Barely a year has passed since violence incited by white nationalists led to tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the death of Heather Heyer. That anniversary makes Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist all the more timely and important. With the skill of a novelist, Saslow tells the extraordinary story of how the “rightful heir to America’s white nationalist movement” came to repudiate his racist heritage.

If anyone could lay claim to an impeccable pedigree in prejudice, it would be Derek Black, the son of the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who founded Stormfront, a vicious internet hate site, and the godson of white supremacist David Duke. Starting as a teenager, Black shared a microphone with his father on a radio talk show that relentlessly spewed venom against black people, Jews and other minorities.

But Black’s life began its radical transformation when he enrolled at New College of Florida, a small liberal arts institution in Sarasota, in 2010. Not long after his arrival, he befriended Matthew Stevenson, an Orthodox Jewish student who invited him to Friday night Shabbat dinners to observe the Jewish Sabbath. On one of those occasions, Black met Stevenson’s roommate, Allison Gornik, who became the principal agent for upending Black’s worldview.

Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with Black, his family and friends, Saslow describes how Gornik methodically engaged Black, who proved to be a bright, intellectually curious young man, in conversations. These discussions exposed the flawed sources and logic of the information and fallacious thinking that fueled Black’s bigotry and his fears of a white genocide. Even more significantly, she patiently persuaded him to make amends for his racist past and the harm he’d inflicted.

Nothing in this thoughtful account suggests the conversion Black experienced is likely to become widespread among his former compatriots, but it’s reassuring to learn of one instance in which reason, hope and love prevailed over hate.

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

When Michiko Kakutani ended her tenure of nearly 35 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic with the New York Times in July 2017, she announced her intention to “focus on longer pieces about politics and culture.” If The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, her fiery takedown of the culture of lies personified by the presidency of Donald Trump is any indication, her voice soon may become as influential in the world of politics as it was in literary culture.

Kakutani covers ground that will be painfully familiar to regular readers of her former paper or the Washington Post. Unlike conventional political commentators, however, she digs deeper to seek out the “roots of falsehood in the Trump era.” It’s here that her immersion in literature provides a fresh perspective on our current dilemma: Kakutani lays some portion of the blame on postmodernism, with its “philosophical repudiation of objectivity,” expressed most clearly in the work of Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionists, who posited that there was “no such thing as truth.”

Though Trump likely isn’t familiar with these literary theories, Kakutani argues that, in coining terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts,” his allies are cynically employing the same notion of subjectivity to advance their political agenda. Aided by the right-wing media and highly effective Russian internet trolls, they’ve capitalized on America’s increasing tribalism and skepticism of traditional sources of expertise, employing “language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord.”

As she envisions the inevitable post-Trump era, Kakutani is not optimistic. If there’s any hope of recovering from this relentless onslaught of falsehood, it will only come about through the efforts of an engaged citizenry, insistent on respect for our institutions and, above all, for the truth. Some of the critical information to fuel that engagement can be found in these pages.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, August 2018

Dopesick is no doubt the hardest book that award-winning journalist Beth Macy (Truevine, Factory Man) has written, and it left this reviewer in tears. Macy spent six years following families affected by the opioid epidemic in and around her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, and she begins by noting that several interviewees died before she had time to transribe her interview notes. It’s a heart-wrenching and thorough treatise on the national crisis that everyone knows about, but few deeply understand.

Macy addresses a wealth of complex issues in her engaging, spitfire prose, such as the difficulties of rehab and disagreements about the benefits of 12-step programs versus medication-assisted treatment. Macy is a masterful storyteller, and Dopesick is full of unforgettable stories, including those of policemen, caregivers, prosecutors and a dope dealer named Ronnie Jones.

Macy traces the origins of the crisis, which was perpetuated by Purdue Pharma, a company owned by one of the richest families in America. Purdue went from “selling earwax remover and laxatives to the most lucrative drug in the world”—prescription opioids they claimed were not addictive. As one Virginia lawyer aptly notes, “the victims were getting jail time instead of the people who caused it.”

Dopesick is dedicated to the memory of 10 opioid victims. Their stories and those of their surviving families form the heart of this book. There’s Jesse Bolstridge, a 19-year-old high school football star, and “blond and breezy” 21-year-old Scott Roth, who “looked like one of the Backstreet Boys.” Macy herself wasn’t immune to the heartache, admitting that there “were times that journalistic boundaries blurred,” especially when it came to the lively and likable young mother Tess Henry, whom Macy interviewed during drives to Henry’s Narcotics Anonymous meetings for several months.

