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NonfictionSelf-HelpScience

Rewire

Review by Linda Castellitto

Each section of neuroscientist and corporate coach Nicole Vignola’s Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change is titled with phrases that will sound familiar to readers bent on self-improvement: “Ditch the Negative,” “Shift Your Narrative,” “Boost the Positive.”

While those imperatives may not be new, the author’s explanations of how one might actually achieve those goals—via understanding and taking advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity—feel remarkably fresh, thanks to her knowledgeable, approachable voice and gift for making the complex clear.

An edifying mix of scientific research, personal anecdotes and real-world examples of rewiring done right provide aha moments galore as Rewire leads readers on a path toward change. Herself a reformed “stressy messy,” Vignola explains that we ignore the fundamental interplay between physical and mental health at our peril (or at least frequent frustration): “The brain is your hardware, and the memories, thoughts, habits and behaviors within it are the software.” For example, someone who’s not eating properly or getting good sleep will run on “low-power mode,” making it especially difficult to overcome negative self-talk, a tendency toward rumination and other long-held habits.

Similarly, while social media is vital to Vignola’s coaching practice and educational endeavors, it’s become a serious energy drain for so many—and a brain without ample rest or space to daydream isn’t receptive to rewiring. “Imagine you were on a treadmill for eight hours a day . . . and then in your lunch break you move on to the stationary bike . . . you’re not actually taking a break,” which stymies “brain energy renewal.” However, planned “strategic breaks” shore up the overworked brain; exercise releases myokines, which “aid in alleviating depressive symptoms, improving anxiety,” and more; and visualization techniques boost adaptability, as exemplified by Olympian Michael Phelps.

Vignola firmly believes that once armed with a deeper understanding of how the brain works, even non-Olympians are capable of effecting positive and lasting change. In Rewire she provides a “neuroscientific toolkit” rife with practical strategies and tips, data and experience to back them up, and an unwaveringly supportive refrain: “You can, if you so wish, create yourself. Whoever you want to be.”

In Rewire, neuroscientist Nicole Vignola provides a remarkable toolkit rife with practical strategies and tips for self-improvement.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The Wilderness of Girls

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

In her eerie and engrossing debut, The Wilderness of Girls, author Madeline Claire Franklin invites readers to ponder the sometimes blurry line between belief and delusion, and to consider what it means to be free.

Sixteen-year-old Rhiannon Chase is barely hanging on. Her financier father is neglectful and angry, and her stepmother’s cruelty has led to Rhi’s decade-long eating disorder. But suddenly, salvation: Her father is arrested for numerous crimes, her stepmother flees and Rhi is taken in by her late mother’s brother, Uncle Jimmy. She barely knows him, but he’s attentive and kind, and even secures her a part-time job at the Happy Valley Wildlife Preserve. 

Rhi feels at home and alive as she rambles through the woods. But when she encounters four wild young girls surrounded by a pack of protective wolves, she doesn’t know what to think. As for what she feels? “She understands their pain, their grief, their loss, even though she knows nothing about them. Her throat aches to join them.”

Franklin reveals the girls’ astonishing story one tantalizing layer at a time via rotating perspectives, flashbacks, news articles and other narrative moves. She deftly builds tension as the girls warily contend with a host of strange new experiences, from eating with utensils to being placed with foster families. Rhi steadfastly helps care for the girls as her fascination with their strange past grows. Was Mother, the man who raised them, a kidnapper and brainwasher or a mystical prophet? Could Rhi be the sister in Mother’s mantra, “When the heavens meet the Earth and your fifth sister has arrived, you will return to Leutheria and save your kingdoms”?   

Magic, folklore and contemporary society collide in The Wilderness of Girls as it sensitively explores the pain of trauma, the beauty of found family and the possibility that “There is room for the unknown, the undefined. There is room for magic, and wildness. There is room for so much more than any of us had ever dared to imagine.”

