Book Reviews: Summer 2026

Anna Faktorovich

Likely 20^th Centuries Forgeries Attributed as Ancient Nubian Art

***

Rita E. Freed, Ancient Nubian Art: A History (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2026). 290pp: color illustrations and photographs. ISBN: 978-1-60606-981-3.

“Kings and queens of Nubia reigned over one of the largest empires in the ancient world and had contacts extending north to Greece and Rome, south to sub-Saharan Africa, east to the Red Sea, and west across much of the Sahel. Even a quick look at Nubia’s artifacts reveals the incredible creativity of its artists, architects, craftspeople, and thinkers. Despite their significance, the achievements of ancient Nubia are little known to the public and are often viewed as a subculture, a derivative offshoot of Egypt, Nubia’s northern neighbor… During its over eight-thousand-year lifespan (beginning around 8000 BCE), Nubia indelibly shaped the art and architecture of the ancient world… Ancient Nubian Art is the first comprehensive and accessible treatment of Nubian artistic culture and showcases its vast range—from ceramics, sculptures, and jewelry to tombs, temples, and palaces.” The book is by “Rita E. Freed, curator emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has the largest collection of Nubian artifacts outside the Nile Valley”.

This past year I wrote a book called Atheist’s Guide to Mythology that questioned the introduction of forgeries by westerners attributing their own fantasies to ancient peoples from regions they were colonizing. So I had to request this unique book that looks back at some of the earliest claimed artifacts whose dating has been set by theoretical archeologists or historians, instead of definitive methods such as carbon-dating. For example, the title of the “Nabta Playa Stone Circle” explains that it is a “Reconstruction”. I discuss in my study how Stonehenge could not have survived too much longer past the 18^th century when these stones seems to have been put in place by fraudsters because they have had to be installed with concrete to keep them from repeatedly falling over, and otherwise disintegrating. The curator explains that what was found at this location was merely “a ring of small sandstone slabs”, from which researchers illogically projected these were “a solar calendar” or a religious “ceremonial center” (33). Creating a reconstruction suggests to visitors and the public that it is firmly known what these looked like and their religious purpose, when there might have merely been a few rocks here that people used to sit on them in a circle. Evidence other than religious delusion is missing for why “scholars believe” this “was predicting and celebrating the summer solstice and rains” (34). And she adds they pointing to “constellations” (34): this further supports the claims in alien ancient religious practices that supports the antiquity of religions, but is not supported with any rational facts in mere rocks. Figure 1.4 seems especially likely to be a forgery or a much later creation, as it’s a piece of stone with a few holes and lines punched into it, which as been dated based on similar items with this dot and curled line motif being seemingly also erroneously attributed to this extremely ancient “ca. 5500 BCE” period. Ceramic potsherd cannot be carbon-dated, so modern dating methods cannot disprove a forger’s claims any stone with such markings is not ancient and worth enormous sums. As in other such books, Freed describes “Nubian artists” creating these “ceramic vessels”, as if she is seeing it happen, instead of offering specific evidence for each dating claim (34). Museum curators have traditionally accepted researchers’ claims of almost divine-inspiration knowledge of such “truths” for the world to arrive at the current fictitious or mythological “history” of the ancient past.

While this is not a scholarly study, this is a very pleasant book to look through. The designer set some of the text in blue: this is difficult to read, and tends not to include anything sufficiently distinct to place it into articles of its own: despite this it is a very pleasant blue. The book is luxuriously designed, with a giant simple vase taking up a page (36). I was mesmerized by a set of bowls with pointy bottoms that must fall over if anybody attempted to eat out of them. Why would this be a practical device somebody other than a forger thought of (52-3)? There are almost never mentions of when an artifact’s provenance began, or when it was “discovered” by westerners or locals. For example: “2.11: Figurine of a Woman, A-Group, 3800-2900 BCE. Nubian; found in Halfa Denheim, Sudan… National Museum, 13729.” The author mentions that it was found in a “grave” of a “woman” with “child”, together with “two clay figurines”.  No mention is given for when this grave was dug up. Instead, the next section begins with the mystery of why the maters of this Group-A disappear (58-60). On looking up this item, it was excavated as late as 1962-3 by Swedish archaeologist Torgny Save-Soderbergh. The site was identified as a cemetery by seeing indentations in the dirt. No scientific dating has ever been applied to these findings. The first attributions to this “A-Group” were made in 1907-8 by American George A. Riesner, followed by a couple of digs in bursts. It is extremely likely that either these digs disrupted relatively recent or only a few hundred year old graves and misattributed items belonging to the same artist to a population spanning hundreds of years, or a forger created a set of these stone items and they were gradually “dug up” and attributed to this broad period. Without mentioning this digging timeline, the author makes this very contestable claim seem certain.

This was a very pleasurable book to glance through. I have not seen many books with so many illustrations of simple to complex Nubian art, or forgeries of it. I do not recommend this book for scholars of this subject who would not learn anything new for it other than seeing a summary of significant artifact attribution claims to research further elsewhere. But members of the public would probably have a great time looking at these images, as one might tour this distant place. I hope this book will not be assigned in classes, as students are likely to be frustrated by the limited details, and many generalizations here.

Puffery of the Animation Business from an Insider

***

Tom Sito, Drawing Life Back into Animation: A Personal Journey Through the Toon Renaissance of the 1990s (London: CRC Press, 2026). 182pp: color illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-138-50145-4.

“By the 1980s animated cartoons were seen as an art form in decline. An archaic vestige of the old Hollywood studio system. Yet by the 1990s animation was booming. Blockbuster movies and TV shows, interactive games and special effects extravaganzas all generating billions of dollars… Artists and moguls. Geniuses and hustlers… Tom Sito, a veteran Hollywood animator… takes us deep inside the studio corridors to watch the birth of Roger and Jessica, Bart and Lisa, Woody and Buzz, Shrek, Simba, Mario, Lara Croft and Yu-Gi-Oh.”

The “hustlers” idea interested me. It seems to be addressed in chapter 7 “Moguls, Mavericks and Movie Brats”, which describes Ted Turner inheriting “his father’s outdoor billboard company”, which he then expanded by purchasing a TV station, and then starting CNN (65). This rich guy then started paying others to animate. The author is not critical of these efforts, but as usual puffs that his early shows were instantly with “strong ratings” and “very popular” (66). Ted began collected and “dumped” a bunch of Looney Tunes etc. Despite describing these purchases/ investments as thoughtless, the focus is instead on celebrating the success of Ted’s networks, measured solely by viewership and pufferies. This is info is not helpful either for a business person who would need the details of these deals, or for a creative interested in how to pitch their work to these types of execs. There is a page-sized ad of a puffery that celebrates “Turner”. It is interesting to see this compressed history here, as too few histories are written of the film businesses, and too many theoretical or puffing studies about individual directors. There are strange interruptions from the employee perspective, such as that there were too few projects “to make a living on” (69). She describes animators instead looking for work abroad In Toronto etc. without clarifying what exactly made good work rare in the US (70). Then, there is a puffery of Spielberg’s preference for “animation” as a “co-equal pillar” of movies (70). A puffery of Spielberg’s blockbusters’ use of animation follows.

As I am considering what to do next in my career and planning a trip to LA to present at WorldCon, I was hoping to find practical advice here on how to become a Hollywood artist, or at least some fun dirt about Hollywood fraudsters, but instead this is a puffery from an insider who is not revealing secrets here. There are probably many curious details if one digs across the length of this book though, so readers are welcome to attempt to dig further. This is a good book for libraries to have access to, as there are many who want any accessible info on this goldmine industry. 

An Illustrated Explanation of How and Why Artistic Propaganda Is Sponsored

***

John P. Murphy, New Deal Art: World of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2025). 336pp: 254 color illustrations and photographs. ISBN: 978-0-500-20502-0.

About “artists and activists who made up the New Deal art programs… What role should the arts play in a democracy? At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal turned crisis into opportunity. Through unprecedented federal funding for the arts, the New Deal launched the careers of artists such as Philip Guston, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. They belonged to the era’s bold vision of cultural democracy: art by the people, for the people… Through state-sponsored murals, paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, and posters, these artists redefined the role of art in society. They formed the first Artists’ Union and fought fascism through collective action. They reimagined art as a public good rather than a private luxury.” It “confronts issues relevant today: freedom and censorship, race and representation, art and activism, politics and propaganda…”

Having just finished a book about how the British Ghostwriting Workshop shifted from being mostly government-funded to becoming capitalist profiteers in the second half of the 19^th century, it is startling to find this book is celebrating artists’ returning to relying on government sponsorship in America by the middle of the following century (1933-9). Why is this author thrilled about artists being paid massive sums to create propaganda in the middle of the Great Depression, when these funds were needed by the starving poor? Instead of answering such questions, the intro opens as if this is a novel with a melodramatic description of the start of the Depression: “Millions of families faced eviction…” (8). The government’s inaction had led to “protest” as “a twenty-thousand-strong ‘Bonus Army’ of unemployed veterans” marched to Washington to demand change (11). Instead of helping them, Washington decided to divert the attention of the masses with art that made them seem to care or to be attempting to help. Songs were designed to celebrate the New Deal (12), as well as art. Instead of helping vets, DC’s concert was with artists whose “patronage disappeared” (14).

While it is easy to see this propaganda-purchasing pessimistically, I have always enjoyed art that depicts people working or the poor in their natural conditions. This is certainly more engaging, though I have not used such images on many covers, as most writers would find realist art too depressing for a poetry collection or the like. And anybody who is seeking to create propaganda art sponsored by a government grant or the like would certainly benefit from reading this book closely to understand how such grants are won. The story is dramatically written, and is splendidly illustrated. The picture of “Moses Soyer, Artists on WPA, 1935” is especially captivating as it depicts an artists’ workspace, where a few artists seem to be drawing in a single style, or in a kind of Artists’ Workshop, as if a master artist drew outlines for them to draw within and they are coloring in the details in this Workshop’s company-style (18), though the individual pieces might have been distinct, and only the artist’s representation of them is in a single style. The realist drawings of workers across this period-book do seem to be in a matching style, as if a collaborating Workshop did create them. This would mean only insiders in this group had access to these enormous government-donations to the arts. Hale Woodruff’s art is a bit brighter and more shaded (21), while Austin Mecklem uses dimmer colors and more tiny details (35). There is less of a difference between Victor Arnautoff (38) and Diego Rivera (40). Instead of focusing on such echoes or on the craft, this book is concerned with explaining the “Marxist iconography” and other theories communicated by these pieces (40).

If I was considering applying for government funding for any type of art, I would read this book very closely, and would study the awesome illustrations here for clues on what direction would result in funding. Artists being paid to make propaganda sounds depressing only from an outsider’s perspective. For anybody who succeeds in such applications, this is the dream.

A Close But Mistaken Scrutiny of Sophocles’ Fragments

***

Leonardo Bononcini, Sophocles’ Nausicaa (Bristol: Bretschneider, 2025). 126pp: BW images. ISBN: 978-88-913-3555-5.

“Odysseus meeting princess Nausicaa on the Phaeacian seashore is the core of the 6th book of Homer’s Odyssey” (750-700 BC?). “This episode seems to have inspired some theatrical adaptations, Sophocles’ Nausicaa (for which a secondary title, The Washerwomen, comes into question)” (450-420 BC?) “possibly being the first one of them. Unfortunately, as so often happens studying Sophocles’ lost works, very little of this play is known. Primarily from Athenaeus” in The Sophists at Dinner (200 AD) “we infer that Nausicaa was an early play of Sophocles, presumably dating back to 470/68-458/56 BCE, and that Sophocles himself starred as Nausicaa, showing off some skills in ball-playing, in an adaptation of” Odyssey’s Book “VI, 99-117.” To clarify: the Odyssey was adopted during Sophocles’ period into Satyr or comic plays, such as Euripides’ Cyclops, or Aeschylus trilogy on parts of the Odyssey. So, Nausicaa is claimed to have been one of these Odyssey adaptations, but it has not survived, as only descriptions of it from hundreds of years later claim to be summarizing this non-existent text. “From the extant fragments, both of certain and uncertain ascription…” some are obvious forgeries that have been as equally believed as more doubtful possible myths or forgeries, “whose language shows clear Homeric echoes…” These echoes logically mean that this set of texts was ghostwritten at around the same time relatively near or in the Renaissance by the same forgers, as otherwise an adaptation would have been borrowing content, as opposed to having “echoes” of the same style. Though uniquely, in this story: “the presence of Odysseus telling his (mis)adventures is assumed: a huge innovation compared to the model. Despite its fragmentary status…” This is strange since a nonexistent or as previously noted “lost” play should not have surviving fragments, as this means it is only partly-lost. Meanwhile it is “shedding some light on Sophocles’ literary debt to Homer and forcing researchers, and readers, to ask themselves puzzling questions, such as ‘What was the literary genre of such play, whose subject seems to be the least tragic of all? Was it a tragedy, a satyr-play or something else?’” The latter is not the question I am asking myself, but yes, its genre is of structural interest in determining if it is an echo, a reproduction or an innovation.

Researchers apparently call a play “lost” when the full play is missing, even if fragments have indeed survived to give an outline of what the whole would have contained. The introductory remarks do not clarify matters, as they seem to be indicating there are several mutually-plagiarizing plays that have similar titles that are also lost: Philyllius and Eubulus’ plays of the same title. Only the title survives from one hinting that this was a misattribution by a mythological historian. These significant echoes are abandoned in favor of reviewing the plot of Homer’s plot for this section. The use of abbreviations (“T 28 R” or “Eust”) makes it a bit difficulty to decipher sources; this is a very short book that could have included full spellings without becoming much bigger. And when encountering contradictions, such as the presence of a third title, The Washerwomen: Phaeacians, the author finds excuses such as: “there is no compelling reason to assume that Sophocles did not produce two plays with similar plots” (19). There is indeed a great reason not to assume this, as this would leap, without due evidence, to add yet another non-existent play to Sophocles’ credit, when the others have not been established as anything other than fragments made by much later forgers. The author also makes an erroneous claim when he states “having three titles referring to the same play is not only unusual but, more importantly, without parallel” (19). This is entirely false, as plays are regularly called by varying titles by historians: Oedipus the King, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Tyrannus. My theory is that such mis-titles and misattributions were deliberately applied by late forgers to confuse later researchers who could be told that a play they have figured out could not have been something claimed was instead some other play because if its slightly different title. Such mistakes make this an unreliable source. The author mentions this is an edited dissertation, so it just might not have been sufficiently cooked. I did want to look closer at it because, as I expected, there are many curious speculations here, and a closer scrutiny of antique evidence that in typical studies of “lost” plays.

Scholars would benefit from closely reading this study, as long as they verify all claims made in other sources. This is just a rare close analysis of a text, with Greek text examples, translations and histories. Students of Greek or Sophocles would find a lot of ideas for further research. So libraries can benefit from having this study in their collection.  

A Thorough, Multi-Perspective History of War-Photography

****

Stuart Allan and Tom Allbeson, Conflicting Images: Histories of War: Photography in the News (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024). 278pp: BW illustrations and photographs. ISBN: 978-0-415-61832-8.

“In contrast with historical examinations centering the evolving role of the war correspondent, Conflicting Images focuses on the contribution of photographers and photojournalists, providing an evaluative appraisal of war photography in the news and its development from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Stuart Allan and Tom Allbeson critically explore diverse genres of war photography across a broad historical sweep, encompassing events from the Crimean War (1853-56) and the Civil War in the United States (1861-65) up to and including conflicts unfolding in Syria and Ukraine. This book reflects on the relevance of different types of warfare to visual reporting, from colonial conquest via trench warfare and aerial bombardment, to the ideological dimensions of the Cold War, and ‘embedding’ and ‘winning hearts and minds’ during the ‘War on Terror’ and its aftermath. In pinpointing illustrative examples, the authors examine changing dynamics of production, dissemination, and public engagement. Readers will come to understand how current efforts to rethink the future of war photography in a digital age can benefit from a close and careful consideration of war photography’s origins, early development, and gradual, uneven transformation over the years.”

