Book Reviews: Spring 2026

Anna Faktorovich

Destructive Conservation Is an Oxymoron

Matthew Wolfe, Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage (New York: Viking, 2026). 356pp.

***

“The explosive true story of a secret group of radicals who launched a clandestine battle to save the planet—and what their legacy illuminates about the past, present, and future of the environmental movement. In the early hours of October 28, 1996, a driver in rural Oregon spotted flames rising from a federal ranger station. Firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze, but not before discovering a cryptic phrase spray-painted on a nearby wall: ‘Earth Liberation Front.’ Over the next decade, the Earth Liberation Front would carry out the most audacious series of politically motivated arsons in American history. Their targets—car dealerships, slaughterhouses, lumber companies, a $12 million Vail ski resort—were chosen to send a message: if the government wouldn’t halt the destruction of the natural world, they would. Despite causing no deaths, the ELF would soon be branded the foremost domestic terrorism threat in America and become the target of one of the FBI’s largest investigations.” This “is the… story of the ELF’s rise and unraveling, stretching from the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest to the Seattle streets of 1999’s legendary WTO protests to the paranoid aftermath of September 11. For years, members of ELF, many of them close friends…” (i.e. this is a biased account from an insider) “led double lives, meticulously planning and staging their attacks, using secret book clubs, dead drops, and anonymous communiques, while trying to manage interpersonal friction and stay one step ahead of a relentless task force of police and federal agents. Drawing on years of original reporting and interviews, including with reclusive activists breaking their silence for the first time, as well as thousands of pages of unreleased investigative files… Exactly what kind of resistance is justified?”

The chapter titles are engaging but cryptic: “Violent Aberrants”, “A Symphony of Car Alarms”. The opening “Prologue” starts in a strange place: a random guy is seized while he’s sleeping at an airport hanger. After suggesting he was completely innocent, the second page explains he was arrested because he was wanted due to his affiliation with ELF. In the middle of complaining about this guy’s plight in jail come environmental statistics are crammed in the middle of a long paragraph. After being “tortured” in detention, he is interrogated, and one supposes proceeds to confess. This is a reasonably exciting opening, but it is too spread out, or has too many empty phrases and repetitions to fully grab attention.

“Chapter 1: A Call to Arms” begins even more casually, and comes to a crawl. There is a digressive description of country life without enough details to make it realistic. How Tubbs, the lead character here, finds out about animal cruelty is rather dull: he reads an ad. There is digressive moralizing with a few horror-like descriptive phrases. There are awkward phrases, and a lot of hot air. There are mentions of “books” etc. being read, but no specific sources are cited for just what this guy read to convince him violence was the answer. He takes an internship for PETA, but then uses a list of his environmental arrests to get a better paying job in DC with the Earth First! Journal. Then, there are complaints this guy is not making enough, and has to dumpster-dive. Though when one stops at an average paragraph, it tends to include some new information that carries the story forward, and offers some facts. The writing is too casual: “after almost a year of occupation, the Clinton administration caved, retightening their restrictions on logging national forests.” And in the next paragraph: “God’s little creatures were having their skulls split.” Instead of describing who specifically is splitting what skulls, what specific legislation is changed etc., these types of generalities are used.

This is not the type of book I can read because its done is too conversational and fails to deliver enough new data, and research per paragraph to capture my interest in learning more about who sponsored these environmental terrorists, or why this author is seriously defending violent environmental action. It seems to be that any type of destruction to others’ businesses is counter to the point of saving stuff. Either you are for destruction, or for preservation. Clouding the actions of violent thugs as positive leftist activism by using digressive emotional rhetoric cannot convince either legislators, or the public in this cause. These guys could have become lawyers and filed thousands of lawsuits against these corporations. They could have become self-sponsored scientists and developed solutions, and done performance art to convince the public to buy them. Slaughterhouses and lumber companies were probably run by small-town businessmen who were barely surviving. After this damage, their low-wage employees had to clean this damage up by working overtime. And these businesses probably had to cut more lumber and slaughter more animals to make up for these losses. These types of books seem to be arguing for the opposite of what they are pretending to argue. On the surface, this seems to be an argument for supporting ELF, but subversively it is attacking their selfishness, and the irrationality of their actions.

Job Recruiters Are Clueless Too

Kelly O. Kay, and Jeffrey Sanders, Show Up to Win: How to Land the Leadership Role You Want (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2026). 182pp: ISBN: 979-8-89279-213-4.

*

I usually keep away from books about how to win jobs or how to lead, but during this hiring season I have had questions about these topics that I hoped this book would answer. But it does not. “To win top leadership roles, be as skilled at your job search as you are at your job…” Fortune-teller’s advice that can apply to any job search without being of any help. “As an ambitious leader, you have no problem closing a deal or hitting your numbers, but knowing how to take the next step, the big step, will prove more difficult. To land a top job, you need to be clear about the distinct value you bring to the role you want.” In other words: “know thy self”: again a fortune-teller trick. “Yet the higher you rise, the harder it becomes to get honest opinions about your strengths and weaknesses.” This is a book, and yet this sentence suggests it is a chatbot who is going to respond to cold-read what your individual problems are. “Backed by a wealth of insights from real-life case studies and interviews, this straight-talking book shows what the job search looks like for today’s senior-level candidates, what companies are looking for in candidates for their top jobs, and how you can identify and best position yourself to win the role they’ve defined. Drawing on more than three decades of experience and two hundred conversations per week with Fortune 1000 companies about executive roles…” These are some ultra-inflated claims.

The “Foreword” explains this book is basically paid advertising for a consulting business: the point is not explaining how people can find jobs with the included advice, but rather to funnel readers to become clients to pay these guys money to do the thinking for them. But if they cannot explain what distinguishes their method, then there’s corruption afoot, and not brilliant strategizing.

Things do not improve in the “Introduction”, as the first paragraph makes generalizations, and the second against sells this consulting business’ credentials. One interesting element that stopped me is “Figure 1-1: Career path evolution”, which compares a linear progression from VP to CEO, and then a “nonlinear” chaotic nonsense diagram where one point is a question mark, and there are random irrelevant terms such as “public”, “global” and “segment” (11). It seems an AI program was asked to make some kind of a diagram, and it did its best. 

This is one of the worst-written books I have seen in a while. It is unreadable.

Why Modern Mythologists Believe Myths Are Ancient

Just Knud Qvigstad and Isak Saba; Barbara Sjoholm, Tr., Sami Folktales: From the Near and Far Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, May 26, 2026). $39.95, 516pp, 6X8.25”, 24 b&w images. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1674-9.

*****

“The most comprehensive collection of Sámi folktales ever translated into English. From the vast region of Northern Sápmi comes Sámi Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds, the most extensive compilation of Sámi narratives recorded from Sámi storytellers ever published in English translation. Comprising more than 300 folktales and legends from Northern Norway, including many from the coastal Sámi and the Skolt Sámi of Eastern Finnmark, this volume illuminates an oral storytelling tradition and shares narratives told by fishers, farmers, reindeer herders, lay preachers, and teachers from the interior plateaus and valleys to the Arctic fjords. Originally recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Norwegian philologist Just Knud Qvigstad and the Sámi politician and folklorist Isak Saba, this collection spans centuries of storytelling in multiple genres, from migratory fairytales with kings and princesses to legends of ghosts and the Devil to fables with talking animals. A young lad from a poor family embarks on a quest through the wilderness to find treasure, receiving help from a wise female elder along his path. A Sámi boy falls in love with a háldi girl from another world, and they find a way to marry. A man carries sickness out of a village and stops the plague from spreading. Cunning foxes outsmart bears and humans alike. The villainous Chudes are tricked, foiled in their plans to steal from and kill the Sámi. People are turned into wolves, able to turn back only if they don’t taste the blood of a reindeer or if they are given cooked food. The ogre Stállu appears again and again, terrorizing the community until he’s outwitted or subdued. Rávgas, undead creatures of the sea, drag themselves out of the depths to lure others to their demise. With historical context that reveals the cultural resilience of the Sámi people, Sámi Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds honors these traditional narratives, often overlooked in other folktale anthologies from the Nordic countries. Translator Barbara Sjoholm’s insightful introduction describes Qvigstad’s and Saba’s backgrounds and their work in gathering and translating these essential texts, and she introduces Sámi storytellers Johan Aikio, Efraim Pedersen, and Elen Utsi, who contributed dozens of stories.”

This year I wrote comments and collected an anthology called Atheist’s Guide to Mythology. This seems to be an original translation because the Sami tales did not appear in the collections I consulted before choosing what to explain in my version. Norway is usually cited as the setting where Norse myths were written. The reference to the “oral” tradition suggests the same problem is behind these tales as with most mythology: it was probably written recently by fantasy writers and has been attributed as ancient myths to maximize profits from the sale of books. It is good that this blurb mentions the original recording was by 20^th century “philologist Just Knud Qvigstad and the Sámi politician and folklorist Isak Saba”; too many collections entirely leave such interventive sources out. But it trusts that these guys managed to collect “centuries” of stories, as opposed to being the fantasists who wrote these fictions. There is a broken telephone between generations: if these stories had not been put in writing before the 20^th century, they were written in the 20^th century. The reference to the Devil and the demonization of trickster characters gives this away as one of the colonial demonization of natives’ narratives common in international myths during this peak-colonialism period. Usually, when such philologists mention native authors, they tend to use mere inclusion of native names to give credibility to the authenticity of a text, without explaining who these natives were, or distinguishing between their voices by crediting specific stories. Another warning sign is that this anthology is divided by formulas common to such anthologies, including “Far World”, “Animals” and “Enemies”. If these stories can be broken by such themes, they were probably written by a propagandist who was replicating similar archetypes or character-types across myths attributed to places across the world.

In the “Introduction”, there is a summary that Qvigstad was the second person to “translate” Sapmi tales. There is no immediate explanation regarding what manuscripts he translated these tales from: who the original native authors were should be at the center of this authorship narrative. And these stories are credited as having been translated starting in the 1880s, when they were first published in 1927-9. In such cases, the point of the delayed publication tends to be to wait until all credited native contributors are dead and cannot object they had not contributed these stories. This editor does not even disbelieve there were “over eighty Sami individuals” who told these tales, without citing a list of who these people were. At least these 80+ names should have been cited somewhere? Are there 80 different handwritings in these manuscripts? No doubts are cast over the possibility of forging culture. And no doubt is cast over the folklorist having died before these tales were credited to him: a hint he might not have agreed to take credit. The editor describes coming across this book in 1997 and being captivated by these fantasies. She accepted that the “translators” had recorded genuine local stories and decided to translate this readable collection to make it accessible to the public (xviii). This is how these fantasies written by colonialists have been echoed as genuinely native, as opposed to native-demonizing across the century or so since there was an outburst of these profiteering mythological attempts. It is good to interest the public in reading fantasies. But I hope that my research will eventually succeed in explaining these types of collections are not genuinely native.