There are no easy fixes, of course. Macy writes, “America’s approach to its opioid problem is to rely on Battle of Dunkirk strategies—leaving the fight to well-meaning citizens, in their fishing vessels and private boats—when what’s really needed to win the war is a full-on Normandy Invasion.” It’s indeed time to storm the beaches, and Dopesick is a moving, must-read analysis of a national crisis.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage and edited online for clarity. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Make no mistake: The water crisis that has plagued the people of Flint, Michigan, is not the result of a single decision. Rather, it is the disastrous culmination of state government dysfunction, decades of enforced housing segregation and the meteoric rise and fall of the American automobile industry.

In April of 2014, Flint residents discovered that the water pouring from their faucets was not only undrinkable but also downright toxic. Due to a recent switch in the city’s water supply, Flint’s lead pipes corroded. Initial reports from horrified Flint citizens were largely ignored. By the time the state of Michigan admitted to its mistake, 12 people had died and Flint’s children had been exposed to irrevocable harm. Anna Clark, a journalist and regular contributor to the Detroit Free Press, recounts the tangled series of events that eventually led to the city’s poisoned water supply in The Poisoned City. Clark avoids sanctimonious judgments, but she isn’t afraid to painstakingly show how racism and state-sanctioned white supremacy shaped the socioeconomic policies of Flint.

Flint’s water crisis extends beyond an environmental disaster; it’s a public health and civil rights issue. In a way, it was by design that Flint’s communities of color were hit hardest. Unfortunately, the narrative surrounding Flint’s poisoned water is not an anomaly. For Clark, it’s a reflection of America’s tradition of inequality—the nation’s foundations are structured at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized. Ultimately, the story of Flint’s water crisis echoes throughout countless American cities.

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

If your view of youth in China involves drab clothing and groupthink, it’s time to come into the 21st century. And it would take quite a long march to find a better guide than Zak Dychtwald’s Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World. Dychtwald, in his 20s himself, has lived and traveled extensively in China, and his first book is an entertaining and instructive exploration of the Chinese generation born after 1990.

Want to immerse yourself in a foreign culture? Take a cue from Dychtwald, who first leaves Hong Kong for “the real China” speaking “no meaningful Chinese” and brimming with garnered advice such as, “Don’t let the prostitutes steal your internal organs.” With admirable determination, he learns to speak fluent Mandarin, lives with Chinese roommates and survives multiple awkward situations.

Along the way, Dychtwald develops insights about everything from the obscure (the hugely popular “double-eyelid” cosmetic surgery, which creates a more “Western-shaped” eye) to the well known (China’s now abolished one-child policy) to the inevitable (sex). He discovers that contemporary young people in China and the United States have essentially identical dreams. But the journey to this point is a fascinating story, and Young China tells it well.

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

College students aren’t having as much sex as everyone thinks, professor Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Instead, most students are just talking about hooking up—and participating in a set of rituals that goes along with it.

Wade describes the cycle: pregaming in dorm rooms, dirty dancing at parties and then pairing off in bedrooms where actual sex may or may not occur. The next day, the events are discussed obsessively with friends. The pair who hooked up follow rigid rules, avoiding each other to prove the hookup was meaningless. The next weekend, the whole thing starts again. 

To compile specifics about sexual behavior, Wade relied on journals prepared by three classes of freshmen. These journals are predictably scintillating. It’s important to remember, though, that they were prepared for a professor and may therefore be regarded with some skepticism. Wade complements the journals with data from national surveys, dissertation studies and journalistic accounts. 

As a teacher at a residential college, I was not totally persuaded by Wade’s representation of sex culture on campuses—there are many students who opt into social circles with other kinds of rituals, and there’s more nuance and complexity in campus culture. Still, American Hookup could be a helpful conversation starter—and Wade’s takeaways about how to make the culture of hooking up kinder and more compassionate are well supported and important.

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

The stark numbers continue to arrive in our daily headlines: 5 million refugees fleeing Syria since the Arab Spring began there in 2011, 1,000 a day arriving by sea to the Greek islands. Germany and Sweden are swamped with new arrivals, while Hungary closes its borders. Nine hundred refugees cram onto a fragile boat that capsizes in the Mediterranean, trying to reach Italy. Seventy suffocate in the back of an Austrian truck. A drowned toddler washes up on a Turkish beach. The world looks on these people and describes them as everything from opportunistic job seekers to desperate asylum seekers, but nothing stops the flow of refugees. Who are they?

