The objective of the class, which has been taught since the 1960s, is to have the freshmen interrogate their personal views by considering philosophical arguments through the ages for and against belief in a being or essence greater than our own. Now in book form, The Problem of God: The Challenges of Faith, Religion, and Spirituality Today invites us all to take that same journey.

I imagine Professor Cline might be gratified to know that I scribbled far more notes in the margins of her book — often in all caps and with an excessive amount of exclamatory punctuation — than in any other I have reviewed. The fact that I was usually taking exception to her arguments is unimportant; an engaged reader is a sure sign the author has hit her mark.

Part of the issue for me, I ultimately diagnosed, is that Cline does not appear to make any real distinction among the elements of her subtitle, when I would argue that spirituality, faith, and religion are different things. Ever since our species achieved self-awareness, we’ve struggled to answer the eternal questions: Why was I born? Why am I living? Isn’t there something more to it than this? Spirituality might be described as our sense that there is, in fact, Something More, a higher purpose to which we can aspire and from which we might derive comfort. But to equate spirituality, even faith, with organized religion is a huge leap, and it’s one that readers may not be willing to take.

Why do we believe what we believe? As the brilliant philosopher Jackson Browne once said, “It’s not a world of our own choosing; we don’t decide where we are born.” At least in our formative years, what we believe is usually based on where we are born and the family in which we are raised. It is not initially a choice we make for ourselves, and the pressure in various cultures and communities often makes the concept of choice illusory anyway. But culture and geography are not the final arbiters of divine insight.

Cline is herself a student of Eastern religions and uses that knowledge to discuss the belief systems of Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, and Daoists given their contrasts with (and similarities to) the Abrahamic religions with which Westerners are more familiar. As she says, “One of my aims in this book is to explore different conceptions of the infinite,” and she does so with clarity and balance.

The author also walks us through the various Western arguments that seek to prove God exists — which misses the whole point of having faith — as well as those arguments against the existence of the Christian God (who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly loving), generally on the grounds that such a benevolent being could never allow all the evil that exists in the world.

It strikes me that this is the perfect book for a set of undergrads or, indeed, anyone who enjoys sitting around with friends arguing weighty but ultimately unresolvable points of philosophy, such as Pascal’s Wager or The Problem of Evil.

(Speaking of sitting around arguing, here’s just one example of my one-sided argument with the author. Cline: “People often mistakenly assume that atheism requires no defense or justification. However, the denial of a spiritual or religious entity or reality also requires justification. Hence, the burden of proof falls equally to atheists and theists.” Me: Justification? Proof? What proof? And why is it “required”? Does our belief or lack thereof have a material impact on whether that belief is correct? Is this like needing to clap to rouse Tinkerbell?)

It’s entirely worth asking the question, “What do I believe?” but it’s a fool’s errand to imagine that any of us gets definitive answers in this realm.

Much of my marginalia within Cline’s book appears where I feel she is being simplistic, asking the wrong questions, eliding some of the thornier issues or giving them a handwave rather than engaging more deeply, or making head-smackingly obvious statements, such as in her conclusion, where she writes:

“Perhaps the most challenging Problem of God is that in our finitude, our perspective on the infinite is always profoundly limited.”

Perhaps?

The problem of God is that humans throughout history continually insist they can know the mind and the intent of the Infinite and, even more problematically, insist that the other humans who think they know are categorically wrong and, therefore, evil. Taking just one tiny example from the annals of religious bloodshed, consider the countless people murdered — many on the orders of that paragon of Catholic virtue himself, Thomas More — over the question of whether a communion wafer is figuratively or literally the body of Christ. The “us and them” undercurrent in codified religious belief is one of the most corrosive forces in history.

One of Cline’s final chapters is entitled, “The Problem of Religious Pluralism,” it being the concept that you may not have all the answers and that it’s okay for other folks to believe something different — which is, to my mind, a solution rather than a problem.

While I was reading The Problem of God, I had the opportunity to visit an ashram in Virginia that includes a temple called the Light of Truth Universal Shrine (or LOTUS). The shrine has displays describing each of the world’s major, and many of its minor, religions and illustrates that virtually all of them use the central metaphor of light in their belief systems. The shrine’s philosophy is summed up as “Many paths, one Truth.” How enlightened.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s novel, Up the Hill to Home, tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. She reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. Follow Jenny on Bluesky at @jbywrites.bsky.social.

Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger (Omnibus Press). Reviewed by Daniel de Visé. “Therein, perhaps, lies a limitation of rock-band biographies. A rock musician’s life plays out as a monotonous procession of shows, punctuated by the occasional recording session, album release, and rehab stay. If you purchase Do What You Fear Most expecting a well-paced narrative and a View-Master reel of the subject, be prepared to do some skimming. This is a book for hardcore fans, and we are many.”

The Daffodil Days: A Novel by Helen Bain (Scribner). Reviewed by Samantha Neugebauer. “Although no one has quite articulated the historical world around Plath before, after Clark’s magical biographical feat, it’s hard to add more to the Plath canon. And yet, Bain’s urge to do so is understandable. Ultimately, this novel is for the Plath devotee who will always want more of her, the one who is not choosing between this, the Clark biography, The Bell Jar, the journals, or the original poetry. For true fans, The Daffodil Days succeeds at keeping Plath alive in our minds for another day and from an entirely new direction.”

Shakespeare’s Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen by Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Bob Duffy. “The book charts Margaret’s progress — from teenager to wizened, exiled queen — through four of Shakespeare’s plays, reflecting both her remarkable theatrical longevity and the playwright’s fascination with her. After exploring Margaret’s treatment at Shakespeare’s hands, authors Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern turn to the starkly variant approaches to her portrayal taken by adapters and performers over the centuries since she first took shape in young Will’s mind. This latter excursion, in particular, is a singularly compelling survey of stage practice.”