The murder of hundreds of photojournalists in recent conflicts showcases the response of totalitarians when the news from the frontlines contradicts their desired propaganda. Every empire wants to convince its people that it is acting in the interests of all, while hiding that its rulers are solely acting in their own best-interests, such as by profiting from bribes over weapon sales to both sides, or via bribes for seizing aggressions, or other nightmarish scenarios. In the 19^th century, ghostwriters in European capitals could imagine a positive spin for how a war was going based on the few facts coming in from the front lines. When photography was introduced, it became harder to imagine things that just were not happening, and thus would be contradicted in any authentic photos from the war itself.

This is a unique book in its ambitious attempt to explain this dangerous journalistic attempt to fight fiction with documentable truth. It describes early attempts, such as the arrival of photographers to document the Crimean War in 1853 to counter Russian aggression by rival empires, as seen from the perspective of individual photographers such as the Hungarian Carol Popp from Romania, or the British Gilbert Elliot who recorded photos from other dramatic perspectives. It is certainly exciting to read about a “hurricane” sinking one photographer’s ship, while “two military officers, Ensigns Brandon and Dawson” dared to “supplement the official record” with their own photos after training in London (18). The pattern here seems to be that the Brits sent spies to find evidence to accuse Russia of war-crimes during this conflict. The British press was framing the Crimean War as a defense of civilization against a barbaric tyrant (Russia), while Russia was propagandizing this war as a holy crusade to protect the orthodox Christians from Islamic oppression and Western betrayals. However, the Russians might have either bribed the Brits to favor them, or the facts were against the British side. As later in the war even the British Times began sincerely reporting that British soldiers were dying from cholera, starvation, and freezing. This book details far more than the latter reporting by “William Howard Russel’s newspaper dispatches, which spoke directly to the plight of ill-equipped soldiers”, by also describing how rivaling propaganda continued to create “heroic, celebratory painting” of war as a noble endeavor (20).

This is a book that explains war-reporting’s history with unprecedented detail. Anybody who is considering a career in journalism, and especially heading out to cover a war, should read this book first. No matter is somebody is planning to write propaganda and to report only the version of events desired by an authority, or if somebody needs to know how to avoid being blown up from the sky while tracking the authentic truths, these lessons from decades in the trenches will help prepare you for humanity’s most inhumane practice. Historians of war reporting will find a wealth of information here to guide further research. All sorts of libraries would benefit from adding this book to their collection.

Gang-Performed and Artist-Administered LA Protest Art

****

Anna Indych-Lopez, Judith F. Baca (Los Angeles: CSRC Press, 2018). 190pp: color illustrations and photographs. ISBN: 978-0-895511-60-7: $29.95.

“Behind the fascinating public artist’s practice of collaboration. Judith F. Baca is best known for the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976-83), a vibrant 2,740-foot mural in Los Angeles that presents an alternative history of California—one that focuses on the contributions of marginalized and underrepresented communities. The mural is emblematic of Baca’s pioneering approach to creating public art, a process in which members of the community are essential contributors to the conception and realization of the work. Anna Indych-López explores Baca’s oeuvre, from early murals painted with local gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to more recently commissioned works. She looks in depth at the Great Wall and considers the artist’s ongoing work with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California, a nonprofit group founded by Baca in 1976. Throughout, Indych-López assesses what she calls Baca’s ‘public art of contestation’ and discusses how ideas of collaboration and authorship and issues of race, class, and gender have influenced and sustained Baca’s art practice.”

“Figure 81. Judith F. Baca, Concept sketch for the 1960s section of The Great Wall of Los Angeles” clarifies that the initial planning pencil sketch can be very simplistic, as it is the professional painters that execute this sketch who gain the hours of drawing labor to develop precise execution skills necessary to make murals that seem flawless, at least at a distance when a sketch is blown up to wall-sized dimensions. The original sketch was probably based on photos from this period, such as firemen hosing down a fire combined with men with their hands against a wall against whom the fire hose in this compilation is directed. It does depict a true incident. In May 1963, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene Connor ordered firemen and police to use high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful black student protestors. And there were photographs of this incident were taken by Charles Moore: they were published in Life, and pressured Kennedy to introduce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The mural semi-imitates but does not precisely copy the authentic photos that were copyrighted and have been digitized on the Smithsonian’s website, such as Alabama Fire Department Aims High-Pressure Water Hoses at Civil Rights Demonstrators, which depicts a woman and two men with a hose firing at their backs, as they crouch against a building. The drawing changes the gender of the woman into a man, flips the image into its mirror, and adds several fallen-over victims in addition to the trio in the original photo who are standing in a crouch.

This is a very interesting book from an artist’s perspective, as it invites further research into this popular artist’s methods of turning news and history into massive and expansive art projects sponsored with public funding. Again, I find myself very jealous of Baca. His ultra-designed Venice home, and his capacity to move donations towards art are indeed enviable. More so because his sketches, as in “Figure 44.” For a “proposed mural at Estrada Courts, 1974” are simple enough for somebody with a basic art education to dream of bettering. I did not even catch Baca was a female artist until looking closer at this text: women are usually not allowed to make rough sketches. Most puffed female artists tend to have skills above their male rivals. The book explains that she was lucky because “at the same time… muralism as a practice was becoming canonized throughout east Los Angeles” (92). The first chapter explains that Judith Baca commenced her career in LA by organizing “a team of twenty artistically untrained youths—gang members from four rival neighborhoods—to paint murals in contested public spaces” (8). In other words, this was an example of gangs receiving funding to create massive licensed tags across LA whitewashed to seem to be public-service projects that were designed to turn gang-graffiti artists into good citizens. There are still some great arts on walls in LA, but there is far more disturbing graffiti that is contributing to making LA feel unsafe and to making people walking around this city feel tensely surrounded by gang-messages. While Civil Rights art is certainly admirable, many of these images showcase violence, the bare breasts of women, or various other intense scenery that is not designed to foster a calm and orderly environment. Yes, it is important for public art to call the public to right wrongs perpetrated against them by the establishment, but if it convinces the mob to burn a city down… who is winning in this public service campaign?

Much can be learned from studying this artistic biography more closely, so this is a great book for libraries to acquire, and for art historians to closely dissect for what it says about gang-performed and artist-administered public art.

Doodles and Jokes About Animals on Architects’ Minds

****

Kostas Tsiambaos, Ed., The Architect and the Animal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2026). 148pp: color illustrations and photographs. ISBN: 978-0-262-04969-6: $35.

“A spirited abecedarium-style book that shows how architects have engaged with animals as references and metaphors in modern and postmodern architecture… 26 different architects look at how 26 different animals, from A to Z, have found their way into modern architectural discourse. The animal was typically approached in this discourse not through its various cultural or symbolic identities but as a body examined under a formalistic scientific lens. In this volume, the authors explore a less operative—and more meaningful—understanding of animal references and representations in twentieth-century architecture. Both playful and serious, there is nothing quite like this book.”

I pondered this question in my forthcoming book with Routledge: Writing Speculative Fiction (2026). In the chapters on building strange characters, and places, I recommend studying strange animals on Earth and borrowing what makes them strange and mixing them with other strange elements to make alien or speculatively new creatures or building structures.

This book even smells awesome, as it is printed on high-quality, thick art-paper to house its color images. The Contents are humorous, as they are organized as an alphabet with their first letters in red, starting with: Ass. Each of the animals is created by a different architect, with the Ass handled by M. Christine Boyer. The chapter opens with a rough sketch of an ass on top of a bird, and then a bird on top of an ass, with some scribbles around this pen-and-ink with a big of crayon color sketch. The opening paragraph uses the humor of something in a high tone that addresses a silly subject, as it attempts to derive the meaning of the word “ass”. Though after some jokes, the story digresses into biography of Le Corbusier’s Christianity. Then, there is a digression on this guy’s obsessive writing about the plight of donkeys’ labors; though he later objected that at times the “brute donkey” instead “meandered… always trying to gain shade”. While these anecdotes about how this artist kept observing donkeys are curious, the author fails to explain how he utilized this animal in specific architectural projects, which would be directly useful to architects trying to use this book as inspiration for their own design (1-4).

The “Preface” promises to deliver this as it reports it aims to act as an “ark” that “collects various references to, and representations of, animals in the architecture of the long twentieth century”. It adds that this book is intended to perform a “mirroring, as animals replace, disguise, or extend the particular subjectivity of the architect’s work. By including animal references and representations in their buildings, texts, sketches, drawings, photographs, and so on, architects question… what happens to architecture when an animal appears in the scene?” (ix-x). Ah, I see, I misunderstood the uniting theme. This book is about any type of obsession an architect has had with an animal that might be acting outside their architectural designs, as opposed to about how architects based their designs on a given animal’s characteristics.

This is a very silly and entertaining book. I wished to find more in its pages, but it achieves what it in fact promises very well. This book is designed for casual readers and artists in need a bit of light inspiration. This book was on display at Brandeis, and it probably should be in other displays to invite browsers to look at the doodles inside, and amusing anecdotes as their wait for an appointment.

Ballads as Advertisements of Renaissance Plays

****

Tiffany Stern, Ballad Business: Selling Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026). 352pp: BW images. ISBN: 978-1-107-17967-7.

“Playwrights, including Shakespeare, often started out as song writers and regularly product-placed ballads within their dramas. In this enlightening study, Tiffany Stern asks who wrote, financed, published and marketed theatrical broadsheet ballads and investigates the migrants, women, and individuals with disabilities who sung and sold them outside playhouses—in striking contrast to the white, able-bodied and male actors who performed inside. With case-studies ranging from ballads in plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, sung after plays as jigs or ‘themes’ by the clowns Tarlton, Kemp and Armin, and performed about the plays of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare and others,” it “argues that broadsheet ballads were often the first and sometimes only parts of the performance to be published. Advertisements and souvenirs, ballads constituted a crucial though now forgotten form of theatrical merchandise and musical paratext.”

In my BRRAM series, I explain that William Percy and Ben Jonson were the two leading dramatists, who were frequently helped with the verse in their plays by William Byrd (holder of the music-publishing monopoly). They were also occasionally assisted by the versifier and playwriter Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), who was exiled over his Judaism, and died young as a result. Most of the broadsheets that have been claimed as fragments of “lost” plays were part of Percy’s play-lending schemes that were profitable because they bypassed usury laws by allowing people who could not otherwise obtain a loan to obtain loans on very unfavorable terms. Marlowe was not a playwriter but rather one of the people this lending network murdered when he failed to repay one of these loans: that’s why his name was credited on a loan against some plays in playbooks. It began appearing in bylines of published books after his death to take advantage of readers’ sympathy for a playwriter who died tragically while young. The ballads and the like assigned to women, disabled and the like characters were similarly designed to be written in the voices of pathetic or sympathetic biographical characters, who could convince purchasers of broadsheets to buy these poems more easily than if they had been signed as written by able-bodied male authors: i.e., by Jonson and Percy.

In the center of this study, there is confusion from the author as Stern questions: “The ballad and picture, though likely to have been commissioned to co-promote the playbook, have different publishers; what this suggests about wider printer ‘networks’, and how the ballad partners ended up printing almost all ballads including those that advertised books…” is discussed later in this study (234). What I explain in BRRAM is that similar-looking ballad broadsheets are very likely to have been mass-produced systematically by the same printer (probably Verstegan who was operating under many printers’ bylines), with Percy and Jonson as the main writers, who used these to advertise their plays or play-lending schemes, or to sell these as antiques to collectors. Elizabeth I had introduced publishing monopolies that made it illegal for printers to compete in these types of genres, so the presence of only a single printer using multiple pseudonyms was the legal norm. Though printers or writers could not advertise their use of pseudonyms without confessing to committing criminal fraud, making subterfuge and confusion necessary. Several other images in this book show the same image reappearing between a broadsheet and a playbook title-page as in The Spanish Tragedy: this just meant that Verstegan probably took his already created image and printed it into both a broadsheet and a play version, as he owned both the broadsheet and the book printshop, just leaving out a printer’s byline from the broadsheet, or otherwise disguising a shared printer between such genre-divergent texts (222-3). Instead of focusing on these aspects, Stern instead guesses the actor portrayed in the guessed “1615” creation date might have been “Holger Syme”, who was credited with playing Hieronymo since 1598 (226). While this is a curious digression, it misses the broad patterns these massive echoes are explaining about the tiny number of artists or writers functioning during the Renaissance. Stylometry indicates there were only six ghostwriters through 1648, and none in a few decades that followed the temporary termination of the monarchy.

This is an interesting and well-researched study, though it reaches erroneous conclusions as it is missing my clarifying explanations in BRRAM. This book should be useful for advanced researchers in this field, and thus is a useful acquisition for academic libraries.

A Nonsense Puffery of AI Maths

*

Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI (New York: Penguin Random House, 2025). 482pp: diagrams and formulas. ISBN: 978-0-593-18576-6: $22.

“Explanation of the mathematics that has brought us machine learning… Machine learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumor is cancerous, or deciding if someone gets bail. They now influence developments and discoveries in chemistry, biology, and physics—the study of genomes, extrasolar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems… This technology is based on relatively simple mathematical ideas, some of which go back centuries, including linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mathematics. It took the birth and advancement of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental math behind machine learning, while suggesting intriguing links between artificial and natural intelligence. Might the same math underpin them both? As Ananthaswamy resonantly concludes, to make safe and effective use of artificial intelligence, we need to understand its profound capabilities and limitations, the clues to which lie in the math that makes machine learning possible… Ananthaswamy dives into the Transformer architecture that makes large language models like ChatGPT possible and points to groundbreaking future directions enabled by the technology.”

I recently wrote a chapter/article on how artificial-intelligence is referring to fraudulent mimicry or plagiarism, whereas a computer program is purely intelligent by deriving only precisely correct answers. AI guesses from patterns what comes next, whereas a calculator gives a trustworthy answer. This book twists this distinction by making AI seem mysterious, as if it is performing some higher science than the basics of what is true in math established in the 17^th century. If AI gives a mathematical answer that contradicts a truth known since the 17^th century, it is not being highly creative, but rather is hallucinating, and is introducing a major falsehood that could lead to misdiagnoses, and various other problems that should be mentioned in this blurb instead of this puffery.

The “Prologue” opens by suggesting AI was already created by 1958, when the Navy promised it had designed “an electronic computer” that could “walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” This is followed by corrections that this was science fiction, but not really. The capacity for a program to plagiarize past content to make itself seem to be generating original thoughts when recombined is indeed a very old technology. Modern AI is an illusion just like these early claims were. The intro puffs AI’s capacity to “discern patterns in data without being explicitly programmed to do so”. But this is a celebration for a programmer who does not have to program. It is a problem for the user who needs accurate answers, as opposed to hallucinated answers that imitate what a correct answer would look like based on the pattern of past answers without the guidance from a programmer to explain to this system how to arrive at this sought accurate answer (2).

The metaphorical titles in the Contents page do not invite easy digestion of this book. What might be covered in a chapter called “In All Probability”? Probability theory? This chapter opens conversationally by claiming “uncertainty messes with our minds”. A long digression follows about a game-show that posed a probability dilemma, and the following disagreements about if its probability theorizing was correct (96). At the end of this discussion, there is a strange diagram that suggests probability of switching doors vs not switching changes as 10,000 trials are attempted to make the better answer easier to distinguish, whereas when only a few trials are attempted, the odds seem chaotic. There is no clear lesson at the end regarding what a student has learned regarding probability. What exactly does a programmer or somebody using AI need to know about AI’s perception of probability for any of these anecdotes to be useful (98)? Later in the book, there are extensive theories of energy functions that theorize on concepts such as an “energy minimum”. These seem like possibly fictitious formulas AI might write when asked to theorize using scientific formulas (272-6). At the end of this section, the author adds a brief paragraph about “neuron flips… reducing the energy of the network” until a “stable state” that cannot “change” (276). There is no conclusion about what relevance anything covered in this section has to AI, or to working with AI, or to programming AI.

This is not a useful book. It is a strange book. It is a ponderous book. But it is not practically useful. I do not recommend it for anybody from a casual person interested in testing AI to help with their homework, to a researcher who is writing a book on AI innovations. Though it might help a researcher who wants to write academic nonsense puffing AI with help from AI that might succeed in landing a major publisher…

A Rare Study of Cross-Writing Between Antiques Attributed to Distant Times

****

Richard North, Beowulf and Grettis Saga: From England to Iceland, 1016-1219 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2026). 384pp: BW illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-84384-763-2.

