Nancy Pelosi’s Iron-Fisted Housekeeping
While Susan Page conducted several interviews with her subject and clearly admires her, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Political Power is no work of is hagiography.
Reviews
The Culture of Bruising or How Some Black People Argue
Sowell has forthrightly challenged his critics and detractors with the sheer volume of his work. In the blood sport of academic disagreement, that production is the sign of the bruiser. Whatever the reason for the neglect of Sowell, Jason L. Riley provides us with a much-needed book.
Literary Criticism as Autobiography
While Sansom’s September 1, 1939 professes to be a biography of Auden’s poem, the result borne out by the actual structure of Sansom’s text and the nature of its many self-reflective digressions complicates that goal.
Everyone Talks About Bowie
From David Bowie’s cousin to his childhood friends, his managers, musical collaborators, girlfriends, writers such as novelist Hanif Kureishi, and extraneous celebrities to the last word of the midwife present at Bowie’s birth, A Life leaves almost no stone unturned, no corner empty, and no speculation left unsaid.
The Re-Possessed
Ursula K. Le Guin created an alternate history for our wayward species so suitably epic in scope, theme, and detail that it rivals anything Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein conjured during the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Visits to a Small Planet
The essays in The History of the Future often chronicle the various ways these places and their founders, planners, architects, or investors imagined the future alongside the ways the future did and did not cooperate. Even where wrong (and they almost always were), their vision still shapes the fruits of their labors in ways they never would have wished.
“Are the Important Things Something Else Entirely?”
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.
Fly Us to the Moon and Let Us Live Among the Stars
Milligan’s central thesis in Nobody Owns the Moon is that we should avoid applying overly simplified ethical guidelines to make decisions regarding current and future activities in space, and that we need to weave multiple moral concepts into a complex and flexible framework.
The Soldier as Great American Statesman
With new evidence, along with fresh perspectives, David L. Roll has revised and refined aspects of conventional wisdom. First, Marshall’s leadership is more inspired than previously acknowledged. Second, in his professional life he is generally more assertive and self-assured, more likely to be uncompromising, and at times even less humble.
Lady Bird Johnson’s White House Adventure
Julia Sweig’s richly researched, extraordinarily detailed biography of Lady Bird’s term as First Lady is a substantial attempt to bring needed and deserved attention to the woman who was essential to Lyndon’s self-understanding and his ambition.