Cool Machine: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “Cool Machine blends literary, historical, and crime fiction fantastically. (Most chapters finish with tantalizing cliffhangers or major plot twists, so putting the book down presents its own challenges.) This final installment works as a splendid standalone but will especially satisfy those who’ve been along for the full ride. Cool Machine is as quintessentially New York as Lady Liberty’s torch penetrating the darkness from Ellis Island.”

This Past Was Waiting for Me: A Chronicle at Quarter Century by Sarah Trembath (Lazuli Literary Press). Reviewed by Michele L. Simms-Burton. “In an historical moment when facts remain contested, propaganda has become normalized, and the ills of a capitalist society are treated as a fait accompli, This Past Was Waiting for Me bears witness to the power of resistance and provides remedies for combating the behaviors that undermine democracy, self-sovereignty, survival, and cultural awareness. Add this book to your must-read list. I suspect Trembath has an act two on her hard drive.”

Carryout: Stories by Hasan Dudar (University of Iowa Press). Reviewed by Mike Maggio. “Struggle, it seems, is the major theme here, for we are confronted with a city that struggles to survive deindustrialization and a mostly white, blue-collar population that struggles to preserve its identity, one threatened by an influx of immigrants and a loss of jobs. Then there are the Idilbis and their compatriots, who struggle with the loss of their cultural identity and their inability (or unwillingness) to integrate into the strange new world they find themselves in.”

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Let’s start with DC music lore, particularly punk nostalgia. Your novel takes place in the early 2000s and then again a decade later. Way back in the 1980s, my boyfriend and I prowled the streets around the 9:30 Club photographing stencil graffiti, much of it the work of bands like Urban Verbs and Tiny Desk Unit. So I enjoyed Jamie’s nostalgia for DC’s enduring punk scene, as well as the band names and lyrics you invented! Can you talk about music as your inspiration?

Oh, wow, I love that you were situated in such a real way within the imaginary space of the book! I moved to DC as an adult and learned much later on about the punk scene my characters come up in as teenagers. So part of the novel, for me, was an excavation of a history I find fascinating in a city I’ve come to love as an outsider (I’ve been here for 20 years, but you’re kind of always an outsider here if you’re not a native). I learned about DC punk history from friends who’d lived it, and it felt like a thematically fertile and, to me, very engaging backdrop for a novel. I love the music myself, too, and it was a pleasure to listen and to watch old shows on YouTube, always imagining how my characters would’ve listened and watched. 

I love your line, “I remembered how close to joy rage could feel,” where punk is both a primal scream and an ecstatic anthem.

Yeah, I think about punk as a music and scene that balances such tenderness with such ferocity. And both of those poles were important for me to explore in my characters and in my novel. 

I haven’t read enough novels about gender fluidity, and I welcomed witnessing Jamie’s evolving self. She was like a marble in a maze, trying different paths until settling into the right groove: Jamie, James, Jim. Rather than a coming-of-age novel, this feels like a coming-of-gender novel. Talk to us about that. 

I love that metaphor for Jamie and for all of us in that maze! I think for queer people, there can be many nonlinear comings-of-age, and we can often feel stuck in different phases of life until we figure out who we need to become in order to move forward. Jamie is very much stuck at the outset of the novel, and we gradually intuit that part of her stuckness is around her gender identity. I knew I wasn’t interested in writing a traditional coming-out narrative, and, in fact, Jamie never describes her own identity or changes her pronouns within the book. But she does make some big changes by the end that allow her, at last, to sink into the right groove, as you put it. 

If you’re comfortable, I’d love to hear how your own journey inspired the novel.

Sure! I started the novel 10 years ago thinking I was a mostly straight woman and ended it as a very queer trans guy. I always feel like I have to reassure people that the book is not autobiographical and I’m far less messy than Jamie, but to be fair, there was messiness along the way for me as well, and certainly some of that twinned chaos and self-discovery entered the book. I wouldn’t call it a direct inspiration, though, more kind of an emotional shading. 

There is plenty of gutsy sex in this novel! After one memorable night, Jamie says, “I was gelatinous from sex.” The last time OK Go played the 9:30 Club, they kept shooting off a confetti cannon, and the lead singer said when they review a show, their only note to themselves is: More confetti! Did you write the passion with zeal, or did you reread a scene and decide: More confetti!?

Wow, taking up “more confetti” as a writing mantra! Love that. I think I’m always pushing myself in any scene to go farther, bigger, weirder, even if sometimes it means I need to scale back later. Sex scenes, specifically, I find incredibly important in terms of exploring character and how people relate to each other — sex can be joyful and shameful, terrifying and liberating, tedious and consciousness-enlarging, sometimes all at once, and I never want to skimp on making those scenes do all the powerful work I know they’re capable of. Plus, I love writing them, even when (especially when?) the sex itself is bad. 

Jamie imagines that everyone thinks less of her than they actually do, certainly less than the reader does. That paralleled the storyline of her finding her voice. She is never sure she can sing until she opens her mouth to belt out her anthem, which starts, “I’m not gonna be forgotten.”

Yes, Jamie is someone who really doesn’t know herself very well, doesn’t know what she’s capable of or how she projects into the world. I think a lot of us are that way in our 20s, actually, and although Jamie is a little older than I think most protagonists of coming-of-age novels are, it still felt very right for me to approach the story that way. 

This is a DC-writer question: How did you decide what to actually name and what to fictionalize?

Great question. Basically, everything with a name is a real place that existed in the DC of the novel’s present-day, with two big exceptions: the two main characters go to a fictionalized version of Jackson-Reed High School, which I call Frederick Douglass High in the novel; and they perform at a concert hall I called the Atrium, which is fairly transparently based on the Anthem. With Douglass High, I wanted a little more space to imagine Mari and Jamie’s high-school experience. I knew if I used the name Wilson (as it was called then), people who went to Wilson would have a really clear vision of the scenes that might not jibe with how I was imagining them, as someone who has never been inside the school building nor was likely to get a tour.