I use the term “native” here to refer to any people who were native to a region that has been fantasized about in myths; and specifically, those claimed to have continued to live in “native” ways long enough for their ancient “culture” to be recorded by such anthropologists. The point of such recordings tends to be to claim locals are backwards, or have ancient traditions, having failed to modernize.

This is a relatively insightful collection that offers a rather detailed introduction, in comparison with rival collections. It is also doing a genuinely good service in translating this collection from Norwegian to allow English forgery detectors to examine this text for clues of its illegitimacy. There are also some nice pictures, and even a scan of a manuscript page. Though I wish there were money manuscript pages, unless this one page represents the only handwriting: proving there is only one author (xxi). There are a few other pages, and they seem to represent some divergent handwriting styles, but are all written on modern paper. The stories themselves are too lightly written: they are basically pop-fiction. A modern reader who enjoys moder fantasies might find them to be similarly easy to read. There are even detailed notes in the back. Overall, this is one of the best mythology anthologies I have seen during my research. Those who enjoy fantasy, and scholars of mythology should either enjoy or learn from this effort. 

A Grammarian Who Relies on “Magic”, Should Instead Become a Magician

Sarah L. Kaufman, Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing (New York: Penguin Press, 2026). 204pp: ISBN: 979-8-0593831-46-5.

**

“Verbs are the underrated stars of the English language. They hold it all together. A complete sentence cannot exist without one, yet a single verb can create complete meaning. (See?)… This… exploration of language, grammar, and style… illuminates how all of us, professional writers and novices alike, can master the art of the verb and unlock the infinite potential of written expression. When she was the dance critic at The Washington Post, Kaufman was challenged to translate the dynamic language of movement into words. Verbs showed her the way. Good verbs power great storytelling; they leap off the page, fire our senses, and transform our perceptions… Strong verbs can make your own writing—be it an email, a text, a report, or an ad—more efficient and effective,” Kaufman “investigates theories of language that will change how you read and write. But this isn’t a grammar guide, and it surely isn’t a set of rules. Great writing comes from a mix of inspiration, passion, and intelligence—from your unique discernment and imagination…”

When critics recommend using the active voice, they probably really mean using more verbs or specifying actions, as opposed to if the subject is giving or receiving an action. (“Chapter 3: Take a Stand: Passive voice or active voice? On the morality of verbs and keeping your writing honest.” This is a strange moralization of a scientific grammatical problem.) While the subject is indeed important, the note that this book argues against rules and for intuitive writing contradicts the stated purpose. If a book discovers something new about language, it must explain this thing as a rule others can follow. If it argues that writers should intuitively know how to write, they do not need to read a grammar book to learn this.

The subtitle of the fourth chapter instructs writers to avoid adverbs and instead use verbs. The very long subtitles here are unusual, as they are chapter abstracts that otherwise are either only used in scholarly journals or antique fiction that included chapter summaries.

The “Introduction” opens with a cartoon that has a lot of text that is a bit difficult to read, and then a transcription of this content to explain the punchline that “Senator Kennedy’s” answer to a reporter did not have enough verbs. Instead of clarifying that the lack of a verb made the speech somewhat nonsensical, or otherwise raising the cartoon’s message with a scientific analysis of the grammar employed, the author then offers general pufferies of verbs. For example, there is a note that verbs do “not only energize your writing, they’ll streamline it”. But then an example is given with the comment that the verbs make the “scene” jump “to life”. The definition of “streamline” is to simplify, which is an antonym to liveliness (xvi). When puffing Fitzgerald’s verbs, this critic relies on “magic” because logic is contrary to the standard assumption there is greatness in the verb-heavy ending: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This is a poorly written cliché. 1. There are no boats or seafaring in this narrative. 2. It is referring to the non-linear structure of this novel, as Nick is narrating events in the past, and there are flashbacks, and delayed revelations. Ending with this means the author was focused on delivering this structure, as opposed to a coherent portrait of these characters actions. 3. Even the use of “we” is a royal we, as Nick is alone after going specifically back to the Midwest to live a simpler life, and thus gave up on fighting the current. Since these verbs are nonsensical, Kaufman focuses on the repetition of sounds between the b’s. Kaufman is deliberately persisting in this puffery despite evidence being to the contrary as if by puffing a puffed writer, they know their book is more likely to be repuffed by others. “If Fitzgerald had chosen common, humdrum verbs, his last line wouldn’t hit us physically and emotionally with the same force.” Kaufman indicates that a worst example would have been: “So we carry on, boats against the current, sent back ceaselessly into the past.” Carry and sent are somewhat less common than beat and borne but borne was not antique a century ago when this text was written.

This is an unreadable book for a grammarian. It just does not take language seriously enough.

A Digressive Pondering About Blackness and Publishing from a White Guy

Benjamin Fagan, Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers: Black Organizing and the Press for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026). ISBN: 979-1-5128-2923-5.

**

“The first book to focus on the newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass and their impact on Black organizing. A robust body of work has established the importance of print in general, and newspapers in particular, to African American culture in the 1800s. Such work regularly acknowledges Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) as one of the most influential newspaper editors of the nineteenth century, a judgment that Douglass and many of his contemporaries shared. But while recent scholarship has continued to expand our understanding of Douglass’s life and work, his newspapers remain largely understudied.” This “is the first book that explores the full range of Douglass’s periodicals.” It “traces the making and impact of the four newspapers edited by Douglass: the North Star (1847-1851), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851-1860), Douglass’ Monthly (1858-1863), and the New National Era (1870-1874). Fagan highlights how Douglass and his co-workers—which included Martin R. Delany, James McCune Smith, William C. Neil, and Douglass’s daughter Rosetta Douglass, among others—practiced versions of Black organizing as they made his newspapers. By teasing out the inner workings of Douglass’s newspapers, Fagan explores the complex and often messy practices of Black organizing that made these publications possible. In doing so, this book places Douglass’s newspapers at the center of the story of Black organizing in the nineteenth century. Douglass’s newspapers not only offered examples of how to organize for Black readers across the country, but he and his co-workers also participated in a variety of other kinds of Black organizations. Writers for Douglass’s papers put such experiences into print, and stories and lessons of Black organizing filled the pages of Douglass’s newspapers. They covered a variety of issues: abolitionism, school integration, politics both domestic and international, the Civil War, and the burgeoning Black labor movement, among others. Fagan’s close examination of the making of Douglass’s newspapers as well as what appeared in their pages chronicles how his publications were simultaneously examples and archives of Black organizing.”

My past research into publishing has indicated a monopolization of the press by underlying ghostwriters and ghost-editors who pulled the strings to favor propagandistic messages. Despite this glum background, cases where an author gained power by running their own publishing organization tend to be inspirational. Then again, I have found cases where colonizers, and pro-slavery activists used the bylines of people of a given color, ethnicity, nationality or gender to convince readers that stereotypes against this given type matches how they in fact act by putting these stereotypes into action, as a fiction writer would paint a stereotypical caricature. Thus, the stress on the uniqueness of “Black organizing” or a “Black” newspaper type is troubling. Humans are humans. Why would Black people run a newspaper differently? The introduction does not help explain this as it repeats generalizations about dualities between races and sexes. After paragraphs of insisting that Douglass’ papers were unique in their blackness, there’s a note that he employed both Black and white “workers”. There are too many empty phrases and generalizations without research, such as that Douglass “initially explored the role that interracial alliance could play in Black organizing”. Did he later decide to only hire one specific race? If not this was not a merely initial intention. Did Douglass think at all about race, or was he focused on founding and running a newspaper? Why is this writer attempting to mind-read what Douglass was thinking instead of quoting what Douglass himself said about his intentions?

The chapters are logically divided by the names of these periodicals. One technical problem is that clicking on this ebook’s notes does not lead to any notes. I tried to click on them to figure out the sources for this narrative. These notes are at the back of the book. One note is from a newspaper article that describes an “Anti-Slavery Soiree” given by Douglass. Another quote is from a letter from Miss S. Carpenter about Douglass. Only the 10^th note is from one of Douglass’ books: My Bondage and My Freedom, that argues that Douglass rejected funds from those offering to “purchase Douglass’s freedom”. He was against merely using his friends’ money to obtain “a printing press and printing materials, to enable me to start a paper” because he was concerned this would bias his intention to represent the interests of the enslaved. Instead of directly accepting money, Douglass’ friends then formed a fund that accepted money to start it on his behalf. This suggests an intention to mislead investors by suggesting money is not biasing the paper because an independent fund is being used. Since Douglass might not have had control of this fund, this would have put him under the control of whoever did control the fund.

This is a badly written book about a great subject. I want to learn more about Douglass’ periodicals, as the one line from him hints at some scandalous revelations, but it is too digressively written to be readable.

Indigenous Slavery Is Not a Secret, It Is Just Rarely Taught

Linford D. Fisher, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (New York: Liveright: W. W. Norton & Company, April 2026). $39.99: Hardcover; 544pp, 6.125X9.25”, 90 illustrations, 19 maps: ISBN: 978-1-24-09495-1.

***

“Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its ‘passionate prose’ (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans. From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. ‘This double theft,’ Fisher writes, ‘was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States—not just initially but throughout all of American history.’… Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.” It “also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community.”

The latter notes about how Natives fought these enslavements seems to be manipulating the narrative from tragedy into comedy, or is giving an uplifting tone, instead of allowing the tragedy to resound. If there are indeed cases of rebellion, why were these not specified in this summary?

The contents are logically divided by time periods, with interesting titles, such as “The Erased Caribbean Trade”. This is a useful book with illustrations, a timeline and an index, so it invites usage as a history textbook with students, who need these components.

Though the “Preface” starts absurdly by explaining the author has researched this topic so little previously they did not know Native people were enslaved previously (though he then clarifies that it was only new to him before he studied it in grad school). The blurb does stress the uniqueness of this fact, when he goes on to cite several previous books about this slave trade of Natives.

Then, the “Prologue” begins with a description of a powwow, instead of just jumping into the central subject. Finally, on page 4, statistics are given of the scope of the problem: millions of Indigenous people were enslaved. Basically, in 1492, Europe still had feudalism or enslaved its own people, but then it decided to enslave foreign people, while pretending to give freedoms to their own kind. Slavery continued to be legal in some parts of the world even near the end of the 20^th century. Colonizers’ primary reason for colonizing was to enslave populations to perform free labor in these new lands. This was not a strategy to suppress any specific people, but all people to profit a few theocratic rulers who pretend to be gods on earth who solely deserved to receive all the wealth without performing labor. The following pages digress into what this book is going to do, and about power in the US without admitting such simple realities. Anybody who is looking for history has to skip these opening chapters.

