Anna Faktorovich
“Unfettered”: The Uninhibited University Professors?
Ian F. McNeely, The University Unfettered (New York: Columbia University Press, March 26, 2025). $30: 344pp: Bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-231220-58-3.
**
“After generations of fickle state support, public universities behave more and more like their private counterparts—charging what the market will bear, offering what consumers demand, competing relentlessly with peers, and managing their own priorities… U.S. public universities emerged largely intact after a decade of disruption bookended by a financial crisis and a pandemic. Resisting widespread calls for corporate reinvention or ‘disruptive innovation,’ they hewed to their core missions. If anything, exposure to the rigors of competition only enhanced their longstanding commitments to the public good.”
This blurb is repeated in the middle of the “Introduction”. I searched for “public good” across the rest of the book in an attempt to understand this reference. The next mention is followed with a sentence that indicates this good refers to “robust student enrollment, vibrant faculty research, and record-setting philanthropic donations”. How exactly are two of these in the public good: high enrollment and profits in donations are clearly only in these institutions’ good… It seems the idea is that universities are right to solicit funding because they will do good with it. But just what good they will do is not clarified. Like this blurb, this book seems to be full of empty phrases without concrete explanations amid a general puffery of universities.
“The story of a single public research university that was a generation ahead of its peers in repositioning itself for an independent future.” Neither this blurb nor the introduction, nor the first chapter mentions the name of this university that this book is about. Since McNeely is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, he must be talking about his own university… He mentions universities in North Carolina a few times, focusing mostly on that Chapel Hill was sued over its diversity policies. “It answers eight fundamental questions about how any contemporary university balances competing missions—questions about how money is spent, how education and knowledge are pursued, and how decisions get made.”
As I searched this book for “$”, I found mostly references to the philosophical solicitation of a $1.6 billion endowment by this unnamed “University”. There were no references to how this money would be “spent”. Few details are offered just how this money was solicited and from whom. Generalities are offered instead. For example: “A separate $425 million megadonation from a different donor followed in 2022 for a separate applied-research minicampus”. This is entirely general and unhelpful for explaining who’s giving money, why, and what this signifies. The only breakdown is that this funding was split between scholarships, academic programs, and construction. That’s pretty much the three possible categories for how money can be spent at a university… There is also a mention of how underpaid and unappreciated adjunct instructors are: whose numbers are growing, while professors’ numbers have remained consistent. And there is a curious mention that $5 million was spent on “rebranding” that seems to have included paying “ex-reporters” who had lost their newspaper jobs (due to online media) to be hired as university puffers, or marketers.
“Each chapter blends deeply informed reconstruction of strategic decisions at one university with concise analyses of the entire sector.” There are a few semi-specific uncited mentions of general money being raised and spent by an unnamed university. No examples, or concrete data is given from other universities. And then broad philosophical conclusions are arrived at, without any rational proof to substantiate them. I noticed one Table 4.1 with some specific data. The notes section at the back of the book mentions some other tables in other sources with links to them. One table is for the graduation rates of minority students. I found 1 other table in this book itself: “Table 7.1. Demographic Diversity”: it shows an increase in non-white and women students and faculty between 2010 and 2020. Since this book does not advertise itself as being about DEI, it is odd that so much of it is about diversity. This has a nefarious air about it. And there’s just generally something terribly wrong with this book. Why is this author afraid of specifying he is talking about his own university? Or is he talking about somebody else and is afraid of directly criticizing a rival school?
I do not recommend reading this book, unless those who have read this review are interested in learning more.
An Anti-Scientific Guess About Homo Sapiens’ Specialness in Language
Madeleine Beekman, The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why (New York: Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025). $29.99.
**
“…A… new story about the birth of our species… It was not hunting, fighting, or tool-making that forced early humans to speak, but the inescapable need to care for our children.” This does not make immediately clear sense. Monkeys and all animals have children, but only humans have developed language. So it seems irrational to associate a thing we share in common with all animals as the cause of the thing that makes us different… “Journeying to the dawn of Homo sapiens, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman reveals the ‘happy accidents’ hidden in our molecular biology—DNA, chromosomes, and proteins—that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: our giving birth to babies earlier in their development than our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans.” I tried to find sources online that might have confirmed that scientists have figured out the length of time Neanderthal or Denisovan babies spent in the womb, but no such science has previously been achieved. I searched for “womb” inside this book. One mention uses faulty logic to reach this conclusion. It claims that homo sapiens’ babies had a “large head”. This is not true, as Neanderthals and Denisovans technically had larger brains than homo sapiens. And then this falsehood is used to claim that babies with bigger heads would have needed to exit the womb earlier. Absolutely no evidence is given for this imaginative hypothesis. The two other mentions of “womb” are entirely irrelevant, with the second being to “artificial wombs” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This is not a scientifically sound study.
“Faced with highly dependent infants requiring years of nurturing and protection, early human communities needed to cooperate and coordinate, and it was this unprecedented need for communication that triggered the creation of human language—and changed everything.” Most of science is pseudoscientific, or uses these types of fantasy-imaginings to raise a claim. Some scientists manage to convince other scientists of such unfounded theories, and as more and more repeat the same falsehood it tends to be established as a “scientific fact” taught in science classes. Here it is: fictional science in the making.
“Challenging the traditional theories of male luminaries like Chomsky, Pinker, and Harari, she invites us into the intricate world of molecular biology and its ancient secrets…” If these secrets are ancient; how can they also be something new the author has discovered? Curious to learn about this opposition, I searched for these “luminaries’” names. Chomsky is mentioned in chapter six. It begins by explaining that Alfred Russel Wallace has been credited as a “co-discoverer of evolution”, and that he argued against the study of a “proto-language” until both the Parisian and London societies of science “banned the discussion of the evolution of language in 1866 and 1872”. This ban was apparently only “broken in the late 1950s” first by Skinner and then by Chomsky. Skinner thought language was a simple “conditioned behavior”, while Chomsky romanticized it as “an innate faculty unique to humans”. Then, there is a lengthy explanation of an experiment that tested if other primates can acquire associative language, and proved that it was a conditioned behavior. The section concludes by nothing that “both Skinner and Chomsky were half right. Language is partly acquired and partly innate.” This is not at all a refutation of what Chomsky argued, but rather a refusal to offend either Chomsky or Skinner. This is the only section in this book that mentions Chomsky. So, this book does not really criticize “male luminaries”, but rather repeats their achievements in a puffery. Other primates can be taught complex and associative language when enough effort is invested. Baby-nurturing duration might have given humans more time to communicate with babies. But orangutans spend up to eight years nurturing youths, and there are other record-holders who get attached to kids for greater durations than humans. This is an element that should mean other primates should be capable of language-acquisition, as opposed to proving human specialness.
I do not recommend this book to any readers. It is anti-scientific. It is also poorly written, or lacks the flare fiction would have had to include.
A Helpful Critical Edition for the Vampire-Genre
John Polidori, The Vampyre and Carmilla (New York: Penguin Books, October 14, 2025). Hardcover: $22. ISBN: 978-0-143139-00-3.
****
According to my forthcoming 18-19th century re-attribution series, “Le Fanu’s” “Carmilla” (1872) was ghostwritten primarily by James Edward Muddock (1843-1934), while “Polidori’s” Vampyre (1819) was ghostwritten primarily by John Bowring (1792-1872).
The Vampyre was first-serialized in the New Monthly Magazine, for whose editor, “Alaric Alexander Watts”, Bowring was also the dominant-ghostwriter (prove stylometrically and because “Watts’” handwriting matches Bowring). Thus, the introduction to the Vampyre credited to “Watts” must have also been ghostwritten by Bowring. The publication of the Vampyre was uniquely controversial. It was initially credited in April to “Lord Byron”, then in the following May issue was re-attributed to “John Polidori”, who was claimed to have worked from “Byron’s” idea (for this “idea” Polidori was later paid £30 in a settlement from the magazine’s publisher), but the following book edition in 1819 was anonymous. Editor “Watts” resigned his editorship over these re-attributions.
Muddock also ghostwrote for “Arthur Conan Doyle”, “Robet Louis Stevenson”, “Thomas Hardy”, as well as for later light popular fiction-writers. Bowring mostly specialized in non-fiction (i.e. “Charles Darwin’s” autobiography), and wrote some political (“Scott’s” Waverley) and occult fiction such as “Bulwer-Lytton’s” Coming Race (1871). Given these different interests, Bowring would have developed a philosophical or theological argument, while Muddock would have borrowed this earlier formula to profit from the established popularity of vampire narratives. This division is confirmed by Bowring’s” “Watts”-bylined 1819 included “Introduction”, where the phenomenon of vampirism is credited to a story reported in the London Journal in 1732 that demonized Hungary by claiming there was a vampire haunting “on the frontiers of the Turkish Servia”. This is scientifically-minded propaganda or terrorization, a vampire’s body is said to be “fresh, and entirely free from corruption, and emitting at the mouth, nose, and ears, pure and florid blood.” “Watts” also credits “Southey” with previously writing a poem about a vampire; the same ghostwriter (Samuel Rogers) wrote verse for “Southey” and “Byron”; thus, the initial credit to “Byron” might have been due to Bowring borrowing this verse idea from Rogers and wanting to indirectly credit this poet.
With these elements in-mind, I searched through this book to grasp this edition’s perspective. I was relieved to find that the initial “Byron” attribution is mentioned in the introduction. “Byron” has been the subject of many controversies, so I tested 5 of his texts: his poetry is mostly ghostwritten by Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), with some help from Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), while his letters, journal and drama are ghostwritten by Francis Burnand (1836-1917) with help from Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846). Burnand also ghostwrote “Stoker’s” Dracula (1897). In 1819, Thomas Clarkson had not yet begun writing his main projects for “Byron”, and when Don Juan was published in 1819, it was released anonymously. The editor helpfully explains the connection between Byron and Dr. Polidori: Polidori was Byron’s physician when they traveled together starting in 1816. There is a myth about the trips that followed through 1818 that claims that pretty much everybody on that adventure competed with each other as they became authors: “Mary Shelley” supposedly writing Frankenstein, in the same ghost-story competition as when “Polidori” write the Vampyre. “Frankenstein” was ghostwritten by Pierce Egan (1772-1849). And the thing this myth seems to have been designed to hide was the sexual exploits of Byron and the other participants during it. For example, Byron impregnated Mary’s sister Claire. For the British ghostwriters, the biographies of the bylines they were writing for were fictions they manipulated to maximize sales by appealing to the readers’ sympathy. This edition’s introduction falls for this sympathy-trap by expressing outrage at Polidori’s self-interested attributions, without seeing the larger picture that the entire biographical narrative is a fiction. But almost all critics of British literature have been falling for this trap that the Workshop set up when this Workshop monopolized British publishing.
“The first vampire short story and novella, which came before Dracula, together in one Penguin Classics hardcover… with a foreword by #1 New York Times–bestselling author V. E. Schwab.” This foreword is a bit strange, as Penguin Classics rarely include pop-fiction-author intros. This foreword is written in a horror-novel style with short paragraphs: “They hunger, and so they feed./ They want, and so they take…” Almost nothing relevant particularly to either of the two stories actually included is stated, as if the author did not read the items he was asked to introduce.
“The first vampire short story in English, The Vampyre by John Polidori, and the first vampire novella, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, are published together in one volume. The Vampyre, first published in 1819, features Lord Ruthven, a deathly pale yet fatally charismatic nobleman who preys on women of high society and is generally considered as the first fully developed vampire narrative in English literature. It is here accompanied by Alaric Watts’s introduction, with which it was published throughout the nineteenth century, and which contains important supplementary material on vampire beliefs. Carmilla (1871-2) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a nineteenth-century Gothic novella featuring a protagonist who typifies the long line of female and lesbian vampires in literature, movies, television series, and artwork. In a castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura, a young woman, leads an isolated life with her father. A horse-drawn carriage crashes and an unexpected guest, the mysterious and seductive Carmilla, enters their lives. An early, sophisticated, and influential vampire novel, Carmilla predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by twenty-five years and the film Nosferatu by fifty.” Muddock was a sensational novelist, who favored exaggerated sex or violence. He also self-replicated a lot of ideas; thus, if there were later variants of this “lesbian vampire” narrative; it was probably Muddock’s re-writing of a concept that sold well.
This is a well-introduced, and annotated edition that logically groups these two central texts to the history of the echoing vampire-genre together. Professors who want to teach either of these texts in a course would logically choose this edition to allow students to learn about the surrounding history and connections between these works. Though, as my study explains, most of the assumptions that critics have had about these texts’ authorship have been wrong.
Examples of Dictatorial Seizures of the Media
Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (New York: Columbia University Press, October 2025). Paperback: $28: 368pp: 978-0-231212-91-5.
****
“From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.” Trump fired the labor-statistics economist over negative data-reporting the other day, so this is a relevant history for this present moment. Though this study is also an example of propaganda because it demonizes 7 outsider-countries (that are regularly displayed as villains in US-media): Russia, China, Hungary, India, Brazil, and Mexico. On the other hand, the introduction does point out this omission by stating: “Although no single chapter is devoted to the United States, like Banquo’s ghost it haunts the book throughout. Many of the techniques to influence the news documented throughout this book have been integral to Donald Trump’s media strategy prior to and since his re-election in 2024.” “Trump” is mentioned 118 times across this book, so he is indeed the ghost haunting this study. The purpose is clearly to explain the totalitarian turn in the US by comparison with how such media-control happens at suppressive extremes elsewhere. Though the stress is on accusing rivals, without seeing that America has been following the same authoritarian playbook but with fewer outsider-publishers daring to criticize them, or without letting these critiques enter the academic mainstream. For example, the US media had information on Donald Trump’s association with Epstein since the 1980s. It only chose to make it a point-of-public-interest recently after a billionaire like Musk seems to have sponsored this raising of alarm. Trump bombed Iraq’s nuclear sites while selling this as a “liberator” move, or as a logical solution to stop an immediate nuclear threat, after Israel had been selling propaganda about this threat being imminent for decades without any material proof of Iran developing any nuclear-weapon. America has been making the worst imaginable decisions in its wars, from throwing the atomic-bombs at Japan after they had mostly surrendered, to starting the Iraq war over false claims of Iraq’s development of nuclear weapons. While Russia has been in an immoral war with Ukraine for a few years, the US has been in non-stop immoral wars for a century.
“Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media.” It “details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities—and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies.”
The US Public Broadcasting Corporation just announced its closing because it has been defunded. Colbert was just fired for making a joke about corruption between businesses and totalitarian-leaders. One sign that propaganda is working is if the people are not aware they are being lied to. There are sources this author found that prove that India’s “news owners” are trying “to outdo one another in their support for the BJP government.” This means that some reporters in India are reporting on this corrupt influence. In contrast, in the US news support the two corrupted political parties without significant rival outlets breaking through to report that corruption is taking place.
As I browsed through this book, I found that its claims are supported with sources. Its opinions are offered with proof. Few lines go by where theory is not supported with facts. Overall, this is a well-researched, and densely-sourced study. Those who research corruption in the media would benefit from reading it closely. Those who are concerned citizens, or who discuss media-bias on social-media would also benefit from reading it. Its style is easy enough for anybody to read through it without difficulty. And yet it is dense enough to provide new information for specialists in this field. It is a good acquisition for any type of library.
Perhaps the First Frank Biography of a Slaveholding-“Abolitionist”
Anne E. Marshall, Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Hardcover. 294pp, 6X9”: $39.95. ISBN: 978-1-469690-99-5.
****
“The nineteenth-century Kentucky antislavery reformer Cassius Marcellus Clay is generally remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries. Clay brawled with opponents while stumping for state constitutional changes to curtail the slave trade. He famously deployed cannons to protect the office of the antislavery newspaper he founded in Lexington.” This point is clarified in the “Introduction”: Clay “fortified his printing office with lead panels and two four-pounder cannons. After only two months of the True American’s publication, a mob of proslavery citizens still managed to dismantle its office.” Clay probably paid this mob to take this office apart because this paper probably was not selling well in the South, and Clay proved he was on the other side when he “enlisted in the Mexican-American War” shortly thereafter, “a conflict he had previously denounced as a proslavery fight” (2). This weekly newspaper only saw a handful of issues in 1845 before the Lexington office was mob-closed. Then, it claimed to have relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio starting in September 30, 1845, but kept carrying the “Lexington” dateline until it closed without an explanation with its October 21, 1846 issue. The latter 1846 closing-date was a few months after Clay began volunteering for the “proslavery” War. Apparently, he exclaimed that he was threatened by enemies in Cincinnati, and “had sent to Cincinnati for the cannon that had once guarded his True American office”, threatening to attack anybody who stood against him with extreme deadly force (138). Clay’s flip-flopping was part of his desperate struggles to make money, as by 1856 he was forced to default on “debt repayments” when his associated “Cincinnati-based bank failed” (122). An example of how Clay managed to hurt and seemingly help abolitionists is when he wrote a letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer anti-accusing his “friend” Fee of “distributing biblical tracts to enslaved people in an effort to incite insurrection” (117). Clay was saying Fee did not do this, but he was doing this while advertising this false propaganda to those who had not heard this rumor against Fee.
In my 18-19th century re-attribution study, I explain how Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) puppeteering “King George IV” (by ghostwriting for him as proven with stylometry, and handwriting-analysis), he kept outwardly writing anti-slavery pamphlets under his own byline, such as Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), while subverting this movement as a spy and blocking the speed of its progress. Clarkson is likely to have been ghostwriting for “Clay” in America, and the sudden closure of this antislavery newspaper was probably due to Clarkson’s death in 1846, as opposed to any rational reason related to Clay’s ongoing life. If this was the case; the True American is likely to have been ghostwritten and printed in England and merely shipped to “Cincinnati” and “Lexington” with names of these cities credited to maximize local sales.
“Despite attempts on his life, he helped found the national Republican party and positioned himself as a staunch border state ally of Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln had to beg southern governors and generals to defend themselves against Confederate troops, as their initial response was to refuse to engage, and to let the Confederacy take over. This showcased how having people who were only pretending to be anti-slavery while in fact being slave-holders meant profiteering interests of slave-owners won many battles that made the US one of the last places in the world where slavery was belatedly outlawed.
“During the Civil War, he served as US minister to Russia, working to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy. And yet he was a slave owner until the end of the Civil War. Though often misremembered as an abolitionist, Clay was like many Americans of his time: interested in a gradual end to slavery but largely on grounds that the institution limited whites’ ability to profit from free labor and the South’s opportunity for economic advancement. In the end, Clay’s political positions were far more about protecting members of his own class than advancing the cause of Black freedom. This vivid and insightful biography reveals Cassius Clay as he was: colorful, yes, but in many ways typical of white Americans who disliked slavery in principle but remained comfortable accommodating it. Reconsidering Clay as emblematic rather than exceptional, Anne E. Marshall shows today’s readers why it took a violent war to finally abolish slavery and why African Americans’ demands for equality struggled to gain white support after the Civil War.”
I hope that my research is indirectly rubbing off on this field because this is one of the first times I am seeing a scholarly book that is this critical of an “abolitionist”. Past studies I have seen have been echoing celebrations of canonical “abolitionists” without similarly questioning their motives, and if they might have been countering abolitionist efforts while pretending to support them. This is a good step towards the truth. This book is well-researched throughout. I found its references to be very helpful in me figuring out just what Clay was up to. I found I had to do just a bit of outside research to figure out just how long the Cincinnati office was functioning for. Just what these newspaper offices were like, and just how a mob dismantled one of them could have been covered in greater detail for my taste. Despite what I wish had been included, this is a strong study that should enrich those who read it to learn things they did not previously know about abolitionism. It is thus recommended for researchers of these topics, and for libraries that serve such researchers and concerned members of the public.
Anthology of Primary Sources on Cults with Thorough Commentary
Joseph P. Laycock, Ed., The Penguin Book of Cults (New York: Penguin Books, October 7, 2025). Softcover: $20: 304pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-69-3.