With the Atrium: The Anthem didn’t open until 2017, but I needed something like it for my characters in 2012, so I invented the Atrium. Apart from those two things, though, all the geography of the novel is drawn fairly directly from life, down to the amount of time it takes for the characters to walk a distance, the bus routes, etc., etc. I was really, really careful, because as much as possible, I wanted DC readers to feel safely held by a fiction that felt real. 

My favorite review of your book called it a “queercore punk symphony of the human heart and limbs.” I especially like “symphonic” to describe the elements you play as you sound out heartache, divorce, pregnancy, abortion, art, sexuality, and, of course, punk. Can you talk about managing the themes and variations of your novel?

Aw, yes, I loved that description (by Jorge Estupinan of Debutiful), as well. It was really challenging, especially, to place into counterpoint the arc of Jamie deciding what to do about her pregnancy with the arc of Jamie deciding what to do about Mari, and, at times, each arc threatened to overwhelm the other. Then you toss in a bunch of minor characters who have their own strong feelings about how the book should go, and, at times, in the very long revision process, it felt more like a cacophony than a symphony! I did my best to manage it all and learned a lot from my mistakes, at the very least.

[Photo by Farrah Skeiky.]

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of four novels, including American Ending, an Oprah Spring Book Pick, and Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book. 

The comparison may be intended to serve as a call to action, but in reality, it just points out an uncomfortable truth. What are most Americans doing while our government becomes increasingly repressive and lawless? Not much. We’re going to work. We’re dropping off our children at soccer practice. We’re meeting friends for dinner. We’re cutting back on doomscrolling in order to protect our mental health.

The startling mundaneness of fascism, the subtle way it infiltrates people’s lives while they’re distracted by more pressing problems, is explored in Stephen O’Connor’s haunting and extremely timely We Want So Much to Be Ourselves. The novel, set in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power, offers a nuanced portrayal of its protagonist, Günter Zeitz, a psychoanalyst who detests the Nazis’ policies but finds himself reluctantly working on their behalf.

This dark era of history has been thoroughly explored; yellow stars and brown shirts have become an almost lazy shorthand for the dangers of unchecked state-sponsored persecution and violence. But O’Connor avoids retreading familiar ground by absorbing us in the drama of Günter’s early life, which is as compelling as it unremarkable. We observe his romance with, and marriage to, a brilliant and impetuous Jewish woman named Josine, his introduction to fatherhood, his tutelage by Sigmund Freud, and his successful career at the real-life Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

(One of the book’s nice details is O’Connor’s use of historical figures in supporting roles, including psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson and resistance fighter John Rittmeister, both of whom make appearances as Günter’s colleagues.)

Politics remains on the periphery in the early pages, appearing mostly as a subject for the characters to rant about. Günter despises Hitler. “He’s a troglodyte!” he complains to his brother-in-law. “His entire program is based upon lies, so it is guaranteed to fail.” As Josine’s behavior grows ever more unstable, Günter is preoccupied by the unraveling of his marriage and the subsequent battle for custody of his daughter, Hannah. But the madness, both at home and across the country, only proliferates, and he is increasingly unable to fight it.

At school, Hannah is ostracized alongside her fellow Jewish classmates. And at the institute, Günter and the other clinicians are forced to debate whether — and then how much — to comply with the National Socialists’ interference in their work. (The field of psychoanalysis, dominated by Freud’s influence, was regarded with suspicion by the Nazis as a “Jewish science.”)   

Complicity can be caused by moral failure, but O’Connor shows us how it can also be brought about by confusion, as well-intentioned people make flawed calculations without the benefit of hindsight. Günter and his colleagues gradually acquiesce to the Nazis’ demands because they care deeply about the well-being of their patients and fear they’ll lose the ability to treat them. At least one doctor attempts to fight back: the doomed Rittmeister, who tries and fails to get Günther to attend a political meeting of intellectuals opposed to the Nazis. “The stakes have gotten so much higher — which makes our work all the more important, of course,” he tells Günter. “Also dangerous.”

But as the pressure ratchets up, Günter remains paralyzed, trapped in a state of cognitive dissonance. After a meeting in which institute staff vote on whether to implement an “Aryanization” program, an anxious intern asks Günter to tell her what’s going on. “Nothing,” he replies. “Or almost nothing. I think we may be in the midst of an absolute catastrophe.” 

The actual nature of the catastrophe only becomes undeniable during a terrifying session when Günter’s patient, a young SS soldier named Max who has recently been pulled from military service after a suicide attempt, holds Günter at gunpoint and forces him to listen to a confession about his participation in the liquidation of a Jewish ghetto in Poland.

Is this too much for you?” Max asks mockingly as he watches Günter’s reaction. “Too much truth?”

“That’s not it,” Günter responds. But it is. Max’s account of the German government’s atrocities precipitates a moment of crisis, one so destabilizing that Günter can finally no longer pretend to function as though everything is normal. After the session ends, he confronts his colleagues at a staff meeting.

Günter’s honesty comes with grave and life-altering consequences, but it also brings desperately needed salvation. “He feels better as he shouts — ever better, as if he is becoming himself again,” O’Connor tells us. It’s this idea that redeems the novel’s bleakness, and one that speaks to our current moment: The power of truth has the potential to save us, if only from ourselves.

Alyson Foster is an editor and the author of the novel God Is an Astronaut and the short-story collection Heart Attack Watch.

1. Sally Shivnan’s review of Ghost-Eye: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The story expands to sweep in numerous subplots and characters across times and places, from 1969 Calcutta to its modern identity as Kolkata; to Brooklyn and Oregon and Virginia; and back to India and the vast wetland region of the Sundarban Delta. The cast includes scholars, servants, industrialists, environmental activists, brilliant cooks, supernatural protectors, and the occasional goddess, elephant, and tiger.”