The history finally begins in chapter “One: Colonial Templates” that describes how Columbus believed he had found Indians, but dismissed them as savages (in contrast the point of finding India being to find India’s cultural and industrial products). There are quotes of how Columbus theorized these Natives could be turned into “good servants”. Absurdly this author is trusting the colonizers’ absurd account that on seeing his family being taken away a native begged Columbus to take him too. Obviously, this is propaganda that is suggesting natives wanted to be captured, or begged to be taken to Europe. There are no Native accounts of what happened during this period, so all histories are biased versions that relate what colonizers wanted historians to repeat into the present and beyond.

This is a thoroughly researched book, but there is nothing new here, other than what is new to this author because he is learning things for the first time. I do not recommend this as a history textbook because it would frustrate students, while making teaching it difficult for the instructor.

An Editor’s Grand Promises Undelivered

Budi Darma; Tiffany Tsao, Tr., Olenka (New York: Penguin Books, 2018; 2026). ISBN: 979-0-143138-53-2.

***

“A new English translation of an existential tale of obsession by Indonesia’s celebrated writer of absurdist realism. In Bloomington, Indiana, Fanton Drummond’s life changes when he encounters Olenka Danton in an elevator. Infatuated at first sight, Fanton begins to see Olenka everywhere, from bus stops and parks to the imagined settings of his mind’s eye. Soon they begin an affair, and Fanton steps deeper into Olenka’s mysterious world. But one day, Olenka vanishes. Fanton’s subsequent search for Olenka becomes an existential journey filled with tragicomic twists and introspective musings on the meaning of life, all through which Fanton realizes that he knows little about Olenka, and even less about himself… Budi Darma foregrounds the absurd monotony of everyday life—and the meaninglessness it masks… The novel, layered with literary and visual references, blurs realism and absurdism, fact and fiction, tragic and comic, to probe the human condition and pinpoint our common plight.”

To clarify this is the first English-language release of Budi Darma’s Olenka (1983), originally written in Indonesian. Darma (1937-2021) was a pop and academic Indonesian writer, who moved to the US with help from grants. This explains why the setting of this Indonesian novel is in the US. Given that I have not heard anything about Darma in the past, this type of summary would have helped this blurb. Some background is offered in the “Introduction”. The opening paragraph curiously explains that it took Darma three weeks to write this novel after meeting a mother of three boys in an elevator (this account is also provided in the afterword by Darma). The editor explains that this novel had a few strange features for fiction from the beginning, including annotations. Then there is a summary of its non-linear narrative. This intro is relatively dense with explanatory information, so it should be helpful for readers and critics who need an introduction before they learn more about this work to research it. The afterword acknowledges the absurdity of such elements’ need to puff their own creator. Darma notices that he is really writing a “dime-novel” and is not aspiring to anything much “nobler”, as he experiences a “catharsis” or “a revulsion at one’s very self.” And the editor clarifies this is referring to this novel’s study of human narcissism or love with themselves.

These front-matter parts raised the bar very high for what I expected from this novel. But “Chapter 1: Three Scruffy Children” proves it is indeed a “dime novel” or pop fiction written in a minimalist or simple style with choppy paragraphs, such as: “‘Why?’ I asked.” It just describes this woman in the elevator and her “scruffy children”. There is nothing here to attract readers to explain why this character becomes obsessed with this woman enough to keep writing about her across this novel. The most detail offered mentions common objects such as an apple or a sandwich.

This is not a brilliant novel that takes fiction to a new height. I do not recommend teaching, or reading this work. But I do recommend reading the introductory matter because it does a uniquely good job of selling this book, though the text itself does not live up to this extraordinary promise.

Digressions About Philosophy, or Maybe Stoicism, or Whoever Is Stoic…

Manly P. Hall, The Book of Stoicism: Essential Texts on Stoic Philosophy (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2026).

**

An “anthology of Stoic wisdom illuminating the enduring power of resilience, reason, and virtue. Featuring works by renowned thinkers such as” Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), Charles Harold Herford (1853-1931), William L. Davidson (1746-1781), and Gilbert Murray (1866-1957). These are not at all the scholars associated with stoicism, but rather have merely compiled historical essays on Stoicism. Classical stoics are: Seneca, Epictetus etc. Why are critics of stoicism being called stoics? “This anthology offers readers a comprehensive exploration of Stoicism’s core tenets. From the ethical frameworks that guided ancient sages to reflections on Stoicism’s influence through the ages, each essay provides valuable insights into living a life of purpose and equanimity… The selected texts discuss the practical applications of Stoic principles, the contrasts between Stoicism and other philosophical schools like Epicureanism, and the historical context that shaped Stoic thought.” Epicureanism is a near-antonym to stoicism, as it focuses on pleasure, materialism, chaos, the indifference of gods, and withdrawal from politics. These scholars did contrast these schools, but in a way that simply both with the logical fallacy of a false duality, when there is a spectrum of related theories. The goal of this book is to enhance “understanding how Stoic philosophy has been interpreted and applied over time.” Specifically, there was a shift from theology to psychology with Davidson and Murray. But mostly later critics simply added more confusing rhetoric to say the same thing, such as convoluting political duty with literary metaphor. Given this focus on how the rhetoric about stoicism changed about its convoluters, readers are not likely to find practical advice here on how to “navigate life’s challenges” as the blurb promises.

This is also a very unfinished draft of a book, with front matter missing, and a strange “Excerpt” without an explanation of who wrote it. And it is oddly divided not by these four thinkers, but into sections on “logic”, “ethics” and the like themes. Then a section generally digresses about “Philosophy Among the Greeks and Romans”, without specifically identifying examples of this philosophy, or the point of this section.

This is yet another unreadable book. The author might have read it, but nobody else can penetrate its depths while remaining conscious.

Oxymoron: Government-Sponsored Mercenaries

Christopher M. Faulkner, Raphael Parens, and Colin P. Clarke, Moscow’s Mercenaries: The Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026). 340pp.

****

“The Wagner Group emerged from Russia’s shadowy criminal underworld in 2014 and soon became one of the world’s most infamous private military companies. Led by the provocative oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner developed into a key instrument of Russian power projection, with deep and direct ties to the Kremlin.” This is a common simplification of this group that shifts the fault away from private business actors and onto the Russian state. But Wagner was not founded by Kremlin, but it did use secret Russian state funding, and its training facilities and arms. It began as a mercenary unit that employed some former Russian military officials. It is claimed to have been designed to give deniability to the state by being a private unit, despite Putin admitting to sponsoring it with around a $1 billion just in the year between 2022-3, leading up to the absurd rebellion that ended this direct state funding, and thus immediately dismantled this otherwise fund-less entity. “Its mercenaries fought on the front lines in Ukraine, propped up regimes in the Middle East and Africa, and exploited chaos to secure lucrative resource contracts before Prigozhin’s mutiny against Moscow in 2023 brought him down.” It attempts to expose “how a shadow army built an empire that seemed to have no end in sight until it turned on its masters. Drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews,” it “offers a comprehensive examination of Wagner’s inner workings: its hybrid structure, battlefield tactics, propaganda campaigns, and connections to the Russian military. From Ukraine to brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mali, and beyond, the book shows how Wagner evolved into a global criminal syndicate and reveals why its ambitions led to a fatal collision with the Russian state.” My own recently completed book on Epstein shows how the CIA, Mossad and other intelligence and military agencies around the world traditionally fund private companies to cloak their illicit activities, as highlighted in the Iran-Contra scandal. While such attempts are internationally common, these news stories and books about Wagner tend to use this as an opportunity to demonize Russia as uniquely corrupted. Despite this shortfall, it is very important to study the actions of such players; by understanding how these work in one country the media wants to demonize, we can learn about how they work in the countries the international media prefers to defend. This negative spin is apparent in the line that this book dives into “the erosion of international norms, and how authoritarian regimes outsource violence.”

The “Introduction” opens with a rather complex explanation of how the media incorrectly covered what seemed to be the French military forces burying bodies of dead “civilians” in Mali to coverup their inability to help this region, when in fact this was a Wagner operation designed to discredit French interventionism. This is a curious perspective that does grab attention, but it is too convoluted to clarify who’s who and to what benefit this was to Wagner. Instead of answering these mysteries, the author then summarizes the broad topics covered.

There is a helpful diagram of “Russian PMC timeline” from 1997 (official escort in Iraq) to 2023 (mutiny). It shows the commonality of such military deniable operations in Russia: this proves that Wagner should not be singled out as a solitary villain, as plenty of similar actors are still operating internationally without media coverage. And there is a more useful map with labels that explains the many parts of the world where the Wagner group staged operations, as well as where they trained, or spread disinformation campaigns (15). The following chapter briskly accuses Wagner of having committed “acts of terrorism” (18), without immediately giving examples to support this. Then there is a definition of what defines a mercenary group, before these are claimed to have been partly met. Since Wagner was sponsored with billions from the government and had no funding when it stopped receiving this funding; then, the conclusion should have been that it was not a mercenary group, but a “secret” part of the Russian army that it was denying was acting on its behalf, and was thus probably making a corrupt profit for its operators by not needing to account for where most of this dark funding was going (it was mostly going into the founders’ pockets, or was funneled to sponsors elsewhere).

There is insufficient mentions here of specific monetary evidence? How much money is being spent? Where is it going? Who is profiting? How are they profiting? There are general digressions about “deteriorating or limited state legitimacy” (31). This is not arriving at the meet of whodunnit, and what they did. Though there is another diagram that clarifies the differences between Wagner and other PMCs and other types of entities that explains how Wagner allowed for high profits from weapons sales, and extractive industry (33).

There is meat on these bones, but it takes a lot of labor for a reader to find it. This book is written for scholars of this subject who want to hear a digressive lecture to think through these problems. A student who is new to this history is going to be lost and frustrated trying to read through this. But it shows more insight and consideration for this delicate subject that most books about Wagner.  

The Hustle of Selling Books About Eating

Robin Arzon; Johnny Miller, Ph., Eat to Hustle (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2026). 260pp, index: ISBN: 979-0-316594-27-1.

*

“…Arzón teaches anyone looking to amp up their daily protein how to get it—plus fiber and energy-giving carbs—from easy-to-love plant-based recipes.” This is a nutritionally absurd premise: only fat is missing from the triangle of the three possible types of macronutrients, and fiber is a type of carb. “Robin includes recipes straight from her home kitchen, designed to keep you fueled throughout the day—whether that’s pre-workout, post work, or to satisfy those midday cravings. Chapters and recipes include: Morning Routines: Protein Matcha Latte…” Matcha is a powdered tea in Japanese. This is not mentioned in the brief recipe, which merely repeats “matcha” as an ingredient called “matcha powder”; there should have been at least some mention this is a tea, but the entire page lax the term “tea”. “Veggie & Pesto Frittata Skip the Lunch Salad: Creamy Alfredo Pasta”. There is a giant title-page that begins by warning readers she is not a “lunch salad girlie”, but in parenthesis there is a mention that “dinner salads” are on pages “120 to 124!” The photo opposite this title is of a salad over rice, and topped with beans, so this is a triple negative. And this is absurdly followed by a soup recipe. And this recipe lacks the details to be applicable, as it just asks users to use a “Dutch oven” and to toss a bunch of stuff in it, and wait “about 15 minutes” (67). The blurb stresses this book is written by a “registered dietician”, and recipes are indeed accompanied with “macronutrient breakdowns”, but there is no logical reason to avoid any given macronutrient. The numbers are a minor element when a reader is interested in learning the difficult art of cooking or the science of nutrition beyond this simple math.

