Estimated reading time: 5 minutes You might pick up Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries, expecting a confessional, a mea culpa. I did. But that’s not the book she wrote. As Nguyen makes clear at the outset, “I never became a true believer and cannot profess to be one.”...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes As Heather Cox Richardson notes in the foreword to her new book, Democracy Awakening, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” And since that prospect faces us later this year, the story she tells of the decades-long...
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A century ago in Italy, fascism began taking hold in much of Europe. Within a decade, illiberal and authoritarian political parties had moved into the mainstream, most prominently in Germany and Spain as well as Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Austria. Soon, the governments they led propelled the...
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To understand how the American political system is unraveling, look no further than the state of Texas. Although Republicans had been making gains since John Tower won LBJ’s seat in the United States Senate in 1961, it wasn’t until 2003 that the Texas Republican Party gained undisputed...
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes What Senator Bernie Sanders calls the “billionaire class” has had a profound impact on American society—and, indeed, on the world at large. Still, I was surprised to learn that so many of the books I’ve reviewed involve billionaires playing instrumental roles....
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Scandalous. Notorious. Brilliant. But always entertaining. They were the Mitford sisters, and you could hardly pick up a newspaper in England in the 1930s without coming across them. Still, it was just three of the six who drew the most attention, and the most rumors. Unity, Adolf Hitler’s...
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Fast forward to . . . whenever. The Religious Right has won. Ten years earlier Congress had passed the CHRIST Act, which declared Christianity as the official religion of the United States of America. “The Twenty-Eighth Amendment, which repealed part of the First Amendment, made it possible...
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For millennia, the huge peninsula we call India today has been Asia’s pivot. South of the central Asian steppes, midway between the European trade routes of the Middle East, the Chinese behemoth, and the East African coast, India has long been one of the most diverse places on the planet....
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Day by day as I write, evidence continues to surface about just how close we came to losing democracy in the United States. Right-Wing extremists and religious zealots nearly disrupted the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021. They’re still trying. And it’s not too much of a...
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One of the greatest crimes committed by the fascist regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was to steal babies from leftist parents and sell them to affluent conservative families. And the practice went on even long after Franco’s death in 1975. At least 50,000 babies were trafficked...
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The United States is coming to an end. The question is how. Every government, every business, every person alive will be affected by the answer.” Thus opens Canadian journalist Stephen Marche’s deeply disturbing assessment of America’s prospects in the third decade of the 21st...
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Many of the thousands of books about Donald Trump that have seen the light of day in recent years—Amazon lists more than 30,000—were written by people with an axe to grind or a reputation to restore. Not so the latest of Bob Woodward’s twenty-one books, Peril, coauthored with fellow...
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In dystopian fiction, some authors envision a future along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world in which a trickle of survivors struggle to survive. Others picture a time yet to come when a tyrannical state enslaves those unlucky enough to lie within...
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Lies, conspiracy theories, dirty tricks, and attack ads represent the ugly side of politics to the public at large. But the down-and-dirtiest aspects of election campaigns today emerge from political opposition research, or “oppo” in the jargon of the trade. In hopes of uncovering some...
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Here is the story of how America lost its way and came to elect a man who rejected democracy itself. For nearly half a century, the broad-based liberal consensus that grew out of the New Deal produced robust economic growth, rich corporate profits, and an expanding middle class enabled by a...
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Here’s America’s leading scholar of Right-Wing politics with an up-to-the-minute analysis of the contending forces that have seized hold of the Republican Party. Because, as UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Rosenthal explains in Empire of Resentment, conservatism comes in many flavors, of...
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Few of us who live in comfortable circumstances—or just about anyone else, in fact—in the Global North can fully appreciate the impact of poverty and official corruption that runs rampant in so many of the nations clustered in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is the reality the debut novelist...
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She has one of the most recognizable names in America. Yet far too few Americans have more than the most trivial understanding of who she is and where she comes from. And that ignorance is compounded by a relentless, years-long smear campaign by the Right Wing—a campaign that has only intensified...
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Lucas Davenport is one of the most engaging protagonists in all of crime fiction, and he has proven as popular as he is commanding. Davenport’s creator, John Sandford, has just published Masked Prey, the thirtieth bestseller in the Prey series that features the millionaire investigator....
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If you wonder what’s gone wrong in America and why our society is so deeply divided, you’ll find a lot of the answers in Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s brilliant new book, Tightrope. You’ll also find a litany of possible solutions to the problems they expose. Tightrope...
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Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.