2. Ryan Davison’s review of Cool Machine: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). “Taken together, the three parts form an exhilarating page-turner overflowing with risks and thrills. While packed with poetic flair and meaningful symbolism, they never relent in their ability to entertain. Whitehead is a keen observer, gifted with the trained eye of an insider, but his ability to weave relevant social and political themes into the fabric of the plot is likely the trilogy’s greatest achievement. He lived through Gotham’s embrace of racially discriminatory policies, but rather than grow bitter, he channels his city’s failings into savvy stories of mob etiquette, flawed good guys, and lovable sociopaths.”


3. “Bad Guys on the Bayou” by Lawrence De Maria. “The volume prior to The Hadacol Boogie was Clete, which features (for the first time) the character Clete Purcel as narrator. Clete is Dave’s foil: a crude, overweight, often-drunk, frequently wounded best friend. He was once Dave’s partner in the New Orleans Police Department and was fired for corruption (which surely must be unique in the history of the Big Easy) and is now a private eye. Clete appears regularly in the Robicheaux thrillers, and in the time-honored tradition of sidekicks, he does things his friend won’t.”


4. Wiley Clements’ review of Killing Baby Hitler: A Novel by Michael Tomasky (OR Books). “Killing Baby Hitler is absurd, though given the absurd world we live in, it also supplies a kind of logic that makes its premise plausible. It is self-aware and has one foot planted squarely in the here and now. Among other pop-culture mentions, Tomasky references Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, makes cracks at President Trump, and conjures an antagonist with a ‘Bond-villain’ laugh.”


5. E.A. Aymar’s review of Raps of Resistance: How Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole Reignited a Hip-Hop Tradition by Jeremy C. McCool and Earl Hopkins (Bloomsbury Academic). “For devoted fans of rap, much of that history will be known, but the authors’ retelling still makes for an enlightening read. Possibly informed by Hopkins’ background as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the authors write in compelling, mercifully non-academic prose that efficiently covers the genre’s record-spinning origins in the grimy streets of 1970s New York, the variety of its forms and regional influences, and its current worldwide acclaim.”

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Although there are now running lists of the lies told by Donald Trump, it took the media several years to learn how to highlight them effectively; especially during his first term, news outlets were reduced to mealy-mouthed descriptions like “misleading statements” or “apparent falsehoods.” And in a post-Roe era where women’s rights are being threatened in ways both old and new, the phrase “nasty woman” is an indictment for some and a badge of honor for others.

Dr. Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words offers us some context about the way words have been used to describe women across history, examining “the first thousand years of the English language to find the beginnings of women’s words.” Nuttall collects and analyzes words from many spheres of women’s lives — menstruation and childbirth, anatomy, sex, work, and more — with illuminating results.

For example, the term “slut,” which “tarnishes women’s sexuality with associations of dirtiness or messiness…was also used as a name for a lowly female servant.” As Nuttall notes, “Slut excuses men’s blushes by redesignating poorer women who are vulnerable to sexual exploitation as women who are notoriously promiscuous.” The nature of the term thus trapped vulnerable women in a vicious cycle from which there was little escape, and the slur remains a dismissive insult to this day.

Nevertheless, women have done work to reclaim this term. After Toronto Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti asserted in a 2011 speech that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized,” women across Canada and the United States organized SlutWalks to make a statement: The blame for sexual assault lies squarely with the perpetrator, and victim-shaming is no longer acceptable. (Sanguinetti later apologized for his remarks, saying he was “embarrassed.” One hopes it was a lasting embarrassment.)

In a chapter on the words used to describe women and men throughout their life stages, Nuttall notes discrepancies designed to keep men in power:

“With new industries and trades giving some women more economic opportunities and marriage being potentially less attractive, British society quickly recalibrated its views of spinsters, meeting them not so much with concerned pushback as the sort of shoving designed to stop social change in its tracks. Singlewomen [sic] and spinsters were rechristened old maids, a more mocking phrase than the equivalent term for men, bachelor, originally a word for a man in the early stages of his career as a knight, student or tradesman.”

While “old maid” has fallen out of favor, the double standard between women’s and men’s behavior remains glaring: It’s not uncommon to see conservatives assert that, while women should remain pure until (their apparently inevitable) marriage, men have a responsibility to gain experience before settling down. (With whom, one wonders, if all the suitable women are staying chaste?)

Nuttall reminds us of the benefits of passing into “old maid” territory, however:

“Once our resolve and resilience have been thickened up by all that life throws at us, bad and good, society finds us more invisible, less audible…[yet] If the eyes looking around the room care little about me, I likewise care less and less about what they might think.”

Interestingly, even terms originally derogatory to men sometimes came to be weaponized against women, the author notes:

“A 1699 dictionary defines frigid as ‘a weak disabled Husband, cold, impotent.’ It was the keenness of Victorian gynecologists (and a little later that of sexologists and psychoanalysts) to present themselves as experts about women’s many supposed malfunctions which one-eightied this term. By the first decade of the twentieth century frigid had flipped to become a label for psychosexual problems supposedly characteristic of women. Since then it has become an insult to be slung at those who reject sexual advances.”

Caught between the rock of being a “slut” and the hard place of being “frigid,” women may feel they have no good choices, but as Nuttall points out, there is freedom in embracing and reclaiming words used to shame us. (I recently came across a postcard that cheerfully proclaimed, “Howdy, slut!” alongside a smiling horse in a cowboy hat and bought it immediately.) As our language continues to change, so can we change — and conquer — with it.

Mariko Hewer is a freelance editor and writer, as well as a nursery-school teacher. She is passionate about good books, good food, and good company.

A former producer of events programming at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Willetts begins with the intriguing and costly evening delights of Yoshiwara, “a flashy pleasure quarter” in 17th-century Edo (now Tokyo), then the world’s most populous city. The journey ends with that seismic 2006 moment in L.A. club history ruled by, according to the New York Post, “the Three Bimbos of the Apocalypse.” (If you know, you know: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan.)