“Investigates the relationship between two texts separated by hundreds of years and nearly two thousand miles. In the saga, Grettir fights a giant who wields a hepti-sax; in the poem, Beowulf uses a hæft-mēce on Grendel’s mother. These two unique words for ‘hafted blade’ appear to be related. Can the same be said for the works that surround them? This book says yes, arguing not that the weapons have a common origin, nor that their likeness is a coincidence, but that Grettis saga has borrowed from Beowulf. The case for a textual loan begins in the context of England’s connection with Denmark in the reign of Cnut the Great (1016-35). This book argues that Cnut took an interest in Scyld and the Scyldings of Beowulf and that his skalds transformed these names into ‘Skjǫldr’ and the ‘Skjǫldungar’. The Beowulf manuscript is placed in Lichfield in 1017, with the suggestion that it was commissioned by Eadric Streona as a gift for Earl Thorkell of Skåne. It is proposed that in 1159 a copy of Beowulf was brought from Lincoln to Iceland to serve the interests of a family that claimed descent from Skjǫldr, that in the 1180s the poem influenced Skjǫldunga saga, and that in the 1190s Beowulf went north to Þingeyrar abbey, where Oddr the Monk, author of Grettis saga, used it to enhance Grettir’s fights with Glámr and the trolls of Bárðardalr. This is a daring book that sheds new light on the circulation of Beowulf, on questions of dating and patronage, and on the authorship of Grettis saga.”

As I explain in my yet unpublished book, Atheist’s Guide to Mythology, the reason for linguistic and structural echoes between many of these antique-claiming texts was because they were forgeries created by the same monarchies’ ghostwriters as part of their colonial and imperial propaganda. Specifically, Beowulf was first-documented in 1563 in England by “Lawrence Nowell” in a manuscript now stored in the British Library, which was first-printed in 1815 in Denmark. Grettis Saga was never “discovered” as it was claimed to have been in Icelandic archives from before the Renaissance before an 18^th century scholar in Copenhagen, Arni Magnusson, dissected and published it via Bjorn Markusson in Iceland in 1756. There are only a few decades between these publication dates, and thus the former date might have been when both were forged by the same ghostwriters, and these manuscripts could have been sold to archives in Britain and elsewhere at a profit as antiques. In the decades around 1756, Copenhagen was in the middle of the independent Denmark-Norway kingdom that had maintained its independence from the Pope’s theocracy, and was in rivalry over colonial territories with Britain and France as they began to fight among themselves in 1756. The two epics are both set in Scandinavia and both describe antique ownership of this region by monarchs: they were tools designed to support the ancient rights of the Denmark-Norway kingdom in a time when rumblings began about anti-monarchist revolutions.

Given the unique doubting of previous propagandistic accounts of why such “ancient” tales share cross-period similarities makes this a unique study, as nearly all preceding studies have accepted past fictional or mythological histories as facts without putting them through modern forensic methods.

Though the problem this author encounters is assumption. The standard method has been to bridge the gap between a falsehood and reality has been to build a bridge that makes the falsehood seem real. For example, the “Preface” begins by explaining there is no true answer for the similarity between the terms in these two texts, as the blurb explained. It mentions past critics have made the mistake of assuming this was a “coincidence, loan”, describing three erroneous explanations or bridges. This paragraph concludes with why past theories are impossible: “there is no proof that a copy of Beowulf lay in a library in Lincoln from where a visiting scholar could have carried it home to Iceland” (x-xi). Though this author creates another bridge to reach a new desired conclusion, instead of following the facts where they want to go. In the “Conclusion”, the author summarizes that he has “argued that Grettis saga was compiled” in Iceland “in the late twelfth century by the historian Oddr munkr Snorrason, who was descended from Grettir’s sister.” He has speculated that this “Oddr… could have enlarged his family’s stories of Grettir with some of the above works and motifs from England, including a copy of Beowulf.” The researcher is not considering both can be significantly later forgeries, without explaining why he is excluding these more obvious options (326-7). While this is an erroneous conclusion, this is an incredibly thoroughly researched book, with close analysis of the tiniest parts of these texts, an exploration of Christian mirroring, and a review of the various antique biographical claims made about these periods in these texts themselves or in related forgeries attributed to these periods (177).

Overall, this is a great book that shows an enormous scholarly effort in texts that are too often either treated as fairytales that can be simplified, or as obscure fragments that can have their bits treated in linguistic isolation. This book is recommended for scholars in this field from undergrads to scholarly book writers, and for all sorts of libraries.

A Unique Grandchild’s Perspective on the Wilde Scandal

****

Merlin Holland, After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal (New York: Europa Editions, 2026). 690pp: color photographs. ISBN: 978-8-88966-176-4.

“Written by Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, After Oscar recounts the gripping story of Wilde and his enduring legacy. Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris, his reputation in tatters, exhausted by scandal and prison life. While the details of his life in the limelight are well known, often ignored are the reverberations of the Wilde scandal over the decades following his trial and death.” It “documents decades of sensationalist conjecture surrounding the Wilde family and exposes a century of bigotry and hypocrisy within the cultural establishment.”

My reattribution scholarship has explained that “Wilde’s” novels and plays were ghostwritten, along with those of his mother and other Wildes. Thus, this study of what happened after Wilde’s death is indeed the historically most significant narrative. How Wilde’s death changed perception of homosexuality is what modern readers tend to care about vs the structure of Wilde-assigned stories.

The relationship of the author as Wilde’s grandson explains the large section of photographs in the center of this book, as he is the heir of the Wilde archives. Books have been repeating some of the same familiar photos of Wilde, so it is refreshing to see some new images. Curiously, a photo of “Oscar’s last table in the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris” specifies that it was “Not used for creative work but for writing begging letters to friends.” Every hotel has a table, so it seems somebody set this table up with a pen and ink to suggest Wilde was writing here without anybody in a chair after his death: probably the press was hoping to publish this as a melodramatic note. It is a bit morbid there is a photo of “Oscar on his deathbed”: a corpse amidst flowers. Another odd element: “A forged letter to Andrew Gide” versus “a genuine one to Frank Harris”: there is a claim that the forger erred because Wilde would not have “had the funds to buy monogrammed stationery” while in exile. I believe they are in the same handwriting, just one written with genuine wealthy flare, and another scribbled to make the reader pity the writer’s impoverishment.

This is an incredibly dense book with a lot of extraordinarily detailed information. Only Part One is about Wilde’s last years, while the rest is on the aftermath, taking readers by-decades, starting with what happened to Wilde’s “orphaned” children. And there are some sex jokes, such as a cartoon of a naked buttocks, and a chapter called: “A Tale of Two Testicles”. The chapter on the orphans begins in the first-person recollection of the summer of 1898 schooling. It includes reflections on these scandalous years from relatives, while their family was “destroying any evidence which might possibly connect them to him” (76). Though a lot of this evidence is a bit too childish, just notes on feeling sad about the scandal. The interesting sections start later in the book, as on “28 June 1925” when “Millard wrote to Methuen, saying that Cosgrove had tried to sell him forged Wilde letters”. This was probably the Ghostwriting Workshop attempting to convince Wilde’s associates to accept newly forged letters as also genuinely “Wilde’s” for a profit. One of Wilde’s ghostwriters, Muddock, was still alive, and thus could forge letters in “Wilde’s” hand. It is interesting why these affiliates rejected these: they clearly had obvious absurdities to them due to a rushed forgery process, or an assumption they would not be questioned if the family could imagine a way to profit from a resale.

This is a great book for somebody to dive into to learn more about the Wilde scandal, and about many other things related to the heirs or archives of Great Authors. Libraries would benefit from adding it to their collections. It is also well-written enough for all researchers of Wilde to profit from consulting it for their projects.

A Study of the Suppressed Collaborative Strategies of Mainstream Artistry

****

Marie Sartain, Team Up: How Collaboration Powers Superhero Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2026). 146pp: index. ISBN: 978-1-4968-6098-9.

“How collaboration between creators, editors, artists, and fans drives the creation, evolution, and enduring impact of superhero comics. As superhero comics have become increasingly mainstream, so too has the attention given to the creators behind them. Yet, while it is widely known that the majority of superhero comics are produced through collaborative efforts, the ways these partnerships shape creation and reception of such works remain largely unexplored.” It “addresses this gap as the first book to examine the crucial role collaboration plays in the making and the reception of superhero comics by Marvel and DC. It delves into what collaboration in superhero comics entails, how these partnerships function, and their far-reaching impact on the genre and industry, both past and present… Exploring various forms of collaboration—from the dynamic interplay between writers, editors, and artists to the passing of projects between successive creative teams and the contributions of fans to the broader media landscape…”

The “Introduction” claims that collaboration is rarely discussed because of the American spirit of “self-sufficiency” (x). My research into attribution has concluded that there are indeed “solitary geniuses” who do most of the work, while an enormous team of creatives are paid salaries to do very little. Though the geniuses typically credited as such tend to also be merely contractors paying to be puffed as the leaders of a given team, while the underlying ghost-artists or ghost-writers work in the shadows and rarely put their own names on projects. The comics industry here seems to have realized it needs to explain just what everybody else is doing and why they need to be hired when most books about this field tend to describe innovations as the creations of a few leading-creators.  

“Chapter 1: Who Cowrote the Watchmen?” begins with a long puffery of a show, before describing a mystery of authorship. “Moore” has been lauded as its sole creator, while assistants such as “illustrator Dave Gibbons and publisher DC Comics—acted as unequal partners” (4). There is an explanation that “Moore’s” initial pitch hit a wall at DC when they refused to let him use standard character outlines, and “Moore and Gibbons” had “to create the completely new characters we recognize today”, which could not rely “on Charlton’s” previous “creations” they could now blend info from alternative related “superhero comics”. Then, there was a problem of teams being on different sides of the Atlantic that allowed Moore’s side of the team more freedom and work, with directly merely being given over the “telephone”. There was a division of labor with Moore writing the initial script, Gibbons making corrections, and then Higgins would create the artistic elements using the others input on “color”. The author reports this process displayed greater independence than other projects from this period (10-12).

This is a unique and needed book, but I do not think it is sufficiently skeptical about claims regarding credit. It assumes reported descriptions of who-did-what are frank. Though it is logical that the writer, the editor/sketcher, and the illustrator would have needed to be distinct people, there might have been some professionals holding these roles at DC who were simultaneously working on several shows, and this would explain DC’s matching styles between comics. If there were unique writers/artists on each show, the finished work should not be uniform, but rather would display unique artistic and writerly characteristics. Either way, great start to explore how the sausage at mega-entertainment businesses is made. I recommend this book for all types of readers, from hopeful artists or writers, to researchers in need of access to documentary sources that might be introduced here and in very few other places outside DC archives. 

Modern Art Is Not Dead: Nicholas Party’s Experiments

****

Nicolas Party, Murals (London: Hauser & Wirth Publishers: Contemporary Masters, 2025). 314pp: color illustrations. ISBN: 978-3-907493-20-5.

“The first instalment of the new ‘Contemporary Masters’ series—a set of monographs spotlighting some of the most influential artists of recent years—focuses on the mural work of celebrated Swiss painter Nicolas Party. His oeuvre ranges from the intimate to the gigantic, spanning from paintings, sculptures, and pietra dura, to the installations and public murals that are this monograph’s focus. Often commissioned in the context of institutional exhibitions, Party’s mural works are usually removed when the associated show comes to a close. The extensive documentation featured in the book offers a way of revisiting and experience these ephemeral works anew, with newly written texts by the artist about each mural providing intimate access to the thinking that goes into his brightly hued, uncanny universe of fantastical landscapes, characters, and motifs.”

Having tossed out hundreds of books from my library to move from ND to MA a few months ago, I felt nostalgic when I saw this humongous art book with a very bright cover. I am missing the art books I previously reviewed and had been displaying in my house/apartment. The construction of this book is curious: it’s cover has a unique material flexibility. Most books of this size have a very firm cover. I found this and other physical books reviewed in the first section of this set of reviews in Brandeis’ new books section. Hauser & Wirth have several high-end art printers they use across Europe, as this is a gallery that contracts different renown printers to help them advertise its past wares. This isa semi-flexible cover with a cloth woven binding that has created a soft-hardcover. It stands straight when placed upwards, but can be bent to study images when in-hand.

The illustrations across this book are elegantly designed. For example, the mural of strange multi-colored plants might be dull in isolation, but is explained as a deliberate brightener when contrasted in a photo against a beige apartment building behind it, or a bit of pointy-wire rope in another image: “157 Days of Sunshine” (2013, Glasgow).

 Though the enormity of these extremely sophisticing images is dampened by the simplicity of the mega-font explanations from the artist of what these represent from their perspective. Apparently a Glasgow artist “invited” this guy “to activate a neglected, empty lot” for a “temporary summer event”. This is nonsensical: they painted this mural to fix the dull space, then by the end of the summer they painted back over it, so now its again a dull fence. It had to be removed because the space was rented for temporary use. This is apparently a modern graffiti response to the museum culture that preserved art for future generations. However, since somebody is sponsoring this art collective, I really think they should stop destroying what they are making and instead find some poor people that want art on their apartment complex’s walls or the like: increase value of the building, and enjoyment of the space for passerbys and those who live there. I really think these guys should reconsider their methodology in the future.

There are many even more curious projects in this collection, like the “treescape, rendered entirely in marble textures”. Though I was disappointed that the classical painting at the center of Nicolas Party’s “Pastel” (2019-20) was an 18^th century drawing. I wish he had attempted to paint in this antique style himself: this would have been a more shocking modern-art experiment. He semi-painted one of the walls in this exhibition by projecting an antique painting of a woman’s dress and filling in modern details, or modernizing it with melded styles: though this is more like repainting vs creating his own modern equivalent by just copying the technique. Another mural of people is a more ambitious mimicry, but is a bit too simply drawn given the ambition of this book, which is suggested by a BW very realistic caricature mural that echoes Bosch but with 18^th century outfits.

Wow. I think I am just very, very jealous. I just want to join these guys, and try to contribute something to these massive projects. This is a curious combination of experimentation and imitation, which I tend to do with my projects.

It is a good idea to let the artist describe their work simply vs rephrasing ideas via a curator’s perspective. This book would be a great addition to any library’s collection. It would delight casual people interested in art, and would grab attention of anybody walking by a display with it in its center. It would also be a good choice for a private library collection, as it would be enjoyable to return to it in future years to find new elements to enjoy.

A Polished Literary Biography of Vonnegut

****

Susan Farrell, Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). 258pp. ISBN: 978-1-3505-8000-8.

“Banned, burned, and censored, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is widely regarded as one of the greatest (and most controversial) novels of the twentieth century. Fusing vivid biography with popular history and close textual analysis”, the “story of the making of a modern classic and the writer that created it. New archival discoveries and recently released oral histories give us the fullest account yet published of Vonnegut’s real-life prisoner-of-war experiences at Stalag IV-B and Dresden, which heavily influenced Slaughterhouse-Five. A recently discovered trove of letters introduces us to his first wife, Jane Cox Vonnegut, and her influence on his writing.” My research hints, late-found letters are extremely likely to have been forged. “Along the way, we also encounter UFOs and aliens, grapple with the shadow cast by the Vietnam war, and unearth the stranger-than-fiction tale of David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden, the historical reference behind Vonnegut’s writing about the Dresden firebombing.”

The “Prologue” opens with a seemingly dramatic but very disorienting scene where prisoners are nearly frozen as they are told to rise. The following paragraphs clarify that these prisoners-of-war were marched into Berlin during WWII to work as “slave laborers”, who had to unload “railroad cars, cleaning rubble from the tracks, hauling oxygen cylinders” and the like. This is relevant because they were living in a “slaughterhouse”, echoing the title of the puffed novel (x-xi). While this is a dramatic and informative intro, what is missing is any mention of Vonnegut. Though there is a brief name-droop for him a few pages later, when it is explained that this summary is based on what Vonnegut “remembers”. Though no note on in which source he remembers this in the body of the text. There is no corresponding notes section in this early-review copy for me to have checked the original source.