****
“A chilling documentary history of the most notorious cults of the past two thousand years, from the Celtic druids whose ritual sacrifices inspired the folk horror film The Wicker Man all the way up to the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate. The word ‘cult’ conjures images of people in thrall to a charismatic leader who extracts obedience through lies and threats, and of apocalyptic prophecies, ritual sacrifices, sexual perversion, and mass suicide.” It “charts the history of our fear of the religious other: the arrest and public execution of thousands of members of an ancient Roman cult devoted to Bacchus, the god of wine; the burning alive of victims in giant wicker effigies as an offering to Celtic gods; the nocturnal orgies, murder of children, and demon worship of medieval heretics; a church of ‘human vampires’ in nineteenth-century Kansas City; moral panics over the hypnotic powers of yoga; and mass casualty events like the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. Bringing to light little-known sources such as a ‘death tape’ of Jonestown’s final hour, when Jim Jones led more than 900 of his followers to drink poison, and a minute-by-minute log of the FBI’s final assault on the Branch Davidian headquarters, and including accounts of drinking the blood of sacrificed cats, theories that we are living inside a hollow earth, and reports that space brothers from Venus are coming to redeem us from the threat of nuclear war, this volume opens a fascinating window into cults and why some of them have ended in spectacular violence.”
After the previous review of the vampire-genre, my attention was initially drawn to the chapter on the “Vampire Cult in Kansas City” article from a newspaper in 1890: the “Samaritans” cult in “rural Missouri” were accused of drinking “human blood”. “One Samaritan suffering from tuberculosis began feeding extensively on his children, prompting a neighbor to report the matter to the police.” Christian-charity was evoked in convincing people to give their blood to help others’ health willingly. Curiously, the introduction to this chapter explains: “no evidence” appeared to “corroborate this story. It appears to be an example of the ‘yellow journalism’”, or sensational fiction-writing that was sold as “news”.
This collection also includes an interesting chapter that describes how early Christians were accused of holding murderous orgies, just as they later accused Jews and pagans of doing in echoing passages. These early accusation against Christians appeared in Octavius, and The Apology of Tertullian for the Christians.
Another interesting chapter is on the “Orleans Heresy” (1022 AD), when a sect of Christians who objected to some of the rules of the mainstream Catholic order were all “burned alive” as heretics: the first such burning “in medieval Europe”.
Another significant section is the “Legends of the Wicker Man” (58 BC – 18 AD). Its introduction explains that this fear of a “Wicker Man” was partly spread by “armchair anthropologist” James Frazer (1854-1941) who deliberately “discovered” “ancient sources” with “accounts of human sacrifice and stories of Celtic druids burning people alive within wicker effigies.” This was part of central-Europe’s campaign to spread Christianity by demonizing pre-Christian beliefs, which are likely to have been fiction-propagandas ghostwritten by an earlier generation of Christian myth-writers. The “wicker man… druids… first” appeared “in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War” (58-49 BC?), or in Roman anti-Gallic-European propaganda. This source claims to be relying on a “lost” manuscript of a Greek geographer called Posidonius (or Poseidonius) (1335-51 BC). The editor of this collection explains this bias, writing: “Because of the lack of eyewitness accounts or corroborating archaeological evidence, there is a strong possibility the wicker man is just a legend. However, it is still an interesting case study in how claims about the wrong sort of religion are deployed. Caesar’s political ambitions required the support of the plebeians (commoners), and one goal of his book was to win their support. By presenting the Gauls as a monstrous people, Caesar emphasized his own role as a courageous hero.”
I am thinking about the difference between “cults”, “myths”, and “religions” as I prepare for my Mythology class for this Fall semester. I saved the titles of some of these chapters to research more about these entities as I progress in developing my course.
This anthology helps to explain that past centuries’ cults had been fictions designed by propagandists. In contrast, the past few decades, people have adopted this cult-formula by actually starting sects that aim to control people by selling false-beliefs as mainstream Abrahamic religions have sold their theological concepts. The simple reality is that to maintain a “unified” set of religious beliefs, Christians and other mainstream religions have tended to have to execute anybody who attempts to edit, expand or otherwise to alter the accepted-by-administration set of religious rules and beliefs. As they murdered authorial rivals, they have had to design extreme falsehoods that accused these rivals of horrifying wrongs, instead of these simple acts of authorial disobedience. Thus, the horror-fictions of cult-accounts are these false-narratives that were used to justify state-sanctioned mass-murders of rival-theologians. Studying this topic is very relevant today because Trump partly won two elections by exploiting similar cult-accusations against Democrats being pedophiles, orgy-exploiters, murderers, etc.: all tricks designed by these old cult-fiction-writers.
This is a thoughtful and well-designed study. It fails to grasp some of the larger implications that I am explaining. But otherwise, it is as useful and thorough as one might hope. It might be a good textbook for a college course on cults. It should be very helpful to researchers studying any related subject. And thus, all types of libraries should purchase this book for their collection.
Another Edition of Dracula
Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin Books, October 14, 2025). Hardcover: $25. ISBN: 978-0-143138-99-0.
***
“Bram Stoker’s iconic and immortal tale of desperate battle against a powerful, ancient vampire, with a foreword by acclaimed director Robert Eggers…” This is the second case where Penguin is introducing a vampire-story with a popular or industry-insider “Foreword” in this set of reviews. At least in this case Eggers actually mentions Dracula; though he describes it as he experienced it in popular-culture: dressing up for Halloween, and the like. A couple of pages into biographical reflections, Eggers announces that after “drama school in New York”, his “first lead role was Dracula on stage in the Hamptons…” And he was working on a “feature film adaptation of Nosferatu”. Then, he puffs why he loves this novel so much. This is not a helpful intro to this work, as most of it is irrelevant. The following editor’s “Introduction” clarifies that film portrayals have convinced audiences they are familiar with Dracula, even if few have read the novel itself cover-to-cover. The rest of this “Introduction” does offer some insightful commentary I have not seen in earlier editions. It mentions that “Stoker’s notes” describe intense research for this novel: “pages of words in Yorkshire dialect” used “to create the garrulous Mr. Swales of Whitby. Stoker studied meteorological patterns and the 1885 shipwreck at Whitby of the Dmitry…, which brings Count Dracula to England.” In my Handwriting Comparison Study, I demonstrate how “Stoker’s” handwriting in the “Manuscript of Lady of the Shroud (1909)” matches Hand-A, or Burnand’s handwriting in samples attributed to Burnand and others he ghostwrote for. Fiction was Burnand’s primary interest, and these detailed research-notes exemplify how he achieved realistic elements in this genre.
“When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client’s castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his ‘master.’ In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries—led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing—Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.”
It is not an accident that this set includes two new editions of vampire-narratives: this genre continues to be popular in modern-gothic-horror, as well as in such new editions of past centuries’ popular successes. I mentioned that Francis Burnand ghostwrote “Byron’s” journals and Dracula in the previous review. “Byron” is mentioned five times in this new edition. The first mention is in a credit to Polidori’s character as a “Byronesque… demonic seducer”. Then, Byron is mentioned as the inspiration for the biography behind Polidori’s vampiric seductive character. It might have become necessary to mention Byron because he is mentioned in the body of this novel: “…A man does not like to prove such a truth; Byron excepted from the category, jealousy./ ‘And prove the very truth he most abhorred.’” This note is in response to the argument that it is difficult to “accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the ‘no’ of it…” (“Chapter XV: Dr. Seward’s Diary”).
Burnand was a very productive generalist, also ghostwriting for “Emily Bronte”, “Wilkie Collins’” mysteries, and “Joseph Conrad’s” African horror-novel, among other classics, and lesser known or light works, such as “Lewis Carroll’s” Alice in Wonderland.
There are no notes to help readers understand needed references/allusions in the body of this novel. And there is only a short back-matter section for “Further” reading. This would not be a good book for researchers to use, as it would require checking other editions to understand the text fully. This seems to be an edition intended for a mainstream audience of readers who have seen vampire-movies and are here tempted to read one of the formula-setting novels modern variants are based on. Thus, this is not a good book for library collections that probably already have at least one scholarly edition of this novel.
Intolerably Annoying Presentation of Immunity Myths
Daniel M. Davis, Self-Defense: A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune Health (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, September 2025). Hardcover. 286pp: $26. ISBN: 978-0-226-83937-0.
**
“…Analysis of what it takes to have good immune health—helping readers navigate what can really help, what is a complete myth, and why. Does orange juice help ward off colds? And how does our age affect our ability to recover from one? When it comes to immunity, are we really what we eat? Or how much we eat?” While I am hopeful this book offers thoughtful commentary, this note on the quantity-of-food consumed and its association with disease being a myth suggests that this book leans towards science-fiction, instead of a serious exploration of the facts. It is not in-dispute: obesity causes disease. “…How do we tell the fiction from the facts? And, ultimately, what can we do to reduce our chances of getting sick?… Immunologist Daniel M. Davis offers answers in this… guide to the effects of stress, age, exercise, weight, nutrition, sleep, vaccines, and mental health on our immune health. Taking us to the cutting edge of immunology research and explaining both what we know and how we know it, Self-Defense helps readers spot phony claims and make informed choices. Davis shows us that everyone’s immune system is entirely unique, and that’s why we should be wary of one-size-fits-all ‘cures.’” This is a common generalization made by people who have nothing concrete to say on this topic. If no “cures” can be offered; a text is then just offering hot-air or a bunch of contradictions in myths, instead of deriving what the rational “cures” are that indeed apply to all humans. The biology, chemistry etc. of humankind is far more consistent between people, than the few differences between our individual immune-systems. “We learn how exercise, for example, has all sorts of different, even opposing, short- and long-term effects on our immune health. And while our gut microbes are vitally important, it’s unlikely that yogurt drinks can really boost your immune system to stop you getting ill… Distinguishing bogus and beneficial health claims about everything from vitamin D to inflammation and cancer therapies…”
I began with chapter “3: The Evidence of Weight—or, Does Weight Affect Immune Health?” The capitalization is incorrect: I’ve corrected it. The author also uses contractions (“it’s”), and conversational language with almost no citations. The first paragraphs philosophize about the politics of even mentioning weight, without any new points raised. There’s a complaint about the “obsession with thinness”… What does this have to do with answering the central question the book promises to deliver: is weight related to immunity problems? The first citation appears on the second page of this chapter in a reference to “unfair generalizations”. And after a bunch of hot-air content, there seems to be a pro-fat conclusion: “If we have an excess of fat, the immune cells which reside within our fat tend to become more active.” If a reader skims the rest of this paragraph; they might assume that the more fat there is the more a body is able to resist problems with a stronger immune system. Those who keep reading will find the clarification: “Various molecules produced by fat itself, and immune cells living within fat, can trigger unwanted inflammation elsewhere in the body, which in turn, increases our risk of disease such as cardiovascular problems or rheumatoid arthritis.” At least the following section confirms that being overweight leads to an increased chance of type 2 diabetes. But none of this is helpful information I did not already know. I do not know what kind of a reader would benefit from these general reflections. Specialists in this field would find this to be too general. Those with no knowledge of immunology/ disease are likely to find it difficult to read through an entire book on this topic. I do not think this book should be purchased, or read. This is an important topic to study, but this is the most annoying manner of presenting it possible.
A Fictitious, or Confessionally-Criminal Account of CIA’s Spy-Hunting
Andrew Bustamante, Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America’s New Spy War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, September 1, 2025). Softcover: $15.99. ISBN: 978-0-316572-14-9.
**
“A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife CIA operatives who, against all odds, triumphed in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against a mole within the agency—an unprecedented insider account of 21st-century spycraft in the tradition of Argo and Black Ops.” Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (2013): describes how a CIA agent faked being a producer of a fake “science fiction film called Argo” to contact “escapees” and smuggle them out or Iran. The American diplomats just hid in locations such as European embassies, and then gathered in the home of Canadian diplomat John Sheardown. They could have just been given fake papers or the like to get out of the country, but instead the CIA spent enormous resources on this fake “film” project: probably to profit those involved rather than to logically help those in-hiding. Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior (2022) is about the “shadow wars” during “the Vietnam Era”; between 1998-2000, the narrator sets out to “re-establish a once-abandoned CIA station” in (not Korea, or the Middle East) but apparently in an African city… he refers to as “Shangri La”, instead of specifying just where this terrorism hotbed is supposed to have been. Who was this Cuban-immigrant warring with in Africa…? If this book follows in the footsteps of these earlier CIA-confessions…
“Andrew and Jihi Bustamante were a ‘tandem couple’: married spies who’d dedicated their lives to the CIA. They met as trainees at Langley, and got married while hunting terrorists across the globe. Then, suddenly, they were assigned to a mission so sensitive and explosive that the CIA still has never acknowledged it.” This means that this narrative can be a fiction that the CIA directly denied, or insisted is a fiction, and yet these guys are selling their fiction as fact. Alternatively, it might be a true story that the CIA wants to deny because it speaks about their misdeeds. “The CIA’s source network in a country code-named ‘Falcon’—one of America’s most formidable rivals—had been compromised by a mole, and the agency needed a new way to collect intelligence there.” This use of a fictional country-name “Falcon” echoes the lack of a country-name in Africa where Black Ops took place. Using fictional names and denying such stories allows the CIA to spread propaganda about their heroic deeds, without needing to provide any documentary proof to substantiate such claims. And without even a concrete country-name critics cannot disprove such CIA-puffing propaganda either. The “Author’s Note” elaborates it is “a government implacably opposed to the United States and its allies.” Opposed to what part of the US government? With actors like Trump acting on behalf of the US there are certainly many rational reasons for all non-totalitarian governments to oppose something the US government is doing…
“Young newlyweds, the Bustamantes were considered safe choices for this daunting task precisely because they had no experience in Falcon. They were also loyal, forgettable, and completely disposable—operatives who could help to strengthen the CIA’s position in Falcon while simultaneously serving as bait for the mole. But although their superiors at the CIA didn’t realize it, the Bustamantes also brought another advantage to the table: a granular understanding of how terrorist cells operate, and how the agency could exploit those same tactics to keep America safe.” What? The CIA did not know this couple had any knowledge about terrorism? This either means that this couple was previously embedded or acted in concert with terrorists without letting superiors at the CIA know about these affiliations, or… I cannot imagine an opposing possibility, as this seems to be what is being suggested. “Assembling a rag-tag team of fellow operatives and recruiting new sources from Falcon, the Bustamantes pioneered a new way of spying by building a cell of their own—right at the heart of the CIA.” What? These guys built a new terrorist cell? Why fight the enemy when you can become an enemy? I can see why the CIA would not want to acknowledge whatever nonsense this is suggesting. “The propulsive, untold tale of one of history’s greatest intelligence crises…” What, again? Something cannot be historic, if it is “untold”. Either this narrative has escaped historic notice, or it is historic and thus cannot be secret and untold. There must be a lie in this claim, either way. “…And the unlikely band of agents who were sent in to clean up the mess”. It “allows us to peer behind the curtain to see how today’s spy wars are being fought—and won.”
To figure out a bit more, I searched inside: no mentions of “rag-tag”. “Operatives” are mentioned in an explanation about how Andy created a false-identity by being assigned an “overseas posting as a mid-level employee of a US federal agency”. If he had been given an official job; he surely would have been sent abroad under his own name… So this explanation is irrational, and again must be false. Then, there’s a description of “training” with “Langley” where Andy is put in nightmare scenarios such as being swatted, seeing his friends fake having been shot, and the like.
There are several references to a “mole” throughout. The fictional country of Falcon is accused of penetrating “American media, industry” and “intel services”, including his “mole” who “had penetrated of Langley’s most elite and sensitive divisions…” associated with the country the mole was claimed to be spying for: in other words they found that an ambassador of country X had been researching America on behalf of the country they were hired to represent in an ambassadorial role. This is not espionage: this is legal diplomacy that is being investigated as if it is criminal by the US.
I cannot keep reading this book-of-nonsense. It might be confessing some kind of extreme wrongdoing by the CIA, but it is doing so in such cartoonish, and poorly-researched terms that it is unreadable. I do not recommend for anybody to attempt reading it.
Biography of the Mythologized Founder of Mormonism
John G. Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, June 17, 2025). Hardcover: $35. 456pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-25516-4.
****
“…Portrait of Mormonism’s charismatic founder. Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-44) was one of the most successful and controversial religious leaders of nineteenth-century America, publishing the Book of Mormon” (New York, 1830) “and starting what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” For clarification: the Latter Day Saints movement has 17 million members, most of whom are in the LDS Church. The LDS Church branch is the splinter that practices polygamy and is housed in Utah; and it was split in 1847 by Bigham Young, who later served as the governor of the Utah territory. Polygamy had been illegal in the US since 1854, and was specifically outlawed in territories including Utah in 1882. “Joseph Smith” is credited as “The Prophet” who gave the “Revelations” not only in this Book of Mormon, but also for the Doctrine and Covenants (1835), and Pearl of Great Price (1851). Mormonism diverges from other Christian branches because it disagrees with the three-person God theory, including not viewing Christ as always having been God’s son. The narrative in the Book of Mormon covers 1000 years in fictional-history between 600 BC and 400 AD: with America as its setting; the Jewish and Christian versions of the Bible take fictional-history up to 100 AD, and then Islam’s Bible takes this fictional-history up to a bit after 632 AD. In the Mormon version, prophet Lehi travels from Jerusalem to America. When Christ is resurrected, he travels to America and preaches there. Smith is claimed to have found plates with this history in New York, translated them, and then wrote the Book. I had to look these details up because they are never clearly simplified in mainstream media accounts of this theology.
“He built temples, founded a city-state in Illinois, ran for president, and married more than thirty women.” Both Smith and Young were politicians: this is not accidental. They wanted power over laborers, and women, and they hired a propagandist-ghostwriter to write theological texts that supported otherwise illegal and immoral positions. The reference in bylines to “Smith” being merely the channel of “Revelations” suggests that a ghostwriter had to be the hand behind these texts; otherwise, Smith would have been directly credited as an author. Ghostwriting has traditionally been required in theology to convince worshippers a text is the Word of God, and not of a human with a specific name.
“This self-made prophet thrilled his followers with his grand vision of peace and unity, but his increasingly grandiose plans tested and sometimes shattered their faith… Smith as a consummate religious entrepreneur and innovator, a man both flawed and compelling. He sold books, land, and merchandise.” Eager to learn just how Smith hawked “merchandize”, I searched for this term. It is only mentioned thrice. “In 1802, Joseph rented out his Tunbridge farm, leased a store… and borrowed $1,800… to purchase merchandise” for his store. So, Joseph was a professional salesman: selling the Book was his main life’s-function (8). The last mention of “merchandise” is in reference to Egyptian scrolls found with mummies that a seller claimed Smith had the “power” to translate without some God-given inspiration. Since I recently have come to believe Europeans forged a lot of the mythology “discovered” and attributed to other countries in the 19th century, it seems Smith was initially one of these minor mythology-imagining projects, before his Book took off as an especially popular branch of Christianity.
“And he relentlessly advanced doctrines that tapped into anxieties about the nature and meaning of salvation, the validity of miracles, the timing of Christ’s second coming, and the persistence of human relationships for eternity. His teachings prompted people to gather into communities, evoking fierce opposition from those who saw those communities as theocratic threats to republicanism.” One clear point: theology is a fiction. Books like this one explains how such fictional theologies are artificially generated. In contrast books about popular theologies (mainstream Christianity/Judaism) are full of puffery, and present theological-writing as if it was seriously “divinely-inspired”. “With insights from newly accessible diaries, church records, and transcripts of sermons, Turner illuminates Smith’s stunning trajectory, from his beginnings as an uneducated, impoverished farmhand to his ultimate fall at the hands of a murderous mob, revealing how he forged a religious tradition that has resonated with millions of people in the United States and beyond.” The note that Smith was “uneducated” especially strengthens the case that Smith had to use a ghostwriter, and cannot be personally responsible for writing any of the texts semi-attributed to him. Though it is problematic that this book puffs Smith as having been killed by a “murderous mob” when his death preceded with a legal negotiation wherein “a state circuit court judge” asked Smith to surrender willingly to “arrest”, but Smith refused, while calling to retaliatory violence against the court (362). Apparently, a long time (months or years) of insults and threats went by before the troops finally dared to arrest the Smith brothers, who “drew their pistols” before they were shot. This is hardly a mob-hit… The author, John G. Turner, is a professor of theology at George Mason University, and a Presbyterian; while he is not a Mormon, his bias must have been somewhat with Mormons to gain access to records that previous historians might have failed to access.