Magic, folklore and contemporary society collide in The Wilderness of Girls as it sensitively explores the pain of trauma, the beauty of found family and the possibility of magic.
NonfictionSocial Science

Undue Burden

Review by Deborah Mason

For over a decade, health care journalist Shefali Luthra has been reporting on reproductive rights for Kaiser Health News and The 19th. In Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, she details the public and private chaos that commenced when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in its 2022 decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Immediately after the Supreme Court issued Dobbs, the right to a safe and legal abortion was no longer protected by federal laws. Even before then, however, many states had been chipping away at reproductive rights, making access to abortion care nearly impossible and Roe almost meaningless. After Dobbs, state legislatures began passing increasingly draconian statutes illegalizing abortion. With clarity and passion, Luthra describes how Dobbs put American lives, health and autonomy at risk.

Luthra does an excellent job explaining the complex legal and political history of the anti-abortion movement, and her analysis of the impact of Dobbs is meticulously documented. But at the heart of Undue Burden are the stories of dozens of patients who sought a safe abortion in a post-Dobbs world. She focuses particularly on four people to illustrate the major themes of her book: Tiff, a high school student whose inability to access a timely abortion in Texas changes her life indelibly; Angela, a single mom who knows that another baby will make it impossible to provide her young son with a stable future; Darlene, whose pregnancy threatens her life, but whose Texas doctors can not give her the care she needs; and Jasper, a trans man from Florida forced to make a crucial decision before the state’s 15-week deadline kicks in.

Luthra also gives voice to the providers whose stories are rarely heard. We meet nurses and doctors hopping on and off planes to provide safe abortions to pregnant people desperate for their help, and doctors whose colleagues have been harassed and even murdered. Their dedication to their patients is both remarkable and inspiring.

In her empathetic book, Luthra capably zooms in on private stories and zooms out on the laws that have irrevocably changed lives, proving the feminist adage: The personal is political. Undue Burden is a rigorous and compelling condemnation of the unnecessary pain and sorrow Dobbs left in its wake.

 

Shefali Luthra’s Undue Burden is a rigorous and compelling condemnation of the unnecessary pain and sorrow Dobbs left in its wake.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Until You Find the Sun

Review by Alice Cary

By day, Aminah stays busy seeing friends and eating mangoes while basking in the sunshine of her tropical home; at night, she enjoys cozy times with her grandfather, Da, as he reads aloud stories of great adventurers. Aminah’s world suddenly changes, when her parents announce they are moving and Da will stay behind. “I am always with you,” he advises. “You will find sunshine wherever you go.” Debut author Maryam Hassan, a first-generation child of Pakistani immigrants, writes in a realistic, reassuring way about displacement in Until You Find the Sun, a story that will appeal to a wide audience of young readers, whether the changes they face in their routines are big or small. 

Despite Da’s encouragement, Aminah struggles to find any sunshine in the cold, bustling city of her new home. Her only source of joy comes from calls with Da, to whom she yearns to return. Anna Wilson’s buoyant art energizes every page, highlighting the stark contrast between Aminah’s hometown—bathed in bright colors and “full of sparkles”—and her dreary new world, drenched in dark blue shadows. Eventually, a new winter coat, as bright as the sun, gives Aminah “a new glittering glow in her heart,” while an overnight snowfall opens her eyes to fresh types of beauty and joy. 

A new friend further rejuvenates Aminah, allowing her to start enjoying her situation. Wilson uses patterns and shades of bright orange and yellow as motifs that connect Aminah to both her native land and to Da. Toward the end, Aminah gazes with anticipation at her vision of a wintry, icy-blue castle high on a hill, a symbol of new adventures waiting to be discovered.

Until You Find the Sun is a joyful book that celebrates new adventures while acknowledging the challenges that transition may bring. It’s also a reminder of the powerful bond between grandparent and child, which remains even when distance keeps them apart.