The first body chapter, “1: Indiana, 1922”, also opens energetically with the depiction of a high school auditorium ready to listen to their native Vonnegut in 1986. It explains that while Vonnegut “left Indianapolis permanently after high school”, he designed his speech to instead claim that his whole life has been about Indianapolis to appeal to this audience, showing how he succeeded in winning readers (1-2). The history of this region follows intertwined with the story of Vonnegut’s childhood. In the second chapter, sympathy is garnered by claiming Kurt wanted to become a journalist, but instead was forced by his family to enroll in a chemistry BA, while writing for the school paper. Chapter “3: War” also commences with excitement as it explains how Vonnegut prepared to set off for the war in 1944. The details of this scene are closely researched via journals of other GI’s and the like.

After a long section on his imprisonment, chapter “7: Becoming a Writer—Cape Cod and Iowa” finally returns to the reason most would pick up this book. With credentials as a returned prisoner-of-war, Vonnegut easily sold 10 stories in 1951 to different pulp fiction magazines. Though his first novel was well-reviewed in the New York Times, it did not sell many copies, noting his career might have been derailed then by his inclusion in a science fiction anthology, which might have barred him entry into the high canon. Vonnegut complains about this anticipated categorization (96).

This is a very well researched and written literary biography. I do not believe Vonnegut’s success was this simple, and I do not particularly appreciate Vonnegut’s novels, but as a biography this is very polished, and excellently written.

I recommend this book for all types of libraries, and for those who have enjoyed reading Vonnegut and wish to learn more about him.  

Mostly Unresearched Fictional Biography of a Tudor Hoax

*

Hayley Nolan, Notorious: Anne Boleyn and the Great Tudor Hoax (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-25441-15-7.

“…Narrative of an audacious young girl who conned her way to the center of King Henry VIII’s divorce scandal and went head-to-head with Anne Boleyn. This gripping new analysis tells of how Elizabeth Barton, a poverty-stricken housemaid-turned-nun, became the culprit who delayed Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn for seven infamous years. Wielding unimaginable influence over the biggest names in Tudor history—from the Pope to Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey and even the King himself—Barton spearheaded the smear campaign against Anne Boleyn that would eventually ruin her. But was the young girl simply a victim of these Catholic power players or the dastardly mastermind behind this great Tudor hoax? Elizabeth Barton wasn’t born into power or privilege. A household servant, she shot to fame at the age of nineteen when a terrifying illness prompted apparent prophecies from God. But when a group of ambitious clergymen saw an opportunity to stop the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, an almighty con began. Now, as a national celebrity, the daring young girl commanded audiences with Henry VIII, threatening death and damnation if he married Anne Boleyn, whilst urging the Pope not to give into Henry’s demands for divorce. But when Anne Boleyn achieved the impossible and became Queen of England, the clock began to tick down on Barton’s own demise; Boleyn launched a counterattack in support of England’s Reformation, desperate to save the people from what she saw as a corrupt system of oppression and wicked schemes like these. And though Boleyn would shock the world by trying to save the young girl and the conspirators who had been plotting her ruin, she couldn’t prevent the Tudor’s most dangerous courtiers, Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer, as they closed in to bring the audacious Elizabeth Barton down for good.”

The “Historian’s Note” opens by claiming their consultation of basic “primary sources” such as “official proceedings” of the courts is a major achievement. A pamphlet from somebody with “first-hand insights into Barton’s life” is also stressed. Since these sources fit in half of a paragraph, this means this is a book that is very light on research and is mostly a fiction. And this fiction-writer made it easier for themselves by copying “Direct quotes from letters or testimonies”. The bibliography at the back matches this impression with only 3 pages of common source cited in previous biographies and histories of this period. The notes include a few dozen notes per chapter, with several sections from the same source in a row. At least there are notes in the body of the text, whereas some books of this non-fiction-fiction type just have a bibliography without in-text citations. The fictional nature of this narrative by there not being a possible source to justify: “The young girl had he vague sense that she should have wilted under the awe of it all…” If Barton did not write her impressions, and since onlookers did not describe how she felt at this moment, this can only be fiction. Elizabeth clearing her throat and other details on how people are reacting must also be fictions. This means this book is not useful either for scholars who need firmly documented evidence, or for general reads who want to be entertained, but would find too much empty content here.

Complaints from and on the Female Bodybuilder’s Body

*

Harry Crews, Body (New York: Penguin Books, 2026). 222pp. ISBN: 978-0-143139-19-5.

“Harry Crews’s savagely funny and gritty portrait of discipline, obsession, control, and power. Shereel Dupont, formerly the secretary Dorothy Turnipseed, trains rigorously at the behest of her boss turned personal trainer Russell (‘Muscle’) Morgan, sculpting her body into taut muscles and bone in preparation for the Ms. Cosmos bodybuilding championship. But the arrival of one family—her family, the Turnipseeds—endangers her chance for victory. The ragtag group disturbs the chiseled competition and leaves Shereel at a crossroads: to whom does her name, and body, belong?… Gritty exploration of how far some will go for physical glory and purpose.”

The “Foreword” begins with the puffer figuring out that a “foreword” is supposed to be “an endorsement… that helps sell the book”. Well, this is a frank start. But then, the commentor goes back to their childhood claiming to have been introduced to this text early on. Some slang is involved. The author of these comments is apparently MJ Lenderman, a musician in his twenties. Why is this person the authority who was asked to introduce Crews?

The first chapter opens with a stumble too: “She was called Shereel Dupont”. This seems to be just a deliberately opening start, but then the thought continues with an interesting appendage: “which was not her real name”. The rest of the opening paragraph is written in a conversational podcast style, as her trainer is blamed for putting her on a diet and training routine that has stopped her period. As dialogue starts, the woman keeps whining: “I hurt”. Then, she’s studying her naked body: awkward from a male author. There’s a sense of shape about her near-nakedness there and while performing to win a body competition, which casts a negative light on what this girl would have idealized to take it to this extreme. Then, a dude comes in and criticizes her, saying she looks “heavy”. This is just an unreadable book. Who can it be aiming for? A bodybuilder would not want to hear about a top building repeatedly complaining, as they are grinding through this work and avoiding all negativity to keep going. Somebody who resents builds would not want to read a whole book about them. Maybe pervy young musicians, who want to read about a naked and embarrassed muscular woman? I am exiting this review here. I do not recommend this book for any readers. There are blogs and sports programming that is far more exciting.

A Novel About “Ordinary People” Is Designed to Be Tension-Free

*

Judith Guest, Ordinary People (New York: Penguin Books, 2026). ISBN: 978-0-143139-46-1.

This is a new edition of an over-puffed and media-over-covered “bestseller” that was Guest’s “first novel” about “the Jarrets… a typical American family. Calvin is a determined, successful provider and Beth an organized, efficient wife. They had two sons, Conrad and Buck, but now they have one… Into their lives to share their misunderstandings, pain, and ultimate healing. Ordinary People is an extraordinary novel about an “ordinary” family divided by pain, yet bound by their struggle to heal.”

I requested this book because I have been reading Penguin classics across my education in literature, and I want to learn what new classics they are introducing into the canon.

The “Foreword”, by Amy Bloom, certainly starts on a curious note by explaining that Ordinary People in 1976 “was the first unsolicited novel—that is, unagented, submitted cold, and discovered in the fabled ‘slush pile’—to be published by Viking in more than a quarter century.” My recently completed book on British Victorian publishing manipulation explained the birth of the age of agents as gatekeepers of publishing at the end of the 19^th century, and they have become so powerful that it needs to be stated there was a single exception to their complete power between WWII and 1976 at one of America’s top publishers. Why was there any slush-pile if no novels had been solicited without an agent in that long? Viking seems to have been previously giving writers hope to perhaps steal incoming ideas, or to encourage writers to read their books to learn their style to become more successful at pitching in the future. There must have been some corrupt trick to this book’s acceptance against the pattern. Despite high sales of this novel, afterwards Viking and other major presses closed their slush-pile option by directly explaining they only accepted agented or insider work. It might be technically impossible to non-corruptly become a licensed literary agent today because to gain membership in AALA takes a past record of several book sales to traditional publishers that only accepted licensed-agent submissions (and also must be sponsored by an insider), making it impossible for a newcomer to achieve this feat. The only option is to find employment as an assistant at an agency, as opposed to starting an independent agency outside the existing structures.

Instead of diving further into this, the “Foreword” then digresses on the rarity of books about “mental illness” during this time. The note that “Guest doesn’t sensationalize Conrad’s pain” is not an argument for reading this book, as the point of reading fiction is to be engaged in high-drama or intense emotions. If a subject is treated too casually, this means the novelist has not done their job. Bloom adds that the “therapy scenes… are near-transcripts of good quality care”. This might be interesting in a realist novel but is likely to be handled here as light chatter about emotions without emotionality. For example, “You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna fell anything else, either.” Not a deep thought, and it digresses from there. And the woman, Beth, is depicted as having “no interior life”: this suggests the author is sexist, and this contradicts the female byline on this novel.

The novel opens with a reading of trite bumper-stickers. Then a character is lying around in his room. There are repetitions of “right”, a stress on humorlessness, with a few occasional actions, such as rolling onto the boy’s “stomach”. Digressions follow about being icked up, playing a bunch of sports, and random morning noises.

This is an unreadable novel. I hope teachers are not assigning it in classes. While Chuya’s poetry is sharp and surprising, this is just the most boring story ever told. The point seems to have been to convince publishers to stop accepting unagented submissions all together by just how bad they can be when they are chosen by unwitting readers. As an overly-puffed book, it was natural for Penguin to accept it into their classics series, but I think this is one of their mistakes of trusting the hype, without objectively judging the quality of a text.

Scholarly Edition of the Experimental Poems of Chuya

****

Nakahara Chuya, Angel at the Earth’s Extreme: Collected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 2026). 230pp. ISBN: 978-0-143139-17-1.

“The intensely confessional work of Japan’s most famous modernist poet, considered the Japanese Rimbaud, whose poems have inspired cultlike devotion—especially among fans of the hit anime show Bungo Stray Dogs—in a brilliant new translation, the most comprehensive in English. Nakahara Chūya lived only to age thirty yet ranks among the finest of Japanese poets, evoking in his work the alienation, ennui, and romantic melancholy of a changing world. An introspective, sensitive writer and early-twentieth-century contemporary of Natsume Sōseki, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Osamu Dazai, he chronicled in his poems a life of personal and political upheaval: His lover left him for his most trusted friend, his first son died at age two, his country hovered on the precipice of war, and his own tremendous promise was cut short by illness. This edition is by far the largest collection in English of Chūya’s poetry, containing unabridged translations of the two books Chūya completed in his lifetime—Songs of the Goat and Songs of Days That Were—plus nearly one hundred additional pages of his traditional Japanse tanka poems, uncollected poems, and various other manuscripts, as well as an extensive scholarly introduction that situates Chūya within his historical moment.”

The “Introduction” mentions the tendency of critics to favor poets whose biographies solicit sympathy from readers, as opposed to merely their verse. Dickinson’s isolation tends to be covered before the structure of her cryptic poems is dissected in a class. The blurb certainly sells that Chuya’s biography is as dramatic as canonical rivals from elsewhere. Though the fact that he only “completed” two poetry books and only published one before his death—given my reattribution research—suggests that his biography was manipulated into a tragedy by posthumous publishers deliberately to profit from buyers’ sympathy with his premature death. The texts that were attributed to this byline as it became famous and began selling copies are very likely to have been ghostwritten: this is apparent even without linguistically testing these texts. The canonization of Chuya into Japanese textbooks mostly communicates the power of his posthumous publishers. The use of Chuya’s photo when he was only 18 in most media-coverage explains that young readers have found it easier to admire somebody they perceive as their-age.

As Chuya’s biography commences, it seems to be echoing Japanese propaganda about him without citing specific sources, and adding embellishments that might be fictional: “The family lavished attention and love on Chuya.” How does the author know this? In a family with seven kids only one of whom died, it would be logical that each child would have felt relatively neglected, instead of being “all the more precious”. While I have a pessimistic perspective, this is a good standard biographical introduction that explains who this poet’s family was, and various other elements a researcher or a student would need to know about this foreign author to determine a subject and to build some initial research for a research paper or the like on Chuya. If I was in a class, and I was reading this intro for an assigned reading, I would be pretty happy with the direct delivery of essential facts and some enticement that sells this poet as somebody I should care about as I dedicate time to studying the following poems closely.

Though the note that Chuya “discovered” avant-guard poetry of Dadaism at “sixteen” once again brings me to my reattribution speculations, as verifying this would be difficult. The documented records of his school performance prove that he was a bad student who failed out. Just as more than half of the canonical Victorian corpus I recently reviewed, there is a claim that most of Chuya’s correspondences and journals were destroyed in a 1972 fire. This claim has explained why there are chunks missing from the surviving correspondences, and it has elevated the relative worth of the surviving materials due to their relative rarity. His letters have been published between 1950-71; if some of these were ghostwritten for these collections without manuscripts to substantiate them in a single handwriting, this would have been a motive to claim the missing manuscripts had been burned. This book does not dive into such theories or possibilities as it repeats standard pufferies about Chuya. Though it would have been strange if an American publisher questioned Chuya, while accepting such mythical biographies from Western poets.

While the blurb sells Chuya’s original style, Dada-type poems are especially easy for a ghostwriter to fabricate because of their brevity and non-specificity. The opening poem from the published 1922 collection, for example, merely mentioned a “veranda”, summer, and trimming “nails”, and that this is “dull”, followed by similarly non-specific stanzas. This collection was self-published by Chuya with two other poems. To a westerner each of these might look like a haiku (5-7-5 syllables), but it is instead variants on the tanka (5-7-5-7-7) applied to taboo subjects. The count is based on phrases, as opposed to lines of verse, so in the following stanza, the first three lines are a single 5-syllable phrase, and some words have to be subtracted as modifiers or missing words added for it to fit the standard format:

feeling

the

loneliness

well up

I ought

to climb a mountain

this autumn day

and whistle

The intention for these to imitate satirically the “tanka” structure is in the heading: Selected Tanka Poems. While these poems that Chuya published during his lifetime are thus relatively traditional, the poems that were posthumously assigned to Chuya are clearly divergent for their experimentality (xxvii). For example, there is a poem that surrealistically asks: “why don’t I let my legs go/ & let them walk around on their own…” (25). The poem called “Blank Sheet”—“Books are where the books are/ Ink is where the ink is…” (142) reminds me of the common British trick of soliciting sympathy from readers by describing a writer experiencing writer’s block. Since most people struggle with writing, they sympathize with a similar hesitancy in professional writers, being repelled by writers who advertise hacking away at writing at an extreme speed.

It would probably be delightful to slow down and read this collection without my attribution research weighing down my estimations. Students or writers who are free of pessimistic reflections would surely enjoy the strange turns, jokes, and experiments in this dense collection. Professors should include this book on syllabi of world-literature or of Japanese literature or poetry, as this is one of the best scholarly editions of a significant poet that has not been as widely known in the West as he is in Japan.

How to Make 15 Prison Escapes Boring

**

Kevin Maurer, Code Name Dagger: The Incredible True Story of a World War II Soldier, Spy, and Special Forces Legend (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-250274-40-3.

“The true story of Major Jerry Sage, an O.S.S. agent during World War II, who inspired Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape. Jerry Sage was a Canadian-born American soldier, special forces operator, spy, and prisoner of war during World War II. He was notable for over 15 prison escape attempts leading to 15 sentences in solitary confinement, earning him the name ‘Cooler King,’ until his final successful escape… Sage was recruited into an organization run by William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which was the precursor to the Office of Strategic Services… Detailing his operations in North Africa and his capture by the Nazis after the battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943.”

