Among the many flaws of the frenzied 24/7 news cycle is the lack of context for the latest breaking news story. That’s what makes New York University professor and historian Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America such a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fractious debate over immigration and the attendant controversy over a wall along the United States’ southern border.

Grandin’s compact survey of American history spans the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present, but at its heart is historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” which argued, as Grandin summarizes it, that “the expansion of settlement across a frontier of ‘free land’ created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism.” Relying on a rich trove of source materials, both primary and secondary, Grandin pointedly contends that this mythic “Edenic utopia” has now been eclipsed by the shadow of a concrete and steel border wall, “America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier.”

Whether he’s decrying the “Jacksonian consensus” over the means of westward migration, which promoted a ruthless regime “forged in frontier expansion and racist war,” or critiquing free trade agreements like NAFTA and post-9/11 American foreign policy, with its open-ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Grandin finds plenty of targets of all political stripes. But he reserves some of his harshest criticism of a country he says has “lived past the end of its myth” for President Trump and the segment of the American electorate he represents. “Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry,” Grandin writes, “a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.” 

Grandin concludes The End of the Myth on an even more ominous note, observing that future generations will face a stark choice between “barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” Regardless of whether one accepts Grandin’s Manichaean prophecy, with all the bitterness of the conflict it foretells, there is no escaping the need to come to terms with the painful legacy that’s meticulously revisited in this unsettling book.

In 1975, three young black men (two were teenagers at the time) were sent to death row after they were convicted of the vicious murder of a salesman outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite there being no physical evidence tying them to the crime, they were arrested and convicted solely on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy, Edward Vernon. Years later as an adult, Vernon recanted his testimony, and the three men were exonerated after spending several decades in prison.

Told with profound empathy and deeply researched history, Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America uncovers the shameful story of the longest wrongful incarceration in the history of the United States to end in exoneration.

In his debut, Washington Post journalist Kyle Swenson expertly unravels two connected stories: the personal histories of three innocent black men (Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu and Rickey Jackson) who were sent to prison for almost four decades for a murder they didn’t commit; and the history of Cleveland, a city embedded in an unmovable, corrupt system that allowed gross injustice to thrive. A formerly booming industrial town in the early 20th century, Cleveland was falling apart by 1975 from decades of neglect, systemic racism, poverty and police corruption. With dramatic, cinematic detail, Swenson connects this to a larger problem by showing how federal policies on both the war on drugs and the war on crime have devastated targeted communities in Cleveland and across the country, and have resulted in one of the most overburdened and draconian justice systems in the western world.

Though small reforms and cosmetic changes may be slowly lifting the burden of history, this book questions the very nature of the justice system—and whom it benefits.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, starred review, February 2019

Fans of polymath Maria Popova’s popular website, Brain Pickings, will find themselves right at home in Figuring, her audacious new work of intellectual history that focuses on the lives of a coterie of brilliant women, some well-known and others less so, whose gifts in fields like astronomy, literature, ecology and art have helped shape our world.

Popova’s goal in this book is to tease out the “invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and place.” Time and again her nimble mind and deep intellectual curiosity make those connections plausible and compelling, like the link that bonds 19th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, who discovered a new comet in 1847, to Vera Rubin, who became the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory in the 1960s.

For Popova, subjects like literary critic Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson and sculptor Harriet Hosmer are not disembodied intellects from the past. In describing the often frustrating courses of their personal—and especially romantic—lives, Popova exposes the tension between mundane human existence and the unrelenting demands of great science and art.

Though most of Popova’s icons flourished in the 19th century, she devotes considerable attention to a deeply sympathetic portrait of marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, whose 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, decried the indiscriminate use of pesticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement. Popova especially admires the way Carson “pioneered a new aesthetic of poetic science writing, inviting the human reader to consider Earth from the nonhuman perspective.”

Popova’s own mellifluous prose enhances her discussion of even the most arcane topics. She draws extensive quotations from primary sources, allowing her subjects to speak at length in their often eloquent, always fascinating voices. Figuring invites the reader to engage with complex ideas and challenging personalities, unearthing a wealth of material for further reflection along the way. 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the election of President Obama in 2009, many young black men and women saw hope in the promise of the American dream—the belief that hard work and unrelenting persistence guaranteed a seat at the table. But as the years passed, the envisioned path of upward mobility proved impassable. And yet, the reality of the lives of black millennials in a post-Obama nation isn’t a portrait of total despair. For Reniqua Allen, Eisner Fellow at the Nation Institute, the demystifying of the American dream represents a chance to abandon the expectations of white America and forge a new path. It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America is a portrait of young black people grappling with the enduring legacy of white supremacy. Combining nuanced reporting with the intimacies of personal experience, Allen showcases the lives of black millennials, which are rarely portrayed with accuracy in mainstream media.

Gathering the stories of more than 75 black Americans living everywhere from sprawling cities to contained suburbs, Allen dismantles the conditional terms of a lie that has been peddled for decades. The American dream says that the road to success is built upon meritocracy, but black millennials soon discovered that education alone couldn’t fully shatter institutional racism and systemic discrimination. Allen shares the experience of Michael, a former college athlete with a crippling amount of undergraduate student debt. Like many of his peers, Michael did everything “right.” But Michael lost his athletic scholarship due to injury before graduation. He was determined to finish his education, despite the mounting debt. Although he doesn’t consider his experience “a sob story,” it’s in line with the stories of many black Americans who followed the rules put in place by white America.

In this insightful book, the idea of the American dream is proven to be a fairy tale at best, and a nightmare at worst.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

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.