Until You Find the Sun is a joyful book that celebrates new adventures while acknowledging the challenges that a big move may bring.
NonfictionSocial Science

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Who wouldn’t want to keep reading a book that opens with these lines: “Yabom was lucky. She heard one flat tone, then an abrupt pop. A moment of silence, then the flat tone again. Thank God, she thought. The phone was ringing.” With the brisk pacing of investigative journalism, Mara Kardas-Nelson’s revelatory We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.

The idea behind microfinance originated with Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus, who theorized that microcredit could end poverty. He believed that by giving women a few dollars, they could start small businesses and take care of themselves and their families, and he engaged in this practice by giving a total of $27 to 42 poor women in a village in his native Bangladesh in 1976. Although Kardas-Nelson first learned about microfinance in the early 2000s, the word and the idea had fallen out of the zeitgeist by 2010. When she moved to West Africa in 2015, however, she started hearing about it again.

Drawing on interviews with more than 350 people, from policy makers to aid workers and loan recipients, Kardas-Nelson focuses on the stories of women who’ve taken microloans in hopes of pulling themselves out of poverty and building a sustainable future. Aminata, for example, took out a loan so she could make and sell yogurt, but she lost all her goods in the chaos that led up to the 2023 Freetown, Sierra Leone, elections. Kadija has used her loan to support her work as a hairstylist; while she complains about the high interest rates and fees, she feels lucky to be able to borrow at all. Yabom’s phone call that opens the book, and this review, was to a friend; she begged him to check on her young children after she was brought to the police station for failing to pay back her loan. No one has seen or heard from her since. As Kardas-Nelson points out, “microfinance is remarkably unremarkable: just another source of debt woven into a complex tapestry of lending and borrowing, an expensive, burdensome appendage they’ve learned to live with.” Yet, she observes, “Women are terrified of the loans and their consequences. And they are also terrified of life without them.”

With riveting storytelling, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky reveals the often heartbreaking human dimensions of international monetary policy.

The riveting We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky probes the perils and promises of microfinance for women in developing countries.
NonfictionMusicBiography

Traveling

Review by Brittney McKenna

What comes to mind when you think of Joni Mitchell? Is it her landmark 1971 album, Blue, or her foray into jazz? Her paintings? Her 2015 aneurysm? Ask a handful of people that question and you’re bound to get a different answer each time. Mitchell long ago transcended the status of a mere musician and became an icon, someone larger than life whose body of work is a cultural touchstone.

Leave it to critic Ann Powers to untangle the intricate web that Mitchell, 80, is still weaving today. In Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, Powers traces the artist’s life from childhood to the present day with curiosity, context and compassion, using Mitchell’s often nomadic existence as a template to try to understand her life and legacy.

She does this through interviews with those who know Mitchell best, like Graham Nash and Brandi Carlile, as well as through painstaking research into archival interviews and the myriad writings inspired by the “Both Sides Now” artist. Powers notably includes her own experiences with Mitchell throughout the book, too, as well as the difficulties and surprises she experienced while writing it. That real-time sense of grappling with Mitchell’s music and persona both grounds the book and offers food for thought, like when Powers tries to understand how Mitchell’s childhood bout with polio affected—or, crucially, didn’t affect—her artistry. Powers favors nuance over easy answers, and the book is better for it.

As always, Powers, a longtime critic most recently known for her work at NPR Music, writes with precision and a healthy dose of the poetic, a combination that makes for an immersive and enlightening read. This is no dry biography. Traveling is hardly the first book about Mitchell and won’t be the last, but it fills a necessary gap in the library of tomes dedicated to her work. Powers has crafted a travelogue of one of the greatest artistic journeys ever taken, and it’s a pleasure to go along for the ride.

 

Ann Powers’ biography of Joni Mitchell is a travelogue of one of the greatest artistic journeys ever taken, and it's a pleasure to go along for the ride.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

There Was a Shadow

Review by Julie Danielson

A child heads outdoors, walking through a verdant and hilly rural landscape, as the sun rises and a shadow appears as the “last hint of night.” Thus begins an evocative exploration of shadows, both literal and metaphorical, in There Was a Shadow, written by Bruce Handy and illustrated by Lisk Feng. 

