Emily Feng’s dazzling Let Only Red Flowers Bloom documents how Xi Jinping’s efforts to narrow Chinese identity endanger the extremely diverse country’s people.

Medicine, Nonfiction, Science

Everything Is Tuberculosis

Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.

History, Nonfiction, Science

Nonfiction Science History

A History of the World in Six Plagues

Edna Bonhomme’s frank, timely A History of the World in Six Plagues reveals how infectious diseases have been leveraged by colonialism and capitalism.

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre

Review

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science

We all have one. That friend or relative who cannot hold a conversation without bringing up their pet conspiracy theory. The one who believes COVID-19 is a hoax or that a certain former secretary of state actually wore a mask made from the face of a dead child. The one who frightens and confuses you in equal measure, leaving you to wonder what happened to your dear friend or favorite uncle. The one you might be thinking about cutting off, because the mere thought of listening to one more lecture about the faked moon landing sends you around the bend.

Before you do, however, you really should read Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill. Since starting at The Daily Beast in 2016, Weill has focused on how conspiracy theories flourish on social media. In Off the Edge, Weill uses flat-eartherism as a case study, documenting its surprising roots in a 19th-century socialist utopian commune, its truly astonishing endurance and popularity, and its links to other conspiracy theories, including QAnon. In addition to conducting meticulous research for her debut book, Weill had searching and substantive conversations with flat-earth believers that informed her understanding of how conspiracy theories evolve, grow and converge. She is especially critical of the role YouTube and Facebook have played in this history, but she is equally clear that the mainstream media, including some of her own articles, are also at fault.

Weill’s investigation of flat-eartherism makes clear that adherence to a conspiracy theory is not intellectual but emotional. Fear and uncertainty about the world and one’s place in it fuel a desperate desire for clarity—even if that clarity is rooted in a nonsensical worldview that drives a wedge between the believer and their loved ones. But there’s still hope for these broken relationships. Weill shows that people can and do recover from their fever dreams, but not through intellectual argumentation alone. If the exploitation of fear can divide us, only compassion and openheartedness can lay the groundwork to draw us together again.

Before you cut off a loved one who won’t shut up about their pet conspiracy theory, you really should read Kelly Weill’s extraordinary debut book, Off the Edge.

Review

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Film

Film Arts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Not since Francois Truffaut took on Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s has there been such an illuminating exchange in print between a director and a critical fan. In Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, filmmaker and writer Jeff Young interviews the renowned and controversial director Elia Kazan over an extended period, beginning the interviews in 1971 as the director neared the end of his career. The publication of Kazan’s autobiography contributed to the delays this book encountered in seeing print.

Kazan’s career as a movie director began with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 and ended with The Last Tycoon in 1976. His total output of 19 films include the classics East of Eden, which introduced James Dean to the world, and On the Waterfront, which similarly introduced Marlon Brando. Kazan was also a prolific novelist and theater director. Unfortunately, his achievements as a director are often eclipsed by the controversy over his naming names testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy days of the 1950s. Many of Hollywood’s liberal members, such as actor Nick Nolte, sat on their hands in protest during the applause for Kazan as he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1999 Academy Awards. Young is unabashed in his admiration for Kazan’s work. His films moved me more than anyone else’s, he writes. I was transported, taken into the worlds they depicted, made privy to the inner tensions, conflicts, and feelings of Kazan’s characters, in whom I’d always found some part of myself. . . . Kazan’s films both forced and enabled me to think about my life and to view the world around me as I never had before. This was artistry of a very high order. In an age in which artistry seems replaced by gimmickry, and in which computer-generated worlds replace the landscapes of the human soul, an artist like Kazan stands as a reminder of what great cinema is all about. Kazan’s greatest strength as a director understanding acting and how to bring out the best in actors is increasingly becoming a lost art. Reading this book is inspirational, because it transports the reader back into a value system that needs to be rediscovered by the next generation of filmmakers. This book is not merely an homage by an admiring fan. Instead it is an exchange between two filmmakers on the art of filmmaking, which forces the director into a searching examination of his work, blemishes and all. With a chapter on each of Kazan’s films, the interviewer pushes the director to provide reasons for doing what he did, even when they are in disagreement. As I said, all of my sentiments are diametrically opposed to yours. Nothing you’ve said changes that, Young interjects during a discussion of Kazan’s incriminating Congressional testimony. At another point, when Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, “I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. When Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. With this frank, sometimes confrontational, but always admiring style, Young brings out the best thoughts from the fertile mind of this great filmmaker. It is invaluable for filmmakers wanting an inside look into the reasoning that goes behind the thousands of decisions made in the creative filmmaking process. After you’ve read the book, you’ll want to rent the movies.

David Hinton is the dean of Watkins Institute College of Art and Design.

Red Paint

by Catherine Hollis

With Red Paint, Sasha LaPointe offers a poetic narrative of trauma and healing through ancestral rites and punk rock.