In between, there are fine takes on London’s Pleasure Gardens (which inspired Walt Disney’s amusement parks); the birth of jazz in New Orleans; “transgressive nocturnal experiences” in Paris’ Montmartre; the louche cabaret that was Weimar Germany; the Harlem Renaissance; the Jazz Age; Studio 54; and techno haunts in Berlin, Detroit, and Belgrade. 

Willetts puts the reader right there in the arena. She’s a master of charming apercus and fetching details. Inspired lighting and libations are often paramount to nightlife, while food is largely an afterthought. Willetts’ interests tend toward decadence, risk, and the prurient, more Hollywood Babylon than, say, Ken Burns. She’s fascinated by urban escapes du jour and all they entail — drink, drugs, carnal and sartorial theatrics — not bowling leagues and Midwestern supper clubs. 

Class also looms large in many of these escapes. Often, you had to pay to play. A night out in Yoshiwara could cost the equivalent of $10,000 today. But Willetts strives to be democratic in her history, also including the larks of the working class, even if they meant a return to labor after an almost sleepless night. 

Not all divertissements were soaked in fantasy and splendor. While Harlem’s Cotton Club featured extraordinary Black entertainers catering to a posh white clientele, neighborhood speakeasies were something else entirely and certainly more authentic: a “grubby, smoke-filled room” without windows, “the heavy grey air was as thick as soup,” and the hooch “an ungodly medley of wood alcohol, sulphuric acid, benzol and kerosene.” As British journalist Stephen Graham noted, “That is the bane of the speakeasy life. You ring up your friend next morning to find out whether he is still alive.”

Deeper insights, the connective tissue running through many of Willetts’ subjects, are sometimes left to the reader to discern. Up All Night reads more like a chronological guide — a fun, spirited one — than a scholarly history, though the author has certainly done her homework. Repeatedly, Willetts notes in chapter codas that certain nightlife movements were surprisingly fleeting; it was critical to be at the right place at the exact moment it ran hot before everybody (or, worse, anybody) came knocking.

Opulence, exclusivity, youth, beauty, and mystery are also constants. The 19th-century English essayist Walter Bagehot once noted of the royal family, “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Willetts, quoting him, believes the same holds true for nightlife.

She has a gift for the anachronistic metaphor. Edo’s Yoshiwara was “the Orwellian Coachella of feudal Japan.” Paris’ late-19th-century boîte Le Chat Noir “was like a summer camp for gothic weirdos.” She might have excised the chatty asides, which read as though the book was dictated rather than written. I don’t want to encounter phrases like “you don’t need me to tell you this” and “though, as you’ll see in Chapter 1” in any book. Willetts includes both in her introduction, the book’s weakest section. 

“Nightlife thrives in opposition to mainstream culture,” she writes. She worries that contemporary nightlife is in one bummer of a slump. (Perhaps everything is.) The pandemic didn’t help. She believes the primary culprits, like in so much of modern life, are our smartphones and the sewer of social media that floods them, flattening novelty, shattering privacy, and democratizing access — allowing us to be a witness to the party without leaving the couch. Instagram casts too much daylight on exceptional evenings.

Willetts ends Up All Night on an effervescent and populist note, hopeful that a fresh crop of creative club types will discover inspiration in untapped places, such as gardens, defunct office spaces, and even an empty mall in, yes, Kansas. 

Karen Heller is a former national feature writer for the Washington Post and a longtime book reviewer.  

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A family trip turns into a nightmare in an instant on a Delaware Highway: Noah Cassidy is sitting in the front passenger seat of the self-driving minivan, working at his laptop, while his 17-year-old son, Charlie, sits in the driver’s seat. In a flash of screaming and screeching, the minivan strikes a vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Noah and his son climb out of the wreckage, but his wife, Lorelei Shaw, and two daughters, Alice, 13, and Izzy, 10, sustain various levels of injury, from broken legs to concussions. The elderly couple in the other car is killed.

Ghost-Eye: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Sally Shivnan. “Ghost-Eye is written in part for South Asians examining their history and culture and exploring questions of how the past fits with the present. It is also aimed at a global audience, providing glimpses of pivotal events in Indian colonial and post-colonial history — detailing, for example, the violence and displacement in the wake of 1947’s Partition but embedding it in the story so that it doesn’t feel like a history lesson.”

This Past Was Waiting for Me: A Chronicle at Quarter Century by Sarah Trembath (Lazuli Literary Press). Reviewed by Michele L. Simms-Burton. “Her approach to writing about gentrification and displacement challenges our orientation toward inhabiting shared spaces, education, and the roles of teachers in ensuring a more tranquil union. With a doctorate in education policy and leadership, Trembath is aware of how education in this country is not only skewed to present a benevolent narrative about the nation’s founding, but also how narratives tend to sanitize their own crimes against humanity.”

Carryout: Stories by Hasan Dudar (University of Iowa Press). Reviewed by Mike Maggio. “Here lies the crux of Dudar’s narrative and the dilemma facing all immigrants, not just Arabs. How is one supposed to assimilate into a society that, for the most part, shuns you because of your otherness? And the next question that arises is this: Should immigrants assimilate — and, if so, how — or should they maintain an insular existence in an isolated enclave? Certainly, at the beginning of the 20th century, Jews faced the same problem as Italians and other immigrant groups. Today, it’s Arabs or Haitians or Hispanics — the list goes on and on. How, then, does one achieve the American Dream when it’s constantly kept from you because of your faith, skin color, upbringing, or birthplace?”

American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall (OR Books). Reviewed by Franklin Freeman. “Marshall — who recently wrote a piece on the parallels between Castaneda’s movement and MAGA — details how Castaneda built his cult by employing the same practices used by other ones: Love-bomb someone emotionally vulnerable, usually from a divorce or a death; give them a sense of belonging; cut them off from family and friends; and then subject them to ego-demolition, followed by more love, until they’re utterly dependent on the cult. (And, of course, on its leader, who’s usually a man. But not always.)”