This is certainly an interesting realistic account of the life of a mythologized personality. Other than some bias, I could not find fault with the quality of the undertaken research. Those who read this book more closely are likely to find much else of interest. Researchers of Mormonism might find some source materials quoted here that have not been quoted in any previous studies. For these reasons, all libraries should have a copy of this book to make it accessible.
Rarely-Covered Biography of a Founding Socialist-Anarchist
Tom Goyens, Johann Most: Life of a Radical (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, December 9, 2025). Softcover: $29.95. 266pp.
****
“Known best for articulating the propaganda of the deed, Johann Most” (1846-1906: German-American) “was and still is caricatured as a radical fanatic… Rediscovers the complexities that animated the German American agitator and made him a pivotal figure in the development of anarchism in the US and socialism in Germany.” It is strange that this entire blurb never mentions Marxism. Most did not develop these branches, but rather followed Karl Marx and Engel: one of his early pieces was a summary of their earlier work. Most spread these ideas as a newspaper-editor and theory-applying politician. In the body of this book, Goyens explains that when Most adopted socialism starting in 1867, it was a fringe idea. This ignores the fact that Marxism successfully inspired the 1848 revolutions across Europe: so, it was pretty popular since that point: it just was resisted by European mainstream parties because it argued against them inflexibly, until a softer socialism emerged with Most. Goyens does mention the other predecessor: Michail Bakunin “Championed anarchism as an alternative to Marx’s vision of state socialism”. Though Marx’s ideal communism was not state-control: state-control was supposed to be only a step to later achieve a utopia of complete equality under pure-communism. I think Goyens exaggerates Most’s contributions in such references and in this blurb without offering evidence to support these claims. Most was important, but relatively little has been previously written about him because he was a minor-player.
“Most galvanized workers through passionate speeches and writings that showcased his gifts as a performer, satirist, and rhetorician. Numerous challenges, including repeated convictions for his incendiary rhetoric, failed to curb his organizing or his efforts to foster a dedicated network of comrades that included Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and his common-law wife, Helene Minkin.” I searched for “convicted” to understand just what he was sentenced for. In 1869, he might have been among “several labor leaders… arrested and convicted” among “meetings” in Vienna’s socialist-movement (31). A more specific reference indicates: “On July 19, 1870, Johann Most, along with Oberwinder, Andreas Scheu, and Johann Pabst, was convicted of high treason, leading to a commotion in the courtroom. Most received a sentence of five years, which included one mandatory fast day each month, and he faced expulsion upon completing his term. The grounds for his conviction included his intention to distribute Socialist Party membership cards, his use of inflammatory language, and his knowing involvement in a subversive group” (39). This is a succinct, detailed, and useful clarification. I could not have asked for more detail. And the source for this description is properly cited.
“Goyens details Most’s essential contributions to the anarchist movement while also highlighting his critique of religion and defense of science within emancipatory movements. As Goyens follows Most’s ideological journey, he illuminates the political contexts that shaped the anarchist’s evolving views on revolutionary action and social change.” If I had to look up details as I researched this review, most readers (including specialists in socialism, communism, and related ideologies) will be equally curious and puzzled by just who Most was, what he did, and why his biography is rarely clearly depicted, unlike other contributors to this cause. It is especially relevant to study political descent in our current political-climate. The failure of multiple convictions to suppress a radical editor is certainly an inspiring narrative that deserves to be widely read. Thus, I recommend this book for acquisition by most types of libraries. And researchers of this subject should find much to learn from, even if they (like me) disagree with some of the claims or arguments.
The Propagandistic Motives Behind China’s First Science-Fiction Novel
Wu Jianren; Liz Evans Weber, Tr., The Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, June 2025). Softcover: 978-0-231203-47-0: $30. 570pp.
****
“One of China’s first works of science fiction, New Story of the Stone” (author: Wu Jianren (1866-1910); first-printed in Chinese: 1905) “is a belated twentieth-century sequel to the beloved eighteenth-century masterpiece Story of the Stone (more famously known as Dream of the Red Chamber)” (author: Cao Xueqin; mythological: characters include a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk; first-printed: 1791). Europe had been publishing mad-scientist, or semi-scientific fiction across the previous centuries; this work was just the earliest formulaic time-travel science-fiction in China. “The story follows protagonist Jia Baoyu, borrowed from the original Story”—in the original this character becomes a monk by the end—“as he is dramatically hurled forward over a hundred years from his own time into a bewildering future: first the decadent semicolonized late Qing China of the author’s own time…” The “Introduction” misstates that during the Qing dynasty China was “forced to sign a series of ‘unequal treaties’ that imposed crushing indemnities upon China while simultaneously forcing Chinese territory open to foreign trade” (x). In my re-attribution studies, I explain that British merchants and ghostwriters combined warfare and corruption to manipulate a few Chinese politicians into signing these “unequal treaties”, defending them with violent attacks on Chinese territories. This intro instead makes it sound as if there were economic hardships in China that made these unequal deals necessary. The Europeans publicized they were building infrastructure, or otherwise doing something positive in China, while they were in fact robbing China of its resources, and force-selling opium to its population (i.e. the Opium Wars). Since this intro explains that Wu’s narrative was “a trenchant indictment of the state of late Qing society and morality”, it seems likely that this work was a Western propaganda (xiv). The 1890s was part of a Scramble for China when various European nations, including not only Britain, but also Russia and others seized parts of China across the Qing dynasty: spheres of influence included Tibel and other regions under Britain, French Indo-China, Japanese regions, and a German region. Since there was no preceding interest in science-fiction in China, it seems logical that a European author ghostwrote this propaganda, and it was then translated into Chinese and sold as an authentic Chinese narrative. The biographies of authors were part of such propagandistic fictions, which convinced because the author seemed to be a friendly-insider. In the body of this novel, the narrator first-mentions the “Great Qing” before exclaiming: “How Shameful!” He is referring to a failure to document a historical event’s date (“1900”) until this science-fiction “discovery” (56). The next reference is to “upholding the Qing and exterminating the foreign” (170). This seems to be an exaggerated rivalry that positions foreigners as the victims. This battle-crime is described as a “teaching” of a sect, satirically described as a “sagely decree” (179). Another confirming detail: “But as I see it, we are all Chinese, and so everything that concerns China is our business.” This seems to be protesting-too-much: who said the speaker/narrator is not Chinese? “And since this particular treaty was made in secret, it’s clear that the government isn’t willing to tell us what’s in it.” This shifts the blame for making a bad treaty onto the Chinese government, instead of leaving the fault with the foreign invaders. “But after the uprising of the Boxer bandits, when Prince Qing and Grand Secretary Li went to the capital to negotiate for peace…” “Prince Qing” is accused of reaching this corrupt deal, and failing to stop the Russians from forcing the Chinese from throwing themselves into the Heilong River (221-2). Showing the Chinese killing themselves, instead of being slain by Russian troops is again hardly siding with the Chinese side of this dispute. I think these references consistently show a Western bias.
“And later an astonishing high-tech Confucian utopia called the Realm of Civilization. Baoyu is equally disoriented in both places: in China proper, he is distressed by the growth of foreign influence and weakening of the traditional moral code in favor of capitalist consumerism and selfish gain; in the Realm of Civilization, he is amazed by everything he encounters—from flying cars and ingenious medical technologies to the perfectly moral populace.” The moral seems to be that western invaders will eventually lead China to this ideal Civilization through their continuing colonial control: since this is where the earlier scene is heading. “Seen through Baoyu’s eyes, the Realm is everything that late Qing China has failed to be and offers a hopeful vision of what it might yet become. This quick-paced romp deftly highlights some of the major preoccupations of the tumultuous final decade of China’s last dynasty while raising important existential questions about China’s future.”
There are indeed important questions raised in this text, but I believe this editor has misunderstood what these questions are. Though my interpretation of events is based on original analysis of monopolistic control of the press in Europe by ghostwriters that has not been publicized in any previous study. Thus, it would have been stranger if this book matched my findings.
The introductory content and the back-matter notes are extensive and should help any researcher to similarly reach their own conclusions. I would just advise all to think critically when any text is puffed as a “first” in a field. All types of libraries should benefit from this acquisition, as this novel is indeed important to the history of the invasion of science-fiction into eastern realms.
Financial-Nonsense Blamed on Philosophers
Ethan Everett, The Investment Philosophers: Financial Lessons from the Great Thinkers (New York: Columbia Business School Publishing, October 2025). Hardcover: $28. 170pp. ISBN: 978-0-231221-11-5.
***
“What do Warren Buffett and Friedrich Nietzsche have in common? Why does Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of irrational emotions help explain financial markets? How did Voltaire’s success in a bond lottery arbitrage shape his writing? Can David Hume teach an investor when to buck the consensus and when to heed it? Exploring these questions and many others, Ethan A. Everett reveals the surprising lessons we can learn about investing from major philosophers. Demystifying ideas and texts that can often seem intimidating or irrelevant, he shows how philosophical concepts can be fruitfully applied to financial markets. Everett shares how philosophers’ insights have informed his development as an investor, and he considers how great investors have embodied philosophical wisdom in their own endeavors… Ranging from the birth of modern securities markets in seventeenth-century Amsterdam to recent trends like meme stocks, this book shows why a philosophical perspective can prove invaluable to challenging common assumptions in finance.”
This book is divided into parts by themes: markets-and-morality, profiting from skepticism, market abstraction and investor identity, “money mindsets and market meaning”, and “market adaptation”. The first couple of these are reasonably clear, but the others are too abstract to grasp how these ideas can be connecting for an entire part. Madoff-rejection is a chapter in the last section on “adaptation”. Why would rejecting a Ponzi-scheme be a form of adaptation? The editor should have applied clearer part-titles to guide the reader.
The “Introduction” explains that teachers of investing, such as Benjamin Graham, regularly use philosophical quotes, as from Baruch Spinoza, to explain their financial advice. However, the first example offered shows how this philosophy is used to confuse, instead of guiding. Graham claims a “proper psychological attitude” is needed for investing before quoting from Spinoza on “eternity”. Eternity is a theological concept, not a psychological one. But what student would have been daring enough to raise their hand and object that Graham’s allusion was irrelevant? The following clarifying remarks are very convoluted as they seem to be stating that “common-people” cannot grasp philosophy, and that’s why financial-lecturers can use such quotes to mislead or confuse them into compliance with their will, without understanding.
“Chapter One: Going Short Irrational Emotions” finally arrives at some kind of useful philosophical-financial analysis. It opens with the note that in 1637 “the largest public company in history… the Dutch East India Company…” reached “an inflation-adjusted market value of” around $7.5 trillion”. My research in my BRRAM series into Renaissance’s market-manipulations by Richard Verstegan (probably a Jew (though advertised Catholic), who lived in the Netherlands, and was paid to write propaganda for the Dutch colonialists, among others) and other ghostwriters explains how this enormous wealth was acquired. I had not calculated this was the sum their wealth amounted to before, so this is an interesting and useful intro. The author explains that almost exclusively Jews initially invested in the Company, but their share dwindled by the end of this entity’s lifespan. Rabbi Menasseh puffed the Company in his theological Jewish texts, and he had taught Spinoza philosophy. While this is a dramatic intro, what follows is vague quotes from Spinoza that never mention the Company, or make direct financial advice. Spinoza was vague in his philosophy, instead of explaining financial concepts directly because his research was obviously sponsored by the Company. Spinoza’s argument against emotions is introduced: that argues that people make decisions that go against their self-interest because their emotions intervene. Then, the author introduces a first-person account of his own financial experience. He notes that he had raised a question about if Herbalife was a Ponzi scheme before realizing: “I had been emotionally comforted by the idea that laws in the US were almost always duly enforced, especially in the case of emotionally charged subjects, such as a big corporation defrauding vulnerable people”. The following paragraph starts with a contradiction that the “law is not something magical” (15-6). This epiphany is not helpful in explaining either Herbalife or Spinoza’s theory. The chapter(s) conclude with “Key Investment Takeaways”. These are generalities such as that “market actors will often take actions that do not further their original ends” (17). This is not helpful because most actors do take actions that are in their financial interests, so this is not rationally applicable to situations an analyst would need to practically analyze.
While I was briefly inspired by parts of this book; overall, I do not recommend anybody to try to read it because it is likely to convince them both philosophy and finance are nonsensical. Only poorly written social science is nonsensical, and this book is an example of this category.
A Bad Edition of an Atrocious Erroneously Canonized and Attributed to a “Lady” Novel
Jane Austen; Juliette Wells, Ed., Mansfield Park (New York: Penguin Books, September 9, 2025). Softcover: $18. ISBN: 978-0-143138-71-6.
**
Both of the “Austen” novels I tested in my re-attribution corpuses were ghostwritten by Pierce Egan (1772-1849) between 1811-6. Egan rarely attributed his texts to female bylines; though the “Austen” novels were initially attributed as anonymously written by a “lady”. Most of Egan’s female bylines were added when his novels were posthumously published under female bylines, such as “Charlotte Bronte” in 1857, etc. Egan’s female protagonists can indeed be easily interpreted as feminine authorial voices, especially in novels that are not as realistic as Egan’s “Benjamin Disraeli’s” Sybil (1845).
“Jane Austen’s complex tale of social class and morality…” This edition is described as a celebration of the “author’s birth”: 250 years since. This should have taken place a few years earlier, in 2022, to celebrate Egan… “Shy and penniless Fanny Price is brought up on her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram’s estate, Mansfield Park, as an act of charity. Sir Thomas also owns land—and benefits from the labor of enslaved people—in the Caribbean colony of Antigua. Fanny is miserable until her kind cousin Edmund Bertram takes her under his wing. Having secretly fallen in love with him, Fanny suffers severely when his head is turned by the captivating Mary Crawford.” Men are far more likely to fall-in-love at-first-sight only based on physicality: re-attributing this novel to a male author would thus free female authors to create a more authentic version of just how women fall in love, and if been a captive of a man’s power and wealth is something that stimulates women towards “love”, or if it can only move them towards fiscally-minded dependence.
“Fanny’s quiet fortitude makes Mansfield Park one of Austen’s most psychologically astute novels.” Fanny’s quietness is a positive? Or is her silence an example of the silencing of female characters even in novels of Egan’s that pretend to have a female-lead.
The introduction to this text explores biographical content about the Austen family. My research indicated that the biography, and letters associated with the “Austen” and “Bronte” families were forged by ghostwriters and sold to collections. “Austen’s Manuscript of The Watsons” (1803), as well as Arthur Bell Nicholls (Charlotte Bronte’s husband’s) letter and “Charlotte Bronte’s” Jane Eyre and Professor are in Hand-C: James Planche (1796-1880). In contrast, the “Manuscript of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte” is in Hand-E: John Bowring (1792-1872). Thus, the biographical claims regarding these female authors were made by a different ghostwriter(s) than the hands who wrote the fictions attributed to these bylines. Introducing these novels by trying to find supporting evidence for fiction in false-biographies is generally a nonsensical enterprise. The introduction in this case notes that Austen’s sister and brother were “fond of Fanny”: these admirations were pufferies designed to sell this character to readers, despite its faults. Silence is hardly a virtue in a coherent character. I searched inside the novel to check if there are any instances where the character of Fanny Price actually speaks. No quotes appear until the middle of Chapter II. She has one line “with a frightened look”: “My uncle!” The next line is preceded by the observation that everybody “thought her prodigiously stupid”. And there is no intro that this letter was actually written by Fanny. She tends to leave rooms without saying anything, before others ridicule her. The previously-mentioned letter is addressed to “Mamma”, and seemingly contradicts her claims to intellectual achievements by ending with: “Did you ever hear any thing so stupid?” The following mentions of Fanny restate that she is “stupid at learning”. In the next chapter: “Fanny was too much surprised to do more than repeat her aunt’s words, ‘Going to leave you?’” This is one of the most anti-feminist, or derisively anti-female novels ever written. Only the fictional biographical attribution to a female writer has confused critics, who seemingly have not actually read the interior of this novel.
I had a sense that female-bylined novels were not presenting a positive or a truthful version of women, and my re-attribution research has certainly solidified this sense into a certainty. The puffing introductions to this and other female-bylined 19th century novels have been selling these books as required reading in curriculums, and perhaps this assignment has contributed to the continuing misogyny, exemplified by the recent return to abortions being illegal across half of the US. Liberal universities and norther high schools teach Austen as much as southern ones do. So, the fault in propagating this stuff falls with the entire academic establishment, as opposed to villains in any single geography. This novel should leave libraries, instead of having new editions of it enter.
An Anti-Scientific Pondering Attempts to Normalize Morbid-Content-Curiosity
Coltan Scrivner, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away (New York: Penguin Books, October 21, 2025). Softcover: $19: 272pp. ISBN: 978-0-143137-34-4.
*
“The leading expert on the science behind morbid curiosity explains our spooky, gory, and macabre fascinations. What makes us peek at a car wreck or binge-watch true crime shows late into the night? Why are some of us drawn to horror movies while others shudder at the thought? Takes readers on a thrilling journey into the psychology of morbid curiosity, uncovering why we can’t resist the macabre. From grisly serial killers to spine-chilling paranormal stories, Scrivner reveals the psychological forces that compel us to explore our darkest fears—and explains how this proclivity is more than just a quirk. It’s a powerful survival instinct, helping us mentally prepare for real-world threats, all from the safety of our imaginations. Blending fascinating insights and cutting-edge research at haunted houses across the world, Scrivner makes a powerful argument for the value of playing with fear and embracing the gruesome.”
The author, Coltan Scrivner, is a research fellow at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University. This lab’s website lists a few of their publications, which look into: “heart rate synchrony” in a “high-intensity horror setting”, such as a haunted-house attraction. Another is a study of scary activities “children enjoy”. Another considers “the effect of recreational fear on inflammation”. Measured factors include rate of hyperventilation. These are semi-pseudoscientific, but they do ask curious questions.
Penguin’s bio for Scrivner adds that he’s self-interested in the horror industry because he’s the “executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl”.
The “Prologue” puffs the horror genre ridiculing critics who have dismissed it as “utterly worthless”. It insists that those who enjoy horror are not women-haters, but rather can be excused for being “morbidly curious”. He claims to have developed a “Morbid Curiosity Scale” for “scientists… to assess how morbidly curious a person is…”
Instead of offering any science, the first chapter describes ghosts as real entities. Unscientific questions are asked and answered digressively, such as: “what does it mean for something to be negative or bad?” What possible benefit comes from such abstract and nonsensical reflections. Nothing promised in the blurb is delivered here. This book is not worth reading.
A Believable Biography of Female Authorship and Directorship
John Bassett, Rachel Crothers: Broadway Innovator, Feminist Pioneer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic: Rowman & Littlefield, August 28, 2025). Hardcover: $36, 9X6”. 186pp. ISBN: 978-8-8818-0491-6.
****
“This is the story behind one of the most important—yet largely forgotten—women in American theater during the early 20th century. Rachel Crothers was renowned for her ability to command all aspects of a stage production—unusual for playwrights and even more so for a woman of this time period.” It “celebrates her remarkable skill and feminism, from her experiences as a young actress in Illinois and New York to the success of her first play in 1906 and beyond. Crothers integrated themes of double standards, prostitution, and women’s rights in her work, and she went on to become President of the Stage Women’s War Relief Fund through both World Wars and the Great Depression. Incorporating extensive archival material, this book also discusses each of Crother’s plays with careful consideration for her attention to detail, character influences, motivations for social justice, and creative vision.”
I have not performed extensive re-attribution studies for America, so I lack an opinion regarding Crothers’ abilities. Though if she wrote about “prostitution”, it seems likely that somebody ghostwrote her books and assigned this risky content to a female byline to soften their reception, or to avoid them being censored.
The “Preface” explains the need for this study, since only two previous critical projects have been attempted. She was “one of the most successful American playwrights during the ‘Golden Age’ of Broadway Theatre”, bringing 24 plays to Broadway (1906-38). Though when I tried to look up other Golden Age writers, I found that this age might have been between 1943-59. Well-known American dramatists include Tennessee Williams (25 full-length Broadway plays), Arthur Miller (42 plays, but not all or perhaps few appeared on Broadway), Eugene O’Neill (20 full plays, but few on Broadway). Thus, Crothers was relatively as successful, or more so than these top-names in selling her plays to Broadway, and yet unlike them she has been mostly ignored until perhaps this study. And those guys certainly did not direct “all” or perhaps any of their own plays, unlike this woman.