This book would frustrate chefs who need to learn some original cooking method, and general readers who need guidance to get started. It is written in a chatty way, with most of the pages left blank: it is designed for casual anti-readers. This is not a book I recommend for anybody.

Katherine Mansfield Has Been Over-Puffed

Katherine Mansfield; Sloane Crosley, In., The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Modern Library: Random House, 2026). $19.

**

“A… collection of stories exploring class, relationships, and the beauty and banality of ordinary life by an underappreciated master of the form, with an introduction by bestselling novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley.” Her collections became NYT bestsellers. Her novels did not achieve bestseller status, so this is an undeserved puffery. “In New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield’s brief yet blazing literary career, she became a pillar of early-twentieth-century modernism, and left behind her own dazzling body of work.” This is an incredible string of exaggerated pufferies without clarifying proof. This collection “includes her two major collections of short stories, Bliss and The Garden Party, in their entirety… In these stories, Mansfield explores themes of class and social dynamics, sexuality, and family and domestic dramas, all captured in crystalline, slyly humorous vignettes. In ‘Miss Brill,’ a young woman dons her finest fur to stroll through the stately Jardins Publiques, only to be cut down by a stray remark.” While Mansfield is a traditionally or classically puffed writer, is there really anything puffery worthy in these texts? What is Publiques? This reference suggests it is something important, but international readers would miss the meaning. It is French for: public garden. The context suggested it was a mall. This singular foreign phrase is surrounded by a trite vocabulary that describes “a glass of iced water”, some drifting “leaf”, but mostly keeps returning to this woman’s interest in her own furs. This dead animal is discussed as biting its tail. There’s some pondering about its underpainted nose. This is all a bunch of nonsense. The mention of other people just notes there are “a number” of them. Who are they? Why are they there? There’s barely a mention, other than the interest in some other person’s “new coat”. People are simplified to their gender, and if they are wearing a coat or not. The point of this story seems to be an ad for coats. The blurb suggests this walk in the park drives this woman to suicide, but in a tragicomedy ending she (or perhaps the dead animals her coat is made out of) merely starts crying. “In ‘A Cup of Tea,’ a rich woman is moved to help someone less fortunate than herself, and finds that her charity comes at a cost.” There are 19 repetitions of the phrase “cup of tea” in this collection, and only 4 of these are inside this story with this title. And this story starts with the sexist sentence: “Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful.” She is also basically called a “young” idiot who married out of general sense this is what people did. Instead of ending with some deep reflections about charity, the concluding sentences echoes the sexism of the opening: “am I pretty?” Nobody should be reading this book to find “great” classical writing. It does not even reach the standards of modern pop fiction. “Mansfield (who married twice and was romantically involved with both men and women) often turns her discerning eye to romantic relationships: in ‘A Dill Pickle,’ former lovers meet by chance; in ‘Bliss,’ the exuberant hostess of a dinner party discovers a shocking truth about her own relationships… Mansfield was also a brilliant writer of children, as in the classic coming-of-age tale ‘The Garden Party,’ and her masterful triptych of New Zealand stories, ‘Prelude,’ ‘At the Bay,’ and ‘The Doll’s House.’ It is ultimately through the eyes of her youngest characters, their disappointments as well as their sense of wonder and openness, that we see the possibilities in our ordinary world.”

After reviewing these stories briefly, I believe Mansfield should not be taught to students at any level. She has been over-puffed and does not deserve to be worshipped by academics. Teaching these stories in school tells modern writers they should drop their standards to this level, instead of giving them something to aspire to.

A Subversively Anti-Critical Race Theory Book

Isiah Lavender III, Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction: Future Pasts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, May 19, 2026). Hardcover: $54.95: 252pp: ISBN: 979-1-512829-33-4.

*

“An analysis of US science fiction, through the lens of critical race theory, that illuminates how the genre offers new directions for serious appraisals of race and racism…” It “takes seriously the theoretical, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities inherent in the genre of science fiction toward challenging perceptions of race, ethnicity, whiteness, and Blackness in US culture. To do so, he examines works by a wide variety of science fiction writers exploring racial themes—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson (whose Pym [2011] is a direct challenge to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket [1838]), Derrick Bell, and others. Locating racial contexts, social categorizations, and cultural patterns in US speculative fiction, Lavender employs the tenets of critical race theory to sight the unanticipated things the genre might have to say about race at the intersection between imaginary laws and how we, as readers, partake in this imagining. Recognizable science fiction tropes—such as alien contact, time travel, contagion, generation starships, the near future, alternate history, climate change, among others—constitute science fictional novum. The novum is the new thing, invention, or novelty introduced into the fictional world that deliberately functions as the catalyst for the change made in the fictional world, differing from the reader’s world. Lavender coined the term noirum to represent the legislative innovations prompted within the fictional world to cope with, if not to control, the impact of the novum. Whether it is a make-believe amendment, imaginary federal court ruling, fictitious executive order, or something else entirely, the noirum identifies the ways in which these powerful science fiction motifs are organized around question of race.” It “analyzes the ways in which science fiction has engaged with institutions and the law, offering narratives or concepts, or both, that uphold the racial status quo or fictional alternatives to existing legal structures. Bringing critical race theory and science fiction together, Lavender highlights stories that not only counter the dominant narrative of white supremacy but also envision a future in which people are united in full colored racial consciousness against dehumanization of any kind.”

This book has a uniquely grotesque cover that looks as if somebody attempted digital redrawing for the first time and failed.

It opens with a strange quote from Du Bois that suggests this is a subversive negation of critical race theory: “How does it feel to be a problem?” The “Introduction” also starts pessimistically with a quote from Butler: “What good is any form of literature for Black people?”

The Contents are not useful, as the author reuses the “noirum” term they “invented” repeatedly. The intro defines it as something that “represents the initial legal response by some kind of government body to a science fictional event that generates the storyworld envisioned by its author” (1). This is absurdly convoluted because it is mixing the reality of the law with the non-reality of what happens in fiction. Chapters are also divided by strangely narrow categories, such as “Cyberfunk”. There are only five chapters, and another one of them is on “Confinement Narratives”. The discussion throughout is confused by the use of a lot of acronyms, and a lot of theory that cyclically does not arrive at clarity. Why is this writer focusing on how governments respond to science fiction? Is it recommending this genre should be censored by the government? Realizing that this stuff is nonsensical, a few paragraphs later the author screams at the reader: “Don’t check out on me” (4)! This section ends with a general hope that in the future there will be “racial consciousness” that is “against dehumanization” (7). But why does this point need to be repeated?

“Chapter 1: Precursor Noirums” begins by starting and restarting an absurd pondering about the meaning of the year 1976, before puffing Derrick Bell’s CRT essay, and a bunch of other famous contributors to this theory.

This is generally an unreadable book. There are no type of reader that can benefit from it. This is a very important topic. It needed to be handled with care and attention. Instead, this is a subversive anti-CRT book that attempts to make it incomprehensible to repel readers from being interested in pursuing CRT further.

Golding’s Novels Are Over-Puffed: Realities of War Are Missing-in-Action

William Golding; John Gray, Fr., Free Fall (New York: Penguin Books, 2026). 230pp: ISBN: 979-0-143138-80-8.

***

“Sammy Mountjoy rises from poverty to become an acclaimed visual artist. He is then swept into World War II and somehow, somewhere, he loses his freedom—as a prisoner of war, through torture, undergoing captivity in total darkness.” This is a very powerful storyline. But how is it handled? I searched for a description of this cell Sammy was kept in. There is a mention of a “blacked-out cell” that made Sammy feel “terror”, so much so that he can barely “remember” anything about it. There are almost no specifics to help the reader visualize this space, or what this experience was like, as if the author is writing unresearched horror (4). There are more details offered about a random house that is too “cold” due to a lack of “central heating” (133). Later there are some specific mentions of “Nazi bastards”, and a general “cell… with concrete walls and floor and a wooden door. Perhaps the most terrible thing was the woodenness of the door, the sense that they did not need steel in their power but kept me there by sheer will of Halde. Perhaps even the lock was a fake…” (139). These are curious digressive thoughts, but they seem to be designed to keep the reader from realizing the author does not know much about what this place was in fact like. The writer has introduced the idea of a wooden door, when perhaps if some research had been performed, he might have learned it was a steel door, according to accounts from those who were in fact imprisoned. Choosing this heavy subject but failing to paint it realistically detracts from an opportunity to have explained WWII from an insider’s perspective. By instead writing about the horrors happening in a confused mind, the writer has favored scaring readers without informing them.

“As he retraces his life, the narrative moves between England and a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. But have those accumulated choices also deprived him of his free will?” This sounds deep, but it is just referring to Sammy himself becoming a sadist through this torture, which he realizes when he seduces and discards Beatrice. He also expresses that he is not free not to believe in god because his teachers had made his “mind… up for me”. How is this deep or useful? Yes, theology is taught and then accepted without “free will”. This might be somewhat interesting but ideas of this sort are buried in digressions about this and that, instead of exploring such points with depths.

This set of reviews includes three novels of William Golding’s (1911-1993) because Penguin Classics has released this set together. According to their bio, Golding attended Oxford, and published his first poetry collection at 23, before joining the Navy in WWII, and then writing the main novel of his that is read in schools: Lord of the Flies (1954). This novel depresses me whenever I hear mentions of it because it basically describes the normal state of kid-eat-kid antagonism in schools, while making it seem as an aberration that happens from the isolation of being on an island.

There are also almost no front or back matter to explain this or the other Golding novels to readers, who might otherwise lack any background to understand why these have been categorized as “classics”.

An Unrealistic Story Because It Did Not Happen

William Golding; Marlon James, Fr., Pincher Martin (New York: Penguin Books, 2026; 1956). 178pp: ISBN: 979-0-143138-79-2.

***

“Drowning in the freezing North Atlantic, Christopher ‘Pincher’ Martin, temporary lieutenant, happens upon a grotesque rock, an island that appears only on weather charts. To drink, there is a pool of rainwater; to eat, there are weeds and sea anemones. Through the long hours with only himself to talk to, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate, piece by terrible piece.”