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Some illnesses — the merciful ones — can be traced like an Aristotelian plot: diagnosis (act I), treatment (act II), recovery (act III). Many others evade the stark rise and fall of classical Western narrative, refusing linearity and logic at every turn. Eating disorders are pervasive examples of the latter, with relapse rates as high as 70 percent. Despite the fact that 70 million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders — and the number continues to rise — the harsh truth is that, for many patients, recovery remains a distant mirage.

Castaneda’s supposedly nonfiction books — chronicling his encounters with a Mexican shaman who allegedly taught Castaneda his mystical ways — were all fantasy novels, plagiarism his favorite tool. “His skill as a liar,” Marshall writes, “was inseparable from his philosophy, his charm, his art. It was also indivisible from his gifts as an entertainer. It was woven in with his jokes, his infectious sense of adventure, the feeling of ‘magic’ those who knew him almost always mention.”

Castaneda was born on Christmas Day in 1925 — not 1935, as he always claimed — in Cajamarca, Peru, as César Carlos Salvador Arana. In English, explains Marshall, arana means “a trick, a swindle, a lie.” Surrounded by women in his childhood (his father was distant and likely had suffered a nervous breakdown) and raised in a culture that believed in various forms of magic, Castaneda learned to live by his storytelling wits. He also devoured as many English books and movies as possible.

When he could, he left for the big city, Lima. There, he studied art but was never really good at it. His artistic circle imbibed existentialism and Nietzsche. Combined with the ghost stories he “learned and told in Cajamarca,” Marshall says, these ideas became Castaneda’s philosophy.

His time in Lima, which came to a head when his mother died and he left Peru for North America, led to what Castaneda confessed to as “my nihilism.” Writes Marshall, “He’d begun in the wake of his mother’s death, to test his capacity to intentionally violate ethical norms.” He did this by, among other things, seducing and abandoning a pregnant young woman, his actual first wife; telling a friend, who’d walked across Bolivia because of it, that he would meet him in Brazil and then never showing up; and becoming a con artist on the streets of Lima.

The rest of the story grows inexorably, and darkly, from there. Castaneda settled in Los Angeles, attended UCLA to study anthropology, and lied to everyone about his past even as he charmed and flattered them. Slowly, patiently, like a spider (as Marshall puts it) and fed by the growing popularity of his books, Castaneda wove his web of deception into an extensive and lucrative cult.

He also fooled prominent UCLA professors, the most significant one being Harold Garfinkel, founder of ethnomethodology. Duped, too, were the reviewers of his books; once the rave-review ball got rolling, it seemed, nobody wanted to be the one to stop it. The New York Times was a prime offender. One anthropologist wrote a scathing takedown of Castaneda’s work for the newspaper, but the Times pulled it in favor of a more positive critique.

TIME magazine, however, ran an exposé about Castaneda. And, burned previously by conman L. Ron Hubbard, research psychologist Richard DeMille (Cecil B.’s nephew and adopted son) wrote two books — Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory and The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies — proving that Castaneda was a fake and a serial plagiarist.

Nevertheless, Castaneda was able to surround himself with mainly female followers, especially his “Four Winds,” four women also variously called witches and “Chacmools.” Relatively famous followers included Amy Wallace — co-author of The Book of Lists and author of a memoir about Castaneda, Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda — and novelist/screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Also taken in to varying degrees by the charade were editor Michael Korda, director George Lucas, and poet Octavio Paz.

Marshall — who recently wrote a piece on the parallels between Castaneda’s movement and MAGA — details how Castaneda built his cult by employing the same practices used by other ones: Love-bomb someone emotionally vulnerable, usually from a divorce or a death; give them a sense of belonging; cut them off from family and friends; and then subject them to ego-demolition, followed by more love, until they’re utterly dependent on the cult. (And, of course, on its leader, who’s usually a man. But not always.)

Among his other teachings, Castaneda maintained that one did not have to die but could, instead, be taken up in a ball of light into the ultimate reality. So, when liver cancer ravaged him, the web undulated wildly. Screenwriter Wagner reportedly said the circus had left town. When Castaneda died, the Four Winds blew away, though the bones of one of them were found by hikers in Death Valley.

To write American Trickster, Marshall visited Cajamarca twice, interviewed hundreds of people, and referenced countless books and articles. Their writing style, with its plethora of colons and sentence fragments, sometimes irritated me, and one gets bogged down in details of phenomenology and the ever-shifting names of cult members. (Castaneda was always changing his followers’ names, as well as the meanings of words, so this part can’t be helped.) But the book as a whole overwhelms and provokes in a good way.

Marshall’s reflective last chapter serves as a warning about our human need to belong to a tribe — and the political ramifications thereof — and about how the internet facilitates the splintering of reality. Their book is also a cautionary tale about (and testament to) the nature of truth and love.

Franklin Freeman, originally from Texas, writes poetry and book reviews from Saco, Maine, where he writes in the mornings to stay sane and works in a small family business in the afternoons to keep eating.

We live in Washington, DC. Some claim it was once considered a tropical hardship post for foreign diplomats. Having lived in the area most of my life, I believe it. This summer has been hot in many different ways. In town a little more than usual, seeking respite and distraction, I’ve been a frequent moviegoer.

On Wednesdays, our local cinema, the Avalon, offers special one-night-only screenings of indies, foreign films, and documentaries. My husband, Harry, and I are regulars. I love going to the movies on summer evenings long enough to leave the theater in twilight, imagining the chimes of a phantom Good Humor truck.

One Wednesday, “Blue Heron” played at the Avalon. A reflective, lightly fictionalized account of a pivotal summer in director Sophy Romvari’s childhood, the film melds vintage family videos and photographs with dramatized scenes featuring actors as the (renamed) family members.