In The New Odyssey, journalist Patrick Kingsley, an award-winning migration correspondent for the U.K.’s Guardian, chronicles the journeys of the people behind the numbers. Hashem al-Souki is Kingsley’s reluctant Homer, forced to leave Syria in 2012 to escape imprisonment, torture and death. He hopes to lead his wife and three sons to a secure future in Sweden. 

Kingsley provides Hashem with a camera and a journal. The story that unfolds is intimate, terrifying and ultimately heroic. Along the way are ruthless smugglers, corrupt politicians, courageous locals, dedicated international aid workers, surprising mercies and deep despair. Facebook pages like “The Safe and Free Route to Asylum for Refugees” and GPS markers are the new lures and travel guides—if there is cell service and a way to charge a phone. Friends and families left behind must pay smugglers they cannot trust. 

Three years later, Hashem is still wondering what the future holds. His journey is a sharply etched reflection of the disparate refugee policies of the European Union, Canada and the U.S. The future it foretells may be what Kingsley calls “an abdication of decency” in a humanitarian crisis not seen since World War II.

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

In his typically colorful and entertaining style, Tom Wolfe brooks no argument as he boldly declares in The Kingdom of Speech that language is the attribute that distinguishes humans from animals. Speech, he proclaims in the book’s opening pages, is “the attribute of all attributes and is 95 percent plus of what lifts man above animal!”

Wolfe arrives at his conclusion after a whirlwind tour of the development of evolutionary theory. Darwin, Wolfe points out, fails to provide in The Origin of Species any clues to the way that natural selection explains the development of language. Wolfe humorously observes that “mildly negative reviews of his book hit [Darwin] like body blows, and the fierce ones cut him through to the gizzard.” 

Wolfe points out that in the 19th century, Max Müller and Alfred Russel Wallace challenged Darwin on the subject of language and natural selection, with Müller contending that language elevates animals in the fullest way. Although Darwin attempts to explain the rise of language as a part of the evolutionary process in The Descent of Man, he fails miserably, according to Wolfe, and, as a result, “in the entire debate over the Evolution of man—language—was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872-1949.”

Linguist Noam Chomsky—whom Wolfe calls “Noam Charisma”—rides in on his semantic white horse, introducing “universal grammar,” with which every child is born. Through his field studies with a small tribe in Brazil, one of Chomsky’s students, David Everett, concludes that speech is an artifact and explains “man’s power over all other creatures in a way Evolution all by itself can’t begin to.”

In the end, Wolfe declares that speech will soon be recognized as the “Fourth Kingdom of the Earth” alongside the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.

Stimulating, clever and witty, Wolfe’s little book is sure to provoke discussion about the role language plays in making us human.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the wise words of Winnie-the-Pooh, “[A]lthough eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” Tom Vanderbilt does know what this precious moment is called—today it’s known as “liking”
—and the bestselling author of Traffic breaks it down for us in an intensive investigation of what we like, why we like it and why sometimes it’s so hard to decide.

Drawing on voluminous research into the ways we like, and dislike, everything from art to music, Vanderbilt tries to pin down our preferences, something we think we know about ourselves but really don’t. We may be quick to hit the “Like” button on Facebook, but what that means turns out to be both subjective and situational. In You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Vanderbilt talks to the geniuses behind algorithm-based curation systems like Pandora, the food-science folks responsible for military rations and art historians who can predict your preferences in paintings. You’ll find yourself thinking that surely you wouldn’t be manipulated by cues like the color of your cola (clear doesn’t taste as good as caramel color to most folks), but as Vanderbilt’s evidence stacks up, you realize there are many unconscious social, environmental and cognitive reasons for your choices. 

You’ll also find that Pooh was right. One of the mysteries Vanderbilt unpacks is the phenomenon of satiety, and how it changes the taste of food. There are reasons the anticipation of a good meal is so exciting and the first few bites taste so good. Vanderbilt delivers the explanations with ample documentation and enough humorous asides to make his book deliciously palatable the whole way through.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Read it and weep. You’ll find it hard not to. Written by a Harvard sociologist, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has the character development and dramatic drive of a first-rate novel. The core of Desmond’s study was conducted in Milwaukee from 2008 to 2009 and focuses on the day-to-day agonies of specific people who were frequently evicted from their homes by private landlords. In most cases, rent took from 50 to 70 percent of the tenants’ monthly income, a situation that made late payment or non-payment inevitable—and always reason to evict.