Memoir

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Gregory Harris

The rise of Silicon Valley is the background for Sunnyvale, a moving autobiography by author and Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Goodell. This poignant story is less an analysis of the triumph and transformation of Silicon Valley than an intimate portrait of how those changes affected one family. In the opening chapters, Goodell describes his idyllic childhood in a small town whose very name suggests optimism. The oldest of three children, Goodell enjoys the privileges of middle-class upbringing a comfortable home, good schools, a hobby of racing motorcycles. Goodell’s youthful aspirations for a career as a pro cycle racer end at an early age, however, when he is seriously injured in an accident. This setback causes Goodell for the first time to recognize that Sunnyvale life is not charmed.

This realization proves prophetic, as the reader follows Goodell through the surprising decision of his parents to divorce, and his brother’s squandering of his talents as a musician in a haze of drugs and alcohol. His father’s spirit and, later, health are broken by the dissolution of the family, and his brother spirals out of control, alternating between charm and rage, at times sleeping on the streets. Absorbing the narrative, the reader shares Goodell’s frustration, being unable to do anything but watch as his loved ones’ lives skid toward tragedy. Still, all is not sadness and woe. Following the divorce, his mother joins Apple Computer and becomes rich after the introduction of the revolutionary Macintosh. His sister, who as a child plays at Apple’s Cupertino offices, as an adult becomes a member of a high-tech startup. Goodell notes that in any harsh environment, some possess a greater ability to adapt than others. But adaptation is not the only alternative for Goodell. Although he held a job at Apple Computer long before the introduction of the Macintosh, Goodell rejects the software industry and pursues a career as a writer. He attends college in New York City significantly, far away from California geographically and socially meets and later marries a flashy and talented classmate, and eventually settles in upstate New York. Goodell avoids overt criticism of his birthplace and the industry that has made Sunnyvale among the hottest real estate in America. Indeed, he frequently expresses admiration for the loose corporate culture at companies like Apple. His own departure from a computer career was in part propelled by the button-down software drone image in vogue at older firms like IBM. However, in telling his story, he makes clear the impact of the high-adrenaline world of software startups and the impact of an influx of instant millionaires. He relates his surprise that, during a visit, he discovers a fruit stand he remembers from boyhood still in operation. He then ruefully discovers that the produce is now selling at an exorbitantly inflated prices, and Sunnyvale’s aquifer is tainted with toxic waste from runaway industry. Goodell’s honest and insightful account is sad at times. However, Sunnyvale is also an inspiring tale of social survival. Its very existence reminds the reader that success isn’t restricted to those with Internet stock options.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis.

Review

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction, True Crime

Nonfiction True Crime

Scoundrel

Review by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

Edgar Smith is not one of the names that comes to mind when one thinks of storied American killers, but according to the superb crime writer and journalist Sarah Weinman, he was at one point “perhaps the most famous convict in America.” Convicted for the brutal 1957 murder of 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski in New Jersey, Smith spent years on death row claiming he was innocent. His story caught the eye of conservative millionaire William F. Buckley Jr., who befriended Smith and helped him publish his story in a bestselling book. After years of legal wrangling, Smith was released from prison and became a passionate advocate for prison reform.

But then? Smith was caught attempting to abduct a woman in California in 1976. After he stabbed and beat her, the woman managed to escape. He confessed to killing Zielinski while being tried for his second crime, and ultimately died in prison in 2017. Scoundrel is the electric story of a man who managed to fool everyone around him: his wife, his mother, the famous neoconservative who founded the National Review and even the legal system.

The most interesting detail Weinman uncovered during her research for Scoundrel is that Smith had an affair with his editor, Sophie Wilkins—or at least as much of an affair as one can have from the confines of prison. Weinman found a trove of correspondence from Smith to Wilkins, some of which are love letters and others of which are more sexually graphic. “Those long letters, exceeding twenty single-spaced pages, weren’t sent through the Trenton State prison system, lest snooping censors create problems and revoke the privileges of its increasingly famous Death House inmate,” Weinman writes. Instead, Smith gave the letters to his lawyers, who passed them along to Wilkins. Wilkins would later claim she was only using Smith’s affection to produce the best book possible, but the letters suggest a more complicated and sincere relationship between the pair.

Despite his crimes happening more than 60 years ago, Weinman paints a complete portrait of Smith in all his complexity, with an unsettling ending that left me breathless. A chilling and deeply satisfying read, Scoundrel injects life into a story nearly forgotten by time.

Scoundrel is the electric story of a killer who managed to fool everyone around him, as told by the superb crime writer Sarah Weinman.

Review

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Diane Stresing

An odyssey is a voyage, literal or spiritual, usually marked by many changes of fortune. The odyssey of A Blessing Over Ashes might be described as a surprisingly smooth journey through time and terror. Traveling from war-torn Cambodian fields to the good ol’ USA and back, readers can expect to return safely, but slightly removed from the place in which they began. In his first book, 27-year-old Adam Fifield delivers a warm, fascinating, aching, and comforting account of his brother’s life an account as accurate as possible, given what the author admits he does not know. Integral to the story is Fifield’s acknowledgment that he cannot understand his brother as well as he would like; in spite of being raised together, the distance between the two is immense.