This is certainly an interesting and well-written biography. For example, the author notes that past biographers have made the absurd claim that she “graduated high school in Illinois at age twelve”, but this was due to a mistaken belief that she was born in 1878, when she had in fact been born in 1870 (3-4). Reading thus far is beginning to convince me that Crothers might have written and directed her own work, and might have been a more original creative than the before-mentioned male competitors. The lack of critical interest would then prove that she did not pay critics to puff her, merely relying on perhaps authentic media-interview impressions. Bassett is puzzled regarding why so many previous biographers copied the erroneous birth-year without performing research of their own. My own research makes me question how Bassett managed to overcome this tendency by being careful enough to investigate the facts: this is indeed relatively rare in modern scholarship (4).
The mention that Crothers’ mother pursued a medical-education as one of the first women to enter medical-school further proves the likelihood that Crothers was independently intelligent due to this powerful female influence.
It is very tempting to just read this biography cover-to-cover, as it promises to offer a refreshing perspective on female authorship and creativity. I thus recommend this book for all types of libraries, and any researchers who are investigating related questions.
A Poorly Written “Classic”
Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (New York: Penguin Books, August 5, 2025). Hardcover: $28: 192pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-91-4.
***
“Published for the first time on the Penguin Classics U.S. list, the bestselling” from 1987 “modern classic Māori coming-of-age novel that inspired a film” version in 2003. “Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather’s love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Māori tribe in Whangara, on the east coast of New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary ‘whale rider.’ In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there’s only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle, she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to reestablish her people’s ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather’s attention, and lead her tribe to a bold new future.”
The author, Witi (1944-), is from New Zealand, and is the first Maori author to be credited with a short-story collection (1972) or with a novel (1973). It is a bit confusing why he chose a girl as his heroine… But I guess a traditional male-hero narrative would not have been as interesting. Witi did not complete, but started a degree at the University of Auckland, before becoming a journalist, and eventually completing a BA in 1971. He has been married to a woman since 1970.
The foreword is a puffery that argues the representation of a native culture is uniquely inspirational when it becomes a bestseller (no matter what the content of a story might be). The introduction is also from a member of this culture who describes their childhood, and a sense of non-belonging. The echoing message is: “Kahu’s journey was my journey.” Few specifics are given for exactly what this author has in common with the tale of an ancient magical whale-rider. The benefit seems to be that after this novel sold well, this introducer was able to sell their own novel too. Between these two introductions, I have not learned anything new about the story itself, its author, or any other contextual elements front-matter is supposed to provide.
The first prologue chapter opens with a puffery of a magically pristine natural scene: this is a rhythmic/poetic approach that cannot be faulted.
The backmatter is a bit too light for a scholarly edition: only a section on “further reading”, and a brief dictionary of native words. The is a section called “Author Notes” for the first time explains a bit about the context for this book. The author read about whale-riders: he repeats these myths about the origin of “great chiefs” in these whale-riders. I have been researching the possibility of colonists ghostwriting myths for the people they colonized to classify them as “others” who “needed” to be colonized. So I was hoping to find concrete information on the origin of this whale-rider myth that was used to give power to specific “chiefs” in a hereditary line, instead of to whoever was qualified. One book cited is from 1944. Other variants are mentioned with titles or years for their origins. The next section is an autobiography that describes how he came to write and sell the novel.
As with the beforementioned “Austen” novel, the heroine is mentioned for the first time too far into this novel: in the first paragraph of chapter “Three”. As with “Austen”, there is immediate ridicule about this “girl” who dared to be born in the wrong gender. In chapter “Four” there are objections to her name, “Kahu”. The problem is that she is named after “Kahutia Te Rangi”, which is a “man’s name”, and there are objects that “naming a girl-child after the founder of our tribe was belittling Kahutia Te Rangi’s prestige.” When I first read the summary of this book, I assumed it is about a make rider, as “Kahu” is indeed masculine. This discussion about girls being inadequate, and so inferior that they belittle even “great” chiefs when named after them is common in books with female-protagonist that tend to be celebrated as feminist. I do not agree that spending most of a book offering derisive comments about the female gender is in the least empowering because in the end this said girl is in fact going to manage to break these negative assumptions. And while the opening pages are relatively detailed in their natural descriptions the remainder is written in the typical non-descriptive, empty-dialogue manner common to mainstream pop novels. I do not think this is a “classic”, as branding it as such means it will be taught in school, and the linguistic quality of this book is insufficient to teach students what good writing is.
Propaganda on Who Was “at Fault” for the Great Depression
Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History—and How It Shattered a Nation (New York: Viking Penguin, October 14, 2025). Hardcover: $35. 592pp.
**
“…Narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history… 1929 unravels the greed, blind optimism, and human folly that led to an era-defining collapse—one with ripple effects that still shape our society today. In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation.” US began collecting expenditure data in 1917, and first-published its Consumer Price Index in 1921. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was first-published in 1896, and was only made up of 12 companies over its first decades: now this number is 30. In 1920 the Dow Jones was at around the same level as where it ended up at the low-point of the Great Depression in 1932-3: thus, if the spike that made it climb to its peak in 1929 was an artificial bubble that did not reflect an actually unchanged economy since 1920; then, the economy had remained flat, and it was merely the stock-manipulators who had lost what they had gained during the bubble. The next time the Dow reached at equivalent level to 1929’s peak was in around 1955. Thus, 1929 was not the point when most of the crash happened, but rather the point when an incredibly high peak seems to have been artificially manipulated. The first mention of the Dow Jones appears in this book on pages 120-1, and in rather empty conversations that speculate if it is going up or down, comparing this speculation to weather-prediction. Reporters had been logically anticipating a crash because of the very unlikely preceding steep climb in stocks. One of these pessimistic reports in the New York Times caused a 3%: the “Babson Break” named after the predictor. Bubbles inflate and deflate depending on such “predictions”, which can be manipulated deliberately to generate an artificial bubble, but this is not explained, as Babson is blamed as the cause, rather than as the sign of manipulation.
“But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin.” Fraud is only mentioned 7 times, and in none of these cases is there an explanation for how fraud led to the crash. One instance describes how a guy committed tax fraud, and sold shares to his wife fraudulently (270). And this extensively described case was eventually dismissed by a failure-to-convict (315). This is a very airy book with very little research or useful insights. “With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents… A raging battle between Wall Street and Washington… Where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again… It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late.”
This is a badly written book. I do not recommend for anybody to attempt reading it.
Is Free Speech Still Free?
Aryeh Neier, Defending My Enemy: Skokie and the Legacy of Free Speech in America (New York: The New Press, September 23, 2025). Softcover: $17.99. 186pp. ISBN: 978-1-62097-991-4.
****
“A new edition of the most important free speech book of the past halfcentury, with a new essay by the author on the ensuing fifty years of First Amendment controversies. When Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors—Aryeh Neier, then the national director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor—came to the Nazis’ defense. Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy. Now, nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic of free speech in a volume that includes his original essay along with an extended new piece addressing some of the most controversial free speech issues of the past halfcentury. Touching on hotbutton First Amendment topics currently in play, the second half of the book includes First Amendment analysis of the ‘Unite the Right’ march in Charlotteville, campus protest over the Israel/Gaza war, book banning, trigger warnings, rightwing hate speech, the heckler’s veto, and the recent attempts by public figures including Donald Trump to overturn the longstanding Sullivan v. The New York Times precedent shielding the media from libel claims…’”
I looked for the references to proposed edits to Sullivan first: apparently two Supreme Court justices have been philosophizing about ending press-freedom, after Trump has been winning cases such as the $15 million settlement over Stephanopoulos stating what he was found guilty of as “rape” as opposed to “sexual abuse”. Trump also since won a case against the editing of his competitor’s interview, and other absurd cases that are “inconceivable”, if these cases went through court under Sullivan rules. These are troubling cases indeed.
As a publisher, I have had a policy of accepting anything within reason under the assumption that writers have a write to state whatever they believe in. There should not be barriers based on what a publisher believes that block contradictory content from breaking into print. If an idea is erroneous, untrue, or malicious; it would logically be rejected by readers or critics. It is important to allow even evil ideas to be voiced because these are confessions of wrongdoing, or wrong-thinking. Knowing what bad things or ideas people are up to is partly what the press is for, as opposed to merely repeating what is known to be good and right.
Banning books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“most widely banned book”) has historically tended to increase sales for whatever is being banned because readers want access to whatever somebody claims they should not have access to.
On the other hand, banning “10,046” books at the school-level does not help sales, and indeed blocks access. Theoretically banning a book without the power to enforce it is different from blocking a book from being taught, or purchased by one of the main book-buyers. Such bans are meant to impact what is allowed into print because publishing is a for-profit business.
On the other hand, apparently inciting-violence is print has been legal since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, as long as it is not likely to “imminently… take place”. This kind of means that if the public’s discontent with the other violations of freedom hit an extreme-point, the only legally-allowed path might be storming DC, since a “coup” has been proven to be legal based on Trump’s pardoning of January 6 rebels (158).
It is important for me to keep up with research of the type provided in this book, since I should know what’s legal in-print as a professional publisher, and a returning-academic. Others in these fields would also benefit from reading through relevant sections for their situations, or the whole book to understand the broad perspective. Though this book could have been improved be re-organizing it in some structure that allowed researchers interested in specific topics to find what they are looking for. Chapter titles such as “Risks of Freedom” do not clarify what they contain, and there are no section-headings to aid this. Topics kind of leap from paragraph to paragraph, without clear transitions, or an identifiable organizational structure. The legal question of what is legal in terms of speech is one that requires precisely-tailored knowledge.
The History of a Failed Nicaraguan Canal
Jessica M. Lepler, Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, August 2025). Hardcover: 6X9”. 360pp, 15 halftones, 3 maps. ISBN: 978-1-469690-54-4.
***
“In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” When I first read this, I was confused if this was a realistic endeavor. To clarify this point for others: the Panama Canal achieved this ambition when it was completed a century later between 1904-14. “As Spanish American nations declared independence and new canals intensified US expansion and British industrialization, many imagined the construction of an interoceanic canal as predestined. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, and capitalists sent competing agents on a race to transform Lake Nicaragua, the San Juan River, and the terra incognita of Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway.” To clarify this was an alternative location for this passage. The Lake is connected to this River and they jointly fill a significant part of Nicaragua’s length between the oceans. The remaining distance to have expanded to connect the sides would have still been somewhat longer than making the link in the narrower length with some small lakes across Panama. “Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolution, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels…”
There are only a few mentions of “corruption” inside this book. In one instance, Treasury Secretary William Crawford is accused of corruption for plotting “the political demise of rivals” by “illegally” wielding “the power of his office to further his presidential ambitions, despite suffering from a “stroke” (79). In another case, there is an accusation of corruption when two politicians made a “backroom deal” for Adams to be helped to the presidency, in exchange for helping Clay climb by then naming him Secretary of State (99). This section is in a chapter about this “Corrupt Bargain”, which questions if such office-trades are instead a standard part of politics. Another tiny instance of corruption is when a letter was sent to a “private” office for “FREE” via the government-mail (163). These instances are not as exciting as the blurb promised.
The interior includes some diagrams or drawings, such as a sketch of the geography of the proposed project, and a world-map to help those like myself who need clarification about this geographic proposal. There are a few different types of maps at the front of the book to explain this. There are also portraits of the characters involved throughout.
While the narrative is not as dramatic as I hoped, it is thoroughly researched, and has some dramatic-tension between the players. It should be an entertaining and informative read for those with time to read further. And it should help researchers of this subject. Though it is a bit too airy for my taste in places, with some sentences such as: “Human property was simply not part of Bentham’s dream…” (21). This is too abstract for a history book.
A Chat About Artsy Stuff Done
Pat Lipsky, Brightening Glance: Art and Life (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2025). Softcover. 180pp.
**
“For more than five decades, Pat Lipsky has been a leading figure in American color field painting. In loosely connected vignettes, this extraordinary book looks back on a life starting in 1970s SoHo: from her pioneering days juggling painting and single motherhood in a redesigned factory loft on Wooster Street; to Paris, where an enchanting friendship develops with the former director of the Louvre, Pierre Rosenberg…” This troubled me because such friendships would seem to be ethically questionable when this guy might be in charge of choosing or rejecting an artist’s work. References to him begin with a mention that he just dropped by her studio. Then, there is a critique that he hangs “pictures… too close together” (79). No explanations are provided for the nature of this friendship, how they became friends, or why this was appropriate. The next mention is that somebody is “Paul Rosenberg’s granddaughter” (he is a gallery-owner). It seems this is in reference to some other French woman who is a friend-of-a-friend. The preceding dialogue is too chatty to understand the relevance. The narrator is confused about these relationships too. She writes to this Louvre manager and receives a letter back in French: they discuss the lighting of paintings, instead of the artist who is the subject of this study. Then, she meets this guy in person: describing his appearance. There’s chatter about some artist, and commentary about this guy’s furniture. The guy seems to be flirting with the author, so he must have flirted with Lipsky too, returning me to my original question about appropriateness without an answer.
“…To her yearslong close friendship with legendary art critic Clement Greenberg; to a marvelous love affair with the charismatic art dealer Richard Bellamy.” Alright: finally, some directness. Bellamy is mentioned in gushing commentary: the author is delighted he was “coming to my studio.” The next mention is again about the author meeting this guy, instead of just type of affair he had with the artist. Ah, I’ve just figured out this is an autobiography. The blurb makes it sound as if this is a third-person account. I see: so, this artist was married when she met this “Bellamy” and had a casual affair with him after a few visits and drinks…. (125). Then, there’s a mention that years later “Dick Bellamy and I were in bed at his Chambers Street loft” when he criticized her “group” of “friends”: it’s unclear if this is because they are not pop enough, who this agent mostly preferred handling (161).
“We glimpse Lipsky’s first introduction to Cézanne as a child in 1950s Brooklyn and her studies with the mythic artist Tony Smith, who would become her mentor. There is a visit with Lee Krasner at her home in Springs and another at Lipsky’s Manhattan apartment, late-night, smoke-filled loft parties, and evenings at Max’s Kansas City where Lou Reed and Nico sing in the background while rival groups of earthwork artists, pop artists, conceptual artists, and color field painters pretend to ignore each other at the bar. Along the way we experience Lipsky’s emergence at the forefront of her generation of painters.” She “ponders why we love (and hate) the art world.”
This is the least informative, and the most casual bit of gossip and nonsense book I’ve read in a while. Yayks. Not good. Not good. This book sells itself as a rare case of tokenism where a lone woman succeeded, but it troubles me that it’s this particular type of woman who alone succeeds where stronger female rivals fail.
Scholarly Edition of the Lesser-Known Tibetan Book of the Dead
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of The Dead: The Timeless Buddhist Guide to Life, Death, and Rebirth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 16, 2025). Softcover: 368pp: $19. ISBN: 978-1-250-39559-7.
****
“Written by an ancient Buddhist teacher in the eighth century, the Tibetan Book of the Dead offers instructions on how to attain enlightenment, prepare for the process of dying, and move through the stages of rebirth. Translated from the Tibetan by American anthropologist W. Y. Evans-Wentz in 1927…” According to the introduction of Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (the 1919 translator of this manuscript) this new edition’s Bardo Thodol manuscript was copied in “1919 from a young lama of the Kargyutpa Sect of the Red Hat School attached to the Bhutia Basti Monastery, Darjeeling”, who claimed it “had been handed down in his family for several generations”. It is “undated, but the translator judged it to be from 150 to 200 years old.” In July 1919, Major W. L. Campbell, British Political Representative in Sikkim, wrote to the translator claiming there were specific numbers of this Bardo Thodol manuscript: “The Yellow Sect have six, the Red Sect seven, and the Kar-gyut-pas five.” The dating of the origin of this manuscript has been based on “the Block-Print” and on references in “Tibetan sources”, which indicate it was “first committed to writing in the time of Padma Sambhava, in the eighth century AD”. This dating is based on the timing when in this 8th century AD Lamaism, or Tantric Buddhism “took firm root in Tibet”. In the previous century, the “first king” Strong-Tsan-Gampo (-650 AD) began ruling “over a united Tibet” as Buddhism entered from Nepal and China (both by marriage to princesses by the king). Then, Tibetan King Thi-Stong-Detsan (740-786) invited Great Guru Padma Sambhava, a Professor of Yoga at the Buddhist University of Nalanda, India, to migrate to Tibet in 747 to translate and write new Buddhist manuscripts in “Tibetan out of Indian Sanskrit originals”, which are collectively known as Tertons, one of which is this Bardo, or Book of the Dead manuscript.
There are many echoing similarities between this Tibetan manuscript and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is popularly claimed to have been created in 1550 BC. For example, “embalming” was practiced by Buddhist lamas, and Egyptians for monarchs. “The Judgement Scene as described in our text and that described in the Egyptian… seem so much alike in essentials as to suggest that common origin… In the Tibetan version, Dharma-Raja… King of the Dead…, the Buddhist and Hindu Pluto, as a Judge of the Dead, correspond to Osiris in the Egyptian version.” If either of these was a plagiarism of the other; the later writer could have re-written this text as they performed a loose translation and altered names to fit a new culture and language. The Tibetan version seems to be more authentic, as its manuscript looks naturally-aged and is not claimed to date back to improbable periods. In contrast, the Egyptian version was first-published in facsimile as Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte in Paris, in 1805. Neither this year nor Napoleon are mentioned in this edition. The Brooklyn Museum’s team dated the Goldworker Amun manuscript in 2011, and concluded that its papyrus was created in 1420 BC. The New Kingdom period lasted between 1550-1070 BC.
This is a very important book for the history of theology. It has been well-handled in this edition. There are extensive introductions, annotations, and other matter designed to assist both specialists, and the public with understanding this field that is generally misunderstood, despite so much of world history, culture, and modern politics depending on references to such texts as policy-supporting moral-evidence. It should be added to all libraries’ collections, and should be read by all mythology/theology professors.
Yet Another Edition of an Inspiring But Over-Puffed Classic of “Feminism”
Virginia Woolf; Michele Barrett, Ed., A Room of One’s Own (New York: Penguin Books, July 8, 2025). Hardcover: $28. 144pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-89-1.
***
“Virginia Woolf’s pioneering work of feminism, ‘probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in [the twentieth] century’ (Hermione Lee), featuring a new introduction by Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author”. Oh, no… not again: another pop intro to a scholarly edition? As I anticipated, this intro begins with self-indulgent reflections about this bestseller’s move. She confesses she had not read this book in the first decades of owning it until she was confronted with it during a move. Unlike some of the horrid preceding intros, these reflections are followed with a history of the introduction of “universal suffrage” in 1928, giving women the right to vote. Though there are too many autobiographical interruptions, between sparks of meaning, as the not that Woolf was a “self-publishing radical” who served as an “inspiration” for feminists since the 1970s. She writes that she had not sympathized with this white-privileged woman’s perspective until she realized it was “a piece of another woman’s soul”. My stylometric/handwriting tests have indicated that “Woolf’s” manuscripts were ghostwritten by James Muddock (1843-1934); so, it is not a “woman’s” soul communicating through this text, but rather indeed the soul of privilege who was capable of hiring a ghostwriter to bolster their profiteering publishing business. Gonzalez does not seem to really be reading the text closely, as it instead inspires her to research modern problems women are facing. The line she quotes, when viewed from a male publishing-monopolizing ghostwriter’s perspective spell an opposing message: “Hence, the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.” Muddock had founded agencies, societies, and other entities that allowed him to monopolizing the publishing industry in his last decades when most of the past century’s monopolizing ghostwriters had died. He benefited from selling his ghostwriting labor to women because he could convince them of their inadequacy to do this labor themselves. I did learn something new that I have forgotten since my earlier thorough readings of this text: the narrative in “Room” takes place from the perspective of a fictional first-person narrator she calls “Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please”. In this Muddock is confessing that he is describing a fictional “Virginia Woolf” or a fictional female author and student at Cambridge. He had similarly attempted to invoke his gender-confusion, or objection to stay in a female-character-perspective in “Woolf’s” Orlando. The biographies of female-byline-holders were fictions for Muddock, who manipulated femininity to gain power over the publishing industry. The UK gave women the right to vote after most other European countries. As England’s leading ghostwriter during this period, Muddock could have influenced an earlier suffrage, if he had been inclined in this direction.