The first chapter begins as modern thrillers do with a digression about the beauty of the Washington Monument, followed by a call-to-action via a letter arriving that invited Sage to a meeting. The government officials failed to give a specific address, leading to confusion with the cab driver, who had to ask “other cabbies for advice”. This added to the cabbie’s fair and proved that the American bureaucracy is incompetent, but this is not the message the author seems to arrive it: as the point seems to be that Sage managed to solve his first great mystery: the location of this meeting. While such irrelevant information is handled in detail, when an important fact is introduced, it remains unresearched, as when “Donovan” is claimed to have been “Critical of Nazy Germany, especially their treatment of Jewish judges in 1933”, but no sources for this are given. The “Note on Sources” at the back summarizes that it is based on past autobiographies, war diaries, and war histories. It recycles or rephrases past histories, merely adding empty chatter to make this an original work.

Even chapters set up for excitement seem to be deliberately inducing sleepiness to repel readers. Chapter “8: Prisoner 955” begins by describing a crawl of the train, and the rousing of sleeping “prisoners” before they are “herded… of the train”. A similar process of checking-in is reported as with the Vietnamese CIA-torture imprisonment described in this set of reviews, but this author manages to make this dull, as by adding phrases such as, “one by one”, or describing the “combed… hair” and “perfect… mustache” of Sage: the protagonist.

In the second half of the book, there is some excitement, as when a German dentist extracts one of Sage’s teeth without Novocain: partly explaining why he tried to escape so many times.

Though even as they prepare to evacuate from the approaching Soviets, the narrative manages to be dull by slowly describing Sage packing “best-mended socks, long-johns” etc., as if he had any other items than these two sets of each that he had been given by the camp.

There must have been an exciting way to write this story, but this writer failed in this regard. This is an incredibly boring narrative that is near-unreadable.  

The Schemes of Oligarchs to Bribe the US to Do Their Will

***

Casey Michel, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-250430-11-3.

“…Examination of how America’s wealthiest infiltrated the government and allied with dictators, transforming the U.S. from democracy to oligarchy. For years, a small group of billionaires has amassed increasing power, steering American politics for their own benefit… There’s Elon Musk, who has used his wealth to help place Donald Trump back in the White House… There’s Jared Kushner, who has used family connections to gain more political power than he ever dreamed of. There is only one word to describe such extreme levels of wealth, avarice, and political control: Oligarchy. But the oligarchs are not working alone. From China to Russia to Saudi Arabia and beyond, many of these men have cultivated alliances with America’s most notorious adversaries, opening the doors for autocrats around the world to sink their teeth into the U.S. Placing profit over patriotism, they have transformed into vectors of influence for some of the world’s most repulsive dictatorships, all of whom are trying to create a world dominated by imperialism and tyranny. Connecting everything from the devastation in Ukraine to destruction in Gaza to destabilization in Greenland, these oligarchs have transformed American policy and American politics into their own private fiefdoms, regardless of what Americans actually want…”

The blurb claims that oligarchs have only risen to power in America during Trump’s presidencies, but they have been in power of the US government since its founding. The founding presidents utilized their fame and power after the Revolution to spin it into huge businesses, such as Washington’s whiskey distillery, Franklin scaled his businesses post-government service, francizing his printing business. And Hancock profited from warring to expand his import-export shop into a shipbuilding, whale oil export, and retail store chain enterprise. There has been a revolving door that has meant that government power to redirect military contracts, or to grant government printing contracts has meant politicians could set their own business interests to be favored above others post-government-service. This is how the system has been designed to mimic the British monarchy’s patronage or contract-award model.

The opening summary, “Oligarchs by the Numbers”, is very helpful in explaining just what is claimed to have changed given these roots. It explains that 2018 was the “first year the four hundred richest Americans paid a lower tax rate than the bottom 50 percent”. While the net worth of Musk has dozens of times higher than Rockefeller’s, the more relevant number is the increase in “dark money expenditures on… American elections” from under $5 million in 2006 to $1.9 billion in 2024. This does firmly prove that American politicians have succeeded in selling their power to anybody who wants to profit from America or sees a benefit (such as a pardon) from corruptly donating to a politician in charge of the thing they want (such as a contract).

The “Prologue” begins by depicting the walk of an UAE dictator flagged by armed guards. I explained how the US and especially its banks have been involved in profiting from laundering Middle Eastern war and crime tyrannical money for over a century in my Epstein Files book that has not had any replies from publishers. Instead of explaining this history, this story explains how MBZ snubbed Obama and instead met with not Trump, but his son-in-law Jared Kushner, in 2016 to give him a giant billion-dollar bribe via an investment-fund managing agreement. The US had set up a need for this bribe by blacklisting or blocking Middle Eastern countries funds or their ability to do business across the past decades, and now the most blatantly corrupt administration in American history decided to openly cash in on built-up threats.

Problematically, this book is recycling what has been stated in the news, instead of doing research on what was behind headlines. Chapters alter, there is a digression about why Roosevelt put in place the inheritance tax, and how Trump worked to repeal it. There are rare mentions of how American businesses “had hidden significant funds off their books” and how American executives “had covertly paid the Nixon administration” or “secretly bribed any foreign regime they could find.” For example, there “was the head of Gulf Oil, testifying that his company had organized millions of dollars in bribes to South Korea’s ruling dictatorship.” Corruption has remained the way companies win business since the age of monarchies, the US has just previously succeeded in keeping its corruptions secret, keeping it out of indexes that report on public perception of the extent of national corruption. With Trump and with recent statistics, the size of these corruptions and the failure to hide them has invited these types of studies.

There is some interesting information about the corruption of the US government by foreign and domestic business and political interests scattered across this book. It could be significantly enhanced though if around 2/3 of it had been edited out.

The Most Boring Mob-Business Story Ever Told

**

Laurel Woods, Strip Club Heiress: The Jet Strip, My Father’s Conviction, and the Murder of Mac McKenna (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). 222pp. ISBN: 978-8-216-37218-9.

“When Laurel entered her father’s strip club at nine years old, she was dazzled by the kaleidoscope of lights, the shimmering silver of the disco ball. After an injury, Laurel’s father, Michael Woods left the California Highway Patrol and took up a new career in high profile adult entertainment, opening the Jet Strip Club and building a successful business with his partner Horace Joseph McKenna Jr. (Big Mac). Their success came quickly, changing both of their lives. Twelve years, multiple club openings, and millions of dollars later, Mac is found shot to death in his limo outside his ranch and Michael is the prime suspect. For ten years, the case goes unsolved, but Michael remained at the top of the list of suspects the whole time, eventually being arrested and convicted for the murder. Leaving the strip club empire to Laurel to manage, while fighting for her father’s freedom. In this riveting memoir, Laurel Woods, shares raw memories from her childhood to adulthood exposing how her dad’s work and eventual imprisonment shaped her life in unexpected ways.”

The book opens with bright family and business photos. The blurb is a bit disorienting: this is a book from the daughter who inherited a business empire because her father killed his partner in this empire that otherwise would have maintained control of this business? Chapter “1: Shiny Brass Pole” begins instead by stressing they were a religious family, and that her mother resisted her father entering the stripping business. There are moralistic discussions about women who strip. The second chapter is even called: “2: Just a Normal Family”. This is very dull content given what has been promised in the action-packed blurb. By the middle of the book, the story is still a dull story about heading off to college, only interrupted by a note that she found work “posting for Playboy”. Another interruption to the mundane is that her dad gives her “a Smith and Wesson .38 handgun.” There are some blank pages between chapters as fillers.

This seems to be the dullest mob-business book ever written. There are Halloween parties amidst pining for dad’s release in the middle (79). Nonsensical claims are not explained, as when at the start of chapter “26: Making It Rain”, there is a claim that just before her father’s arrest a guy working for the strip club, Ricky, “stopped making cash deposits for one month. At the end of the month, dad’s accountant told him $190,000 in cash was missing. Ricky eventually admitted to stealing the money… Dad forgave him and kept Rick on as manager so that he could eventually pay back the club with a payment plan” (99). This seems to be a story about how “dad” hid hundreds of thousands or millions via minions before going to prison to have some illicit profits available after he got out of jail, if the business failed without him. But the narrator trusts the account of hopeful forgiveness.

The previous podcasts and the like surely focused on the murder, and not on how this girl got through school. Those interested in true-crime are likely to be frustrated when trying to read this book. They might find some new evidence here, but probably only if they read between the lines of how this little girl is trying to spin the narrative to make her family the heroes.  

Welfare-Art-Work as the Only Non-Discriminatory Work for Women

***

Lauren Arrington, Bohemians on the Breadline: The Radical Women Artists of Roosevelt’s New Deal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-250286-91-8: Hardcover.

“Unexamined history of women making radical art under Roosevelt’s New Deal.” This subject was also examined in another book in this set of reviews: John P. Murphy’s New Deal Art. “Like millions of Americans in the Great Depression, artists Alice Neel, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas Straus, Elizabeth Olds, and Pablita Velarde embraced employment through President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. The Federal Arts Project was one of the most unique social experiments in U.S. history: mass public funding of art meant for the public. Murals were painted, sculptures cast, and art classes were taught, as these talented artists gave back to the communities they lived in. They were also making radical art that challenged racism, inequality, and capitalism—despite pressure by bureaucrats to dictate the art produced. When the New Deal programs were dissolved at the end of the decade, much of that art was destroyed or forgotten.” If “much” had been “destroyed”, I would speculate that it never existed, and that “artists” took money corruptly that seeped into the wrong pockets. But no: the problem is that out of 1,700 murals commissioned for U.S. post offices, around 200 are destroyed or missing, and these pieces were photographed to guarantee their initial existence. In 1935, $27 million was allocated to art programs. Less than 1% of the New Deal’s budget was spent on art, whereas some of these new books seem to be claiming propaganda-art was what most of these funds were spent on.

“The surviving works were absorbed into the landscape of our everyday lives. Situated in housing projects, parks, and municipal buildings, this art is seldom understood as more than a cultural artifact. But these are labors of love by women artists who put themselves at risk during tumultuous times. In vivid, eloquent prose backed up by archival research, Bohemians on the Breadline brings to life the intimate stories of these women—of tortured love affairs and fractured families, but also courageous activism and community mentorship, and above all their extraordinary art.”

The frontmatter further explains that the whole New Deal’s WPA “employed 8.5 million people over the course of its eight years of existence”, who “built more than 620,000 miles of roads and 78,000 bridges”. Women were excluded from taking advantage of most of these jobs, unlike in the arts.

As the blurb promised, too much of the main chapters focuses on these women’s relationships, or on Alice Neel being with a “dirty old sailor” at the start of “1: ‘the Beat of Those Days”. As common in puffing biographies, a section follows that explains how tired her art made Neel: “She painted until she collapsed: ‘You die every day….’” She ended up in a mental institution: it was too expensive for her family. Two years after this hospitalization, she moved in “with the man who would try to destroy her career before it ever got started.” Instead of explaining his psychosis, an explanation of their hunger follows. She seems to have then joined an “emergency work relief program”, such as the Federal Art Project, which had “Communist objectives”.

This narrative is too scattered and keeps being interrupted by digressions and wallowing. It seems to be communicating some interesting anecdotes about how somebody can make it by applying for artist-employment-based-welfare, but most of it is too digressive to be read as chronological history. Somebody must commit significant time and patience to dig through this narrative.

Digressions on Politics of Self-Interest

***

Greg Steinmetz, The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon and the Triumph of Big Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-6680-2369-3.

“Why did one of our greatest presidents ruthlessly persecute one of the richest men in America? By any measure, Franklin D. Roosevelt is one our most admired presidents. But behind the beaming smile and folksy fireside chats was a ruthless politician willing to use the massive powers of the federal government to crush his enemies. In this thrilling exposé, Greg Steinmetz recounts how FDR targeted America’s third-richest man to prove his progressive credentials and rally support for his sweeping social agenda. He found his scapegoat in former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Mellon’s name dripped riches. More than any other, it symbolized the Roaring Twenties economic boom and the crack up that followed. FDR publicly blamed Mellon for the Great Depression, using him as a convenient diversion from the New Deal’s failure to bring jobs back to a devastated economy. Roosevelt tortured the aging, frail and reclusive Mellon, cooking up a fake criminal charge in a bid to put him behind bars. When that fizzled, Roosevelt kept up the fight by making Mellon miserable in tax court. Mellon died before the verdict but not until, one final, jaw dropping twist occurred in this strange clash of titans. This shocking book reveals the secret sinister side of Roosevelt—and explains how bigovernment won out of over the libertarian economic order that had reigned since the birth of the republic.”

Bigovernment was at the birth of the republic as it was born out of a monarchy where the government had tyrannic control. But otherwise, this is just the sort of book the world needs: any historical narrative that keeps being repeated deserves to be questioned and perceived from the perspective of the losers to check if the hero might be a villain. Though another complaint is that this blurb leans to heavily on Mellon’s fragility, forgetting the title calls him an “oligarch”: either he had extreme business power, or not.

The introduction begins with the curious fact that Mellon had “put Al Capone in jail for tax fraud.” Thus, it seems Roosevelt was acting in retaliation on behalf of the mobster when he “wanted to do it to” Mellon. Though this is followed by speculations regarding anything other than this point, such as the underlying “political purposes”. One paragraph starts with a general claim that we are now seeing “wrenching political change”. There is always some political change in a democracy, so this is an empty sentence.

The first chapter also begins with generalizations, with a few scattered details, such as Roosevelt’s attendance at a “farmer’s picnic in Butte”, where he was reported to have joked about tyrannically “running a couple of little Republics”, later denying he said this about “influence in the Caribbean.” Chapter “8: Volunteerism” starts by explaining that both Mellon and Roosevelt were luxuriously vacationing as the Great Depression caused havoc for the poor.

The problem with this book is that the blurb promises a dense explanation of exactly how Roosevelt maliciously attacked an opponent through the judiciary, but the author has not found enough relevant information on this narrow subject. It could have been found by looking at court records, and at the piles of evidence presented in these cases, but the writer opted instead to use common news reports, and general information about the biographies of these two characters, only briefly stopping to return to the prosecution plotline. The side topics are addressed too lightly, such as writing at the start of chapter “10: Transition” that: “Hoover was stuck.” There was a stall in action because Congress needed to approve a measure. Such mundane digressions show the author has no created a strict plotline that tied this history into a single set of related events. For example, starting with Mellon’s prosecution of Al Capone, and focusing on such lawsuits, and only the parts of the Great Depression relevant to whatever fraud Mellon was accused of perpetrating might have been an interesting study.

I do not recommend this book for any readers, unless they have a lot of free time to read what is commonly known, with a few curious details sprinkled in.

A History-Changing Study of How the Vatican Helped Nazis

*****

Gerald J. Steinacher, The Pope Against Nuremberg: How the Vatican Helped Nazis Escape Postwar Justice (New York: NYU Press, November 3, 2026). 368pp: 15 BW and color images in insert. Hardcover: $30: ISBN: 978-1-479845-24-8.

“How Vatican officials aided Nazi war criminals and undermined Allied justice after World War II. In the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials promised a new era of international justice, holding Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. Yet beyond the courtroom, a very different struggle was unfolding—one that played out behind the walls of the Vatican…

How the Vatican shielded Nazi war criminals, undermined the principles of the Nuremberg Trials, and ran ratline networks that spirited perpetrators to safety under the cover of Christian mercy.” I recently listened to a book on tape where the lawyer in charge of these trials explained that he manipulated events to avoid interrogating any witnesses but rather relied solely on documentary evidence. He claimed this was to avoid witnesses prejudicing juries, but instead somebody such as the Vatican could have been forging documents they were giving to Americans and others to find patsies guilty, while apparently helping insiders escape justice. If witnesses were questioned, they might have explained the perpetrators were escaping. My Atheist’s Guide to Mythology also mentions several likely forgeries that were stored in the Vatican since the Renaissance that were designed to demonize colonized peoples. The Catholic Church is a monarchy that has been manipulating world events in the interest of monarchs, so their role in helping Nazis is not as shocking as some of their other manipulations.

“Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, as well as government and intelligence records from Europe and the Americas, Gerald Steinacher reveals a campaign that would benefit some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators by helping them avoid prosecution. Church officials petitioned Allied leaders, including the U.S. president, submitted statements for the defense, coordinated public relations campaigns, resisted extraditions, and, in some cases, sheltered wanted war criminals on Church property. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII, long criticized for his alleged public silence during the Holocaust, urged the world to ‘forgive Germany.’” Germany was the center of Catholicism across most of its history, with the capital moving to Italy relatively recently, so their unique interest in helping and manipulating events in favor of a colonial/imperial or warmongering Germany was the standard Vatican position. “Steinacher places these actions within the turbulent politics of early Cold War Europe, when fear of communism increasingly outweighed the pursuit of accountability for mass crimes.” This suggests a moral anti-communist agenda, when the Vatican instead had a pro-imperial agenda as its motive for this support.

The “Introduction” opens dramatically with a long quote from Adolf Eichmann, “one of the key organizers of the Holocaust”, who explains that he viewed it as carrying out the Catholic Church’s interests or working with their “honor” in mind. The “Arian race” ideas had a Renaissance Catholic propaganda origin, when Germany’s Catholics were arguing for their rights to imperial conquest to spread God to the barbarians who failed to worship their God. This righter does not go this far, stopping at explaining the Vatican helped free organizing Nazis, without stretching this theory by accusing the Vatican of being the underlying source of the pro-Holocaust ideas (2).

Later there is an explanation that in the pope’s “diary notes”, he explains he “strongly rejected any notion of Germans’ collective guilt” (65). Because the Americans, such as Jackson, were Christian, they automatically trusted the Catholics’ pro-Nazi sentiments, or requests to forgive and the like, without suspecting nefarious intent (66). Later a leak is described that indicates a papal blessing for one of the Nazis, Pohl, which some accuse of being a “fake”, but others at “the Vatican admitted” was genuine (160).

This is a very powerful book that changes the history of WWII in a field where most other “new” fictions and non-fictions about WWII tend to just repeat old propaganda. Anybody interested in WWII, in religion, in politics, in history in general will find a sea of interesting new evidence here. I strongly recommend a close reading, and for this book’s acquisition for all types of libraries. It is very rare to see any hard truths on the intersection of political-evils and religious assistance. 

Confessions of a Vietnamese Assassin About CIA Torturers

****

Nguyen Tai, Face to Face with the CIA: The Memoir of a North Vietnamese Spymaster (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026). 220pp.

“In late 1970, South Vietnamese forces captured a man who, they soon discovered, was no ordinary prisoner. The highest-ranking North Vietnamese officer taken captive during the war, Nguyễn Tài ran an extensive communist clandestine security and intelligence network in Saigon that infiltrated the South Vietnamese government and carried out targeted assassinations. His arrest triggered one of the most intense and prolonged interrogations of the war, conducted by both South Vietnamese and American intelligence services, including the CIA. After many years of service in the postwar government, Nguyễn Tài published this memoir in 1999, recounting how he resisted relentless efforts to break him. This gripping firsthand account is at once a rare glimpse into the shadow war of espionage and a harrowing story of survival. Nguyễn Tài’s unvarnished testimony depicts years of psychological and physical pressure, with detailed descriptions of CIA and South Vietnamese interrogation techniques. It offers valuable insights into not only the tactics used by the United States and its allies during the Vietnam War but also the ethical and strategic dilemmas facing intelligence operations.”

There is a strange narrative turn in the above blurb. It seems to forget what the first part stated, as if it has been disproven as it veers towards sympathetically describing how this guy was unfairly tortured. Yes, it is uncivil to torture anybody. But this assassin’s book is being published by a major university press, and instead of explaining who he assassinated, this book instead accuses the CIA of incivility? Though Columbia is not breaking boundaries in this publication since the original was published in Vietnamese back in 1999, and the original element here is merely as the first English translation. In this case, failing to translate this work that has become significant in Vietnam would have been a censorship, so I agree with the decision to bring this narrative to light. Though I remain puzzled how this assassin was released so soon after his capture. Shouldn’t assassinations have added up to a life sentence? Apparently, he was never given a life sentence because he was never legally tried or convicted in a court, largely because of CIA’s torture and the like that meant they could not explain their methods by bringing this case to light. He was captured during the war, and the torturers apparently planned on killing him before the abrupt end of the war that led to his release. Vietnam sponsored the publication of his propagandistic memoir because he went on to work as a government official in the unified Vietnam, rising to serve as a member of the National Assembly before retiring to write and promote this memoir. Well, this is indeed a shocking book that should be of interest to the public and researchers of history alike.

The book begins with his capture “on the Mekong River”, proceeds to describe CIA’s tortures, and concludes with a puffery of being “in the Arms of Friends and Comrades”. The translator’s “Foreword” explains this is a difficult topic to research in part because the intelligence around this case “will never be declassified, were completely destroyed in 1975, or are heavily sanitized to the point of illegibility” (vii). Yes, I agree with the author, these gaps do indeed make this an “invaluable primary source” (viii).

The body of the text is indeed very intense. He feels suicidal in one moment, wishing he could “jump out of the helicopter”, and then in place of “a blindfold”, they force him “to lie on my back on the floor” (34). The short paragraphs are suitable for the action-packed narrative. After looking around the prison, the interrogation begins, and as he had before, he oddly confesses to being an “intelligence” officer. Instead of asking about this at first, they ask him about his trip. They make him skip lunch during a prolonged session. He does lie by describing himself as a low-ranking officer without much knowledge. He tells them his codename because they keep asking questions when he’s sleepy. Then, he keeps defending not being a rat by saying he makes up things to confuse the CIA officers (38).

A bit later, he reports exactly what he had been responsible for that is extremely incriminating, such as: “I approved the bomb plan for the police parking lot, and the attack succeeded” (83).

This is certainly more exciting than espionage novels. Even if most of what is claimed in this book is fiction, this is fiction that was approved by a member of Vietnam’s post-war government. This is the positive spin on their story? Anybody who wants to learn a lot while reading an action-thriller would enjoy this book. Though none of the characters are morally justifiable. All sorts of libraries would benefit from adding it to their collection. And international intelligence officers should assign this book in their training to anticipate worst-case-scenarios.

A Puffery of Product-Testing Engineers: Explains Why Your Plane Window Flew Out

****

Alex Davies, Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, September 2026). $29: Hardcover: 272pp: 14 BW photos ISBN: 978-1-324-05129-9.

“Why the stuff we use (mostly) works—and a celebration of the unsung engineers who ensure it does. When a manufacturer offers a 10,000-mile warranty on a car or slaps a ‘bear-resistant’ label on a camping cooler, what do we know about how trustworthy that promise is, and how it’s backed up? For the cooler, it’s Kobuk the Destroyer, the fiercest member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s panel of product-testing bears: Gifted at cracking locks and foiling manufacturers, Kobuk and his fellow bears play a crucial role in keeping us (and our snacks) safe… Tour of the hidden work that keeps the modern world going, safely and dependably—we have test engineers, who imagine how anything and everything could go wrong, and fight back. From echo-proof chambers to Formula 1 wind tunnels to airplane hangars turned torture labs, Davies takes readers behind the scenes of a workforce that combats contingency with equal parts analytical rigor and wild imagination. Armed with sixty-foot cannons that fire frozen chickens into jet engines, rocket sleds so fast they knock fillings out of teeth, and Lazy Susans for tasting hundreds of cups of tea a day, test engineers break it so you can buy it. But failure is a stubborn opponent: The tsunami will overtop the dam, the chatbot will give bad advice, the bear will eat your sandwich. Test engineers don’t just prevent disaster; they limit its fallout and make peace with its reality by balancing risk against reward…”

While the blurb makes this book appealing, it and the “Introduction” are very hazy on if this book is about a testing company or a person. The latter starts with a story about bears… By the second page there’s an explanation that there was a problem bear that got into a lot of campers’ food, so that an Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee had to be formed to stop it. Another entity apparently tested if something was bear-proof by dropping it instead of just letting a bear try to get into it, before the bears themselves were allowed to rummage. But apparently the test bears are weaklings as other species have opened canisters the test bears could not access. These tests do indeed show creativity. The many topics covered, such as a test center to “control floods” (6-7) certainly makes this entertaining and informative reading.

Though it is questionable why this book is puffing these testers. There are a lot of problematic products in the market today that deserve scrutiny. I bought a bug zapper once that exploded, set itself on fire while it was not turned on, so that I had to carry this burning item into the street to keep it from burning my house down, as it would have if this happened while I was asleep. Airplane windows flying out and the like seem to lean this field towards currently being unsuccessful, especially given their resources. Instead of placing blame at faulty engineer-testers, he blames humanity in general for failing to have enough trust in them, or for generally being flawed in our communal ability to reason or to predict outcomes (11).

Then, I stopped at a section on “proof load test” for “pushing a bridge to defined limit after it has been built” to check if it can fail. A Michigan set of engineers tested one “bridge by parking a couple of M-60 tanks on it.” This was an absurd waste of money, when they could have paid a scientist to design a rational test. This is followed by an anecdote of testing “hurricane-proof glass” by “firing two-by-fours at it”, instead of applying similar pressures (31). The point of such tests seems to be to entertain the engineers, and readers, as opposed to coming up with purely scientific methods that are as cheap as possible to achieve maximum prolonged safety or reliability. This might explain why plane windows are flying out: people who are engineers are just out to have some fun, instead of being interested in the tedious grind of scientific research and testing. When engineers care about working as little as possible, skipping safety tests, or using tests that waste money and time without proving anything relevant… we end up with our current problems.

All engineers should read this book, if not to learn what they should do than to learn from others’ mistakes, or to see the problems in their profession from a scholarly and anecdotal distance. And thus libraries can benefit from this acquisition.

How Kissinger Manipulated the Press to Puff Him

***

Barbara J. Keys, Super K: The Making, Breaking, and Remaking of Henry Kissinger’s Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-6680-1892-7.

“The untold story of how Henry Kissinger spent five decades shaping his legacy—and the institutions that helped him do it. In the nearly fifty years after he left public office, Henry Kissinger remained one of the most admired—and controversial—figures in American public life. Super K reveals how he manufactured this extraordinary fame. Drawing on previously unseen private correspondence and interviews with journalists and editors he courted and battled, historian Barbara J. Keys exposes the machinery Kissinger used to build and defend his reputation. From fierce battles over his record in Cambodia and Chile to high-stakes confrontations with television networks and major publishers, Kissinger spent nearly five decades shaping how the world remembered his eight years in power and leveraging those years into continuing influence. In the process, he helped write the playbook for the modern political celebrity.”

The “Introduction” does a great job summarizing the problem by explaining the puffing nicknames the manipulated press came up with for Kissinger, such as “Henry the K” and “Secretary of the World”. The title is based on Newsweek’s 1974 cover: “It’s Super K!” His achievement for this credit was being seen as somebody who arranged for the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which he is more likely to have been responsible for starting. However, instead of then explaining how Kissinger paid these folks to puff him, the story then goes on to repeat most of the puffing press. The author does not seem to notice that Kissinger was acting on behalf of the notoriously corrupt Nixon, and that paying the press off was inflating Kissinger’s reputation, while perhaps the underpaying Nixon was hounded by the same press. There are too many abstractions about the “pinnacle of power”. And too many unnamed sources, such as a “colleague who worked with Kissinger” who is credited with saying “his life’s blood” is power. Such anonymous sources seem fictitious, since they fit the narrative, but are too abstract for comments made in a focused interview.

A chapter later, finally some research begins. Kissinger had apparently attached The Economist’s harsh book about him by hiring “his longtime assistant Peter Rodman” to “write a seventeen-page, unsigned attack” credited as an “independent examination” that he sent as propaganda to “sympathetic journalists and editors.” This was while Rodman was preparing Kissinger’s biography and was thus interested in spinning the narrative to make Kissinger the hero in the news again.

It is likely that this book does explain what the blurb promised in these later chapters. So readers are advised to skip the intros and turn to the middle of this project for the meat of how Kissinger manipulated the press. While it is shabbily researched and written in parts, this seems to be a more researched book than others designed for the masses. Members of the public interested in PR would probably learn much from it.

How an Agent Manipulated Impressionists and Its Rare Female Artist

****

Mary G. Morton, Cassatt Reconsidered (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2026). 200pp: color images. ISBN: 978-8-88712-050-8.

“Fiercely ambitious and independent, Mary Cassatt defied expectations to become one of the most radical artists of the Impressionist movement, though she was—and remains—the least understood. Cassatt commanded and manipulated strains of old master and contemporary painting to express her female subjectivity through a brilliantly modern oeuvre on par with those of the most revered Impressionists. However, mishandled by the Parisian art establishment during her lifetime, and later by art historians and curators, she became known almost exclusively as a sentimentalizing painter of mothers and children. How did this happen to the most aspiring, revolutionary female artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Cassatt Reconsidered, author Mary G. Morton probes this central question and more, demonstrating how Cassatt disturbed conventional ideals of femininity, childhood, and maternity, an uncompromising feat for which she paid dearly during her lifetime and in the annals of art historiography.”

Any book with over 100 vivid color paintings attracts attention. The intro opens by describing a painting called Mother and Child, initially observing what everybody notices: it is a gentle scene of a mother grabbing onto her growing baby. But she then focuses on a less observed element: the “child’s feet… seem to be disintegrating, an almost bloody mess of peach and red… blending into the dark tones of his mother’s skirt” (vii). What this points to is that the artist stopped drawing the feet. The artist seems to have run out of time, or paint, and just left the feet with the under-color sketch, while finishing most of the rest of the composition. The author does not present this as an alternative but instead dramatizes this as an intentional bloody radical message. The intro further argues that “Cassett’s career, as well as her ongoing reception, was shaped by her primary gallerist, Paul Durand-Ruel.” He is credited with having “encouraged Courbet to make landscapes, Pissarro to make cityscapes, and Cassatt to paint children, eventually ensuring that maternity became her ‘brand’” (viii). My research into workshops hints that this was a collaborative artistic workshop with a dominant artist responsible for designing this Impressionist group’s directions, with them perhaps helping to color in outlines set by the master, or perhaps merely being the marketers who were selling individual pieces or brands to buyers or patrons. The Workshop could have been producing whatever they happened to have access to drawing and then individual pieces were distributed to bylines based on what each was “known” for. As Cassett’s biography begins, it is explained that Durand-Ruel had no formal contracts with artists, but merely “‘amicable’ agreements” that gave him exclusive control, with him keeping them loyal by paying “their expenses”. He apparently paid most to Monet, including a “down payment” on a house Mortgage” in 1890. There’s an explanation that Durand-Ruel monopolized the journalism about art by having “hired established critics to write prefaces for his catalogues” and thus obligating them to preferentially puff his artists. Durand-Ruel thus artificially created the Impressionism movement and steered its profits into his own pockets before handing out scraps to seem magnanimous. The section that begins explaining his relationship with Cassett skips over how or why he accepted this rare female artist, and instead focuses on how he contracted a puffer to “write the catalogue’s essay” that puffed Cassatt’s woman-and-child motif (21). It is also left vague how Cassatt trained in America to become a painter before successfully selling her “first Paris Salon submission” in 1868 (22). There is a clear explanation that she struggled to find funding to go to Paris to pursue this career, and had to apply for work as a copyist and the like, until she was oddly very successful for an unknown woman by winning a “commission… from the bishop of Pittsburgh” for two pieces (22). I think readers especially need to know what kind of letters she sent, or what references won this deal. Is there some trick an artist can use to stand out. But this is not what interests this author, it describes her somehow beginning this work and also securing on her own pufferies of her work-in-progress in newspapers.

This is a very well-written book, with fantastic illustrations and many insights. It is not delivering what I wish to know on this subject, but most readers will not be asking the types of questions that trouble me.

This is a great book for all types of libraries, as well as for artists’ or private collectors’ home libraries. Researchers of Cassett’s biography will certainly find much here that might not have appeared in past studies. 

The Historic Impacts of the Rarely-Covered Great Horse Flu

***

Thomas G. Andrews, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026). 310pp. Hardcover: ISBN: 978-1-469698-43-4.