Handy examines the omnipresent, big and small shadows of the natural world, from the noontime shadow a tree casts, to the subtle shadows that land on a face or water. Feng’s delicate, fine-lined illustrations bring these depictions to brilliant life on the page: The falling light casts the faintest shadows across the protagonist’s face as she stares straight at the reader. Feng then depicts sunlight shimmering upon rippling water, creating shadows in various shades of blue, which Handy describes as being “like a dance.” 

A “thinking shadow . . . you could feel but not see” also plagues the protagonist: the feeling of worry. But it’s momentary and soon darts away. As all the children head home, the shadows of late afternoon stretch until they disappear altogether with the setting sun. Dinner is served among cozy and comforting indoor shadows. Feng gives readers a peek of the night landscape with a palette of deep, rich cobalt and sapphire blues, while Handy closes the book with a satisfying and thought-provoking question about memories and dreams.

It is with tenderness and reverence for the interior world of children that Handy tells this multilayered story. There Was a Shadow flows like poetry and sparkles with Feng’s beautifully wielded, sun-dappled colors, which impart mood and mystery. It’s easy to get lost in these shadows, and when the journey ends, readers will want to head right back to the book’s beginning.

There Was a Shadow brims with Bruce Handy’s tenderness and reverence for the interior world of children and sparkles with Lisk Feng's beautifully wielded, sun-dappled colors.
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

This Is Why You Dream

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Dr. Rahul Jandial spends a great deal of time delving into the human brain—both literally, as a neurosurgeon, and figuratively, as a researcher, professor and author of the international bestseller Life Lessons From a Brain Surgeon and the memoir, Life on a Knife’s Edge.

In his engaging and information-packed new book, This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, Jandial enthusiastically explores the slumberous state, offering tips to help readers use dreams to reach their full potential around the clock. “By interpreting your dreams,” he asserts, “you can make sense of your experience and explore your emotional life in new and profound ways.”

Understanding the sleeping brain’s whimsy isn’t as simple as consulting a dream dictionary—which, by the way, Jandial does not recommend. That’s because dream dictionaries “cleverly offer a mix of vagueness and specificity that make it easy to shape your personal circumstances to fit any of [their] interpretations.” Rather, “Your dreams are the product of your brain at this particular moment in your life, and they change with the seasons of your life. To expect them to fall in line with others because they share the same central narrative, or the same visual element, is simply not realistic.”

We bring our unique experiences to the hours when the brain’s Executive Network, “responsible for logic, order, and reality testing,” turns off and the unfettered, judgment-free Imagination Network kicks in. But Jandial also reveals that surveys conducted 50 years apart in four different countries found that broader concerns (e.g., being chased, sexual experiences, school or studying) remained consistent in dreams across time and geography. This is evidence, he believes, that “the characteristics and contents of dreams are baked into our DNA, as a function of our neurobiology and evolution.”

For those in pursuit of personal evolution, Jandial says we can turn to dreams for harbingers of health challenges, including worsening symptoms of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, addiction and depression. Creativity can be boosted by training ourselves to remember dreams and “focusing outward when we awaken.” And advanced dream-wranglers will revel in two chapters devoted to lucid dreaming, another way in which Jandial believes readers can gain self-awareness, boost happiness and make our dreams even, well, dreamier. This Is Why You Dream is a fascinating, eye-opening dispatch from the world of neuroscience.

Rahul Jandial’s This Is Why You Dream is an engaging, eye-opening dispatch from the world of neuroscience.
NonfictionMemoir

The Uptown Local

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Shortly after Cory Leadbeater enrolled in Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in 2012, he landed any young writer’s dream job: personal assistant to famed author Joan Didion. The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion is Leadbeater’s loving tribute to the iconic author, but it’s also a complex family drama and an often painfully revealing story of his early artistic and personal struggles.