The “Foreword” promises the ending of this novel pulls “the rug out from under you”, as this is “one of the most devastating endings in all of” 20^th century “literature”. Turning to this ending: the protagonist, Pincher, had drowned moments after his ship was torpedoed: we are to believe a novel of digressive ponderings could be written in a few moments before death. Even if this was tragic, the casualness of the final conversation contrasts any tragic feeling this might have generated. One character informs another on studying the body: “Don’t joke sir. That was unworthy of you.” And this is followed by a joke about this structural time-compression of this narrative, as a character “looked away at the place where the sun was going down—seemingly for ever.” Then, there is repetitive and empty chatter about occasionally offensive topics such as: “All those poor people—” (161-3). 

Given the unreality of all events, it makes sense there is no realistic detail in how this character ends up on some “slap of rock” slips and falls into an abstract “triangular hole”, with only “a smear of rainwater”. If this is a fantasy; then, the author does not have to research what it is like to be moored. He can just babble about this and that fantastic version of how this might have played out, and what one might think from the comfort of a writer’s office.

This is not a readable or a good book. Humanity needs to write better books. Maybe people are incapable of better writing. So maybe AI will do better in the future.

Homo Sapiens Genocide Neanderthals

William Golding; Ben Okri, Fw., The Inheritors (New York: Penguin Books, 2026; 1955). 202pp: ISBN: 979-0-143138-78-5.

***

“William Golding considered The Inheritors his finest novel, a beautifully realized tale about the last days of the Neanderthal people and our fear of the ‘other.’ The action is revealed through the eyes of the Neanderthals, whose peaceful world is threatened by the emergence of Homo sapiens. The struggle between the simple Neanderthals and the malevolent modern humans ends tragically. Featuring similar themes to Lord of the Flies, although with very different content, The Inheritors is about the breakdown of a civilization and uncompromising savagery.”

Either Golding or the editor opens this book with a racist quote from H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History that describes Neanderthal man” as having the characteristics of “extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness…” This was part of the propaganda that European colonizers used to enslave and de-land peoples across the world: it portrayed them as others, as Wells does with these Neanderthals. Given that the theme of this novel is a satire about how it is really us Homo sapiens who are the barbaric aggressors, it is a bit strange to open with this quote that argues the opposite; though satire does require opposites. 

The “Foreword” offers some help in mentioning this novel was “written in twenty-nine days” but then adds that he “spent four months rewriting it”.

The central concept in this novel is the strongest out of these three Golding novels. It is indeed interesting to imagine how Neanderthals would have died out. Though modern science has proven that humans have a percentage of Neanderthal genes, so we are partly Neanderthal, and Neanderthals were never exterminated in a racist genocide. Imagining this racist scenario suggests such genocides are in out genes, as opposed to being an abnormality artificially created by modern interests.

Chapter “One” opens with a very simple description of a primitive running man. Golding seems to have chosen this primitive subject to avoid layering this narrative with complex descriptions: if these primitive people did not have words to describe something, he could just not describe it. “Lok’s feet were clever. They saw.” These simple words are occasionally layered into convoluted sentence structures, but otherwise, this is just very simple descriptions. The story does not start with a battle, but rather with these general scenes of primitive people living primitively. Thus, few readers are likely to get through these pages. If this book was assigned in a literature class, students would be very frustrated and would show their discontent in class discussions.

This seems to be the worst of these three Golding novels, despite its promising premise. I hoped to find it excellently executed, as this topic deserves a dense realistic portrayal, and it has not yet been approached by others. This means future writers have ground for digging in this thematic direction.

A Fiction About a Lunatic and a Saint

Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Pilot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy (New York: Penguin Random House, 2025). ISBN: 979-0-593187-10-4.

**

The “story of the assassination of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the deadly game of cat and mouse that preceded it. On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as Jacques Mornard into his study. Mornard waited for Trotsky to sit, then smashed an ice pick he had hidden in his raincoat into Trotsky’s skull. For over a decade, Trotsky’s greatest enemy, Joseph Stalin, had been trying to arrange his murder. Stalin’s agents had hunted him across Europe and into a lonely, bitter exile in Mexico.” This summary could have been more intense if it explained these specific earlier attempts. On May 24, 1940, there was a machine gun raid by Mexican Communist Party members who stormed Trotsky’s villa. It is absurd that Trotsky and his wife survived all this gun fire by hiding in a corner. This suggests that Trotsky paid these guys to leave, but they inflicted a lot of damage to also be paid for the attempt by Stalin. This team did kidnap and kill Trotsky’s secretary-guard. This murder echoes other assassinations of associates. It almost seems that Trotsky was a communist plant who was killing, or turning in his associates after getting them to confess they are anti-Soviet. The publicizing of these murders of supporters seems to have been part of a Soviet propaganda campaign that was intimidating anybody who might have otherwise considered rebelling against Soviet ideas.

“He had liquidated Trotsky’s family and friends, and yet Trotsky had always escaped his clutches. The man who changed this all was Ramón Mercader, a minor Spanish aristocrat and Soviet agent who had posed as Mornard, a dissolute Belgian playboy, and infiltrated Trotsky’s inner circle.” The fact that Mercader was an insider stresses that this was a convoluted game of espionage and counter-espionage. Though I am being too pessimistic here. I have not found many examples of true heroes in history in my recent research projects. So, I am doubtful of any character who has been overly puffed by history. Celebrating one of the people Stalin pursued and eventually assassinated is important as an example of Stalin’s brutality. But too many Americans know about this Trotsky case, but not about the millions of similar dissidents who were similarly tortured and executed. “Ireland traces the separate paths walked by each of these protagonists as they steadily draw closer and closer to that fateful encounter on August 20. Blending intimate historical detail and thrilling historical narrative, swinging from Moscow to Paris to Mexico, and taking in a cast of morally conflicted Russian spies, fanatical Mexican painters, and innocent American idealists…”

The “Prologue” is oddly anti-dramatic. It begins with a guy deciding to write a letter. There is a note that it might turn into his “death sentence” before a random biography of this guy.

Chapter “1: Death Solves All Problems” begins by claiming Stalin might have decided to kill Trotsky when they first met in 1907 at a meeting where Stalin had “remained mute” for “three weeks”. Instead of explaining how anybody could be mute at a meeting, the story digresses into describing Trotsky’s tallness and vanity. General assumptions are made about what these guys were thinking without evidence to prove this was indeed their likely thoughts. The title of this chapter is also repeated in what seems to be a quote from Stalin at the start of the book. Stalin never said this. Every time this author repeats this line, he is repeating a fictional misquote. This is instead a quote from the anti-Stalinist Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat (1987). Rybakov’s name is never mentioned.

I want to learn more about Soviet assassination strategies but this book does not contain useful lessons on this subject. It cannot be trusted due to obvious gaps in its research.

How Economists Give False Impressions with Generalities

Liaquat Ahamed, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Penguin Press, 2026). 348pp, index: ISBN: 979-1-597204-17-3.

**

“Reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family—the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century’s most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments. With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system—exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism… The crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire’s slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at ‘Jewish finance,’ a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century.” As I explain in my book about Epstein, when this Empire was transferred to its first non-Jewish head, Ariane, it slumped further into corruption and fraud, instead of righting itself morally.

The contents are divided by periods. Chapters titles are a bit too cryptic, with references to God and Americanism. One of the better titles is “Palace Intrigues”. A front matter fragment helpfully explains that inflation means numbers should be multiplied by 25. But as this book ages, this number is going to grow progressively less accurate.

The “Introduction” starts with generalizations by referring to some people who had anticipated the collapse of 1873 would happen, without citing specific sources. And there are accusations that people had “succumbed to collective madness”. This shifting of the blame onto the consumers means this book does not clarify that bankers are likely to have used propaganda by artificially creating this bubble and then deflating it to benefit from the collapse as well. The survival of Rothschild’s bank means they had to have bet on the right side, or they would have been bankrupted along with the “mad” crowds that were manipulated by overly optimistic media stories (xiii).

There are some good photos in this book, but with oddly long descriptions of these images.

Chapter “1. In Bonds We Trust” again begins with generalizations that the economy was in a great “shape” in the 1860s, without providing evidence this was in fact the case. I suspect that if historians questioned such assumptions, most of the would turn out to be propagandistic falsehoods designed by those who are still profiting from the manipulations of the banking system (3).

There are some interesting details about canals being funded with private capital, instead of by governments. But then there is a long paragraph about different types of manias without explaining what drove prices up in bubbles. The story jumps between histories. Questions I am having as I glance this information is: Why would two bubbles drop by the same “80 percent”, unless these were artificial drops? It seems this number is an artificial generalization, as opposed to a specific percentage, but then why specify 80, instead of saying “by a lot” (8).

This is not a reliable economic history. Too many points are handled without the careful research they deserve. I do not recommend this book for any reader.

Either an Autobiography of a Slave or the Propaganda of a Pro-Slaver?

Frederick Douglass; David W. Blight, In., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (New York: Modern Library: Random House, May 19, 2026). $20: ISBN: 979-8-217-19940-2.

****

“This second edition of Douglass’s Narrative reprints this classic document together with speeches and letters… An… introduction places the Narrative in its historical and literary contexts with annotations on needed background.” I deleted “extensive” from this blurb because the intro is only a few pages long, and most of it is a general puffery of the concept of this description of slavery. It does include a brief bio. It mentions Douglass’ father is “Likely” to have been his owner.

I assumed this was a critical edition when I requested this book.

Given my research into ghostwriting, I doubt a slave wrote this narrative. It suggests that somebody could become literate while being enslaved in brutal conditions. This is highly improbable, as most non-enslaved people tend to barely be able to read or write after 12 years of schooling in America. The intro specifies that Douglass claims his mistress taught him to read and write in only a single year of schooling, or with only first grade. How could this first grade have included vocabulary such as “wretched condition”, “remedy”, etc.? It is also incredible that Douglass escaped using three different modes of transportation, as this was a pricy effort. Just how did his fiancé gain this type of financing? I am not just being pessimistic here. A few similar slave or the like narratives I tested stylometrically turned out to have been ghostwritten by white pro-slavery authors. Thus, there is much this introduction should be researching to check the claims Douglass is making for any potential glitches. For example, why would somebody who was an active fugitive at the time of authorship write a memoir that explains to pursuers they have escaped them, and where they currently are and what they are up to.