What makes Matthew Desmond’s account so compelling is that he lived among the people whose travails he chronicles. Some of the victims—mostly black and often women with children—lived in the inner city; the others, overwhelmingly white, lived in a dilapidated trailer park on the edge of town. He also spent time with landlords to get their sides of the story.

Again and again we witness the tenants’ last-minute attempts to find rent money, negotiating with their landlords, sitting helplessly in court as judges rule against them, watching their possessions being tossed onto the sidewalk and explaining to their kids why they’re moving to yet another school. Desmond is clearly sympathetic, but he is no sentimentalist. He reveals all the blemishes of the dispossessed—their unwise ways with money, addiction to drugs and alcohol and casual attitudes toward birth control. Still, he knows that poverty seldom builds character.

Desmond argues that government-subsidized housing vouchers should be available to low-income families and that landlords should be required to accept them. “Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country,” he concludes. “The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1979, Iran became a revolutionary theocracy. Since then, to the outside world, the country has been identified with repression, false confessions, brutality, torture and worse. But as journalist Laura Secor demonstrates in her compelling, enlightening and often disturbing Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, there is another aspect of the country’s modern history, a “revolutionary impulse as complexly modern as the society that produced it.” These are the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens who exhibit extraordinary courage in endowing the Islamic Republic with their dreams, who embody “the soul of the matter, the experience of politics as it is lived.” They have not moved to overthrow the government but instead challenge injustice, encourage electoral participation and push the government to function in the best interests of the populace. 

Between 2004 and 2012, Secor made five trips to Iran, where she observed four elections. Her extensive research included interviews with over 150 people, both inside and outside the country, about conditions there. They ranged from journalists and bloggers to philosophers and political operatives, most of them activists and survivors of imprisonment and torture. Almost all of her interviewees have been forced to leave the country. 

The story of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the republic that followed “is not only—perhaps not even primarily—a story about religion,” she writes. It is about politics and identity, about social division and cohesion, the convergence of many streams of thought and activism.

Among the many examples of bravery and idealism profiled in the book is Abdolkarim Soroush, a lay theologian who argues that religious knowledge, like all human knowledge, is subjective and open to question. He believes the Islamic Republic made a fatal mistake in emphasizing Islamic jurisprudence over every other aspect of Islam. Soroush was seriously threatened because of his views.

Anyone who wants to better understand the modern history of Iran as it has been lived by people there should not miss Children of Paradise. It is an insightful mix of first-rate reporting, eyewitness accounts and intellectual history, told in a style that holds us in its grip from page to page.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A noted science writer and the author of two previous bestsellers (The Rational Optimist and Genome), Matt Ridley is no friend to central planning or the implementation of grand schemes from above. It’s better, he says, to facilitate the gradual development of objects and ideas as they adjust themselves to changing circumstances—in short, to evolution. To make his point, he asks us to imagine how maddeningly difficult it would be to design a system for feeding all the people of Paris. Yet, as he observes, it happens every day through the uncoordinated and unregimented actions of legions of individuals. Language develops the same up-from-the-bottom way, he says. So has the ever-changing code of laws under which most of the English-speaking world operates. His is a ringing, thoroughly secular rebuff to the notion that the universe is human-centric and unfolds according to “intelligent design.”

In support of his ambitious title, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, Ridley offers individual chapters on the evolution of the universe, morality, life, genes, culture, economy, technology, mind, personality, education, population, leadership, government, religion, money and the Internet.

While he concedes that leadership and a minimal level of government oversight are necessary for social stability, he is wary of their limitations. “The knowledge required to organise human society is bafflingly voluminous,” he contends, too much so to be the province of an enlightened few. “Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge—unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism,” he maintains.

But in setting up his bottom vs. top dichotomy, he draws too severe a line. Generally the ideas that the top tries to implement have fermented at the bottom—as have the current leaders trying to implement them. And top-down government planning has created advances unthinkable left to the private sector. In the U.S. alone, think of the Manhattan project that yielded the atomic bomb, the interstate highway system, land grant colleges and their enormous impact on agriculture and technology and even the government-designed campaign to curb smoking.

Evolution, as Ridley says, is “inexorable and inevitable.” But so too is knowing how to coordinate it and put it to best use.