“In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, arguing with inimitable wit and rhetorical mastery that an income and a room of one’s own are essential to a woman’s creative freedom. These lectures became the basis for A Room of One’s Own, a landmark in feminist thought, in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men?… Xochitl Gonzalez… extends the argument to Woolf’s housekeeper, breaking down divides of not only gender but also race and class in order to include all women in Woolf’s profoundly inspiring call to realize their creative potential.”
The “Notes” section at the back is relatively short, only offering a few comments per-chapter. There is a useful “Appendix: Profession for Women” that Woolf read in 1931: this is useful because it is not included in other editions.
Overall, this is not a scholarly edition of “Room”. It is not a horrid edition, as the introductory remarks are thoughtful, and the notes provide essential information. The “Note on the Text” from the editor is only a couple of pages: it briefly summarizes the reported sales statistics for this book’s early editions. This jointly seems to hint that this is a mainstream edition designed to be short, and sellable; though it would have been more logical to release a paperback edition for this purpose.
European Warmongers That Sold Arms and Warfare to the World
Clifton Crais, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, November 2025). Hardcover: $39.95. 654pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82741-4.
****
“A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age. We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment… The period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive. In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.”
The front- and back-matter is plentiful in this book: maps, figures, tables, a note on language and place names, the main characters are described, and a chronology and notes are offered. There are also appendixes on weapons, deaths, wealth and climate. Any re-writing or re-interpretation of history requires such parts for clarity. The book is divided into parts that cover technological warfare advances as a business, killing in Africa, killing in other regions, killing in America (two parts), and then the “Twilight of the Warlords”. The latter positions the totalitarian “Empire” as a rival force to “Warlords” in Africa, India, and China. This is partly the propaganda European empires used to turn regional rulers into villainous and barbaric “warlords”, which made it possible for them to conquer enormous territories through such propagandistic persuasion of the others’ inferiority at ruling.
I found some helpful information in this book regarding colonialism that somewhat helps my Fall Mythology course. Though most of these historic explanations are too vague, and more directly-quoted, and more thoroughly sourced information is needed to explain these intricate subjects that have previously been misunderstood. I have not seen similar studies previously that begin to shift the blame for the world’s killings onto European warmongering… But it does not really go far enough in this, as it still proposes “warlords” in these regions were not manipulated by the Europeans into fighting through propaganda, but rather themselves found reasons to kill each other. This book is suitable for acquisition by most libraries, and would benefit researchers of this subject.
Psychic Manipulation of the Criminal-Justice-System
John Edward and Robert Hilland, Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, September 2, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-250291-75-2.
**
“How a skeptical FBI agent reached out to a famous psychic for help on a baffling case—and the twenty-five-year crime-solving journey that followed. In the summer of 1998, FBI agent Bob Hilland reluctantly picked up the phone to call the famous psychic John Edward. Bob didn’t expect much from the call, but he was working on an unsolvable cold case and had nowhere else to turn. What Bob never imagined was that the call would lead to a shattering of all his preconceived notions, a huge break in the cold case, and an unlikely crime-solving partnership that spanned twenty-five years.” Bob’s entire law-enforcement career lasted for 30 years, and 25 of them were with a psychic’s help? Serial killer John Smith. Bob has used this book and such claims to retire from the FBI and to make money on training government-agencies. Smith III (1951-) was convicted of murder in 2001 for killing his wife in 1974, and charges are in progress for the murder of his second wife in 1991, and an unidentified third woman. This case was broken when Michael Smith (brother) confessed his brother’s guilt in 1999: the FBI then found the remains and arrested Smith. Hilland claims that he was one of the agents who convinced this brother to confess during a set of re-interviews in 1999. In this book, they claim that John did a reading during which he saw the murder as a movie, and “got a name—Michael.” The psychic would have seen a list of relatives of the believed suspect. Later he apparently John kept thinking of this name “Michael” and that he had told others his brother was a killer. The simple plot is that a brother felt guilty, or was himself guilty and eventually confessed of his brother’s crime. This version of events inserts psycho-babble as somehow necessary to decide on this particular suspect as being instrumental, instead of just interviewing this suspect and asking him. There is no glory in the true-sounding version that some guy confessed and this was sufficient to convict his brother after decades of law-enforcement inaction. On the other hand, apparently best-selling books and TV series can be built by imagining a convoluted fantasy about how supernatural-forces were necessary to suddenly solve the case.
“As Bob and John took on more cases together, they slowly learned how to rely on each other and trust their skills, ultimately finding not only justice for the crimes they solved, but resolution and healing in their own lives…”
This is a poorly-composed, and light on details crime-fantasy novel with the author as its “hero”, as opposed to a documented true-crime narrative. The “psychic medium”, John Edward, is a co-author: he is described in the third-person as being “wary of cops” by Hilland. There is no clear explanation for why this agent chooses to call a psychic, other than that he was failing to solve crimes with his own labor. John claims that he was receiving calls “from law enforcement”, and he kept refusing them. But then, it so happens that “John Edward got a call from me.” No evidence is given that anybody called this psychic before. He must have been soliciting work because in 1995 he “quit his job and began working as full-time psychic medium.” In 1998, the agent reopens “the Smith case” and hears one of John’s popular radio appearances, and then calls him. This is just the most ridiculous and manipulative narrative imaginable. A fantasy-writer uses probably paid-for media appearances to convince cops to call him for help with cases they cannot solve.
Those who are interested in stopping psychics from manipulating the public with false claims might benefit from reading through this book to understand how this type of confidence-scheme works. But they might be tricked into believing some of this fiction if they are not trained to tell fantasy from investigative reality.
Propaganda for Men Who Instigated the Civil War
Peter Charles Hoffer, Three Speeches that Saved the Union: Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and the Crisis of 1850 (New York: NYU Pres, September 9, 2025). Softcover: $32. 384pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-479838-83-7.
***
“How three skilled orators navigated a polarized political landscape. For the generation of politicians who inherited the Republic and the Union, the opening months of 1850 were a desperate time filled with increasing animosity between free and slave state leaders over issues of the expansion of slavery. Following the end of the Mexican-American War and the subsequent expansion of American territory came a series of fiery debates over how this new territory would be governed, and whether to allow California’s admission to the Union as a ‘free state.’ …The first ever deep content analysis of the three most eventful speeches delivered in the US Senate… Analytical study of the roles of the ‘great triumvirate’ of American political leaders—Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster—played in preserving the American Union.” I explained my perspective on “Henry Clay” in the preceding review of his biography. After the main pro/anti-slavery propagandist Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) died in 1846, Clay and these other speakers must have hired some other ghostwriter, who more sincerely favored the anti-slavery side, thus leaving the US finally towards a belated abolition. “All three were lawyers… Practicing law meant knowing and using ‘terms of art’ correctly, and knowing which words would sway a jury—or a nation. Despite their opposing viewpoints, these skilled orators urged for some kind of compromise that would diffuse the possibility of civil war.” Though the demand for a “compromise” hints that they might have been recycling Clarkson’s earlier double-sided rhetoric. “Providing all three speeches in their entirety, alongside a running commentary framing the political climate and manner in which each of these speeches were delivered, Hoffer demonstrates how intractable the slavery issue had become, how near a civil war was, and how it was prevented—at least for a time… Study of a nation that three speeches pulled from the brink of dissolution.” It took a civil-war to end this dispute probably because there was no rhetorical way to end it when the press was financially self-interested in profiting from the continuation of slavery. If these speeches had sincerely helped avoid conflict; they would have shifted history so that there would not have eventually been a civil-war.
In these 1850 debates, Clay proposed compromises such as California being a free state and other newly-acquired regions to be sovereign territories (probably meaning slavery could be legal in them). Calhoun argued for South’s secession to preserve slavery. Webster insisted that Northern states had to protect southerners by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. This 1850 debate really began the argument for separation of southern states instead of helping to prevent this movement. Mexico had abolished slavery previously; when Mexico lost territories in the Mexican-American War (1846-8), Mexicans who were now in American territories objected to the introduction of slavery on anti-slave lands, and this began stirring calls for separating to enforce slavery legally in southern regions, including this newly acquired from Mexico Texan region. California was also part of Mexico. California had tried to remain an independent nation before it was peacefully negotiated to enter as a state. Discussions about separating California or Texas into independent countries gave this idea that the south could similarly separate. Rather than being voices for peace, these three speakers introduced this idea into the mainstream media, and this served to propagate for the Southern declaration of separation in later years (3).
The introduction and most of this book instead puffs these guys as being “hypnotic”, and for “saving the nation”. This is not a useful contribution to further understanding of the truth of this subject. It is neatly presented and reasonably well researched, but it restates old pufferies.
How Scientific Falsehoods Convince the Public
David Baron, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, August, 2025). Hardcover: $31.99. 336pp, 6X9”, 101 illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-324-09066-3.
****
“‘There Is Life on the Planet Mars’ —The New York Times, 9 December 1906.” This “headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many believed intelligent life had been discovered on Mars. The Martians—a bizarre tale reconstructed through newly discovered clippings, letters and photographs—begins in the 1890s with Percival Lowell, a Harvard scion who was so certain of his Mars discovery that he (almost) convinced a generation of astronomers that grainy photographs of the red planet revealed meltwater and an intricate canal system, declaring ‘there can be no doubt that living beings inhabit our neighbouring world’ (The New York Times). So frenzied was the reaction that international controversies arose. Tesla announced he had received Martian radio signals, biologists debated whether Martians were winged or gilled and a new genre called science fiction arose. While Lowell’s claims were debunked, his influence sparked a compulsive interest in Mars and life in outer space that continues to this day.”
To clarify, science-fiction was designed as a genre that excused scientists who made false claims and tried to but failed to convince the public of their truthfulness. Scientific false-telling that succeeds in being believed becomes “scientific fact” until it is hopefully later proven to be false. Scientific fiction is falsehoods that are immediately contradicted or proven to be false because they are so incredible, and are supported with such non-existent, or irrelevant “proof”. This set of reviews includes the first Chinese science-fiction that seems to have been designed by colonialists trying to seize China’s land to sell the idea of a future utopia if Chinese leaders surrendered their power over their own territories. Alien-invasion, or alien “exploration” narratives generally puffed the idea of colonialism, or wars against other nations as a supernatural, or super-scientific endeavor.
The New York Times ran an article on May 27 indicating that Lowell’s Observatory in Arizona found evidence in photographs of “canals” on Mars: Lowell insisted “photographic negative is nothing if not truthful.” These photos are now stored in this Observatory’s archives. They are “less than a quarter inch across” and are incredibly “coarse and grainy”. They show “dark patches” across Mars, but there are no visible “canals”. The marketers of these images stated the opposite or that they “are remarkably sharp”, and this claim from scientists seems to have been sufficient to convince the public. Canals were claimed to be visible with a “good magnifying glass”. These photograph studies took place in around 1905, at around the same time when the first Chinese science-fiction novel was written. Rival scientists probably could not fully contradict these findings because of the monopoly Brits held over the world’s academic and news press.
Telsa is soon roped in, and Telsa’s first instinct is that the generated public interest means there’s money to be made in agreeing with the existence of life on Mars, and working to “prove” this untruth. Tesla wrote in 1907: “As to life [on Mars,] if you will find some millionaire who will listen to me we shall know more” (173). J. P. Morgan had previously “refused to provide additional funds for Tesla’s communications tower on Long Island”. Tesla was failing to find funds elsewhere as he was proposing other sci-fi concepts such as a “remote-controlled torpedo boat”, “wireless energy”, and “communicating with Mars.” Back in 1901, Tesla claimed he “had received interplanetary messages” (174-7). Tesla kept hitting this money-bank until he capitalized on this fiction.
This is a very interesting perspective. I have not read similar attempts to bring science down to Earth by explaining how charlatans tend to rule it because science-fiction or the impossible tends to be more interesting to the public than the small scientific steps that can actually be taken. This is a pretty light book that should be an enjoyable read for anybody interested in this topic. The reader does not have to be a specialist on this subject. All libraries can benefit from acquiring this book, as it provides new explanations of an important subject.
A Uniquely Thorough Study of Dinosaurs Based on Cited Evidence
Dean R. Lomax; Bob Nicholls, Il., The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs: Unearthing the Real Behaviors of Prehistoric Animals (New York: Columbia University Press, September 2025). Hardcover, color illustrations. 360pp: $38.95. ISBN: 978-0-231211-30-7.
****
“Buried within a lost world, astonishing evidence reveals the behavior of extinct animals, giving us a glimpse at both everyday and epic events.” It “tells the remarkable tales of ancient animals through some of the most distinctive and unusual fossils ever found, offering an intimate, behind-the-scenes look into the story of life in deep time… Infused with anecdotes from” the author’s “adventures and sprinkled with a touch of dinosaur humor. These fossils tell real-world stories of prehistoric parenting, the quest for survival, and the endless struggle between predator and prey. Unbelievable moments are captured: saber-toothed cats clashing, mega-millipedes mating, dinosaurs swimming. From ammonite eggs to mosasaur mealtimes, and from a pregnant ichthyosaur that chowed down on a bird to the mammal that took down a dinosaur, these behaviors challenge what we thought we knew about the prehistoric world… Illustrations by Bob Nicholls… in full color.” The illustrations are certainly comedic or cartoonish: starting with the cartoon of the epochs in deep-time. Though most of the illustrations in the body are computer-generated and realistic, as opposed to cartoonish. These are very vivid indeed, color images. Those interested in how these creatures looked would certainly enjoy just looking at these pictures.
The book is logically divided by themes: birth, babies, family, moving, hunting, gathering, conflict, diet divergence, digestion, and health. The diet chapter interested me first because I’m curious if most of these animals were vegan. My hopes were dashed as this chapter opens with an accusation of cannibalism by the mosasaurs in their wars. Though my question is if most dinosaurs were vegan, as opposed to any of them. A “puncture in the left lower jaw” matches “the tooth’s shape”, proving “a Mosasaurus-on-Mosasaurus kill” (198). There are no mentions of vegans or vegetarians in this book. But that’s because other terms are used. The next chapter concludes by indicating that diet of large dinosaurs included “decaying wood and crustaceans”, such as “crabs” that were found on nearby rocks, which “challenges our preconceived ideas about large herbivorous dinosaurs solely eating plants” (237). The chapter on digestion includes an illustration of the act of defection, and a dinosaur towering over the guts-spilled corpse of another dinosaur. Some illustrations are clearly not for kids in this book (230). The photos and digital representations and figures of fossils with explanations are very helpful: I haven’t seen similar archeological details in equivalent books. Interesting details include a “complete lizard” being found in a “stomach” (205).
This book sucks readers in. Those who are interested in the realities of dinosaur life are likely to enjoy reading it cover-to-cover. It is relatively detailed, cites plenty of sources, and yet is conversational to be easy-to-read. It is aimed at the general public, field specialists, and public libraries.
Puffery of Radical Publishing Donations
John Fabian Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollard Upended America (New York: Simon & Schuster, October 14, 2025). Softcover: $35.
***
“…Secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund. In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance… Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambitious progressive projects. The men and women around the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black. They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes. Yet shared beliefs linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age. By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation.”
The blurb is blatantly biased in favor of this project, failing to even acknowledged that money was the main unifying force behind those who participated in distributing this Fund (partly to themselves). To clarify, in 1922, Garland established this fund as a philanthropic organization. It was led by trustees including Roger Baldwin (also one of the founders of ACLU in 1920, before this fund opened). It disbursed, through 1941, $2 million to left-wing causes, including the Federated Press (1922-49: labor: initially established by the People’s Council of America), Vanguard Press ($155,000: 1926), New Masses magazine (1926-48: Marxist: this magazine revived earlier magazines under other names), World Tomorrow… Christian World magazine (1918-34: pacifist, Christian socialism), and the legal-defense fund (labor). In other words, most of this fund was spent on publishing socialist propaganda that might have contributed to the anti-socialist McCarthyism or Red-Scare period of the 1947-59. Or alternatively, all or most of these efforts were artificially forced to close by McCarthyism that began to imprison or otherwise penalize those who openly celebrated leftist views. Garland explained that he was a Christian socialist by evoking Jesus when he first turned his money over in 1920. When Garland tried to just refuse the money Upton Sinclair wrote to him to insist that he should “give it away” instead, and put him in touch with Roger Baldwin to run this fund. This is a pretty artificial start. Given my research into ghostwriters, it seems that Sinclair or other writers probably manipulated Garland into viewing his fortune as evil and then directed most of it towards their own presses and magazines, or to lawyers (who might have been hiring ghostwriters). This endeavor might have accomplished far more practical good if the money had been spent on building great housing for the poor, or teaching the poor to build houses, or a number of other practical direct-assistance programs: perhaps free food on farms where anybody who helps with farming them can just pick free food out of the ground. The main surviving entity, Vanguard, did not have any significant bestsellers that could have swayed the public until after it was sold to James Henle in 1932 (making a private profit for the seller, after they had received this fund’s money to start it).
The interior of the book digresses into the biographies of those who ran this fund, as in “The Education of Roger Baldwin”. It romanticizes what this fund achieved without considering its reality, and how similar donations might be better managed in our present.
NASA Invents a New Story of Space-Exploration
Jeffrey Kluger, Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, November 11, 2025). Softcover: $26.99. ISBN: 978-1-250415-82-0.
***
“…The pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon. Without Gemini, there would be no Apollo. After we first launched Americans into space but before we touched down on the moon’s surface, there was the Gemini program. It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program—the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it. But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. With a war raging in Vietnam and lawmakers calling for cuts to NASA’s budget, the success of the Gemini program—or the space program in general—was never guaranteed… Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program…”
I previously noted elsewhere that evidence leans towards the “conspiracy” that the US never landed humans on the Moon, or that these landings were faked. For example, the speed reached by one of these “manned” flights would have pancaked a human at un-survivable G’s, and yet the astronauts are claimed to have survived this trip. On the other hand, there is currently a Space Station in orbit, so this proves that the US did succeed in imitating Russia in sending humans into orbit around the Earth. Lessons learned in these deadly early experiments have been reused through the present without many new innovations in this snail-speed space-race.
The ’Introduction” opens by creating tension in the threat of manned astronauts crashing back down to Earth at extreme G’s. The transcript of this crash-landing is read with commentary. The writing style is too casual. Most of it seems to be a repeat of NASA’s main sources that reported on what happened. This copying of NASA’s version is why the faking of space-explorations is not likely to be uncovered by mainstream writers who just copy the official version without questioning it.
After this dramatic summary, there’s extensive puffing of the “successes”, the “capabilities”, “mechanical genius” etc. of this program.
The “Prologue” begins with a personal tension as one astronaut is considering cutting another “loose” in space in 1966. An astronaut is tumbling through space, then people step out to discuss what should be done in secret. No astronaut had walked in space before, and now it was necessary to stop from just cutting a guy off and letting him drift into space. If they had to discuss it at that moment this means they had done absolutely no planning, and had to rational plan for this likely scenario.
I cannot keep reading this book because I’ve read a few similar pufferies of NASA’s achievements before. Some of them are dramatic and somewhat interesting to read, but the tensions they depict seem fictional, or as if words not in transcripts are being made up to fill gaps in the record. I do not recommend reading this book unless somebody is researching just what NASA has been up to before, and is doing now.
Great Concept in Bat-Science Mishandled by Digressions
Yossi Yovel, The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, October 7, 2025). Hardcover: $32, 320pp. ISBN: 978-1-250378-44-6.
***
“With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique, super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years. Yossi Yovel, an ecologist and a neurobiologist, is passionate about deciphering the secrets of bats, including using AI to decipher their communication… From muddy rainforests to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal.”
Most of the details in this blurb are things I have not heard before. Bats make up 25% of mammals? Amazing. Most blurbs exaggerate the significance of their subject, but these facts are justly worthy of amazement.
