Hello all. It’s Election Night, so many Kossacks will be paying attention to that. And there;s a lot of books this week: 25 in this week’s selection whittled down from the many choices. So tonight, just books, no review or essay. Enjoy. And here is the link to today’s comment in the Black Kos diary featuring even more books, both fiction and nonfiction, of particular interest to Black and Latino/a readers of all ages.
- Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics, by H. W. Brands. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be. The country’s first years unfolded in a contentious spiral of ugly elections and blatant violations of the Constitution. Still, peaceful transfers of power continued, and the nascent country made its way towards global dominance, against all odds. Founding Partisans is a powerful reminder that fierce partisanship is a problem as old as the republic.
- American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy, by Aquilino Gonell. The author came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a young boy. Although he spoke no English, he dedicated himself to his adopted land, striving for the American dream. He joined the army to pay for college, saw action in Iraq and returned home with PTSD. Believing in the promise of our government, he focused on healing himself and supporting his family. His hard work paid off when he landed a coveted position with the United States Capitol Police and rose to the rank of sergeant.
January 6, 2021, changed everything. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, Gonell bravely faced down the mob attempting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power. The brutal injuries he sustained that day would end his career in law enforcement. But when some of the very people he put his life on the line to protect downplayed or denied the truth of that day, he chose to speak out against the injustice done to him and the country. This is the second memoir by a Capitol Police member about January 6th, following Harry Dunn’s Standing My Ground: A Capitol Police Officer's Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th two weeks ago.
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Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, by Stephanie Land. When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019 and adapted into the hit Netflix series MaidStephanie’s escape out of poverty and abuse in search of a better life inspired millions. Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn’t understand the demands of attending college while under the poverty line—Land finds a way to survive once again, finally graduating in her mid-thirties.
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Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, by Susannah Breslin. When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of over a hundred children who are research subjects in an unprecedented thirty-year study of personality development that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in what she feels is an abusive marriage and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped her identity and life choices. Already a successful journalist, she makes her own curious history the subject of her next investigation. From experiment rooms with one-way mirrors, to children’s puzzles with no solutions, to condemned basement laboratories, her life-changing journey uncovers the long-buried secrets hidden behind the renowned study. The question at the gnarled heart of her quest: Did the study know her better than she knew herself?
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Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, by Ben Austen. The United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is little sense collectively in America what constitutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish. Ben Austen’s powerful exploration offers a behind-the-scenes look at the process of parole. Told through the portraits of two men imprisoned for murder, and the parole board that holds their freedom in the balance, Austen’s unflinching storytelling forces us to reckon with some of the most profound questions underlying the country’s values around crime and punishment. What must someone who commits a terrible act do to get a second chance? What does incarceration seek to accomplish?
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A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice, by Paul Caruana Galizia. An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life. Daphne was also he devoted and inspiring mother to three sons, who with their father have carried on the quest for justice and transparency after her death.
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The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend, by Rob Copeland. The Fund is a page-turning, stranger-than-fiction journey into a rarefied world of wealth and power. It offers an unflinching look at the pain so often caused by the “radical transparency” Dalio has described as a core tenet of his recipe for business success and a meaningful life. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with those inside and around the firm, Copeland takes readers into the room as former FBI director Jim Comey kisses Dalio's ring, recent Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick drinks the Kool-Aid, and a rotating cast of memorable characters grapple with their personal psychological and moral limits—all under the watchful eye of their charismatic leader.
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The Future of Geography: How the Competition in Space Will Change Our World, by Tim Marshall. Spy satellites orbiting the moon. Space metals worth more than most countries’ GDP. People on Mars within the next ten years. This isn’t science fiction—it’s reality. Humans are venturing up and out, and we’re taking our competitive spirit with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human history as much the mountains, rivers, and seas have impacted civilizations around the world. It’s no coincidence that Russia, China, and the USA are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics and the world order as we know it.
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Grace in All Simplicity: Beauty, Truth, and Wonders on the Path to the Higgs Boson and New Laws of Nature, by Robert N. Cahn and Chris Quigg. This book narrates the saga of how we have prospected for some of Nature’s most tightly held secrets, the basic constituents of matter and the fundamental forces that rule them. Our current understanding of the world (and universe) we inhabit is the result of curiosity, diligence, and daring, of abstraction and synthesis, and of an abiding faith in the value of exploration. In these pages we will meet scientists of both past and present. These men and women are professional scientists and amateurs, the eccentric and the conventional, performers and introverts. Scientists themselves, Cahn and Quigg convey their infectious joy as they search for new laws of nature.
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Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe, by George Musser. The whole goal of physics is to explain what we observe. For centuries, physicists believed that observations yielded faithful representations of what is out there. But when they began to study the subatomic realm, they found that observation often interferes with what is being observed—that the act of seeing changes what we see. The same is true of cosmology: our view of the universe is inevitably distorted by observation bias. And so whether they’re studying subatomic particles or galaxies, physicists must first explain consciousness—and for that they must turn to neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. Neuroscientists have painstakingly built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? These same physicists, meanwhile, are trying to explain how particles organize themselves into the objects around us. Could their discoveries help explain how neurons produce our conscious experience?
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How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins, by Helena de Bres. Accompanied by her twin Julia's drawings, Helena uses twinhood to rethink the limits of personhood, consciousness, love, freedom, and justice. With her inimitably candid, wry voice, she explores the long tradition of twin representations in art, myth, and popular culture; twins' peculiar social standing; and what it's really like to be one of two. With insight, hope, and humor, she argues that our reactions to twins reveal our broader desires and fears about selfhood, fate, and human connection, and that reflecting on twinhood can help each of us-twins and singletons alike-recognize our own multiplicity, and approach life with greater curiosity, imagination, and courage.