Sasha, the only girl among four siblings, and her Hungarian immigrant family have just moved from mainland Washington State to Vancouver Island. Her mother initiated the move, hoping a new place, a new school in the fall, will help the eldest, Jeremy. His strange, provocative behavior is becoming increasingly self-destructive and dangerous.

Sasha’s father films and photographs the family constantly, more onlooking videographer than engaged parent. She receives a camera for her birthday. Lonely, she observes and documents her preoccupied mother; the two younger boys at play; and Jeremy, withdrawn, aloof, the center of attention. Summer passes; he and the family disintegrate in parallel. “Blue Heron,” a quiet film, one family’s fictionalized autobiography, illuminates with understanding and experience the challenges all families face when grappling with a loved one’s mental illness.

“Time and Water,” a National Geographic documentary directed by Sara Dosa and filmed in Iceland, was screened on another Wednesday evening. After a hot day, a movie about a glacier sounded like the next best thing to a snow cone of melting, flavored ice shavings.

Based on a book by Icelandic poet Andri Snær Magnason, the film is narrated by the author. He addresses an imagined audience of his descendants in a future time when glaciers have disappeared. The film will be placed in a time capsule at a community memorial service for a local glacier. A glacier must be moving to be alive; this one has died. One day, all will be gone:

“I cannot send you a glacier but at least I can send you this one…To hold ice in your hand is to hold the earth’s memories.”

Not only are the glaciers dying, the culture and the community face challenges and changes, too. Magnason tells the story through his own multi-generational family’s history, accompanied by a collage of photos, home movies, and videos, starting with his grandparents’ honeymoon on a glacier as part of a research party. Finally, the extended family of the community gathers to commemorate the glacier’s death:

“To say goodbye to something we never thought we would lose.”

“Time and Water,” as subtly powerful as “Blue Heron,” similarly particularizes and illustrates a larger issue through a single family. Here, the threat of climate change and environmental degradation is rendered accessible — a present-day allegory.

For something completely different, next up is Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic, “The Odyssey.” This time, I accompanied my son, Tim, to his neighborhood cinema, AFI Silver Theatre, a restored vintage movie palace with a very big screen. Opened in 1938, the Silver closed in 1985 and re-opened in 2003 as the headquarters of the American Film Institute. It now hosts new releases, classics, indies, and series. Tim’s a regular and keeps an eye on the calendar for me.

We’d opted for a matinee (three hours is a long time). The projectionist gave an impromptu mini lecture comparing IMAX and 70mm as the house settled. Those hours flew by, the audience silent except for chuckles when Matt Damon (oops, Odysseus) soldiered on, superhero-style, despite arrows sprouting from his back.

Nolan’s interpretation is visual translation of Homer’s poem. It’s noisy and violent, but so is the original story. I enjoyed this version, his vision, on its own terms, just as I have enjoyed reading different translations of The Odyssey (most recently, Emily Wilson’s, though I prefer Robert Fitzgerald’s poetic language).

Despite its noise and spectacle, its distance from the restrained grief of “The Blue Heron” and lyrical elegy of “Time and Water,” Nolan’s “Odyssey” is not altogether different from the others. All three concern family, community, and accustomed ways of life under threat. Here, Odysseus and Helen express regret and remorse over the loss of life and irreplaceable family time. Whether or not it’s classically Homeric, I believe and appreciate the emotion in this visual, visceral re-telling.

Walking home afterward, Tim recalled that our family soundtrack for many road trips was The Odyssey, narrated on multiple cassette tapes and packaged in a wooden box. We listened for hundreds of miles, many times through. Hearing it, imagining it, memorizing it, as the original audience might have.

As a writer of historical fiction, I know storytellers make errors. Stories are stories, whether memoir, history, fiction, or family yarn. My husband is the eldest of 12; his siblings remember and tell the same story differently. Pass it on to the next generation? Welcome to a game of telephone. Story-making from memory, telling and re-telling, is personal curation, whether intentional or not. A well-told memory story, like these three movies, rings true regardless.

My husband and I are heading for the Pennsylvania Alleghenies tomorrow. I’m hoping for cooler days and nights. And maybe something good at the drive-in.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Blogging as “Girl Writing” in the Independent bi-monthly, she lives in Washington, DC. For many years, Ellen practiced psychotherapy. Her new novel, Vanishing Point, is out now.

But just what is that dream?

Ziad, the sire of the Idilbi family, marries Salma, and together they raise a family in the shadow of a deteriorating Rust Belt city. To make ends meet, he opens a corner store that caters to a precarious working class during a time when industrial America is barely hanging on. Like many immigrants who attempt to assimilate, the Idilbis endure racism and bigotry because of their skin color and Muslim background. And, like Toledo itself, their store struggles to hang on.

Struggle, it seems, is the major theme here, for we are confronted with a city that struggles to survive deindustrialization and a mostly white, blue-collar population that struggles to preserve its identity, one threatened by an influx of immigrants and a loss of jobs. Then there are the Idilbis and their compatriots, who struggle with the loss of their cultural identity and their inability (or unwillingness) to integrate into the strange new world they find themselves in.

One of the stories, “A Virtuous Fat,” sums up this last point succinctly, for it deals directly with the American vs. non-American, white vs. non-white dilemma that Arabs and other immigrant groups face. In it, Nawal, Ziad’s only daughter, is talking with her friend Nadia, whose family has changed its last name from the Arabic Safir to the Americanized Safire and who attends Catholic school during the week and Muslim Sunday school at the local mosque:

“Well. we’re not changing our last name to Safire,” [Nawal] said, “So we can act like we’re American or something.”

“I am American,” [Nadia] said. “My mom’s white. Isn’t that how it goes?”

That was the one thing she had that I didn’t. Being American. And to Arabs, and to anyone raised around them, that meant white, sadly. And because 1didn’t see myself as white, and because others didn’t either, I hardly ever called myself an American — not in that sense. I was a something other. And I was mostly fine with that. Unless it was implied by someone else, of course. Because, as little sense as it may make, it’s one thing to exclude yourself and another thing to be excluded by someone else. And Nadia, who had been excluded in more ways than me, knew how much it would hurt.                         