Though the intensity is dampened in the “Introduction” that starts with generalities about animals in Israel before explaining that the author is waiting in the hot morning to see bats. Then some more facts, and then the author continues complaining about the early hour. My edition does not have a table-of-contents, so I do not know how exactly this book is divided. “Part One: Sociability” explains a bit. There is a digital table in this eBook. The other parts are on: Echolocation, Evolution, and Nature Conservation. This is a logical division: courting, hunting, vampirism, language, and other topics are isolated into chapters so those with interest in individual topics can follow these. A bit too much space is given to echolocation and how this system evolved, but I guess this is the main point-of-interest for bat-types.
The animal-language section interested me. It begins by explaining that human language depends on firm rules of syntax, whereas other animals seem to “lack this capacity”. Though there is an “ability of a bird or monkey species to combine pairs of signals to create a meaningful sequence.” Examples include how birds combine signals to both search and converge during a hunt. Instead of explaining the difference in this system in bats, the author digresses into discussing how he wanted to generally “understand animals” when he was a child: this is a highly annoying digression. After this there is finally an explanation that bats “have an enormous range of communication signals… short and stereotypical…, long or short, whistling or chirping, ultrasonic or audible.” But then he digresses again to explain he personally bird a bat “that wailed like a cat”. This is confusing whereas it would have been clearer to explain statistics, or verified facts about what bats specifically sound like cats.
It would be near-impossible for a reader to get through this book cover-to-cover given these leaps from science into general reflections. Scientists would not tolerate so many uncertainties, and unscientific anecdotes, and those who are searching for action or narrative would be distracted by bursts of science. There are some interesting places, but I generally do not recommend this book.
A Light and Humorous Account of Troublesome Texas Football Origins
David Fleming, A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025). Hardcover: $29.
****
“The… untold true story of the 1952 Dallas Texans―the most dysfunctional team in the craziest season in NFL history. Rattlesnakes on the practice field…” Just yesterday a wasp got into my house. A nest of wasps once formed on my stairs. Spraying them with foam (of different types) tends to work to kill them. There are some animals in my backyard on most days. I’ve seen a fox. Rattlesnakes though are a bit more intense than finding a dead skunk in the backyard and needing to self-dispose of it by tossing it in the trash… This just seems to be part of the hostilities that meet those who attempt to “make it” in Texas. “…Barroom brawls between teammates, bounced checks, paternity suits, house bombings by the Ku Klux Klan…” Inside the book there’s an explanation that a Dallas team’s “best player” was impacted by “segregation laws” and a “string of unsolved bombing attacks on Black residents”: so two Black players could not live with teammates “at the garden apartment complex. Technically it would have also been against the law.” Direct violence seems to follow when somebody attempts to actively defend themselves, or when lighter forms of violent threats fail to achieve some desired aim, such as surrendering a desired job to a less qualified rival. “…Stadium fields covered in circus-elephant dung…” How did this happen? I found this section that explains that the Cotton Bowl where teams were meeting was also where the circus was performing: the NFL had to “share their turf with clowns”. One commentor observes: “Every time you put your hand down… you stuck it into a pile of elephant shit”. Though the question is why this NFL team began practicing on a field without first cleaning up the enormous piles of elephant dung on their field. Why wasn’t a maintenance worker hired to get the “shit” out of there. This is also the Texan way. If “shit” happens; then, it’s just going to stay there no matter how many people stick their hands into it. “…One-legged trainers, humiliating defeats, miraculous wins, All-Pro quarterbacks getting drunk at halftime, strip poker with groupies, and even a future Hall of Fame coach stealing a cab… Over a fascinating, ten-month rollercoaster ride in 1952, in the waning Wild West days of the NFL, before television turned the game into a corporation, the forgotten Dallas Texans would go down in history as one of the worst (and, wildest) teams of all time and the last NFL team to fail. But not before defying the Jim Crow South, pulling off a Thanksgiving Day miracle against George Halas’s famed Chicago Bears and then celebrating with an even more infamous bender that would make Jimmy Johnson’s Dallas Cowboys blush. A year later, the NFL buried all traces of the most loveable, dysfunctional, entertaining team in history by secretly rebranding the train wreck Texans as the wholesome, all-American Baltimore Colts, the team that would go on to save pro football…”
As I skimmed this book, I found that it delivers what this entertaining blurb promises it will. Fans of sports, and researchers of sports should enjoy looking more closely into what this dramatic narrative is saying about the origin of the NFL, and similar enterprises. I think I might watch NFL games if they featured these types of shenanigans. Corporate football is intolerably boring.
Death-Threat Against Houdini Taken as Proof of Spiritualism
Brad Ricca, Lincoln’s Ghost: Houdini’s War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025). Hardcover: $30.
**
“The incredible untold story of how the world’s greatest magician, Harry Houdini, waged war upon Spiritualism, uncovering unknown magic, political conspiracies, and surprising secrets along the way. You won’t live forever, Houdini. You’ve got to DIE. I put a curse on you… During a séance in 1924, Houdini―the greatest entertainer in the world―was cursed by a vengeful spirit, who said his days were numbered.” The publisher’s reference to this curser as a “spirit” and not explaining what person was speaking this curse suggests this is not a serious study of anti-spiritualism, but rather a puffery of spiritualism that presents Houdini’s efforts to dispel it as antagonistic. “Houdini laughed. He believed talking to the dead was impossible. By 1926, Houdini was dead.” Proving a prediction is true because somebody eventually died who had been putting his life in extreme danger across his life stretches believability by insisting on the truth in falsehoods. “This is the untold story of the last performance of Harry Houdini, who―inspired by his hero Abraham Lincoln―devotes himself full-time to a personal crusade against Spiritualism, the practice of speaking to the dead. In a spellbinding journey across Jazz Age America, haunted by the aftermath of the Great War and a deadly pandemic, Houdini encounters modern-day haunted houses, warlocks, and monsters, and uncovers a shocking conspiracy that stretches all the way to the American presidency―and to the House of Houdini itself.” It seems this might be a story about how Houdini was murdered for trying to convince the public these spirituals were manipulating them; and nobody has properly attributed his death as a murder, instead interpreting such threats as curses from disembodied (and thus impossible to prosecute) spirits. “In a… dual-timeline narrative alternating between Houdini’s 1926 dramatic courtroom testimony before Congress and the last otherworldly cases he takes on that lead him there” an “examination of deception, love, politics, the afterlife, and the very nature of magic itself.”
“1: The Curse” begins by explaining just who cursed Houdini: a woman called “Mina”, who was placed into “a wooden cabinet” in the “center of” a “room” in the Copley Hotel in Boston by Houdini, and reporters from Scientific American there to test Mina’s “powers” as part of $2,500 prize competition. Apparently, her husband’s name is Dr. Le Roi Crandon, but it is unclear why her surname is not given, as it would logically match his, despite an attempt to anonymize her with the “Mina” pseudonym. Apparently, she was Mina Crandon (1888-1941). Houdini interrogates why she seems to be guessing some things, trying to find fault to avoid giving her a prize for clairvoyance. With money involved, Mina attempts to find some way to trick Houdini with her usual maneuvers before exclaiming: “You won’t live forever, Houdini. You’ve got to die!” This was after Walter shouted though “Mina” (she was channeling him): “You goddamned son of a bitch!” And then later she shouted “I put a curse on you…” Houdini insisted on having this curse as part of the record, while Walter tried to wipe out this death-threat. The chapter concludes soon thereafter without an explanation if issuing this death-threat helped Mina win the $2,500 award: this seemed to have been the promised subject of this book. So, this omission is troubling. Mina is rarely mentioned across the rest of the book. She was the story, as the Scientific American reporter, Walter Prince, indicated in 1933 that J. Malcolm Bird has confessed that Crandon had attempted to bribe him into performing a trick to convince Houdini and win the price. She appears to have shouted the curse when Bird refused to participate, and Houdini proved her to be a fraud, losing her money. The book mentions that Bird was an associate editor of this publication, and that he was in support of Mina winning this prize, even quoting that Houdini was convinced at hearing her exclamation as “Walter’s” spirit. Bird maid these claims in his book that puffed Mina or Margery (1925). Bird is never mentioned again.
Since the central subject of interest is not handled here, I do not trust this source. Most of this book seems to be borrowed from untrustworthy or biased-by-money accounts. The odds that Houdini was assassinated are rather high because he was sucker-punched by somebody who knew how his gut-punching trick worked, and this caused his appendix to rupture and killed him. Treating this threat as a sincerely spirit-message is thus rather offensive to Houdini’s memory. The title also suggests this Mina had something to do with Lincoln’s assassination, which happened decades before her time, and which is only treated in people claiming to speak with Lincoln’s ghost.
Can a Submarine Shoot Itself Heroically?
Tom Clavin, Running Deep: Bravery, Survival, and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, October 21, 2025). Hardcover: $30, 352pp. ISBN: 978-1-250374-47-9.
***
“The… deadliest submarine in World War II and the courageous captain who survived torture and imprisonment at the hands of the enemy. There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the Silent Service in World War II: the USS Tang. Captain Richard Hetherington O’Kane commanded the attack submarine that sunk more tonnage, rescued more downed aviators, and successfully completed more surface attacks than any other American submarine. These undersea predators were the first to lead the offensive rebound against the Japanese, but at great cost: Submariners would have six times the mortality rate as the sailors who manned surface ships. The Tang achieved its greatest success on October 24, 1944, when it took on an entire Japanese convoy and destroyed it. But its 24th and last torpedo boomeranged, returning to strike the Tang.” I had difficulty imagining how this could have happened: it’s explained in chapter “42: Boomerang”. The captain fires for the first time and strikes the Japanese target. Immediately, the captain fired again a second torpedo. Despite “calm water” in the Formosa Strait, “several yards later, instead of following the straight and true path… the torpedo turned sharply left…” It then “suddenly surfaced… just yards in front of the Tang’s bow. The torpedo then dove, but broke the surface again seconds later. An erratic torpedo… surfaced and dove” a few times”, then “veered to port, skipping along the waves”. After watching all this, they finally ordered a maneuver to move out of the way, but it still hit them. It seems that a more likely scenario is that the captain ordered a fire while the ship was in motion and that it ended up being in a position where its own torpedo hit it. There were some other accusations of boomerang self-sinkings: USS Tullibee (March 1944: before this incident), and USS Sargo (1942: blamed on gyroscope not being installed). This boomerang problem was apparently recorded across the testing of this model, in 1942 before the incidents that killed subs in 1944. If the problem was the guidance-system, it seems somebody manipulated this machine to cause self-destructs, or manufacturers were extremely careless is selling products that had this flaw. These engineering problems are not discussed despite this being seemingly the point of this book. Instead, the drama of the slow deaths that followed are the focus. Since everybody theoretically died, nobody survived to have given any details about what happened, so this is just a fiction. “Mortally wounded, the boat sunk, coming to rest on the bottom, 180 feet down. After hours of struggle, nine of the 87 crewmen, including O’Kane, made it to the surface.” Ah, alternatively, O’Kane and these others generated a self-destruct before surrendering to the enemy that had contracted them… And this is their fictional account that frames them as heroes. “Captured by the Japanese, the Tang sailors joined other submariners and flyers—including Louis Zamperini and ‘Pappy’ Boyington—at a ‘torture camp’ whose purpose was to gain vital information from inmates and otherwise let them die from malnutrition, disease, and abuse. A special target was Captain O’Kane after the Japanese learned of the headlines about the Tang. Against all odds, when the camp was liberated in August 1945, O’Kane, at only 90 pounds, still lived.” Perhaps, O’Kane self-reported being this thin to avoid being put on trial for war-crimes… “The following January, Richard O’Kane limped into the White House where President Truman bestowed him with the Medal of Honor.”
I do not believe this account, and many details are troubling and implicating. Those who research war-crimes might want to read this book closely to understand just what it is saying.
A Horror About the First Female Captain’s Mistakes of Inexperience
Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 9, 2025). Hardcover: $30: 288pp. ISBN: 978-1-250352-58-3.
***
“The… first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica’s deadly waters… Summer, 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua… Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach… And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit—into the most treacherous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune’s Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny.” As I searched inside to figure out what happened, I learned that the crew was expected to “mutiny” if given the chance. This rebellious spirit of partly hardened criminals as crew was one of the reasons Mary Ann had been isolated, only “permitted to speak with… four classes of people: her husband, their steward, the first mate, and any passengers.” Given this, it seems likely that Mary would have mistaken standard objections among a rough crew for an actual threat to mutiny. This is confirmed when William Keeler’s words are taken as “the first step towards mutiny”. She is afraid of “glances”. She assumes that if Keeler takes command she will be murdered by him. No actual violence has taken place. The mere fact that she addresses the crew is “extraordinary”, and she tells them that Keeler is to be imprisoned as her first order. Nobody writes down what she said to the crew. This is a horrific account of a woman taking charge of a ship with no experience, and taking the worst possible decisions from the outset. This is not a feminist story.
“With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faces down the deadly waters of Drake’s Passage…” That’s it. All she did was imprison the second-in-command, and told the crew to steer into a storm, and this ship managed to survive despite all manner of bad-judgement… A horror-story, as opposed to a heroine-story. “Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women’s maritime journals and on her own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann’s route…”
This is a very scary story indeed, and it is told from a strange perspective, as if the author has as little experience at-sea as the character. This story will horrify anybody who has read or researched sea-travel (for all the wrong reasons).
Anti-Helpful and Anti-Informative Digressions on Cybercrime
Eric O’Neill, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: Cybersecurity Tactics to Outsmart Hackers and Disarm Scammers (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, January 1, 2025). Hardcover: $30.
**
“National security strategist and former FBI counterintelligence operative Eric O’Neill exposes how nefarious cybercriminals relentlessly attempt to access your data and wallet, and arms you with his proven tactics for spotting and neutralizing cyberthreats to protect yourself, your family, and your business.” This would be great, if this book actually achieved this. I looked into a chapter on how-to-skip-school with im-personalization first. It begins with the author digressing to describe once skipping school. Some crimes are then abstractly mentioned before a return to the personal anecdote. There is a single fact that notes that between 2019-24 the BEC scam most people victimized by it between $26-55 billion. The following description of how an attack takes place is too conversational. People receive an email with an invoice. A few scenarios are mentioned that have been in the news. There is no organization of ideas that would have been needed to guide a reader towards understanding the categories and stages of such scams to truly avoid them. This book sets a high ambition but it fails to deliver on this promise. Most of this book is counter-helpful. For example, a section on “Act Like a Spy Hunter” merely advises not to pay ransom to avoid encouraging people into crime. I do not trust this author, as he seems to be wearing two hats.
“Cybercriminals, domestic and foreign, are launching attacks day and night using malware, phishing scams, deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and other unscrupulous schemes designed to steal your data and hold it hostage. When they win, it costs nations, businesses, and individuals trillions of dollars annually. It’s possible to fight back, but it’ll take more than a strong password… O’Neill shares his method—called PAID—that you can use to defend yourself and stop attackers in their tracks: Prepare: Pinpoint your most critical data, identify where it resides and who can access it, and build your defenses around it. Assess: Continuously reassess your security and apply counterintelligence tactics to identify scams and cyberattacks. Investigate: Stay educated and hunt the threat before the threat hunts you. Decide: Using your new aptitude, make smart, rapid decisions under pressure…” No, this book does not give any useful tools for how to respond, other than for these criminals to be “paid” when victims fall for scams without having been educated how to avoid them, and then succumbing to pressure.
Horridly Dull Non-Answering Account of Competing in “Reality” TV
Sarah Hartshorne, You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model (New York: Crown, July 8, 2025). Hardcover: $30: 272pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-73524-4.
**
“America’s Next Top Model contestant pulls back the curtain on the iconic but deeply flawed reality competition show, exposing the manipulation and chaos behind the scenes… Over its fifteen-year run, the show captured the glitz of the early aughts as well as its most toxic attitudes—from the glamorous but often questionable photo shoots to the cutting feedback from its highly respected if out-of-touch judges… Sarah Hartshorne would have never guessed that her first foray into modeling would start with being blindfolded alongside three dozen other girls on a charter bus winding through Puerto Rico. In You Wanna Be On Top?, Cycle 9’s only plus-size contestant takes us into the heart of the unforgiving auditions; the labyrinthian cruise ship the girls weren’t allowed to enjoy…” Not being “allowed” to do stuff is mentioned a few times in this narrative. Chapter “3: Shipping In” states they “weren’t ever allowed to speak to one another” while they were being flown into Puerto Rico. During breakfast there, they are still not allowed to talk with fellow girls. Then, she has trouble finding her bed, and is afraid to ask because she thinks she might not be allowed. After they spotted cameras, they were finally allowed to start talking. Apparently then they were only allowed to talk during means, and also to “look out the windows.” When they were allowed to talk, they were “contractually obligated to look like we were having the time of our lives.” But this same note that they were not allowed to talk echoes throughout amidst extensive dialogue when the girls keep talking, and talking, but mostly empty phrases. A ghostwriter might have said as much without knowing what was said, or even if these girls and those filming them really said absolutely nothing off-camera. “…And, of course, the L.A. ‘model house’ teeming with hidden cameras and elaborately constructed tensions. As the season unfolds and the producers’ interview questions about her weight and her opinions of the other girls become increasingly pointed, Hartshorne uncovers the destabilizing methods employed to film ‘reality.’ Drawing on her experience as well as interviews with other contestants and production crew, Hartshorne answers the questions you always wanted to ask: Why didn’t the house have a microwave or a dishwasher?” I searched through every mention about the lack of microwaves, and there is absolutely no explanation offered about why microwaves were taken out of this mansion: this is a failure to deliver on a promise in this blurb. “Why did girls regularly faint during eliminations? Which judge was the meanest off camera? Why is it that the girls had their most meaningful conversations in closets? (Answer: It was the one place camera crews couldn’t fit.)”
It is important for people to document the “reality” of such shows, but this is a horridly written book that cannot be practically useful, or readable for most. Some who are interested in being on a reality-show might find the energy to read this book cover-to-cover to figure out the science of how these shows work. But otherwise, it’s just a horrid piece of writing.
An Unpersuasive Guide to Self-Delusion
Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion: How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life (New York: Crown, July 15, 2025). Hardcover: $29, 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-73527-5.
**
“…The original art of persuasion, backed by contemporary pop culture examples that make transforming your habits and achieving goals easy, even fun… Rhetoric once sat at the center of elite education. Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, and Martin Luther King, Jr., used it to build empires, write deathless literature, and inspire democracies… Take leadership over yourself; not through pop psychology or empty inspiration, but with persuasive tools that have been tested for more than three thousand years… With their help, rhetoric can convert the most negative situations into positive ones. Heinrichs brings in examples from history and pop culture—Winston Churchill, Iron Man, Dolly Parton, and the woman who serendipitously invented the chocolate chip cookie—to illustrate the concepts. But the core of the book tests the tools of self-persuasion and asks: Can the same techniques that seduce lovers, sell diet books, and overturn governments help us achieve our most desired goals?”
I just finished writing a couple of books about writing (in college composition, and professional speculative fiction), and I have mentioned many of these concepts in these textbooks. Part 2 includes the three parts of the persuasion triangle: ethos, pathos, and logos. But then there is a fourth chapter “Framing: Define Your Life”. This chapter begins by accusing Aristotle of being too manipulative even with logos (logic), instead of explaining how this chapter’s topic fits with the three parts of rhetoric… Then, there’s a digression about “forms”. There’s a cliché about calling “a spade a spade”. Then, the author jumps to an anecdote about some student who was caught in a blizzard. She leads people to safety, and so she ends up in the news. The rhetorical element seems to be that her parents and friends perceived this event differently as either a disaster, or a success. The topic of this chapter is mentioned for the first time at the end of this section: “Defining an issue forms a key aspect of framing, a system that allows you to gain the high ground on any subject…” by “defining… the issue.” This is the main lesson, but this author has spent this entire section without defining what he was attempting to argue about. This is not a mystery novel. This is a book teaching people how to rhetoric, and yet it fails to communicate clearly.
Most of it is similarly full of empty advice such as “Your Soul Is a Scout… Just, treating others fairly…”
I strongly discourage people from reading this book. The flaws in such books is one of the reasons I decided to write my own rhetoric textbooks before returning to teaching this subject in college.
Oldest Archeological Scientific and Literary Treasures on Earth
Moudhy Al-Rashid, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, August, 2025). Hardcover: $29.99. 336pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-324-03642-5.