“How a rampant virus brought the US economy—and Reconstruction—to its knees. Seven years after the US Civil War and nearly 150 years before COVID, horses near Toronto began falling deathly ill with a sickness soon diagnosed as influenza. It took just a few weeks for this mutant flu variant to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern US, infecting more than 90 percent of horses, donkeys, and mules wherever it struck. By the time the outbreak relented more than a year later, the Great Horse Flu of 1872 to 1873 had convulsed nearly every corner of North America and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. This little-known scourge paralyzed the continent’s horse-powered economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities ground to a halt, the outbreak exposed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the US’s deep dependence on animal labor. The Great Horse Flu triggered catastrophes such as the Great Boston Fire, unleashed seething social and racial conflict, stoked partisan divides, and set the stage for the Panic of 1873.” It is “illuminating the grave perils that novel viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world we share.”

This blurb does a great job selling this book. I have never heard of this Horse Flu before, and it caused the Fire and the Panic? Wow. Hopefully this book delivers on these massive promises. I turned to “Chapter 4” that addresses the “Fire”. The review copy I obtained on NetGalley has some glitches via missing letters in it, so it is a bit difficult to briskly read through some of this (105-6). The first few pages do not mention horses at all, but they do a good job dramatizing this disaster. Finally, there is a not that the contemporary press blamed this fire on the Horse Flu, as the Chicago Tribune stated: “when the fire came, the lack of horses formed a serious obstacle in the way of the Fire Department.” There is an explanation that human firefighters “replied” on horses “to draw steam engines” (108). A history of firefighting follows, and how it had been relying on horses. Some data and info on the virus itself was given in the intro (9).

This book is written in a pretty dramatic pace, and includes a decent mix of facts and high-tension semi-fiction, but the omitted letters make it difficult to read further into this galley.

How Taft Was Too Fat for a Second Term, So He Could only Become Chief Justice

**

Walter Stahr, William Howard Taft: A Great American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026). ISBN: 978-1-668-1268-0.

“A… new look at the only man to serve as both president and chief justice of the United States. The conventional wisdom is that William Howard Taft was a mediocre president, a man almost without political skills. Yet Taft’s modest, judicial approach to the presidency—he served as a state and then federal judge before entering the White House—looks quite extraordinary in retrospect. Admired by those on either side of the aisle for his genial personality and hearty chuckle, Taft spent his four years in office reducing tariffs, eliminating federal deficits, pursuing government efficiency, avoiding foreign wars, and honoring the Constitution. Yet even Taft’s presidency would serve as merely a prelude to one of the greatest second acts in American history. More than any chief justice since John Marshall, Taft transformed the judicial branch, particularly as the principal proponent of the legislation that allowed the Supreme Court to begin choosing its cases—and thus to devote its energy entirely to deciding key constitutional and statutory issues.”

The intro opens by pointing out Taft was also “the first American civilian governor of the Philippines”. The author is not troubled by Taft’s many firsts. Why exactly did this man have these many diverse powers? Was he just willing to accept any strange assignment, whereas others tended to focus on a single major role-type? And why would Roosevelt have forced Taft into the Supreme Court against Taft’s preference to stay in the Philippines? Was there some manipulations Roosevelt needed Taft to do on his behalf from within the Court? After other appeals were made, Taft refused, and there is a claim it was Roosevelt who felt that “Taft had manipulated him.” And if Taft was best-qualified, why would he “never have another chance to join the Supreme Court”, if he rejected the offer this once? Taft didn’t want a judgement assuming it would “keep” him “poor” for “all” his “life”. This intro keeps leaping between Taft accepting and rejecting offers. Anybody who does not know the chronology of Taft’s life would be deeply confused. To summarize: Taft repeatedly leaped from the judiciary to political offices across his major career stages. In the judiciary in 1887 he was a judge for the Superior Court of Cincinnati. Then, he switched to political office, becoming Solicitor General of the US. Then, he took the revolving door back to be Judge for 6^th Court of Appeals, then back to politics as President of the Philippine Commission, and then as US Secretary of War, before becoming President in 1909, and then serving as a law professor for a decade before returning to the judiciary to take the top Chief Justice of the US role from 1921. He spent less than a decade in journalism and the law before his first major appointment to the Superior Court. What maneuvers qualified him for this first mega appointment? This career seems to have been highly calculated, as opposed to the result of being begged to take these roles to help his country out. By spinning and confusing events this biography does not help historians who need to understand what happened with this ping-pong career.

Qualifiers such as that “Taft was a good if not great president” are not entirely puffing, but also do not communicate useful info. And it’s absurd that instead of explaining serious matters the reason for Taft failing to secure a second term in 1912 is given as Taft’s “weight; he had always been heavy but now weighed more than 340 pounds and suffered from sleep apnea”, so what he did instead was become a professor, and then Chief Judge? How could these jobs have been easier for somebody dangerously obese?

This is not a useful book. Do not read it. There might be something good in there, but it would take an exploration to find it.

Token Victories That Failed to Make News Reporting Gender-Neutral

***

Ashley Walter, Settling: Women Who Sued the News (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2026). 180pp. Softcover: ISBN: 978-1-62534-985-9.

“In 1971, Susan Smith, a young researcher at Reader’s Digest, dared to imagine herself as an editor. Her ambition was swiftly dismissed by a hiring manager who told her, ‘Single girls just don’t do well in this job.’ Crushed—and then furious—Smith sought out Harriet Rabb, the attorney who had successfully sued Newsweek for sex discrimination just a year earlier. Their meeting helped spark a class-action lawsuit that ultimately united two thousand women at the magazine and became part of a broader revolt inside American newsrooms… For much of American history, journalism has been rigidly segregated by gender, with women confined to research, clerical work, or the ‘women’s pages,’ while men dominated reporting, editing, and leadership. That system began to crack in the 1970s, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the women’s liberation movement emboldened newswomen to challenge daily discrimination. Yet this development has remained largely hidden, buried by editors reluctant to document inequities within their own institutions. Settling recovers this lost story. Tracing class-action sex discrimination lawsuits at some of the most powerful news organizations in the United States—including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Time—Ashley Walter draws on oral histories and long-forgotten documents to reconstruct legal battles at eight major outlets. She argues that meaningful change came not from institutional goodwill but from the courage of women who organized, testified, and risked their careers to demand equality. Their victories reshaped journalism itself…”

I have spent the last few months systematically applying not only for academic jobs, but also for journalism jobs. Since I have a PhD in English, have been running an independent publishing company myself for 18 years, have published several academic books and articles, and dozens of news stories, I should have been an easy hire for most editorial roles, and yet I have only secured a Community Reporting job in North Dakota, where they have a certified labor shortage. After I wrote several near-flawless articles on a trial for a local paper, the young male editor promised to speak with me about a job and then never picked up calls or called me back, as the publisher kept saying he was about to. This experiment proves there is still extreme discrimination in the media against intelligent women who are only qualified for the top editorial jobs and cannot be pushed around in minion positions where they can be dismissed or sent to the far north where news never happens. The above blurb goes on to pretend all problems have been solved, but while a few women won money in these cases, the problems of press-corruption or manipulation we have today would be greatly alleviated if women truly were in power. It is nearly impossible to corrupt an intelligent woman with honeypot or the like schemes that probably almost always work on all men.

The opening chronology reports a few settlements for major $1.5 million or $300,000 sums, but most settlements lack specific assigned sums, so they could have been for tiny amounts, and it is unclear what percentage of pretty much all women at these agencies were paid any money for being discriminated against. It seems these were token settlements to write these types of books about victories for women’s rights without actually giving women rights in the newsroom.

The intro begins with an apparent joke about a boss calling one of the suing women a “stupid bitch”: this is hardly a rational start-point. This is followed by a drawn out explanation that this “dogged” woman won money (2). The next page mentions that “many… women… were never asked” to join these profitable lawsuits (3). The writer keeps digressing from sex into race, instead of figuring out the statistical problems behind how a few cases could have solved this industry-wide problem. There is still no anti-sex-discrimination amendment, so sex-discrimination has remained kind of legal.

The first chapter seems to be subversively supporting the editor’s position as he explains that a few of his female editors are pregnant, and so he is trying to ask about a new hire’s plans on getting pregnant or not to avoid having yet another one out-of-work. The chat ends with an insult against this woman, which while dramatic really lands heavily in this watered-down context. Some other guy tells another newly-out-of-college women that: “Women don’t write” and can only do research. This seems to mean that women lack agency to decide the spin that will be put on a story, but rather only have control on establishing the underlying hard-to-find facts (18). A reporter is described by who she is dating before becoming a journalist (20).

There is probably some interesting information deep in this book, but reading through these opening insults and generalities is very unpleasant. I do not recommend this book for anybody but researchers on this specific topic that need to find some bits of evidence here that might be covered at some length and can thus be cited.  

The Fraud of a Corporation Winning Millions to Prevent Itself Being Accused of Fraud

**

Ian Rosenberg, Terrible Stuff Damaging Everybody: The True Story of Lies and Libel in Dominion v. Fox (New York: NYU Press, September 1, 2026). Hardcover: $35: 384pp, 6X9”. ISBN: 978-1-479833-01-6.

“The definitive story of Dominion v. Fox, the battle over election lies that changed the future of democracy. Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network is the watershed media case of the century. After an onslaught of attacks by several Fox News hosts and guests insisting that Dominion’s voting machines were rigged to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, the previously little-known voting technology company decided to fight back. Over the next two years, their libel litigation laid bare the inner workings of the seemingly unassailable Fox Corporation and the thoughts of the media conglomerate’s most high-profile stars, guests, and executives. On the morning the trial was set to begin, the parties reached an unprecedented settlement of $787.5 million. The media lamented that secrets from Fox’s top talent and owners would never come to light, but now the full, shocking truth has finally been revealed.” It “transforms thousands of pages of legal documents into a compelling behind-the-scenes narrative… Why Fox News broadcasted flagrantly false claims about election fraud; what the legal action uncovered about Fox’s power structure and the actual malice standard; and how the aftermath will fundamentally impact the future of libel law, the media, and our democracy.”

I just submitted to publishers a book that I opened in the summary by explaining the MP Parnell fraud. The Times had published letters attributed to Parnell that showed a disregard for the lives of officers, which Parnell proved in court were forgeries and thus won a libel lawsuit against the paper. I compared these seemingly forged manuscripts with those attributed to Parnell to show both were variants of the hand of Parnell’s ghostwriter. I assume a similar underlying fraud was behind this lawsuit over a few exaggerations about the effectiveness of voting machines told by these propagandists at Fox. Voting machines can be manipulated because they are black boxes which cannot be systematically monitored by the public. By stopping these Fox propagandists from complaining about this possibility of machine-tampering, this lawsuit set a precedent that the public is not allowed to publish doubts about this problem, while giving a massive payout to the likely people who paid Fox heads to issue too-fictitious claims: the side that won nearly a billion. I have been mesmerized by seeing this case celebrated by liberals as a victory against the evil right’s horrid assertions. No matter who wins or loses an election, the moral argument is that it should not be rigged in their favor. If a side is claiming fraud, it should be fully investigated, instead of launching a media campaign to discredit the need for fraud examinations.

Act 2 of this book starts by explaining that two days after the January 6 riot, Dominion filed its first “libel lawsuit against Sidney Powell seeking more than $1.3 billion”. What should have happened at this point is voting machines should have been discredited. People should vote from home by using some highly safely encrypted website, such as IRS’s, or FBI’s. Asking voters to go to a physical location where they encounter friction, such as voting-watchers, or rude voters or the like only cuts away at democratic rights. Asking people to prove why they need to vote by mail is also unfair and takes too much work. There would be auto-counting on election nights if all voting was digital and only a spottable hack could change results. There is no reason to believe a giant machine with a tiny tech in it that has previously been proven to be hackable would be more secure than for the government to focus its efforts on securing a single US-wide online voting system.

The inclusion of inflated claims such as that there are “mountains” of evidence to disprove fraud claims in the complaint hint that this lawsuit was settled because sides colluded to take advantage of this scheme for profit, and not because this case had ration weight behind it. How could any amount of evidence disprove the assertion machines could theoretically be hacked or manipulated? The Notes at the back use “evidence” such as the Library of Congress blog, or an article on “Surveillance Under the USA/Patriot Act” from decades earlier. There are numerous articles about an anchor’s death, and mostly propaganda pieces that have been published in the media to prop up the machine-maker as the victim in this story.

I do not recommend anybody should read this book or the associated propaganda narratives. Instead spend your energy by emailing a congressman to vote for online voting for all.

Watered Down Recycled Myths Puffing Monarchies’ Castles

*

Dan Jones, Castles: A Fortified History of the World from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age (New York: Viking, 2026). Hardcover. ISBN: 978-8-217060-30-6.

“…History of the world, told through over three thousand years of iconic fortifications. Castles have been built to defend humanity for millennia—from the walls of Troy in the Bronze Age and the desert bastion of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria; to Windsor Castle and the Tower of London; to Himeji in Japan and Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. They have inspired terror and passion, foiled conquering forces, and been deployed as the ultimate expression of wealth, status, and supremacy… The many eras of castle-building and across continents as each stronghold tells a unique story of power, politics, and survival, revealing the shifting tides of warfare, the rise and fall of empires, the resilience of people under siege, and the flourishing of new ideas…” A “story of why humans build fortifications…”

Given the inflating puffery of this blurb, much is expected. The opening page features an Old English passage without translation where only a few words such as “merveillous” and “beheeld” are decipherable: this is nonsensical to all readers, as it is meant to elevate castles by making stories about them seem magical because they are incomprehensible.

Then, the “Introduction” begins with a fictional description of men meeting in a specific time in March 1314 that must be borrowed from an Arthurian propaganda myth designed to prop up monarchies as magical versus anti-human entities. Instead of supporting claims such as the carbon-dated age of the Edinburgh Castle, the author digs into myths by claiming Queen Margaret “had been working miracles: A book of the Gospels dedicated to her floated when dropped in water…” No correction follows to clarify this is a fairytale and not historical fact. A paragraph starts with: “Their scheme was simple, but not easy.” This is supposed to refer back to the plan the men are plotting to get into the castle, but it uses two synonyms “simple” and “easy” as if they are antonyms. Things to do not improve in “1: Bronze Age Cities” that begins with a quote from Virgil followed by more mythologizing.

This is a typical general-audience book about castles, but there should be a lot fewer of these. These myths have been told before, there’s no point to delude them by adding superfluous text to propaganda to expand word-count without new research. I do not recommend this book for any type of reader.

A Horror Novel Without Characters Sold as Non-Fiction

*

Annie Jacobsen, Biological War: A Scenario (New York: Dutton: Penguin Random House, 2026). Hardcover. ISBN: 978-8-217046-03-4.

“A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society… Based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence. The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.” This is a fictional dystopic novel that avoids the fiction label by covering too many scenarios for fiction to welcome it as structurally coherent. Though while this start promises many possible threats, the rest of this blurb explains only one type of threat is imagined, so it is potentially a horror novel, just perhaps without character development? “…A situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious… This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.”

The list of “Interviews” begins with “William J. Perry, PhD: U.S. secretary of defense”, followed by other cabinet officials, CIA and the like agents, and a few lab researchers, or tech founders. It is not alphabetically organized nor categorized by interviewee type, making it especially difficult to find these people. This book probably has to be read as an ebook to figure out its references, as this book be more of a challenge when trying to find characters in a printed book. This list also does not specify what these people stated, or if discussions with them had any relevant contributions to the scenario. The bibliography in the back includes some health directives, transcripts, and policy propaganda. There are 319 notes across this book, concluding with a note on “Nazi scientist” that cites an article about the “worst drug scandal”. Most citations are to conspiracy theories from the web such as “killer ape theory views”.

Given the prep that this is a fiction, it is unclear if the events in the past, in 1971, that “Chapter One: Recombinant DNA” opens with is truth or fiction: did somebody in Stanford recombine a “monkey virus” and a “second virus” in their DNA? It must be so, as otherwise the writer should have placed this fiction in the future. There are then digressions about “kicking down doors” of innovation, and then pessimistic speculations about how “dual-use technology” means that science created to help humanity can instead be psychotically manipulated to hurt it. I think there is need today to imagine how people can use science positively, as there are already too many horror scenarios that imagine worst-case-scenarios that tend to then be executed by somebody though with slightly less dire than predicted nightmare outcomes. Phrases such as: “elephant in the room” etc. just make this a useless book.

