Page by Page: Book Reviews

Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.

The Affirmative Action Myth is, in essence, a defense of a golden age of Black bourgeois culture, Black bourgeois morality, Black bourgeois striving, indeed, Black bourgeois reality. And being bourgeois here is not about a class, but an aspiration. Riley’s book is an account of how Black people made themselves American. And why not? America is the land of self-invention.

Martin Goodman absolves Herod of the murder of the innocents in the hunt for the baby messiah Jesus. He thinks Herod was likely dead when Jesus was born. Herod probably did not kill the Jewish innocents but what is unsettling about the man, his indomitable will, his swagger, and his ferocious “statecraft” is that he was probably, at that stage in his life, quite capable of ordering it done.

Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.

Critics of Coach Prime often accuse him of providing all glitter with no game plan, but in its most decisive moments, Jean-Jacques Taylor’s book holds space for both the intentionality behind Deion Sanders’s decisions and the pomp and circumstance when the lights are bright.

A preacherly ambition propels Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, as the book chronicles U2’s forty-odd-year career, and the book’s impact hinges on your openness to Bono’s expansiveness.

Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is thought-provoking, well-written, and historically informative. It raises so many questions for activists and theorists in a reconsideration of Frantz Fanon.

The Reagan Renaissance will no doubt be helped by Max Boot’s thorough, engaging, and balanced new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. Although the book is 736 pages, it rarely drags and while the author admires his subject, he is not blind to Reagan’s faults.

In The Sports Revolution, Columbia University history professor Frank Andre Guridy intervenes in this conversation by demonstrating that “Texas was central to the nation’s expanding political, economic, and emotional investment in sport.”

What makes Late Admissions so fascinating to read, and such an important autobiography, is its self-awareness: it is actually a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people. It is a book about the ferocity of self-regard.