****
“Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own. Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw, and relatable moments, like a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child’s teeth… Reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world’s first museum, and a working mother struggling with ‘the juggle’ in 1900 BCE. Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the world’s first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy.”
This is a reasonably well-researched book. But most of its claims are vague, and lightly cited with sources. My interest in this book was to confirm the dates of authorship, or creation of mythological manuscripts attributed to Mesopotamia. As part of my preparation for my Fall Mythology course, I learned that the Library of Ashurbanipal, at the location of what is believed to have been the Royal Palace of King Ashurbanipal in 668-627 BC, was “discovered” by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 amidst the conquest of this region by the British Empire. This library is credited with containing 30,000 clay tablets that have been very profitable through their sale to museums. This collection includes the earliest extensive text ever written: the epic of Gilgamesh, as well as other mythological and astrological texts. Most of the references to dating for these texts use vague claims based on what historians have traditionally dated these texts to. But there is some doubt expressed in one section about these tablets, which “should be taken with not just a pinch, but a heaped tablespoon of salt.” The author then claims that the “later periods” have been set with more certainty because “ancient Mesopotamian scholars” recorded “astronomical phenomena in the first millennium” BC, such as the “total solar eclipse that happened on 15 June 763” BC (74). This date might have been precise by modern calculations because it is a relatively modern (19th century) forgery that was made by somebody who calculated when a solar eclipse should have taken place in 763 BC, and then used this date in the forgery to then give authenticators a reason to cite in support of this claim. There are some other interesting elements such as that Gilgamesh absurdly cares about specifically attributing a multi-million-brick wall in this region as built thousands of years ago contemporaneously with this epic’s overseeing by Gilgamesh himself that had been begun by King Uruk (3rd millennium BC). The labor needed to construct this thick wall might have been more intensive than constructing the pyramids that are credited to being built centuries later. Modern archeologists would have cared about crediting a wall to an ancient source because it would have increased the value of their finds from this region, but an ancient king could not have cared to document building a wall as he was also writing the first ever book. Cited articles in support of this dating tend to use abstractions, or references back to past assumptions about the dating, or just cyclical logic, as with Nils P. Heethel’s “Dating EAE. When Was the Astrological Series Enuma Anu Ellil Created?”
This is not an easy book to navigate to find information, but it is logically organized by archeological objects, covering “the clay drum”, “the brick of Amar-Suen”, “statue of King Shulgi”, “school tablets”, “cone of Kudur-Mabuk”, “Boundary Stone”, “Mace Head”, “Ennigaldi-Nanna”. Those who are passionate about archeology will want to read more.
Examples of Obsessive Collectors Across History
James Delbourgo, A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, August, 2025). Hardcover: $31.99, 6X9”. 288pp, 30 illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-393-54196-0.
****
“A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.” It is suspicious that: “The ancient Roman world is filled with stories about people who loved art too much.” Archeologists or those forging artifacts to be more valuable would have been obsessed with stealing, or treasuring artifacts; but those who lived at the time would have just viewed art as simple decorations. For example, in the 1st century BC, Roman statesman Cicero prosecuted Gaius Verres in part for “plundering the island of Sicily”, arguing he was “a looter on the edge of madness” (10). The “idolaters” are explained in the Quran to have been accused of being “dupes of corrupt priests”: “those who hoard gold and silver instead of giving in God’s cause… will have a grievous punishment”. In other words, when people spent money on buying gold for themselves; they were not donating this residual income to the priests offering this advice (29). Regarding Freud, there is an analysis of Victor Fliescher’s novel The Collector (1920), which describes a “deranged collector”: when this collector meets a rival collector, he panics that he might be perceived as a relative “fool who has bought forgeries” (152). These are pretty interesting stories about collecting. Though I wish they went further in explaining just what role forgery, and other frauds play in creating this collecting-madness.
“Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, and considered great public benefactors. But collectors have also been seen as dangerous obsessives who love objects too much. Why?… From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls ‘the Romantic collecting self’ has always lurked on the dark side of humanity. But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self…” It “recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol.”
The romanticizing of this need to hoard is sleep-inducing. There are great marketers or salesmen behind every mad collector. Somebody is deliberately triggering this madness for profit. Detaching the act of selling from obsessive buying, and turning it into an internal psychological flaw, or grand trait does not really explain the center of this matter. But this is a curious perspective on a major problem that has mutilated history because selling forged history is more profitable than proving what the facts of history are.
The First Explanation of Aztec Philosophy
Sebastian Purcell, The Outward Path: The Wisdom of the Aztecs (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, August, 2025). Softcover: $29.99. 288pp, 8 images, 5.5X8.25”. ISBN: 978-1-324-02056-1.
***
“A practical and eye-opening guide to the Aztec philosophy on how to live. During the twilight decades of their empire, the learned ones among the Aztec filled numerous volumes with philosophical and ethical thought in testimony recorded by Spanish priests.” It is important that this blurb mentions that these beliefs were recorded by the invading Catholics, and thus might be a fiction that is presenting the Aztec in a negative light to explain why the Catholics were colonizing or subjugating the Aztec. “However, these have been largely overlooked and Westerners often see Aztec culture as a matter for history, anthropology, and archaeology—not the elevated realms of philosophy.” It “refers to the central insight that our true desire as human beings is not really for ‘happiness,’ a fleeting mood. No, what we really want is a rich and worthwhile life, which we can only achieve by pursuing an outward path of engagement with other people.” I searched inside for how this is handled. The first reference is to a “hand” “not” being able to “engage in reflective deliberation”: this is absurdly nonsensical. This follows a note about Horoshi Yoki designing an intelligent “hand” robot. This is mentioned on pages 38-9, or in the midst of the book, and it is entirely unrelated to the Aztec. Another mention of engaging appears in a mention of Rogoff’s study of “children of Mexican heritage” who “were found to be more likely to assist a teacher without being asked. In another, Guatemalan mothers were observed to engage in play with their children” (79). This is not useful information, and is mostly nonsensical. At the end of this section there is an explanation that such studies “highlight two key lessons from Aztec philosophy about how to live. First, if you wish to cultivate a rooted life, you must learn to collaborate more effectively… Second, while the Aztecs had a concept of moral ‘excellence’ or ‘virtue,’ their understanding of its practice differs significantly from that of many ‘Western’ philosophers…” “Performing ‘virtuous’ deeds… means that you are enacting a rooted life.” The lack of discussions on “virtue” in the colonizers’ texts proves these are likely to have been propaganda to make the Aztec seem un-virtuous. Explaining this philosophy extensively here proves nonsensical because what is being stated is not to the benefit of the people ascribed with this un-virtuousness.
“Wisdom is not a matter of ‘thinking for oneself,’ but comes through deliberating well in concert with others. Stoic and Buddhist philosophies will teach you to still your mind to address the outside world; but according to the Aztecs, we should cultivate healthy relationships first and then use those to forge a path forward. This ‘outward path’ offers an alternative to the presumptions of our highly individualistic, competitive Western culture, with its epidemic of loneliness and other social ills…” It “is the first book in any modern language to present the core ethical principles of the Aztecs. It not only takes a step to correct centuries of misrecognition but provides us with surprising insights about how to address concerns common to everyone, from how to make a good decision or strengthen your willpower, to how to sustain love and survive tragedy. Structured around twelve lessons and seven practical exercises, it’s an ethical workout routine designed to help you become a better person—one more deeply rooted and fulfilled.” These exercises are described to “similar to yoga” (82). These exercises address things such as “personal” and “social vulnerability practices” (106).
Adventures in Experimental Archeology
Sam Kean, Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations (New York: Little, Brown and Company, July 1, 2025). Softcover: $16.99: 464pp. ISBN: 978-0-316496-55-1.
***
“…An archaeological romp through the entire history of humankind—and through all five senses—from tropical Polynesian islands to forbidding arctic ice floes, and everywhere in between. Whether it’s the mighty pyramids of Egypt or the majestic temples of Mexico, we have a good idea of what the past looked like. But what about our other senses: The tang of Roman fish sauce and the springy crust of Egyptian sourdough?” On first-reading, it seems that this summary is all that can be said about how sourdough smells. I looked inside and found clarification in the “Introduction”. Experimental archaeologists have applied what is known based on archeological evidence to testing what these things would have been truly like in the lab. They “drive chariots, play Aztec ballgames, revive ancient yeast and bake the tangy sourdough that King Tut ate.” In the chapter on “Egypt—2000s BC”, there are BW photographs on some of these experiments, and materials. One image is of a “model bakery and brewery from an ancient Egyptian tomb. The workers are grinding grain, preparing mash, and filling beer jars.” This model was made by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to show visitors how this process was executed. The section on sourdough is illustrated with “A loaf of ancient Egyptian-style bread baked inside a replica mold”. The cook apparently apologized for failing to make “toppings for the bread, like leeks in beef tallow, which he says was an Egyptian favorite.” It is still delicious: “spongy and chewy and has a scrumptious sourdough tang”. Egyptian laborers were paid in this bread, as well as with “1 1/3 gallons daily” of beer” to work in “130’F” temperatures. These are pretty interesting explanations. But preceding sections are lacking in detail, and are too conversational. For example, there’s a description of an experiment’s mind “churning” and digressive questions without immediate answers.
“The boom of medieval cannons and the clash of Viking swords? The frenzied plays of an Aztec ballgame… and the chilling reality that the losers might also lose their lives? History often neglects the tastes, textures, sounds, and smells that were an intimate part of our ancestors’ lives, but a new generation of researchers is resurrecting those hidden details, pioneering an exciting new discipline called experimental archaeology. These are scientists gone rogue: They make human mummies. They investigate the unsolved murders of ancient bog bodies. They carve primitive spears and go hunting, then knap their own obsidian blades to skin the game. They build perilous boats and plunge out onto the open sea—all in the name of experiencing history as it was, with all its dangers, disappointments, and unexpected delights… Sam Kean joins these experimental archaeologists on their adventures across the globe, from the Andes to the South Seas. He fires medieval catapults, tries his hand at ancient surgery and tattooing, builds Roman-style roads—and, in novelistic interludes, spins gripping tales about the lives of our ancestors…”
This is a pretty good book, but it would have been better if it was presented from a third-person perspective or by explaining more about how findings are arrived at, what they are based on, and what precisely they prove. Those who have the time for a bit of digression in their reading-materials would enjoy reading further. This book is intended for the public, as opposed to for scholars of these subjects.
Puffery of Elvis and His Puffer
Peter Guralnick, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World (New York: Little, Brown and Company, August 1, 2025). Softcover: $38: 624pp. ISBN: 978-0-316399-44-9.
***
“…Dual portrait of the relationship between the iconic artist and his legendary manager—drawing on a wealth of the Colonel’s never-before-seen correspondence to reveal that this oft-reviled figure was in fact a confidant, friend, and architect of his client’s success. In early 1955, Colonel Tom Parker—manager of the number-one country music star of the day—heard that an unknown teenager from Memphis had just drawn a crowd of more than eight hundred people to a Texas schoolhouse, and headed south to investigate.” In my research exaggerations such as that 800 kids attended a concert tend to be faked by marketers to convince kids to attend an unknown entity. This detail is mentioned in chapter “Eight: The Beginning of It All”. The claim is that the manager’s “old pal… a DJ… named Ernest Hackworth” who went by the pseudonym “Uncle Dudley” reported that one of the kids he was promoting “had drawn more than eight hundred people to a little schoolhouse”. And apparently “two months earlier… another old colleague, Oscar Davis” had also told the Colonel about this kid, while being employed by the Colonel in promoting another singer’s tour, and had happened to see “this Presley boy in Memphis” before going “to see him perform at some little club where the kid had really gotten the audience worked up.” Since all of these guys were affiliated with the Colonel, this seems to be a purely fictional narrative designed to create a backstory of success that explains why the Colonel chose this particular “boy” over the thousands of other acts he and his team could have seen at little schoolhouse or clubs during these years. Presley was 20 in 1955… not a “boy”. Presley and his first producer at Sun Records where he made his first record a year earlier in 1954 were paying promoters, and probably paid the Colonel and his team to puff or promote him, and that’s how the Colonel would have decided to work with Elvis. Elvis was paying Sun Records to record him starting in 1953. He probably used his mother’s money for these recordings, as he argued he was making the recordings as a birthday gift to her. He then used this recording to start performing, and to book a regular gig, and had a television appearance, making him into a regional star on his own steam. The Colonel would have signed up to receive an easy percentage on money Presley had figured out how to make on his own. Since this basic element is misrepresented, this is not a trustworthy source.
“Within days, Parker was sending out telegrams and letters to promoters and booking agents: ‘We have a new boy that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest things in the business in a very short time. His name is ELVIS PRESLEY.’ Later that year, after signing with RCA, the young man sent a telegram of his own: ‘Dear Colonel, Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me…. I love you like a father.’ The close personal bond between Elvis and the Colonel has never been fully portrayed before. It was a relationship founded on mutual admiration and support.” The pufferies Elvis and the Colonel wrote down were a required part of industry-relations. An artist must puff their agent as instrumental and overpay them to receive top-bookings. And the Colonel’s only job was overstating Elvis’ achievements. Thus, it is strange that these pufferies are used here as proof-of-actual-mutual-admiration. “From the outset, the Colonel defended Elvis fiercely and indefatigably against RCA executives, Elvis’s own booking agents, and movie moguls. But in their final years together, the story grew darker, as the Colonel found himself unable to protect Elvis from himself or control growing problems of his own. Featuring troves of previously unpublished correspondence, revelatory for both its insights and emotional depth,” it “provides a unique perspective on not one but two American originals. A tale of the birth of the modern-day superstar (an invention almost entirely of Parker’s making) by Peter Guralnick, the most acclaimed music writer of his generation, it presents these two misunderstood icons as they’ve never been seen before: with all of their brilliance, humor, and flaws on full display.”
I tried searching for what parts of this narrative have been “unpublished”, but could not find this reference. Mentions of “correspondence” occur when the author explains his own personal letters with the Colonel in the 1980s and 90s. There are many first-person reflections that are light on details about just what this musician knows about the Colonel that might be new. I do not recommend this book. It is a puffery of pop-music-selling, and not a useful historical analysis.
How a Comedian Wins Sympathy
Roy Wood Jr., The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir (New York: Crown, May 20, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-80007-2.
**
“From comedian, Emmy-nominated writer and producer, and former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr… memoir revealing that sometimes the best advice comes from the most surprising teachers. When Roy Wood Jr. held his baby boy for the first time, he was relieved that his son was happy and healthy, but he felt a strange mix of joy and apprehension. Roy’s own father, a voice of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, had passed away when Roy was sixteen.” Inside this book, Roy writes that his father had a “window-rattling voice” that was “so perfect, many news directors did not know he was Black.” Apparently, this smooth operator charmed “panties of the women he dated” and radio-operators to convince him to get a job despite his blackness. There are no citations for the claim that in places where he worked in the “1940s and 1950s” he was “the first Black employee.” He began covering all riots from the “civil rights movement”, especially those in 1965-8. Then, he launched with others WVON, or the “National Black Network”: “the first coast-to-coast radio network fully owned by African Americans.” This is very different from what the blurb is claiming. Roy’s father was a very wealthy businessman, from whom Roy inherited privilege in money, and in having a foot-in-the-door in entertainment/media. His father was not an impoverished civil-rights crusader, as the blurb suggests. This guy surely would have give Roy a good number of useful lessons. Though it’s just this blurb that’s misstating things. The interior of the book is presenting the facts.
“There were gaps in the lessons passed down from father to son and, holding his own child, Roy wondered: Have I managed to fill in those blanks, to learn the lessons I will one day need to teach my boy? So Roy looked back to figure out who had taught him lessons throughout his life and which he could pass down to his son. Some of his father figures were clear, like a colorful man from Philadelphia navigating life after prison, who taught Roy the value of having a vision for his life, or his fellow comedians, who showed him what it took to make it as a working stand-up performer.” For example, in “A Letter to My Son”, Roy writes that he commiserated with comedian Brandon T. Jackson at the Chicago Midway Airport’s convenience store in 2006-7, complaining that his “comedy club booker… accounted for 40 percent of my road bookings”. There are no clear lessons from this puffery, as Roy mostly puffs that the comedy Jackson is thinking of acting in involves “Ben Stiller”. Then, Roy makes Jackson sympathize with him over his early loss of his father. Roy says this conversation was memorable because this was the first time he reflected about his “relationship” with his father. It was irrelevant before, and then Roy learned that he can milk it for sympathy… This is not a good lesson, or it is a non-lesson.
“Others were less obvious, from the teenage friends who convinced him to race ‘leaf boats’ carrying lit matches in the middle of a drought to a drug-addicted restaurant colleague who played hoops while Roy scoured dirty dishes to big names in Hollywood, like Trevor Noah and more…” “Addict” does not appear with any specific name who Roy accuses of this inside this book. Though he does confess to being addicted to “junk food”. Thus, again, this blurb is a mis-advertisement of what this book is about. “…Lessons, such as how to channel anger through a more successful outlet (hint: never ever try to outfox a single mom), how not to get caught snitching (hint: never snitch), and how to become a good man—and a good dad (hint: listen to your fathers).”
This seems to be a rather empty book that somebody might have written who had no personal knowledge of who Roy is. It is not funny, or exciting. I do not recommend reading it.
A Puffery of the Space-Race Among Profit-Driven Billionaires
Christian Davenport, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race (New York: Crown, September 16, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-59411-7.
**
“Musk versus Bezos. China versus the United States. The government versus the private sector. Welcome to the rivalries and alliances defining the New Space Age. At stake? Billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public’s attention… A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before.” This is an incredible over-puffery of this industry. The big rockets that are supposed to go further keep blowing up on-exit, and nobody has landed a human on the Moon (if not ever) than not across the past 50 years. “A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations.” China is the main moon-landing operation at this time, not anybody in the US. “And the world’s two richest men have engaged in escalating brinkmanship, as NASA and the U.S. government embraces Silicon Valley innovation to jump-start the nation’s ambitions.” Is anybody in the US “ambitious” to go into space at the snail-pace we are inching there and back? The ambition is mostly with the billionaires who profit from failing to get anywhere while “trying”. “Space has entered a golden age, and this is just the beginning.” If this is the “golden age”; it might be the ending of space-travel attempts because repeatedly failing is not going to help the public have reasons to support a failing-mission. “Washington Post writer Christian Davenport chronicles the mad scramble to shape humanity’s off-planet future. He takes readers behind the scenes at NASA and the Pentagon as China’s aggressive moon mining plans raise alarms…” What? The only thing to worry about regarding China’s plans is that they are going to succeed in proving the US faked its “moon-landing”, such as by finding and bringing back rocks that prove US’s moon-rocks are fakes, or meteors that might have been chipped off the moon and brought to Earth, or the like. Inside the book, there is a mention that China’s plan to mine for “helium-3” is what’s troubling. This is an energy-source that apparently can be “worth $1,400 per gram”. The US seems to be lobbying to stop this attempt to actually profit from space-travel by evoking the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that claimed “no nation could claim sovereignty over the moon.” Though noting that the Moon’s “resources” are available for exploitation. The remaining worry then is that being able to mine helium-3 would alter the “balance of power on Earth”. Readers are instructed to be afraid that China does not separate “civil and military space efforts”. Why would mining for an energy-source be militarily dangerous? Apparently, Trump voiced this concern, while claiming “NASA alone could not match China”, and so the administration had to sponsor billionaire space-racers. It seems they are inventing a motive to give billions to billionaires who openly sponsored Trump’s reelection. If China manages to take its space-program further this would finally make real progress in this field that has stagnated while the US has been writing fictions about its superiority in technology because of this ancient “achievement”.
“…Onto the sprawling Cape Canaveral factory where Blue Origin is working toward Amazon-style lunar deliveries, and onto SpaceX launch pads as Musk’s engineers log 100-hour weeks—leaving veteran astronauts marveling that they’re now operating ‘flying iPhones.’” This is a cryptic set of phrases. Why are iPhones flying? Searching for these torturous 100-hour workweeks, I found numerous exaggerations that Musk’s company is “running at ‘100 percent’”. I also found a reference to Musk’s claim that he “worked insane hours, didn’t sleep much, and often spent nights at the office.” This is used to explain why “SpaceX was notorious for churning through employees…” Musk has not quiet, so it seems likely that it’s his employees who are working these hours, while he might not be doing much besides what’s visible in the press. There certainly needed to be some documented proof beyond Musk’s own claims to support this statement, and yet the paragraph ends here.