I do not recommend it for any readers. This is just a horrid plan that is too poorly executed to be read. 

Fun Anecdotes About Nature’s Fraudsters

****

James O’Hanlon, Liars, Cheats, and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026). Hardcover: 240pp. ISBN: 978-0-231225-93-9.

“Meet some of the world’s most dastardly creatures, who lie, cheat and deceive for a living. There’s the deadly praying mantis that looks like an innocent pink flower. The assassin bug that strums spider webs to lure in a tasty snack. The cuttlefish that changes color to hide its romantic intentions. To understand how these creatures swindle their way to the top,” it “reveals the science behind camouflage, mimicry and masquerade. Taking readers on a journey from tropical rainforests to the darkness of deep ocean trenches: how animals and plants use deception to avoid predators, lure in prey and even reproduce…”

This is a topic that has not been sufficiently covered, given how popular magic or deception are as both entertainment and in the news as something for consumers to beware of. The “Introduction” opens with an anecdote, which is at least relevant and amusing: a “silly” quest to find “the orchid mantis” in the jungle. He learns it is extremely difficult to spot this flower-imitating insect in the wild because it is extremely rare, and there are too many flowers to examine at a glance. He consults a village elder but fails to learn secrets of spotting them. Then, he is surprised that tigers are very common and easy to find by their tracks, but are tough to spot while roaming in a forest, despite their vivid “stripes”. Then, there is an explanation about how color and other types of deception works to make animals invisible to somebody stalking them. This is an invitingly informative though casual introduction.

Chapter “1: For my first trick, watch this animal… disappear!” starts with a writing joke: “I am supposed to start these chapters bragging about how many hours I have spent trudging through lush jungles”. Instead, this is a book about failing to find animals in the wild and then scientifically explaining the cause for this common realistic failure. The jokes continue, as the “most creative hiding place” is awarded to “small crabs who take refuge inside the anuses of sea cucumbers” (8). Though these jokes become a bit stale as instead of explaining the research on “object imitation versus element imitation”, the author spends a paragraph joking about the uselessness of the underlying research before moving on to examples (10). There is no need to bring in jokes about “what cartoons might have taught us” about chameleons, as readers know common misconceptions, and are reading this book for the facts (11). Some facts about the “tiny elastic sac filled with pigment” that allow an octopus to change color (13-4).

This book showcases how difficult it is to address a general audience with comedy while presenting science. The line between conversational chatter, and including too much information that would make most lose interest is thin. Though most readers of such books have a hyper focused attention span and would find it easier to pay attention if only facts were delivered that teach new things, with only occasional jokes when the facts are funny, as tends to happen naturally the more serious a subject becomes.

Casual readers are likely to be entertained and informed by this book, but scholars are probably going to be too frustrated with the digressions to tolerate it. This book is meant to public libraries.

A Fiction Pretending to Be Research on a “God”

*

Edmund Richardson, Alexander: God, King, Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026). Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-250-28561-4.

“Biography of Alexander the Great, based on a series of important new discoveries and the author’s own translations of source material from twelve ancient languages. In 336 BCE, at the age of twenty, Alexander, a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon, inherited a tumbledown kingdom, a pile of debts and an army which answered to nobody.” My recent research for Atheist’s Guide to Mythology indicated that myths about the deep past, such as the story of Alexander is mostly mythology or fiction, which was designed to propagate for the colonial interests of specific empires who were writing these myths. The mistake in this blurb is not only in trusting this particular myth, but also adding fiction on top of it by exaggerating that there was a paid army who did not answer to “nobody”. If they were paid by somebody, they answered to them. There are no armies that just get together and do violence without anybody directing them at some specific enemy. “Desperate to hold on to power, he led the army east, into the heart of the vast Persian Empire, and inadvertently began the greatest military campaign in history.” Wow. There was just a boy who had a bunch of killers around him, and he just picked a random direction and stumbled into the most awesome killing spree in “history”? “The young man became a king, the king became a hero, the hero became a living god, and the god died aged thirty-two, broken-hearted in Babylon. For centuries, historians have told his story, yet Alexander has remained a mystery. But now, the ruins of his cities have emerged from the bottom of the sea and the dust of Central Asian hillsides. The diaries of Babylonian astronomers who knew him have been deciphered. The tombs of his ancestors have been unearthed. For the first time, instead of the legend, we can meet Alexander the man.” This is not new research. The Babylonian astronomical diaries were “discovered” in around 1881, with the first full academic translations published in 1988. The tombs of Alexander’s claimed ancestors were unearthed in 1977 and were published about in 1978. “Based on more than a decade of cutting-edge research, Alexander allows readers to feel the desert wind and experience the full horror of battle.” Unless there is a tomb inscription that explains exactly how the wind felt for Alexander, this line is explaining it took this author a decade to write fiction about what this “god” called Alexander is imagined having experienced. “Richardson’s research has taken him from the catacombs of Egypt to the passes of Afghanistan. Alexander is a cinematic work of non-fiction: a revelatory retelling of one of the most famous and elusive stories in history.” There is an oxymoronic conclusion here: either something is cinematic, or it is a non-fiction: when cinematic details are added they are fictions unless the original documents specify each of these details.

I turned to the Annotations list first to see the evidence for these claims. Most of the citations are for antique sources, such as Diodorus, Quintus, Plutarch, Arrian, Aeschylus, and Strabo. There are no mentions I immediately noticed of recent scholarship that has changed anything about the original Alexander myth. Turning a few pages, there is a note that some logistics of Alexander’s “fleet have been studied” in a PhD dissertation. Occasionally, artifacts stored in the British Library are cited, but without neighboring sources that might have questioned if these artifacts might be forgeries, or why they have been assumed to be genuine.

The first chapter starts on specifically “5 November 333 BCE” at “1 am”. There is no explanation on what source gave this precise time, and why. There are very few specifics of this type in the quoted antique sources. Instead of focusing on why this moment is militarily significant, where is a digression in the second paragraph on the meaning of the “constellation of the Lion”. A couple paragraphs later, there is an image of a Babylonian calendar: one of these artifacts “discovered” between the 19-20^th century that might mostly be forgeries or misdated relatively recent artisan pieces. Instead of worrying about such matters, the following paragraph ends generally: “For Babylonians, the sky was an engine for understanding the future.”

This book is a recycling of old myths with pufferies that make them seem new, when this is merely a new stage of adding fictional elements that take this story further away from the few established facts in the likely forged or misdated initial accounts of this “god”. I do not recommend this book to any readers. There are scholarly versions of Alexander’s biography that at least try at presenting facts.

Puffery of Big Tech Money-Attracting Magic

**

Sharon Weinberger, Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2026). ISBN: 978-0-316595-93-3.

“Drawing on deep, exclusive reporting, a veteran national security correspondent reveals how a new military-industrial complex is arising from the cradle of Silicon Valley, with vast implications for American democracy and the global balance of power. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alexander Karp. These tech titans are fast becoming some of the most powerful figures in the realm of national security, with enormous implications for us all… The American military and spy agencies helped to create Silicon Valley as we now know it, and some of its biggest and most valuable companies today owe much of their success to the Pentagon and CIA. Beginning with the War on Terror and accelerating under Donald Trump, however, the old alliance between elected leaders in Washington and the unelected CEOs of Silicon Valley has grown increasingly uneasy as power has shifted to the private sector and Big Tech exerts greater and greater influence over its old patrons. Companies such as SpaceX and Palantir, along with newer entrants to the field such as Anduril, are proudly supporting—and quietly shaping—US national defense, whether by providing spies and soldiers with AI and cloud-computing tools or actual military hardware such as microwave weapons, hypersonic missiles, and advanced drones…  What happens when mercurial billionaires like Elon Musk control weapons and technologies that were once the preserve of the US government? How will this new military-industrial complex affect the way wars are fought, or even which wars are fought?”

The first chapter that draws attention is: “Competition Is for Losers”. It begins by clarifying that Elon Musk enrolled in Stanford to legally migrate to the US to then found Zip2 in San Francisco, while immediately dropping out to minimize the cost of enrollment. It goes on to puff how Musk was lucky in reinvesting. Then, instead of focusing on the anti-competitive tricks, it shifts to Musk’s plans to colonize Mars. A couple of pages later there is an explanation that the War of Terror presented opportunities in weapon and satellite sales, with Lockheed Martin and Boeing as the main duopoly rivals. The section ends by congratulating Musk on acknowledging his first launches are likely to be complete fails. The author uses conversational linguistics, such as “couldn’t get”. There is no clarification just how Musk manipulated the system, but rather a puffery of him magically tricking the government and investors into backing whatever he is attempting to do.

“Chapter 10: Arsenal of the Broligarchy” begins by explaining that in 2025 “private funding for the defense startups” doubled, reaching “$50 billion for the year”. Again instead of explaining where this money is coming from and why, there is a puffery of this influx in the US and elsewhere (possibly from military rivals).

I do not recommend this book. It is not “deep” or well-reported. It skims the surface of what’s known on these topics without clearly citing its sources, or following the money to understand the causes for obviously manipulated market success. At a glance, it seems as if dark money must be behind endless wells of cash that multiply even if failure is certain. Musk’s direct intervention in the US government proves he had insiders who must be manipulating contracts in his favor. His tech is not uniquely innovative: he is just winning contracts to make it, whereas competitors are losing because they are not sufficiently corrupt. This book hints at these types of schemes, but fails to deliver the evidence to prove these conspiratorial hints. Thus, it is neither useful for those who need details to support explanations of historical patterns, or for casual readers who would want more direct accusations.    

Great Overview of a Myriad Vegan Cooking Strategies

****

Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegan (New York: Harvest: William Morrow, 2026). 324pp: color photographs. ISBN: 978-0-06-334521-8.

“Hundreds of vegan dishes to cook from scratch.” It “provides a simple roadmap for the best plant-based food you’ll ever eat—free from ultra-processed alternatives and junk food. With straightforward recipes and variations, plus helpful technique and ingredient guides, you’ll learn all the ways to turn basic cooking into hundreds of exciting meals, snacks, and desserts, including: A world of seasonings, sauces, dips, and spreads; Homemade plant-based milk; oatmeal, rice, and whole grains; Beans; Knife-and-fork vegetable steaks; All kinds of crisp fries and chips; Tofu in ways that wow everyone; Vegetable sushi and sashimi; Paellas, scrambles, stir-fries, and other… mains; Rice paper rolls and dumplings for beginners and experts; Creamy and rich noodles and pastas; New spins on Mark’s famous burgers, balls, and loaves; Flatbreads and pizza for every day; Easy pudding, ice cream, frostings, and dessert sauces; …cookies, cakes, and crisps… Helps home cooks assemble dishes into delicious, flexible meals, including how to spin flavors and seasonings, make smart ingredient substitutions, reimagine leftovers, and use ingredients you already have in the fridge, freezer, and pantry.”

As I have attempted to be somewhere between vegan and vegetarian across the past decade, I have found a myriad of obstacles to this commitment. Stores keep having a significant percentage of fresh fruits and vegetables going bad, leaving an extremely small selection. The price of groceries has climbed, leading to European-style gauging, without European quality control. Frozen vegan meals tend to have less fiber than even some equivalent non-vegan options: a seemingly difficult achievement without overly-processed fake-meats. I have been eating at Brandeis’ dining hall this summer during my Visiting Research Scholar stay, and I discovered cooking vegan stuff is easy if one adds a lot of oil and sweet sauces to a batch of vegetables and soft tofu. The way to solve might problems going forward might be to cook giant pots of simple vegetables, rice, and the like and then mix them with sauces and oil and freeze them to eat, as opposed to purchasing frozen dishes. I am hoping this book will have some recipes to explain to me how I should do this experiment.

The introduction opens by explaining the difference between different oils. I began making notes about what I should do with my home-cooking plan. There was a good general introduction, though most of it is too conversational and with not enough details. Though perhaps cooking is simple. For example, to make “Lemon Dressing”, “instead of the vinegar use lemon juice, and substitute grated lemon zest for the dried herbs” (24). Simple and true. This is indeed a guide for home cooks that have no idea how to put ingredients together and can find instructions here for how to make restaurant-quality meals without cooking school, or just with this book. The milk section gets more complex on page 53, but the opening pages are for those like me that want less cooking time and more good meals at the end of cooking. For example, there is a recipe for “Cashew Spread” that takes up a page, with variants for either tofu or coconut spreads (53). Though this is a short section.

There are great ideas here about combining boiling and frying, and other tricks. There are frying options, as well as fake egg options. There is even a recipe for how to make sashimi/rootshimi: very classy.

It is too bad I do not have a working kitchen to test these recipes on, or this book would be immediately useful. I think this book will not expire for a couple of months, so I might return to it. This is a great option for private libraries, as well as for any public or university libraries. It might help those studying to become chefs, just as it might help those who want to eat healthy foods. Food science majors need to understand vegan problems in this modern world.

A Puffery of a Very Controversial Newspaper

***

Matthew Pressman, The People’s Paper: The Rise and Fall of the New York Daily News (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026). 260pp.

Oddly, this blurb does not mention the element of this paper that is most relevant today: that it was owned by the Maxwell’s from must before Robert’s bankruptcy and death until it was sold by Ghislaine and his sons; I discuss the mob background surrounding this purchase in my Epstein Files book, and articles about it are also available from various sources online. Maxwell is mentioned a few times inside this book. The first mention abbreviates Maxwell’s purchase to a two-year stint by a fraudster (9). A second mention puffs him as a “cartoonish-looking” and “unconventional… figure”. It evokes sympathy by claiming he was born poor and Jewish and served in the army. It repeats the standard account that frames him as an accidental fraudster, who had good intentions, as he merely “craved adulation” and “treated the unions as respected partners” (166-7). The truth was that he worked with the union mob to win a contract with a lower bid and probably encouraged the unions to riot against this paper to win this lower price. There are many things Maxwell and his family would have done that was illicit at this time that could have made dramatic narrative in this book that is avoid in favor of writing the most flattening possible version of events that makes this mired paper and its crooked players seem heroic.  

Here is the publisher’s blurb: “When the New York Daily News launched in 1919, it didn’t just sell papers—it reinvented them. Brash, populist, and impossible to ignore, the United States’ first tabloid quickly became the country’s best-selling newspaper, reaching millions of readers and reshaping the way Americans consumed news.” Its main innovation was the smaller size that came to be associated with tabloids, whereas the type of sensation content it ran had been popular on both sides of the ocean across the previous century. “The swaggering epitome of big-city journalism, it mixed sensationalist stories about crime and celebrities with in-depth reporting about local and national politics. Yet by the 1970s, the paper was struggling to adapt to changes both in New York City and in how Americans got their news. On top of that, the Daily News faced bruising competition with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, a devastating strike, a shrinking newsroom, and repeated accusations of racism. Somehow, for decades, it weathered these setbacks—until the late 2010s, when the cuts went so deep that they reduced the publication to a shadow of its former self. Drawing on never-before-cited documents and more than sixty interviews, The People’s Paper tells the story of the Daily News through the eyes of the owners, journalists, and readers who defined it…”

I just completed a book that explains the various types of fraud periodicals from dailies to monthlies in the UK perpetrated, including claiming extremely high circulation numbers to spike ad prices, using ad-placements in fiction (for opium or bonnets), forging letters from serial killers such as Jack the Ripper to frighten readers, creating racist panics that drove riots against Jews with stories that accused Jews of being murders, asking investors or editors to pay for bylines, running fake illegal lotteries disguised as non-gambling, among a myriad of other schemes. Writing a book about one of these early dailies (in the US or UK) and failing to explain these types of engrained problems is not a useful scholarly effort. “Chapter 1: First and Biggest (1919-1939)” does begin with a bit of a fraud: Tom Howard was sneaked into an execution from a different city “to ensure… he’d be unknown to the prison staff”, while the paper “strapped to his ankle… a small camera”, so he could take photos of the execution to run in the paper with the headline: “Dead!” This does give me home there are some true stories deeper inside this book.

Readers should attempt a dig to see what they will find. Researchers especially would not mind the expedition with the hope there might be something to write about. It is well written, aside from many pufferies, and despite being not as heavy on research as I might prefer.