There is a note that in 1980 Dickson Preston’s Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (1985) discovered “Douglass’s real birth record”, and authenticated the mentioned “names, places and events”. The proof mentioned is that Denby/Demby was indeed killed. But then other details are that there is a “crawl space” and a fireplace at the Wye plantation: there are echoing spaces on all plantations. And there is a mention that there are “blackbirds” there: as there are in most places. I checked Preston’s book: he notes there is a mention in records that a “Demby” was murdered by an overseer called Austin Gore on Colonel Edward Lloyd’s plantation. It mentions that records indicate there was a guy called Bill Demby/Denby living at this plantation on January 1, 1822, who is described as a good worker, but then when he is mentioned on January 1, 1823, he is credited as “dead”. This suggests that the author who wrote this account probably did research at this archive and found this name of a deceased person and then might have imagined a fiction regarding how he died, with no other evidence in the records to either prove a brutal or an undramatic death by over-work (72-3).

It has been interesting to research this history. I have not done enough research to come to a conclusion regarding if Douglass wrote his own memoir or not, or if his version of his life is sincere. But it is good to be enticed to do more historic research. Thus, others who are enticed by history should find something interesting in this complex historical document.

The Illusion of Spontaneous Seduction

Laurence Leamer, Ladies’ Man: The Careless Heart of John F. Kennedy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2026). ISBN: 979-8-217048-40-3.

***

An “examination of President John F. Kennedy’s complicated, tumultuous life as told through the lens of the fascinating women he loved. John F. Kennedy was a born leader—bold, charismatic, and able to charm with nothing more than a witty phrase and a winning smile.” Such puffery is absurd. What makes John any more charismatic than any average guy? Yes, he was especially good at manipulating people by seeming gentle. But technically he worked with the mob to go after opponents, just as he used the mob to procure loose women for him. Why is this blurb starting by falling for his “charms”? “He was also obsessive, manipulative, and haunted by complex desires for shiny, remarkable women, collecting them voraciously and carelessly, then dismissing them summarily, on his rise to the White House. But these women were perhaps the only witnesses to the real JFK—and it’s time their stories were finally told… Biographer Laurence Leamer knew three of Kennedy’s mistresses,” so he “reveals JFK’s harrowing, intimate life with unprecedented access.” It is troubling that the author is uniquely biased via personal knowledge of these victims. It would have been better if anybody who was not personally involved wrote this book. “From youthful indiscretions at boarding school, early connections with such beautiful aristocratic European women as Inga Arvad and Gunilla von Post, marriage to the stately Jacqueline Bouvier, affairs with Pamela Turnure and Diana de Vegh, liaisons with mafia moll Judith Exner and East German spy Ellen Rometsch, to his relationship with Marilyn Monroe shortly before her death, JFK’s affairs were multifaceted and often tragic. His cautious public persona contrasted sharply with his reckless personal life, where he took bewildering chances that could have destroyed his presidency.” While the author promises this is a new perspective on JFK, this blurb is a summary of what I previously knew about him.

The chapters are organized by seemingly 28 different affairs JFK had. Chapter “1: Don Juan” begins insultingly by the author speculating before meeting one of JFK’s flings that she better be attractive even in her eighties, or JFK “would not have spent so much time pursuing her”. Ridiculously, he puffs the beauty of this elderly woman as being uniquely “slender”. Before explaining who this woman is, the story moves on to his seduction to Jackie Kennedy. And instead of looking closely at Jackie, there is a digression about the fictional character of Don Juan, without clarifying that Byron’s exploits led to his untimely unexplained death. This association suggests to some that JFK’s women bid on his assassination.

The next chapter begins with a journey of some young lovers: they meet JFK on a train. He immediately begins flirting with the girl, despite not “lacking for female admirers”. Such phrases, and the general conversational tone are unreadable. Most of this information is uncited and is specifying details that are not likely to be factually based in sources. 

Those who are interested in a history of how the mob procured girls under their sway to a playboy who did not care if they were spies, blackmailers, or vulnerable girls being trafficked, will not find such realities in these pages. This is a light narrative non-fiction written for fans of multi-partner romance.

A Puffery of an Once and Current Corrupt Ruler of Brazil

Richard Lapper, Lula! The Man, The Myth and a Dream of Latin America (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2026).

**

“From the factory floor to the presidency: the extraordinary story of President Lula’s fight to change Brazil. In October 2022, Lula was once again elected President of Brazil, replacing the far-right strongman Bolsonaro, sparking an insurrection, and exiling the fallen demagogue to the US. Lula won by promising to save the Amazon and to give power back to the Brazilian people. This has long been the dream of Latin American left-wing movements—many of which have ended in corruption, disaster and death. Lula has survived at least three curtain calls. Imprisoned for corruption in the notorious ‘Car Wash’ scandal, voted out, bullied and beaten, Lula continues to draw huge crowds of workers wherever he goes.” There is only one mention of “Car Wash” in this book, and it is in parenthesis, without clarifying what this was about. This was an anti-corruption probe in 2014: a carwash was found to be involved in money laundering: it uncovered other entities that were corrupt state-owned businesses. Lula and others involved paid 24 billion reais to settle this case, admitting guilt. Lula has been portrayed as a hero not because he was innocent, but because he was also a rival to Bosonaro, who has been the target of western attacks (having been found guilty in 2025 of an attempted coup to stay in power). “He speaks of revolution and comes from the streets of São Paulo, and yet he is enmeshed in hidden bank accounts and lobbying scandals.” Most mentions of “bank accounts” inside this book mention general freezing of assets of average citizens in Brazil, instead of explaining why Lula’s accounts had hidden assets. There is a mention that in the carwash case, Lula was “condemned for “Corruption and money laundering.” Lula “was given 24 hours to hand himself over to federal police”. He was then sentenced in 2017 to 9 years in prison, and then this sentence was increased to 12 years. These sections do not explain exactly what this guy is accused of doing: the thing that interests me. “This is the definitive biography of Lula and the history of modern Brazilian politics that gave rise to him. Richard Lapper ran the FT bureau on Latin America for two decades, and lived in Brazil for many years… Lapper’s unparalleled reporting and access allows him to tell the full story…” Financial Times is a credible source. But having special “access” is a sign of bias. Lapper never met Lula. In 2021, a court found that it lacked jurisdiction over Lula’s case, and it found there was “bias” and misconduct because a party illegally collaborated with prosecutors to secure a conviction. This book suggests Lula was angelic by not mentioning just what corruption he was accused of. He was accused of begin given a three-story beachfront apartment as a kickback by a businessman of Petrobras. He also accepted remodeling gifts for his farmhouse, and donations to his Lula Institute. Charges against him were mostly dropped on technicalities, as opposed to proof he had not been corrupted. Lula is the current President of Brazil, so this book is propaganda that is whitewashing his image, while he is probably running corrupt schemes under the guise of social reform. This means that Lapper was one of the puffers that whitewashed Lula’s name previously to help him succeed climb to this post. This is a very biased book. Nobody seeking the truth should look here for it.

An Unresearched Compilation of the Books Rejected from the Bible

R. H. Charles, The Lost Books of the Bible: The Essential Texts (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2026).

**

“Discover the fascinating writings that didn’t make the Bible—but have shaped faith, culture, and imagination for centuries. This thoughtfully curated collection brings together the most important and intriguing ‘lost books’ of the Bible, presented in clear, classic English translations drawn from trusted public domain sources. Inside, you’ll find heroic stories like Judith and Tobit, profound wisdom from Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon, dramatic apocalyptic visions in 2 Esdras, and many other texts that offer fresh perspectives on familiar themes. These writings open a window into the rich spiritual and literary world that influenced early Judaism and Christianity but often remains hidden in modern Bibles. They reveal the hopes, struggles, and faith of communities across centuries and cultures, giving you a broader understanding of biblical history and tradition.”

Since I recently finished my Atheist’s Guide to Mythology, I wrote an entire book on related subjects and so there is a lot to be said that would not fit into a mere review. The presence of contemporaneous biblical books that were rejected from entry into the canon of the Bible proves the Christian-Judeo-Muslim bibles are fantasies that were written far more recently than scholars have been claiming, and that some fantasists were not allowed entry into the canon because it was monopolized by those who had a singular propagandistic purpose of colonialism, empiricism, and other forms of tyranny and conquest through theology. The complexity of this subject is not addressed in the brief “Translation and Selection Note”. There are some notes at the ends of these texts. But these notes merely cite sections where biblical fragments are referenced, and include a few explanations of words. There are no introductions to summarize what these texts are about. No speculations on who wrote them. It is important to have a source of these texts collected together, but as the intro mentioned most of these are taken from Oxford’s 1894 Apocrypha edition. Basically, this is not a useful book for anybody other than somebody that wants these texts in a single ebook to perform their own research on them.

Optimistic Pufferies of AI

Josh Tyrangiel, AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026).

***

This is a biased puffery that focuses on “how, in practice,” AI “can actually improve our lives and tells the stories of everyday citizens at the forefront of this new ‘AI entrepreneurship.’ AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to ‘break shit,’ but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better. Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data.” To clarify, Perna used a platform called Tiberius (which was developed specifically for this operation), which pulled together census data, manufacturing output, and state-level requests to organize the supply chain. This operation was suspicious as both this general and the civilian co-leader Dr. Moncef Slaoui did not take a salary for this work. The program was designed by data analytics firm Palantir Technologies for $17 million, and this contract was renewed in 2021 for another $31 million, and yet another $5.3 million in 2022. If this program was AI and worked without human logistics knowledge, why would these renewals be necessary? And paying a company $53 million could have instead paid for a team of skilled logistics analysts to program and process this data at incredible salaries; their standard salary is no more than $200,000, so there could have been over 100 of these guys hired for these couple of years. And this was a drop in the $12 billion logistics planning and operations budget of this Operation. The entire vaccine project cost $18 billion, of which $12 billion was for logistics, instead of being spent on donating vaccines to poorer countries. Where did the rest of the money go? Has AI stopped auditors from noticing billions are being funneled out of such projects. Whenever a government official forgoes a salary such corruption is guaranteed to be hiding behind this benevolence. 

“AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done. This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise…” This lack of experience tends to be used by programmers to exclude or to hide what they are doing from overseers, who might otherwise catch evidence of corruption, but fail to do so if it is coated in a programming coded language. The YouTube story of Perna being just an average general without technical knowledge is thus a nightmare that explains that he could have been hoodwinked out of billions because of his ignorance, or he was complicit, and helped whitewash this robbery by making this video whose popularity was probably raised by bots.