“…What will happen as human ambition outpaces governmental regulation? Which country will win the race back to the moon? Was Donald Trump’s much-derided creation of the Space Force a surprising act of foresight, and will the U.S. finally make a real push to the moon and eventually toward Mars?”
I do not recommend this book. It’s a puffery of the US side of this space-race, when humanity really should be cheering for all other players.
Study of the Strange and Wonderful Lives of Trees
Harriet Rix, The Genius of Trees: How They Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World (London: The Bodley Head: Penguin Random House, June 5, 2025). Hardcover: $30: 320pp. ISBN: 978-1-847927-82-8.
****
“A mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, plants, animals, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined… For a supposedly stationary life-form, trees have demonstrated an astonishing mastery over the environment around them… Tree scientist Harriet Rix reveals the inventive ways trees sculpt their environment and explains the science of how they achieve these incredible feats.” In the second half of the book, Rix explains that trees have been evolving towards “creativity, producing more and more inventive molecules”, while humans have been evolving towards “avarice” by “taking” these “inventive molecules for our own use” from trees. Trees have been shaping “humans chemically” for “over the last 500,000 years by providing the many compounds we can’t make for ourselves.” These compounds include “medicines, supplements, antioxidants, vitamins and spices”. This is informative, but then the author digresses to describe a trip he took to a garden. He eats a fruit. The description is relatively detailed and specific. It is interesting that some trees in that city had been planted 400 years earlier by Jesuit missionaries, but what is the relevance? The narrative is disjointed and disorganized.
“…Through deep history and unseen biochemistry across the globe, Rix restores trees to their rightful station, not as victims of our negligence but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative. Trees manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends, as seen with oaks in Devon, England, shaping ecosystems through root networks and fungi, and in Amedi, Iraq, changing sexes as they age; laurel rainforests in the Canary Islands regulating water cycles; and metasequoias in California influencing microclimates.” These are indeed interesting details. Those who read through this book should be entertained while learning about these rarely-discussed achievements of trees. “Some tree species have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Others can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch… Research has shown that trees have an even greater role in preventing global warming than we thought—trees, at one time thought to produce methane actually consume it.”
This is one of the most pleasant cover-designs in this set. The rainbow colors, and simple lines are appealing to viewers.
Overall, this is a pretty good book. I did not find many faults in glancing through it. It is well-cited, and descriptively-written. The intended audience is mostly the public. Though researchers entering this field would also benefit from this overview.
A Digressive Guide to Publishing from the Agent’s Perspective
Alia Hanna Habib, Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch (New York: Pantheon Books, January 20, 2025). Hardcover: $28: 320pp. ISBN: 978-0-593700-87-7.
***
“From the literary agent behind some of today’s most successful authors comes a narrative guide geared specifically to the needs of aspiring and working nonfiction writers, demystifying the world of publishing and offering a practical roadmap to getting your book published. Alia Hanna Habib remembers what it was like to be on the outside of the publishing world, looking in. Arriving in New York, a first-generation college student with a love of reading and loads of ambition, she hadn’t any idea how to break into the business of books.” This blurb over-puffs how useful this book is in practice by a mile. I searched for “New York” to understand just how she entered this business. In the “Introduction”, she notes that she helped a friend move to a place with “no AC” in the summer. This whole paragraph seems to be a puffery of a different friend’s writing, but no explanation is given for what has been written, and most of it is empty-air. Later she clarifies that she arrived NYC in 1997 as a college-student at Columbia: a very expensive school that hints she was not poor at this point; though she states she was on a scholarship. While working as “an assistant to the director of cookbook publicity at Houghton Mifflin”, she finishes a graduate degree. There is no mention of how she won this job out-of-college, or what she did there to distinguish herself and move upwards. In the next paragraph, she mentions that she started working as a “commission-only” agent, while doing work as a “freelance publicist”. She describes being challenged, but not the details of what an agent does, outside having a large “slush pile”. She gets the job of agent before she knows what a “book proposal” is… This hardly suggests she is a good authority on this subject… If she self-reports being “clueless”… we should take her at-her-word. Many pages go by and she says absolutely nothing new. She has worked in the same job since this point, and seems to be “asleep at the wheel”.
“Now, years later, in her career as an agent, she hears from prospective clients who, whether they’re experts at the top of their fields or wholly new to the writing game, consider finding success in publishing to be a mysterious and daunting endeavor. Ever determined to flout the stereotype of agent as gatekeeper, however, Habib is prepared to hand emerging writers the key. Drawing on wisdom from her star-studded list of clients, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Merve Emre, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Judy Batalion…” In a section about Abdurraqib, she describes their biography, and writing-type, but does not mention how she chose this writer out of her slush-pile, or what exactly she did to help this writer achieve success, if anything. She might have met him after he was famous, and thus might have just collected a percentage from emailing in an already-famous writer’s work…
“Provides context and clarity to each step of the publishing process, from the germination of a book idea to finding an agent to represent it, from crafting an engaging proposal to navigating the perils of publicity.” In other words, she rephrases the standard steps of publishing that are repeated in most books about how-to-find-a-publisher. “Readers will find real-life samples of her authors’ pitch letters and book proposals, as well as templates writers can use when querying agents or promoting their work on social media.” I did not immediately notice these pitch-letters, but when searching for them I did find an unusually detailed breakdown of what an author receives when they get a $100,000 “advance”: $21,250 after the agent’s commission, printing costs, and the like is taken out. What drew my attention is that apparently even if a book sells zero copies an author gets to keep this sum and equivalent on-delivery. From my research into 16-19th century British publishing: the advance was used as a loan to the author, which had to be paid back with-interests, and publication costs at the author’s expense, if a book sold zero-copies. I had been questioning if it is a loan-scheme in modern-publishing when such advances are advertised to puff giant-publishers. But this is the first proof I have seen to the contrary. Though having to pay-out $200,000 per-book must be one of the reasons so many small publishers go bankrupt, and only the giant ones tend to survive.
“She also incorporates the advice of trusted industry colleagues—attorneys, accountants, editors, publishers, publicists, and more—gifting readers with a full team of experts to answer all the questions they’ve had about the publishing world, but were too afraid, or didn’t know, to ask. Essential for both the aspiring novice and the seasoned professional…”
Most sections of this book are hot-air, but I did find some instances of useful-info. Those who read this book cover-to-cover (skimming the hot-air sections) are thus likely to find other hidden useful details. It is just going to be a difficult labor to pick out these gems from the rubble.
An Unreadable Book on an Interesting Malevolent Female Profiteer
Eden Collinsworth, The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President (New York: Doubleday, September 2, 2025). Hardcover: $30: 304pp. ISBN: 978-0-385-54957-8.
**
“…A portrait of Victoria Woodhull, a celebrated and maligned 19th-century businesswoman and activist, and a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage and labor reforms. In 1894, a remarkably self-possessed American woman, with no formal education to speak of, stood before a British court seeking damages for libel from the trustees of the British Museum.” My research into ghostwriting indicates that people who are uneducated and enter fields where writing or speeches are central are puppets who are being manipulated by their ghostwriter, or whoever is paying for their ghostwriter. Thus, this is hardly an inspirational account of this early female politician. Who exactly did she accuse of libel and why? Garnett is puffed as a gradual-riser in the hierarchy of the British Museum Library. In “Chapter Two: Mrs. Woodhull, a law unto herself” explains that Woodhull had found in this Museum “cataloging” of “archival material she insisted contained unflattering references to her.” This is a curious case, but instead of explaining it, the following couple of paragraphs are spent on philosophizing about the nature of this outrage. Her lawyer offered to drop the case if the museum removed the “offending publications”, “the museum’s trustees revealed the names of the vendor who suppled the publications to the museum”, or if it ran a “public apology”. The following paragraphs are digressive in speculating about the expense of a trial, and reputations, instead of giving a single detail about just what this offensive content was. Only in the following chapter is there a note that these materials had accused her of “immorality”. The source had apparently described her parents as “ignorant and violent” people. This is one of the most anti-sympathetic biographies imaginable.
“It was yet another stop along the unpredictable route that was Victoria Woodhull’s life. Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism—a therapeutic pseudoscience—and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters.” It seems that Woodhull learned to scam from her father, rather than being exploited by him, as her libel lawsuit was blatantly designed to win money, since it was true that her parents were both “ignorant” and “violent”. “It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success… Despite a deeply troubled first marriage at the age of fourteen, countless attempts by the press to discredit her, and a wrongful jail sentence, Woodhull thrived through sheer determination and the strength of her bond with her sister Tennie. She co-founded a successful stock brokerage on Wall Street, launched a newspaper, and became the first woman to run for president. Hers was a rags-to-riches story that saw her cross paths with Karl Marx, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass.” “Chapter Eleven: Mr. Garnett Manages to connect the dots”: in 1849, Karl Marx had been exiled to London and began working at the same British Museum’s Reading Room as Woodhull. But instead of explaining how she intersected with Marx, it seems the author and the librarian blamed Marx, who the librarian said received helped from him in writing in German the Capital, and other works. Several pages later, there is finally an explanation that Woodhull’s Weekly later published Marx’s Manifesto, after which Marx was instructed to “expel Victoria from the International Workmen’s Association.” This made her turn away from communism. She had been expelled partly because she was petitioning for the party to support women’s suffrage. This is the first positive note about her, but this note is inserted in the middle of unreadable digressions.
“…A radical visionary who made defying mores a habit and brought to the fore societal and political issues still being addressed today.”
There indeed needs to be a biography of this woman, but this is not a good attempt at it. Somebody with detachment should reconsider just what the evidence is stating this woman did to win where other women failed.
Confessions of a Failed FBI Crisis Negotiator Turned Warmonger
Christopher Whitcomb, Anonymous Male: A Life Among Spies (New York: Random House, August 19, 2025). Hardcover: $32. ISBN: 978-0-593-59700-2.
**
“A no-holds-barred memoir about identity, from a former Hostage Rescue Team sniper who left the FBI on 9/11 only to lose himself, moving deeper into a world of spies.” Near the end of the book, an interview is included where Whitcomb puffs himself as “the most famous FBI agent in the world” by 2006. Claiming his fame “started on 9/11, with Larry King.” In other words, he did not leave the FBI because he was offended by the events of 9/11 (or their failures) but rather to capitalize on doing a press-tour about 9/11, or to become famous… The blurb mis-credits who this guy is. “In September 2001, Christopher Whitcomb was the most visible FBI agent in the world. His bestselling memoir,” Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (2001)—this book describes his team using horrid tactics in Rubi Ridge and Waco sieges, with the title referring to mental and physical states of being unfeeling; the beforementioned sieges were obviously some of the worst disasters in FBI history, but he spins them as events that helped the FBI improve their strategies to avoid such disasters afterwards… but Whitcomb left the FBI at that point, so whatever improved was after or perhaps because he left, as opposed to being thanks to his efforts—“had led to novels, articles in GQ, and op-eds in The New York Times.” So he profiteered from propagating for the FBI or selling their and his tactics as successful, while describing factual failures. “He appeared on Imus in the Morning, Larry King, and Meet the Press; he was nominated for a Peabody reporting for CNBC.” He had co-hosted a program called Checkpoint CNBC with Martha McCallum (now at Fox). One of his trips with CNBC was to Guantanamo Bay in 2003, or in the middle of early torture of unprosecuted inmates there. This is hardly award-nominating-worthy stuff. He admits his tour of this prison “had been completely staged”. He claims he did not previously know his tour-guide, who happened to work for a unit he had been associated with as well: the torturers at the Fourth Psychological Operations Group…
“He played poker with Brad Pitt while contracting for the CIA.” He puffs this detail in a digressive conversation. He claims this meeting had something to do with hunting bin Laden, and notes that the people he told this story to did not believe it was true. He later notes that he called some guy he knew from Harvard as “Mr. Pitt”, so maybe he was lying by referring to his friend, and letting people assume he meant the actor. This is just a bunch of nonsense, and self-incriminating, or self-accusatory information.
“Then one day in 2006, without warning, Whitcomb packed a bag, flew into Somalia, and dropped off the face of the earth. For fifteen years, he waged a mercenary war on himself, traveling the world with aliases, cash, and guns.” What? On himself? I did not find any references to just how he attacked himself inside the book. There is a lot of wallowing, and complaining about his lot. “He built a private army in the jungles of Timor-Leste, working contracts for intelligence agencies, where he survived a coup d’état only to lose his friends, abandon his family, and give up on God.” In chapter “13: Dili, Timor-Leste: March 2007” he describes starvation in refugee camps that made these people “dangerous”. Beyond this it is entirely unclear where they drove, why they drove there, and what they were doing in this region. Conversations are nonsensical, and the chatter is about what they ate, instead of the matter-at-hand. I did find a section where he explains he built “a private army” in the “jungle full of machete-wielding orphans”. He tried “to turn cash” he “earned in Somalia into a private army”, who he conditioned to believe he had “the power to kill with a glance”. He describes laboring to throw “Molot cocktails with your kids” while drinking vodka, as he prospered from this. He seems to be confessing to using child-sources to make money as a warmonger.
“While surfing the wilds of Indonesia, Whitcomb found himself trapped beneath a giant wave, where, at the edge of drowning, he came to terms with the chaos of his own clandestine life… It is a confession, and a cautionary tale of what happens to people whom the government trains to lie, even to themselves.”
This is indeed a confession. But if this guy meant to file war-crime charges against himself… he should have been a bit more specific about what specifically he was doing. And this is the guy who’s the most famous FBI agent? This does explain things. Anybody who wants to learn more can try reading this book, but they are likely to struggle with getting through it. If they are brave enough to deal with a mixture of boredom and gruesome violence, they might make it.
Confessions of Corruption at the NFL
DeMaurice Smith, Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game (New York: Random House, August 5, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 368pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-72942-7.
***
“An NFL insider’s explosive account of the ruthless power struggles between owners and players over the future of football. During his fourteen years as the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith was a front line advocate for football players through some of the most tumultuous crises in NFL history: Colin Kaepernick’s protests, Deflategate, a lockout, two collective bargaining agreements, and more.” Kaepernick is mentioned in the “Prologue: In a Heartbeat”: in 2017, Trump attacked San Francisco 49ers quarterback Kaepernick because he had objected to police-violence. Trump asked Jerry Jones, owner of Dallas Cowboys, for help. It is unclear what Smith did regarding this case. There’s a note later that somebody wrote an article about this case, but this seems to have been somebody else. Later in the first-person, the narrator says he “personally witnessed” a couple of owners “nearly explode over… Kaepernick’s refusal to concede…” Then, he notes this is a story about avoiding criticizing the NFL or the president, as opposed to explaining his relevance. There’s a later note that Kaepernick sued the leak, with a conclusion that it’s best to “shut up”. In the conclusion, he notes that the NFL “hitched themselves to Trump” in part because of the Kaepernick protest, and because the NFL “is no longer a reflection of America. The country has become a reflection of the NFL.” This is a horror-scenario, but also fails to communicate anything meaningful. I have just read through the book, and it seems this guy is describing stuff he did not have any first-hand involvement in to sound more important in this blurb.
“But after witnessing the league’s troubling response to discrimination and racial unrest, both within the league and beyond, Smith realized it was time to pull back the curtain and speak truth to power. Drawing from his years of unprecedented access and unparalleled knowledge of America’s favorite sport, Smith documents his years leading the NFLPA and explains how the NFL distorts the truth, telling partial stories to insulate itself and grow its $20-billion-a-year brand—and the players’ battles to protect themselves.” There are no mentions of “distorting” in this text. There is a mention of NFL “owners” having “insulated themselves rom financial loss by refusing to even entertain the possibility of signing players to fully guaranteed deals.” This is not exactly relevant. There is a second more relevant mention near the end of the book: “The NFL is insulated from legal scrutiny and has been allowed to engage in business practices that would otherwise run afoul of antitrust laws. If there were no unions, there could be no draft or price fixing.” The NFL “has run and thrived because it is the largest unregulated socialistic system in the history of the United Sates, and it cannot seem to abide by the conditions that actually make it lawful.” The Justice Department is not being stopped from investigating NFL’s “handshake agreement to create an artificial salary cap in 2010, even after I delivered the secret spreadsheet that demonstrated collusion.” This certainly gets to the point of what this book is about. But it’s odd that this revelation is near the end. Thus, those who want to make sense of this book should start reading the last chapters first.
“From contract negotiations to battles over suspensions, Smith shows us how the union fought to protect players from the greed, racism, and dishonesty the league is built on. He also takes readers inside closed-door meetings and unreported conversations and confrontations with the industry’s most powerful figures such as Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, Tom Brady, and Roger Goodell.” It “puts every NFL crisis—both familiar and lesser known—within a broader cultural and historical context, framing the league’s… rise…”
This is not a good book, but those who are researching the criminology of the NFL are likely to find some useful information by digging far enough.
A Legacy of Drug-Smuggling “Badness”
Artis Henderson, No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, Plane Crash, and a Daughter’s Quest for the Truth (New York: HarperCollins, September 2, 2025). Softcover: $29.99: 240pp. ISBN: 978-0-35-865027-0.
***
“…A compelling father-daughter story that reads like true crime, haunted by a question the dashing and mysterious Lamar Chester had always taught his daughter to ask: ‘How do you tell the good guys from the bad?’” Inside the book, she only mentions this quote twice, once when her father tells it to her, and then when she realizes there was a specific moment when her father crossed the line into being a “bad guy” in October 1980 when he failed to decide to “cash out”, taking his winnings and retiring, and instead proceeding to be prosecuted, and to kill the “first witness” in a bit over a year. I just don’t think this author’s compass is right about morality here. She seems to be lecturing that she knows the difference. Cashing out at a point when you are winning at crime is hardly a “good” decision. This book is full of cliches.
“Artis was five when a plane crash killed her beloved father. For years, it was simply called ‘the accident.’ But many things weren’t getting discussed. Like Lamar himself—a swashbuckling, larger-than-life pilot, a doting father and husband, and the most popular farmer in Georgia.” She reports that shortly after her “dad bought My Goal Farm”, she seems to be using a pseudonym (surely unnecessary when it comes merely to a farm), a newspaper (named as White County News: if this is its actual name surely people can just find this article with this farm’s name: I checked and there is a paper of this name in Georgia), “featured a front-page story on his chicken business.” Some specificity is offered in the description of how this article puffed this business.
Thus far into this blurb, I have no idea what this story is about. I found a NYT article from 1983 that explains that “Federal prosecutors unsealed a 36-count indictment” against her father for his “smuggling organization that shipped marijuana and cocaine into the United States from a base in the Bahamas.”
“Or that the IRS had immediately taken everything: the chickens, the airplanes, the islands in the Bahamas… Afterwards, Artis and her mother broke contact with everyone and fled, rebuilding from the bottom up as if Lamar’s big, wild life had never happened. Years later, a friend tells Artis Lamar’s plane was sabotaged: her father had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Miami in the 1970s. At the time of his death, he was about to testify in a trial that had swept up everyone from the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, to a US district attorney, to the Colombian drug cartels.” I see: this is where this blurb finally begins to explain the plot of the criminal story. “But the deeper Artis digs, the more unexpected the story becomes. Beyond the dramatic betrayals, dangerous drug lords, and geopolitical intrigue is the beating heart of this… memoir…” “Betrayal” is never mentioned. Only the “British House of Lords” appears, and not “drug lords”. There is a mention of the “Medellin cartel” in a discussion how when her father heard that one of their associates had purchased a chain of Bahamian islands, he “reached out to Lance Eisenberg, his moneyman, and floated the idea of buying property in the Exhumas.” He deliberately bought expensive property to be near this cartel to do business with them. There are some surprises, and a decent amount of detail in this story. But there is no doubt that all characters are the “bad guys”. Those who are interested in reading about “bad guys” would thus find interesting things by reading this book. Though it is not scholarly and is not well enough cited for researchers to trust what it is stating as historical fact.
Anaphora Literary Press 
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