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Candace Pert: Genius, Greed, and Madness in the World of Science, by Pamela Ryckman. The story of maverick scientist Candace Pert, whose groundbreaking research and book Molecules of Emotion introduced the world to the mind-body connection, opioid receptors, and peptide T, and her fight for recognition in a toxic healthcare system. “Candace Pert was a scientific maverick of heroic and tragic proportion. In gripping, moving prose, Pamela Ryckman pulls back the veil on the scientific establishment to reveal one woman’s struggle against subterfuge and sabotage — until Candace too succumbed to greed. If you are interested in mind-body medicine or just enjoy a good thriller, this book is for you!”—Lisa Feldman Barrett
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Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History, by Ben Mezrich. This book takes readers inside the darkly comic battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time—Elon Musk—and the company that represents our culture’s dearest hope for a shared global conversation. From employee accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with, this is the full story from all sides. Can Musk miraculously succeed or will he spectacularly fail? What will that mean to the global town hall that is Twitter? What, really, is Elon’s end goal? The whole world is watching. I have to say for myself, although I am aware of the mess Musk has made of Xitter, giving rise to a gusher of disinformation and rightwing propaganda, my own Twitter feed remains remarkably informative, filled with progressive points of view, news, and diverse voices. At least so far.
- Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy, by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin. Through the eyes of two frontline journalists comes a gripping narrative history of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement centered around a cast of four core activists, culminating in the 2019 mass protests and Beijing's brutal crackdown. “Mahtani and McLaughlin paint a vivid portrait of Hong Kong’s vibrant streets, once pulsating with hope and promise, now shrouded by the shadows of oppression.” —Maria Ressa, co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “This important book not only bears witness to those who put everything on the line to keep the flame of freedom and justice alive in Hong Kong, but implicitly pays tribute to the millions doing similarly around the world to defend their democratic rights and dignity in the face of autocratic assault."—Amb. Derek Mitchell, president, National Democratic Institute
- American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America, by Martyn Whittock. The geographical reach of the Norse was extraordinary. For centuries medieval sagas, first recorded in Iceland, claimed that Vikings reached North America around the year 1000. This book explores that claim, separating fact from fiction and myth from mischief, to assess the enduring legacy of this claim in America. The search for “American Vikings” connects a vast range of different areas; from the latest archaeological evidence for their actual settlement in North America to the myth-making of nineteenth-century Scandinavian pioneers in the Midwest; and from ancient adventurers to the political ideologies in the twenty-first century. It is a journey from the high seas of a millennium ago to the swirling waters and dark undercurrents of the online world of today.
- Cashing Out: The Flight of Nazi Treasure, 1945–1948, by Neill Lochery. By the end of January 1945, it was clear to Germany that the war was lost. The Third Reich was in freefall, and its leaders, apart from those clustered around Hitler in his Berlin bunker, sought to abscond before they were besieged. But they wanted to take their wealth with them. Their escape routes were diverse: Sweden and Switzerland boasted proximity, banking, and industrial closeness, while Spain and Portugal offered an inviting Atlantic coastline and shipping routes to South America. And in various ways, each of these so-called neutral nations welcomed the Nazi escapees, along with the clandestine wealth they carried. Cashing Out tells the riveting history of the race to intercept the stolen assets before they disappeared, and before the will to punish Germany was replaced by the political considerations of the fast-approaching Cold War.
- The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain, by Matthew Longo.
Sigh; this all seems so long ago and far away. In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic—it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone.
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What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz. The author, trained in Pashto and Dari, was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people’s most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz’s fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause.
- Beyond Genius: A Journey Through the Characteristics and Legacies of Transformative Minds, by Bulent Atalay. An in-depth and unified exploration of genius in the arts and sciences through the life and works of five seminal intellectual and cultural figures: Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, and Albert Einstein…. Umm, stop right there. I notice a certain homogeneous choice in the five lives selected; all white dudes. Kind of dampens my interest.
- A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. This mix of expertise and humor looks at the possibility of outer space settlements. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. Maybe just launch Elon Musk to be a Martian guinea pig.
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Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, by Fuchsia Dunlop. Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet, for more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change. From her on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. , Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.
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The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food—Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes, by Mark Kurlansky. As Julia Child once said, “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.” Featuring historical images and his own pen-and-ink drawings, Kurlansky begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid–spewing plant, then digs through its twenty varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Including a recipe section featuring more than one hundred dishes from around the world, The Core of an Onion shares the secrets to celebrated Parisian chef Alain Senderens's onion soup eaten to cure late-night drunkenness; Hemingway's raw onion and peanut butter sandwich; and the Gibson, a debonair gin martini garnished with a pickled onion.
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Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, by Ed Conway. Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal.
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Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way, by Roma Agrawal. Some of humanity’s mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale—and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump. Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments, Agrawal shows us how even our most sophisticated items are built on the foundations of these ancient and fundamental breakthroughs. She explores an array of intricate technologies—dishwashers, spacesuits, microscopes, suspension bridges, breast pumps—making surprising connections, explaining how they work, and using her own hand-drawn illustrations to bring complex principles to life.
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Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, edited by Jonathan R. Eller. Iconic author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury believed that, someday, a collection of his letters could illuminate the story of his life in new ways. That story emerges across time and memory from the pages of Remembrance. This book offers the first sustained look at his life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade. Bradbury’s correspondence was far-reaching—he interacted with a rich cross section of 20th-century cultural figures, writers, film directors, editors, and others who simply wanted insights or encouragement from a writer who had enriched their lives through his stories and novels.