The contents are divided into themes, such as teaching, health, and government. Chapter “1: Ed’s Dead” describes how the LA school district launched a chat bot called Ed to help students, seemingly to avoid administrators dealing with calls from parents and students. Indeed, this is not an uplifting story even as the author explains it. The company behind Ed “furloughed most of its employees” by 2024, after a 2022 launch. “Prosecutors accused Smith-Griffin of misrepresenting the company’s finances to investors and misusing funds for personal expenses…” The school district lost $6 million. There is an overview of other AI schooling attempts, such as AltSchool that raised $150 million to educate “a few thousand students”. While these are promising pessimistic lessons, then pufferies are introduced with claims the Khan Academy has some special lessons that have been useful to 560 districts. At least this platform is “free”. Though its goal might be to bankrupt all who attempt to create AI-based education platforms that actually work because they cannot compete with: free. Gates if funding Khan’s efforts. I do find Google’s AI answers helpful, and it is great that they are free. But AI-written education is far worse than just asking students to read an assigned reading-list and then have them take tests from home. Any answer a chat bot at Khan Academy can give a student, Google’s free AI can probably match it in accuracy and precision. Why funnel millions to Khan, and not liberate education from such intermediaries. There really should be a free testing system designed to check students’ knowledge of required subjects that allows students some freedom of textbooks and the like (perhaps some want to use free books, while others want to use more complex books etc.). If teachers are not necessary to explain things to students, or if students do not want to do their work and prefer to have AI do it for them, there should be some minimalist option that works for all. Students who want to learn then might have a lot of funding to attend special chemistry or biology labs with advanced researchers in these fields to lead them in practical applications. These experts do not want to deal with the headaches of lecturing, but might profit from these students serving as free lab assistants. And incredible software might be purchased for art students, if the salary of an art teacher is eliminated from a budget. These are not nice solutions for teachers but perhaps work itself is outdated.   

A Good History and Financial Textbook on Corporate Bankruptcy

Stephen J. Lubben, To Protect Their Interests: The Invention and Exploitation of Corporate Bankruptcy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026). ISBN: 979-0-231559-72-0.

****

“Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcy proceedings are commonly thought of as a tool to protect the broader economy from the failure of large firms, even though the biggest players reap the greatest rewards. In the conventional telling, modern corporate reorganization began in the 1890s, with J. P. Morgan leading a noble effort to protect bondholders from the depredations of corporate insiders. What does this story leave out, and how do the true origins of bankruptcy law shed light on its present-day uses and abuses?… A… historical account of how corporate bankruptcy became what it is today—a forum for battles between well-heeled insiders… It emerged a decade before Morgan, when the robber baron Jay Gould strove to keep control of his railroad by working out a compromise with a handful of wealthy investors. The 1885 restructuring of Texas and Pacific Railway set the pattern for future corporate reorganizations: insider dealing, elite manipulation of the legal system, and judicial deference. Lubben traces the evolution of the bankruptcy system through a series of major cases involving companies such as W. T. Grant and Toys ‘R’ Us, demonstrating that it has always been a way for the powerful to maintain power. Revealing the sordid origins of bankruptcy law, this book also considers the limited prospects for reform.”

20% of businesses fail in the first year, 50% in five years, and around 70% by the 10^th year. Though things smooth out after this point, with around 80% failing by the 20-year mark. There is a plateau where if a business has remained in business for a couple of decades, it tends to have enough capital and other resources to keep going. The average lifespan of a S&P 500 company has been shrinking from 61 years in 1958 to under 15 years in 2026. In other words, most major corporations fail within 15 years, taking enormous volumes of invested capital with them. These investors do not want to lose their investments; and this book covers some of the tricks companies have used to stay afloat against these odds. Though bankers are likely to make the most from restructuring, as they keep charging enormous interests before a company comes to its final rest.

The introduction explains that a bankruptcy court tends to distribute assets unfairly or corruptly to those who pay the judge or the like under the table, as opposed to those who are truly deserving of being paid first, such as the poorest investors. Though merely having expensive manipulative lawyers might achieve this result, even without direct bribery. The introduction explains the elements of bankruptcy for those unfamiliar with this system: so it is an important read. It combines a clear vocabulary with complex financial subjects.

The first chapter presents a useful history of the railroad systems. There are annotations throughout unlike in most narrative nonfiction. And just as the blurb promised after the background history, specific financial concepts are explained, such as that there was “an issue of $5 million of bonds bearing 6 percent interest in gold, due in 1890”: this generated an $8 million capitalization for the Memphis, El Paso company. From this company’s story there is a digression into the more general problem of what to do when a corporation “could not pay their bills”, since it was not as easy as confiscating a house from a private lender who could not continue to pay the bank.

This book uniquely succeeds in being conversational and instructive. It is not too dense with information, and yet it manages to convey the relevant information. And it adds drama by focusing on specific businesses cases while explaining broad concepts of bankruptcy and financing. This might be a useful supplemental textbook in a bankruptcy class. A textbook that covers the terminology of bankruptcy alone does not have these types of detailed anecdotes that help to explain the subject from multiple dimensions.    

A Rarely Critical Analysis of Vermeer’s Biography

Andrew Graham-Dixon, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2026). Illustrations, index: 370pp.

*****

“This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer: why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? One spring day in 1683, a notary’s clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer’s life, this discovery merely gave rise to more questions: How had this one Dutchwoman come to possess the majority of the master’s work? And why have these images―among the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art―defied explanation for so long?” My own research into writing and art workshops during this period would suggest that a bunch of paintings from a workshop were found together and were assigned to a given byline, when there were probably many paintings created by this same workshop that were assigned to other artists’ bylines. Assigning art to a “master” artist has historically succeeded fiscally because puffing this artist in the press raises the value of art assigned to them to the profit of its owners. In contrast, unassigned workshop art is dismissed even if it is of equal technical value.

“Following new leads and drawing on freshly uncovered evidence from Dutch archives, acclaimed art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon fills these long-standing gaps in art history, presenting a dramatic and transformative new interpretation of Vermeer’s life and work. Dixon considers Vermeer holistically, placing him in his complex historical, social, religious, political, and artistic context in order to understand what spaces he occupied in his life and how the texture of these spaces inspired his paintings and distinguished him from his artistic contemporaries. Dixon also interrogates the nature of Vermeer’s relationship with the Van Ruijven family, which was unlike any other known relationship in that time period, and discusses how this dynamic shaped his artistic practice… It upends the master’s enigmatic reputation and depicts him instead as a pioneer of the early Enlightenment, a pacifist who was deeply affected by the wars and religious conflicts of the Dutch Republic and allied to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.” This is a very ambitious blurb. If there are indeed new, thoroughly researched revelations in these pages, I would be happy to be proven wrong in my pessimism about artistic masters’ uniqueness.

The book is thankfully organized chronologically, as all biographies should be. There are dozens of illustrations included in this book: this is indeed necessary for an art biography, as explaining the artist without reminding readers of what their art communicates is impractical. There are even maps that explain journeys and wars. And there is a map of the art district: Delft. And there are family trees. This is a rarely excellently illustrated book.

The “Preface” dampens some of the promises in the blurb as it explains there were earlier books that went over the relevant evidence.

The “Prologue” explains that when Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, there was no biography that had been written of him. During this period, whenever an artist or writer is revived with biographies decades or centuries after their death, these biographies tend to introduce fiction as if it is fact. They tend to claim they spoke with some mysterious uncredited sources. Mostly there tends to be no documentary evidence that verifies the claims these earliest biographers make to sell their biography anthologies.

There is also an explanation that these pictures were manipulated by dealers who attributed them “as the work of more well-known Dutch masters, such as Pieter de Hooch, Frans van Mieris and even Rembrandt. Fake signatures were added.” These signatures were only fake for those who imagine “Vermeer” is real, or that the idea of Vermeer as a master artist was not artificially created by these same traders. Was Vermeer “written out of history”, or was he written into history by these forgers? Another clue of “Vermeer’s” unreality is that he was “rediscovered” in the “mid-nineteenth century”. If these works had been assigned to fake bylines, there would have been no forensic way to establish they were Vermeer’s during this period. Only a forger who profited from this reassignment would have been bold enough to make this claim. Instead of addressing these technical problems, the author digresses into his intuitive sense of Vermeer’s uniqueness of style. The critic who is credited with this “rediscovery” ponders on the lack of a biography. This critic and later critics have pointed to the fact that Vermeer was “singularly unproductive”. This is solid proof that “Vermeer” is an imagined byline, as opposed to representing a real master. To become a professional in any trade, you have to create a lot of the thing you are to eventually become good at. Somebody who only paints a dozen paintings cannot be a master at art, just as a student who has only written ten pages in their life are unlikely to be the world’s best writer (4-5). There is a mention there is no document of anything Vermeer said: this is strong evidence “Vermeer” was a pseudonym because it is highly unlike any artist could have been illiterate to the point of never putting anything in writing.

The rest of this book does make a uniquely strong effort to investigate this mystery by looking at the archival evidence of what is known, such as a documented list of Vermeer’s works that seems to set a firm 1657 date when Vermeer started working for the Van Ruijven family (11). It is tempting to read this book cover-to-cover to either find other objections to the reality of “Vermeer”, or perhaps to be oddly surprised by a weird artist who only worked for one family and only made a few paintings before disappearing. This is a uniquely frank art history, whereas others tend to veil some of these unknowns to make them seem as if they are knowns. I recommend this book for anybody interested in art and art history, as it explains a great deal about attribution, and artistic talent—no matter if it is right or wrong in its conclusions.  

How to Kill a Book with Bad Language

Sophia Smith Galer, How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words (New York: Crown, 2026). Hardcover: ISBN: 979-8-217-08697-9.

*

“An urgent, globe-spanning exploration of languages at risk, from Kichwa to Ukrainian, that asks: What do we lose—culturally, politically, and personally—when a language is silenced? Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the dinner table. Around the world, an unprecedented shift is drawing speakers toward national and global lingua francas. For some, that means losing the language of parents or grandparents; for many, it is a permanent farewell to systems that carry knowledge, culture, and belonging. With half of our 7,000 languages due to disappear this century, linguicide is one of the most pressing cultural emergencies of our age… Galer travels across continents and generations to chart this phenomenon. In Ecuador, she sees firsthand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognized. And in Italy, she searches for her Nonna’s dialët, which is vanishing from diaspora communities and Italy itself. But languages can also be reclaimed: We meet the Karuk tribe of California, pioneering a grassroots language immersion program, and the storytellers challenging the criminalization of Kurdish. And in her discussion of Hebrew, Smith Galer reckons with the unintended consequences of raising a language seemingly from the grave. Part investigation, part travelogue from a disappearing world”, it “exposes the true costs of this mass extinction event.” This blurb hints this is not a readable book, as it indicates the author will be telling stories about losing a language from her own life, while digressively pondering languages.

The contents are divided by languages: Ukrainian, Italian, Hebrew. Only ten languages are covered, whereas the blurb suggests it might be a wider account. Though books that attempt too wide of a scope tend to fail to focus on delivering the central content, so it is good this book has narrowed its focus.

As the blurb warns, the “Introduction” begins with a slow personal anecdote about an elderly woman’s language. The second paragraph digresses into the country setting, without mentioning language. The third paragraph finally explains that her family speaks a variant of English-French-Italian or a dialect that is not clearly given a name. By the end of the second page, there is an explanation that digresses into Italian being a variant of Vulgar Latin… How is this related? Is this family speaking Italian? But Italian is not a dying language…

This is not a serious academic study of language. This is a digressive bunch of disconnected ideas vaguely related to language. I do not recommend it for any readers.