Leadbeater didn’t merely work for Didion for nearly a decade: He also lived in the back bedroom of her spacious and elegant apartment on the Upper East Side for the first two years of his employment. In addition to attending to the author’s needs, he spent countless hours in her company, listening to Chopin and The Andrews Sisters, reading aloud W.H. Auden and other favorite poets, and accompanying her on walks through the neighborhood and outings to art museums.

But even as Leadbeater’s affection for Didion blossoms in these quiet moments, he harbors an ugly secret: For several years, his father has been the subject of a federal mortgage fraud investigation that culminates in a guilty plea and five-year prison sentence. As Leadbeater joins his mother and brothers on monthly trips to a Pennsylvania penitentiary, he must deal with the shame of his father’s notoriety and come to terms with the realization that his costly private college education had been financed by criminality.

Leadbeater also frankly relives the mounting frustrations of his early literary efforts, haunted by a murderous character named Billy Silvers, the protagonist of one of the four unpublished novels he writes while working for Didion. Alongside these artistic challenges, he confronts his lifelong obsession with death, including persistent and frighteningly real thoughts of his own suicide, heightened by the sudden passing of his best friend from college shortly after his employment with Didion begins.

Leadbeater describes how only a few months before Didion’s death in December 2021, she experienced the pleasure of holding his newborn daughter. It’s a lovely moment of grace in a memoir that’s full of dark ones. Though Didion didn’t live to see this work, one senses she would have been equally delighted with her protégé’s literary talent and, not least, his unblinking honesty.

In The Uptown Local, Joan Didion’s assistant recounts his relationship with the iconic author, as well as his complex family history and obsession with death.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Stardust Grail

Review by Nicole Brinkley

Maya Hoshimoto swears that her time as a thief is behind her. She used to travel across the galaxy returning stolen artifacts to nonhuman civilizations, until a job gone wrong nearly cost both her life and the life of her best friend, the Frenro alien Auncle. Studying anthropological archives as a graduate student is much safer, but Maya is plagued with visions of a future only she can prevent, one seemingly connected to the doomed expedition of a long-dead space archaeologist who stole a Frenro artifact. 

With government officials breathing down their necks, Maya and Auncle tear off into deep space with the help of a new motley crew to find the so-called stardust grail first. If they can decipher the clues and figure out the hidden location of the relic, it could help save Auncle’s civilization and keep the interstellar gates around Earth open. But it isn’t long before Maya discovers how many people are keeping secrets and how close to war the universe is—and it may be up to her to decide who gets saved. 

Star Trek meets Indiana Jones in this anti-colonial space heist from The Deep Sky author Yume Kitasei. The Stardust Grail blends horror, adventure and fantastical whimsy into an expeditious adventure. Kitasei’s explorations of various nonhuman civilizations will fascinate, and her alien characters are so endearing. Auncle’s whimsical optimism—and love of hats—makes for an especially standout character. 

There are no easy answers to the moral and political quandaries presented in The Stardust Grail. Ultimately, it’s Maya’s hope she’s doing the right thing and belief in her friends that guide her through the story’s breakneck, if occasionally muddled, finale. Fans of Ryka Aoki, Ann Leckie and Becky Chambers will find much to love in this fast-paced, expansive adventure.

Star Trek meets Indiana Jones in Yume Kitasei’s anti-colonial space heist, The Stardust Grail.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Safekeep

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is set in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel is living in the house where she was raised after the death of her father forced the family’s move from the city and into a furnished house their uncle Karel found for them. Isabel lives a circumscribed and watchful life, guarding her dead mother’s things, suspecting the maid of theft and fending off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is closer to Hendrik, although she disapproves of his friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the steady stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even less. Until Eva.

The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. With her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the house, telling Isabel that Eva must stay there while he goes away on business and showing Eva to their mother’s room. Even under Isabel’s watchful eye, things begin to disappear—a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. More alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.

Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.
NonfictionLGBTQ+Biography

The Other Olympians

Review by Anne Bartlett

The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—dubbed the “Nazi Olympics” for providing an international platform to the genocidal regime—produced lasting memories, including the triumphs of Black American track and field star Jesse Owens and the “Boys in the Boat” rowing team that beat Germany in a dramatic upset. Less remembered is the wide speculation at the games that Helen Stephens, a U.S. runner who won two golds, might actually be a man.

She wasn’t. But the phony controversy was symptomatic of a panic in the Olympics establishment. Not long before the 1936 games, two top track and field athletes who had competed in international competitions as women said publicly that they were men (we would say now that they had come out as trans). A handful of Olympic leaders, including Nazi sympathizers, immediately drew the wrong conclusions and called for mandatory medical exams to determine sex prior to sports competitions.

In The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, author Michael Waters sensitively tells this forgotten history and reveals its modern resonances. The book connects the struggles of those two athletes, Zdenek Koubek of Czechoslovakia and Mark Weston of Britain, with the relatively open attitude toward queerness in pre-Nazi Central Europe, the resistance within the early Olympics movement to women’s sports, and the failed effort to boycott the Berlin games.

The Other Olympians is full of surprises for contemporary readers. For example, anyone who mistakenly thinks Christine Jorgensen was the first person to have gender affirming surgery will learn very much otherwise. But Waters’ detailed description of the outspoken Koubek’s life before and during his transition is the heart of the book. He emerges as an overlooked pioneer.

Koubek, Weston and other trans and queer people profiled here never wanted to compete against women after their transitions. Yet an entire regimen of sex testing was built on the unfounded belief that men were somehow masquerading as women to participate in sports contests. Decisions made in the late 1930s created sports competition rules that still exist today, as debate over trans athletes rages in school board meetings, courtrooms and legislative sessions. Waters doggedly chronicles where the debate originated and calls for what he believes is overdue change.

The Other Olympians doggedly chronicles the lives of pioneering trans athletes and the historically fraught 1936 Olympic Games.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Hamilton Scheme

Review by Roger Bishop

The difficult task of establishing a government for the United States required the development of a stable national economy that could deal effectively with a huge debt and other critical concerns. William Hogeland chronicles the twists and turns of the early years of the new republic in his drama-filled and insightful The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding. The nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, welcomed the challenge and had an approach he thought could not only save the country from catastrophe but also move it to become an imperial power. Hamilton’s plan, however, favored the elite, and failed to benefit the broader population that sacrificed much in the war. A scheme, Hogeland notes, “can mean simply a plan or design. But it can also mean a secret plan or design for nefarious ends.”

Hogeland writes of Hamilton’s biggest boosters and adversaries. Readers will not be surprised to see George Washington, who was “first and foremost a politically well-connected businessman,” among Hamilton’s supporters. On the other hand, the “flamboyant war profiteer” Robert Morris may be new to many readers. Coining the term “money connection,” Morris believed that the key to national greatness was “a consolidation of wealth and government.” His influence on the young treasury secretary was so strong that Hogeland contends that “without him the United States probably wouldn’t exist.”

Among those who disagreed with Hamilton was Albert Gallatin, “a brilliant, abstemious Genevan émigré” and treasury secretary to Jefferson and Madison who “[wore] himself down to the nub in the fetid summers of barely built Washington, D.C., trying to discover the antidote to Hamiltonianism.” Another was Herman Husband, an idealist, abolitionist and objector to the conquest of Indigenous North Americans’ land who was “so highly regarded by ordinary people in the remote western regions where he lived that he was . . . ranked by Hamilton as a danger above all others.” These finely drawn characters bring The Hamilton Scheme to life and show the divisions in postwar economic philosophy that are still at play today.

The Hamilton Scheme covers a lot of ground, sometimes at too fast a pace. However, it should be of special interest to readers who want to know about the beginnings of America’s economic history.

Drama-filled and insightful, The Hamilton Scheme chronicles the beginnings of America’s economic history.

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