate family) turns her attention to the final years of the Victorian era. Although Queen Victoria remained in mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert, from his untimely death in 1861 until her own death in 1901, her 42 grandchildren kept her extremely busy in the last few decades of her long reign. Finding appropriate spouses for them all was more than a mere family matter: The fate of European stability hung in the balance.

The plan, inspired by Prince Albert, was to export Britain’s constitutional monarchy throughout Europe by marrying British royalty into the various royal lines of Europe: Denmark, Prussia and Russia. If only the royals were so obedient! While some of Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren were pliable (especially Vicky, her oldest daughter), others (like naughty Bertie and his children) were less so. Readers will need a scorecard to keep up with them all, but rest assured, there will be mistresses, euphemisms for sexually transmitted infections (poor Eddie’s “gout”) and general disobedience.

Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking is targeted at royal-watchers and viewers of BBC’s great biopic television series “Victoria.” It may also interest readers of the “what-if” school of history. What if Princess Vicky’s husband, Frederick, had lived to become the Emperor of Prussia? Would his liberal values have united Britain and Germany and forestalled the wars of the 20th century?

Ultimately, however, this is a rich history of Queen Victoria’s canny use of political power. ­“Grandmama’s” interest in the marriages of her children and grandchildren goes far beyond a doting mother’s dedication to her family: Matchmaking had the power to make and break empires—if only those being matched would do as they were told.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.