Thoughtful Study of the Beginning of National Disaster Relief

Andrew J. F. Morris, Hurricane Camille: When Natural Disasters Became National Disasters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, May 19, 2026). $45: ISBN: 979-1-512829-36-5.

*****

“Hurricane Camille… was one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the United States in the twentieth century… The story of how this one storm changed the way the nation responded to disasters. From that point forward, Americans came to expect the federal government to play a major role in aiding individual disaster victims and helping disaster-struck communities rebuild. For most of US history, Morris recounts, this was not the case. Localities, states, and charities such as the American Red Cross were on the front line of disaster response. But after World War II, the nation’s prosperity and growth put billions of dollars of homes and businesses in harm’s way—particularly in storm-prone regions like the Mississippi Gulf Coast—and exceeded the capacity of this system to respond. When Hurricane Camille struck Mississippi, it ravaged a vibrant coastal economy buoyed by tourism and federal military and space facilities. Moreover, it struck a state that was in the last throes of resistance to the application of federal civil rights laws. And it struck at a particular political juncture in American politics during which a Congress still dominated by the Democratic Party had an expansive view of the nation’s commitment to the less fortunate while newly elected President Richard Nixon sought to draw conservative southerners into the Republican party. Morris argues that all of these dynamics—the sheer scale of destruction, the activism by civil rights advocates for equitable care of African American disaster victims, the desire of southern elites for government subsidies to rebuild a risky coastal economy, and the openness of officials in Congress and the White House to broaden the reach of federal authority—led to a system in which, in the twenty-first century, Americans assume the federal government will be there for them in the wake of disaster.”

There are some glitches in the “Contents” titles, such as the repetition of “Hurricane Camille” in the names of the first two chapters, and the lower-case strange phrasing of: “Conclusion. mississippi-america”. These are probably just glitches in an uncorrected proof copy. The “Introduction” starts by reporting the statistics of Camille and other storms: this is a strong opening from my perspective, as I tend to need this type of an overview on a subject. A good description of how people prepared for this storm follows. There are explanations of relevant wind speeds. And there are accounts of how the storm felt to those who stayed. And there is a large map showing where the damage was. There is also a close-up map, and a few photos of victims after the hurricane. This is a great overview. It is surprising how many books fail to give this type of background info in an introduction.

The body of the book keeps up the specificity of the intro. Each paragraph tends to present new information. For example, a syndicated radio and TV host Paul Harvey questioned why the Red Cross asked for new donations after every disaster, despite having a $120 million budget. He complained that the Red Cross spent 22% overhead, while the Salvation Army spent only 6% (137). The following page addresses that “the Red Cross policy on rehabilitating and reconstructing homes was to restore disaster victims to their standard of living prior to the disaster, regardless of whether that standard was poverty or affluence” (138).

This book raises several questions and provides answers about how the current national disaster response system was started, and the various problems to it being needed, as well as the problems that remained after it was installed. I recommend it for general readers interested in disasters, as well as specialists in disaster relief, as both should find it readable and informative. It is especially useful for libraries of all sizes because patrons are likely to need this study at some point, and especially in regions hit by any type of disasters.

A Great New Scholarly Translation of Catullus

Catullus; Stephanie McCarter, Tr., The Poems of Catullus: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (New York: Penguin Books, 2026). Index: 256pp. ISBN: 978-0-525507-89-5.

*****

“‘I hate and love. How do I do this, you might ask. I don’t know but I feel it and am tortured.’ Award-winning translator Stephanie McCarter presents a dual-language translation of the surviving poems of Catullus (84-54 BCE), the Roman poet and punk, the lover and the hater, the hedonist and the wretch, famous for contradictions on friendship, love, and sex, and infamous for obscene diatribes against enemies. Catullus wrote only a single book of poetry, but in it lies some of the most raw and forceful depictions human emotion to be produced in the ancient world. Catullus’s lyricism is as tender as it is violent, equally capable of capturing fleeting romance, heartbroken despondence, and exuberant rage…” This translation “conveys the nuances of sexuality and gender in ancient Rome and meticulously mirrors Catullus’s poetic variety. This edition, which includes facing Latin text as well as a general introduction, suggestions for further reading, and endnotes, showcases the complexities of a poet who shaped the Western poetic tradition.”

It takes art to write great blurb pufferies, and this is a success in this regard. It is difficult to puff poetry because it tends to be music designed to impact emotions and thus must be celebrated with emotional language. The note that the translator focused on preserving Catullus style is important, given that too many translators modernize a text to echo the style of previous translators, instead of the original author. And the mention of front and back matter content explains this is a useful edition for scholars, and not merely those who enjoy antique love poetry. This blurb was written by the translator, as fragments from it appear in the “Introduction”.

In my recent book, Atheist’s Guide to Mythology, I explain that most of the current dating for antique manuscripts is likely to be inaccurate, especially for texts such as Catullus that are dated as among the earliest texts written. The earliest surviving manuscripts of Catullus’ poetry are mostly dated between around 1370-1392, with only 1 poem (62) that has been dated to a 9^th century anthology: Condex Thuaneus. There is no manuscript of the full collection of poems, so the first printed edition (1472) is very likely to have added most of its poems from a new author, while attributing these to a “lost” (or never existent) manuscript supposedly found in Verona in around 1300-5. There is a discussion of this Verona manuscript in this collection (xvi): the editor mentions that “150 manuscripts” have been copied from this Verona codex, adding that these are “riddled with errors”, which have since been polished (xvii). Catallus is claimed to have written in the 2^nd century AD, and yet no manuscripts survive from before these years. Images of Condex Thuaneus in Wikimedia do not look ancient, but rather seem to be forgeries; it has been dated based on handwriting analysis, its material being the same parchment as used in the Gospel of Luke (meaning both can be the work of the same forger), and another anthology (Anthologia Latina) was been dated to this same period (possibly also only proof of a single forger behind both). Thus, Catallus’ poetry collection is likely to have been either created in Italy in 1472, or in the preceding century. Even if it merely represents Italian sexual and poetic tastes, this is an important historical document that deserves to be translated and annotated to make it accessible to a modern English-reading audience. The editor even himself points out that three poems had been added in a 1554 edition by Marc-Antoine de Muret, all about god Priapus; these were removed in the 19^th century by Karl Lachmann leaving only 113 poems; but they seem to have been as genuinely antique as those that had been added without a surviving manuscript decades earlier (xvii).

The introduction explains that Catallus’ biography has fully been extracted from his poetry and thus is likely to be fictitious. It mentions the inconsistency between Jerome’s claim that Catullus died in 58/57 BC and the fact that the poetry “alludes to events that happened as late as 54 BCE” (x). Such inconsistencies are very strong proof that Catallus is indeed a fictitious pseudonym with a fictitious biography designed to heighten the value of this collection of Italian poetry to the status of an antique. But this editor strives to find some way to align the contradictory timelines, as typical for such volumes. The editor stresses that these poem mention the places that have been associated with Catallus’ biography, but this is because the biography has been derived from these poems (cyclically). Either way, there is a dramatic explanation of the rivalry that fictional history has depicted between Julius Caesar, Cicero and Catullus. Such accusations and satirical ridicule make for great poetry.

All parts of the introduction are of top quality. Each point is supported with dense evidence and is clearly explained. Unique perspectives that are rarely addressed in surface editions are covered fully: this invites researchers to dig further. Slang and other types of strong language are embraced without being censored. There is even a list of changes that had been made to the main 1904 Oxford edition Latin text that is mostly repeated here; those who study changes between editions would find this table format useful. And I have never seen this in a poetry collection before: there is “A Note on Meters” that includes diagrams of the numerous different meters that are used in each of these poems. Poetry is a mathematic science, and those who focus on measuring poetry are going to be relieved to find this guide. The poems themselves are a fun read indeed. In “Poem 2”, the author describes a “Sparrow” in a girl’s “lap” that inspires an observer to wish to be played with in a similar fashion (3). Juxtaposing the English and Latin versions of these poems is helpful to translation teachers, who might thus use this book as a textbook. This sparrow dies in “Poem 3”. This is a great surprise to keep readers alert, as opposed to expecting adorableness (5).

I recommend this collection to all. Everybody should read some Italian or Roman poetry to understand the roots of modern poetic types. Researchers of Latin poetry will especially benefit from this scholarly edition. All types of libraries should acquire it. 

A History of the Realities of the Black Death

Thomas Asbridge, The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity’s Most Devastating Pandemic (New York: Random House, May 2026). $38. ISBN: 978-0-593129-16-6.

****

“In the mid-fourteenth century, a lethal plague struck the medieval world, causing unimaginable suffering and destruction. The Black Death was unquestionably one of history’s defining episodes, yet a critical feature of its progress has often been ignored: the disease was not confined to Europe, but rather affected almost all of the known world, including the Near and Middle East, Byzantium, north Africa and Asia. Tracing the pandemic’s course across the medieval globe, The Black Death contrasts the experiences of different peoples, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews, charting this catastrophe’s transformative effects on diverse aspects of medieval life. And crucially, Asbridge demonstrates that the plague was often at its most destructive in the Islamic world, where it ultimately played a role in the collapse of the mighty Mamluk Empire… Asbridge reconstructs the lives of the men, women and children who faced the Black Death—from ruling monarchs to peasant farmers—laying bare both the abject horror they endured and the courageous resolve they often demonstrated while striving to survive.”

It is unclear what organization system was used for the contents, as most of the chapter titles are cryptic: “The Questioning of Faith”. The cover is very well designed, and there are 36 illustrations, including a few maps. A list of characters is included: though this list promises there will be leaps between these characters, instead of focusing on one region in each chapter. These jumps tend to be disorienting.

The “Introduction” does a good job hooking readers by describing a siege whose fatal course is interrupted by the plague killing the invaders. This suggests the plague might have been used as a tool of war, while also showing its damage when contrasted with the costs of warfare. And then some dramatic contemporary accounts are cited that describe the Black Death’s horrors. This is both an exciting, and a thoroughly researched opening. Though then more general ponderings on the nature of death follow. It is important to mention the significance of studying Black Death, and to contrast it with the modern plague of Covid-19. But drawing these reflections out over pages detracts from the rapid flow established in the first pages.

“Part I: Facing an Apocalypse” against commences with an engaging hook of a Venetian woman entering a convent with some documents, which she deposited in the library, before it later made it to the Venetian State Archive as one of the earliest collections of evidence relevant to understanding the Black Death.

This is an entertaining and informative read. Some sections might be slow, or a bit lighter on information than others. This means this is not a good book to use as a textbook for students, who would be frustrated by these slow sections. It would be a good book to have on the shelf in libraries. It is primarily designed for light or graduate researchers of this subject.