Fifield was an 11-year-old living in Vermont when the Cambodian boy came to be his adopted brother. Fifield was sure that Soeuth, born four years earlier in another world, didn’t belong anywhere. The first thing I thought was: I already have a brother who dismembers my action figures, gets food in his hair. . . . What if our new brother turned out to be some primitive living in our midst, building fires in our living room, sacrificing our cats? By taking us back and forth between rural Vermont and the children’s work camp of Wat Slar Gram, Fifield shows how vast the differences between two boys can be. While Fifield formed the concept of good versus evil largely by watching Star Wars, The Hobbit, and Bonanza, Soeuth was taught by the Khmer Rouge that he must forget his family, and smash the heads of the rich people (and) . . . work for the glorious revolution. Ten years after leaving Cambodia with papers that certified he was an orphan, Soeuth learned that his family was still alive. An old Cambodian proverb says, To live is to hope. While Soeuth’s hopes for himself, his family, and their reunion are never clear, the distance between his two lives shrinks as he travels over it. His journey is indeed an odyssey.

Diane Stresing is a freelance writer in Kent, Ohio.

Review

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Miller

Hail to the King! When Ginger Rogers died they said of her dancing that she did everything her more lavishly praised partner, Fred Astaire, did, and she did it backward and in high heels. Her artistry therefore was that much more difficult and, by implication, greater.

Something like that comment occurred to me while reading Daniel Mark Epstein’s biography, Nat King Cole. As a singer, Cole did everything his more lavishly praised contemporary, Frank Sinatra, did, and he did it in the face of fierce racial discrimination, all the while being one of the country’s premier jazz pianists.

His artistry may have been harder to achieve, but was it greater than Sinatra’s, to which it often has been compared? It’s not for an amateur enthusiast like me to say, though I think that anyone who could make out of such odd, haunting songs as Nature Boy and Mona Lisa boffo hits that turned into enduring ballads has got to be a vocalist of extremely high caliber.

The author doesn’t say, either, remarking only that Cole ranks with the greatest ballad interpreters of all time, including Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith. But he gives us the judgments of experts like Nat Hentoff, who in the 1950s wrote that Cole’s sound, placement, diction, phrasing and beat are the best in contemporary pop or jazz. Whatever his place in popular music, he achieved it in only 45 years. He was born Nathaniel Adams Coles on March 17, 1919, in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a wholesale grocer. He died February 15, 1965, in Santa Monica, California, of lung cancer, brought on by a lifetime of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day.

The central place in his life, however, was Chicago, to which his family moved in 1923 when his father decided to quit the grocery business and become a minister. Chicago was the capital of jazz when jazz was at its peak. Cole was mad for the music, and he learned directly from its Founding Fathers: Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton.

He was an apt pupil of these men, though not of school, which he quit at 15, by which age he already had a highly developed talent, a band, and a following. Dropping the s from his surname, he took the band on the road, one that, with occasional rocky patches, led steadily upward, from the creation of the Nat Cole Trio in the late 1930s to Cole’s emergence in the mid-1940s as a leading pop singer. The Golden Age of Jazz had segued into the Swing Era, and, in Epstein’s estimation, the trio largely defined the term swing, because, despite their modest number, no group on earth could swing like Nat Cole’s Trio. Purist historians and biographers might not entirely agree with Epstein’s approach ( Written with the narrative pacing of a novel, the publicity material says), nor with his sometimes lyrical, not to say purple, language. It is also hard to discern why he switches back and forth, calling his subject Cole and Nat and Nathaniel.

Style aside, this is a full biography, covering not only Cole’s show business career but his domestic life: his two marriages, his five children, and his flagrant philandering that culminated, in his final months, in an intense infatuation with a 19-year-old Swedish-born actress. Though, regarding this subject, methinks the author doth protest too much how devoted the Coles were. It rings as unnatural as calling him Nathaniel.

Yet he was also, according to Epstein, a kind and decent person, rare qualities among artists in any medium. Also rare were his great self-discipline (in musical if not personal areas) and gift of friendship.

And he rarely complained, not even when he suffered the indignities that African-American performers routinely encountered then. Some were not so routine: In 1956 a band of Alabama white supremacists cooked up a loony plot to snatch him from a Birmingham stage to what end, neither they nor anyone else could say. Cole’s mild reaction to this assault earned him the scorn of many black leaders, but ultimately his cool behavior redounded to his credit.

It’s too bad he smoked all those cigarettes. He might still be with us now, at age 80, a white-haired senior citizen of song. But then, so many of his jazz idols, like Fats Waller, died extremely young. It’s one of the few places Cole fits a musical pattern.

Review

by bookpagedev

Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.