Page by Page: Book Reviews

Age of Ambition is no doubt one of the best books about contemporary China in English.

Throughout White Rage Anderson demonstrates that discrimination and violence against African Americans was never just a Southern phenomenon and that Northern whites were equally implicated in undermining the civil rights of African Americans.

Ferguson’s Fault Lines is, admittedly, difficult to read. To be sure, the prose is fine, and the organization is mostly sound. It does not employ much legal jargon or toil in overly complicated theories. Simply put, the book is hard to finish because it invokes memories of a low time in America.

Hillbilly Elegyis a frank, autobiographical account from an actual, living representative. What makes it all the more credible is that its intimate portrait of the hillbilly world was being written well in advance of the Trump phenomenon.

Reading this book has much the same impact as listening to one of his free-wheeling speeches. Significantly, it is a conscious strategy by his own admission.

In the eight chapters that comprise Corton’s book, fog emerges as an active, even murderous protagonist in the city, enticing, disorienting, and even poisoning those caught in its grip. Descending suddenly and often lingering for days, fogs would periodically cast London in an inescapable cloud of chill and gloom.

Roberto Durán made and spent millions, winding up broke, as most poor boys who became successful athletes do. During his salad days, he had a huge entourage, manzanillos, the “Panamanian slang for people who leech off the rich and famous,” as Durán puts it in his autobiography, to whom he gave away thousands a day. He drank, ate, whored, had children out of wedlock for which his wife forgave him. He apologizes for none of it. His autobiography is a defense of his life, an apologia, not an expression of contrition.

Concussion is replete with virtues and vices. It is vivid, sympathetic, in some ways convincing, in some ways balanced. On the other hand, it is often dumbed down to the point of being childish.

For Schlafly, Trump, as a personality, is clearly a break from the moderately conservative Republican nominees of the last few elections like Romney and McCain, which is part of Trump’s appeal. His crudity, his bluntness, and his bouts of incoherence are signs of authenticity, of an utter refusal to submit to the sensibilities of liberal/leftist zeitgeist.

Alone atop the Hill affords a unique look into the life and times of Alice Dunnigan, an African American pioneer of journalism in an age spanning Jim Crow to the beginnings of the civil rights movement.