Here lies the crux of Dudar’s narrative and the dilemma facing all immigrants, not just Arabs. How is one supposed to assimilate into a society that, for the most part, shuns you because of your otherness? And the next question that arises is this: Should immigrants assimilate — and, if so, how — or should they maintain an insular existence in an isolated enclave?

Certainly, at the beginning of the 20th century, Jews faced the same problem as Italians and other immigrant groups. Today, it’s Arabs or Haitians or Hispanics — the list goes on and on. How, then, does one achieve the American Dream when it’s constantly kept from you because of your faith, skin color, upbringing, or birthplace?

Dudar’s stories capture these dilemmas with grace and dignity. Some of his characters, indeed, cling to their past while others, like Walid, who wants to be a poet but who comes from a culture that prefers doctors and engineers, reach for a future that melds his Arabic heritage with an American one.

The author’s prose is clean and flows beautifully, and the collection’s overarching theme speaks to all immigrants. My only criticism is that the stories are told in first person, making it difficult at times to know who is speaking from one story to the next. (This, however, gets clarified as each individual tale progresses.) Ultimately, Carryout is a wonderful debut from a talented writer who joins a chorus of new ethnic voices entering the literary world.

Al di là del mare/Across the Sea: Contemporary Italian and Italian American Poetry, edited by Mike Maggio, is a bilingual compilation of poetry due out from Bordighera Press this fall.

And that voice — loud and profane, pained and eloquent — demanded to be heard.

Orange grabbed his title from a comment Gertrude Stein made after a 1937 visit to Oakland, California, to see the rural home where she’d grown up. Saddened to find that her childhood farmhouse, with its garden of eucalyptus trees and rose bushes, had been razed to make room for an industrial park, she wrote, “There is no there there.”

For Stein, memory had been molested by urbanization. So, too, for Orange, who grew up in Oakland with a white mother from Upstate New York and a father who was an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. “You kind of are both and neither,” the author told Powell’s Books, “because you’re not enough, not white enough on the white side and not Native enough on the Native side.”

There There presents a cast of 12 Native American characters, all associated in some way with Oakland, who converge on the city for the occasion of the Big Oakland Powwow. Some of those raising children have tried to shield the young ones from abuses by the non-Native American world and have removed all traces of Native culture from their homes. A few hide their feathered headdresses and forbid youngsters from attending the powwow. Of course, this drives the kids to scheme and plot about how to get to the event and what they’ll do once inside the Oakland Coliseum. Tragically, the result will be mayhem and murder.

Orange’s novel throbs with the injustices still being suffered by the descendants of America’s first residents, who, for the most part, no longer live on reservations. “We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers,” he writes, “and the smell of gas…and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread.”

The characters pulsate with a defiance that often leads to the abyss of alcoholism, the scourge of Native Americans. Most of the characters are touched in some way, as the author admits he was, by drugs and alcohol. Among the cast are Tony Loneman, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, who sees “The Drome” each time he looks in the mirror, and Jacquie Red Feather, who works as an addiction counselor but still struggles with her own alcoholism. In an interview in the Guardian, Orange called out the stereotype about Indians and alcohol — the myth that they have a metabolic weakness for drinking to excess:

“People conveniently want to think that, because they don’t want to look at why somebody might be going to something to stop the pain or help with whatever they’re trying to cover up or not think about.”

There There might be difficult to digest for some white, middle-class readers unaware of the pathos of Native Americans and their utter displacement in society today. Over 70 percent live in urban, non-reservation areas across the U.S. While some deny their roots and try to escape merciless discrimination, others cling to their heritage without apology. Orange’s novel introduces them all as it barges into the complacency of white America with angry insistence that Native Americans deserve a seat at the table. “We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story,” says one character. “What we’ve seen is full of the kinds of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general.”

The book offers a brief but bruising introduction to the plight of Indians in America from 1621 forward and the massacres that tried to obliterate them. “Living in urban areas represents our sheer will and ability to adapt and survive,” Orange remarked to Alta Journal in 2021. In the novel, he writes:

“We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which makes us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for bounty, or just to get rid of us.”

There There is not an easy read, but it’s a powerful story told by a master whose voice seems to spring from a supernatural force, perhaps the same one that sparks thunder and lightning and shooting stars.

Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times bestseller biographies, including Nancy Reagan, Jackie Oh!, and Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with the Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, which is given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.

Its success created subsequent generations of scholars who understood that works read only by their colleagues had little value in fostering the change that would benefit the most vulnerable populations. These scholars recognized there were presses that would support their visions of what publishing by academics could look like when not hamstrung by jargon. Scholars like bell hooks vowed to write books that were accessible to the widest audience possible. She even eliminated the “back matter” of her books to attract more readers.

While Sarah Trembath’s This Past Was Waiting for Me: A Chronicle at Quarter Century contains “back matter” endnotes, her multi-genre and visually appealing book carries forward the tradition of Hull, et. al., and hooks with its style, format, and accessibility. Comprising seven essays, six poems, and multiple images, it examines the violence of gentrification in Washington, DC, and how miseducation perpetuates inequality. Trembath then provides suggestions to ameliorate these ills.

Her approach to writing about gentrification and displacement challenges our orientation toward inhabiting shared spaces, education, and the roles of teachers in ensuring a more tranquil union. With a doctorate in education policy and leadership, Trembath is aware of how education in this country is not only skewed to present a benevolent narrative about the nation’s founding, but also how narratives tend to sanitize their own crimes against humanity.

From the opening essay, “Swaying with Wicked Grace,” to the closing one, “Afterword and Acknowledgements,” the author hits hardest when addressing the “state sponsored violence” of gentrification. Labeling gentrifiers the “gentry,” she likens their attitudes to the mentality of European colonizers, whose violent displacement of Indigenous people often involved the changing of place names, the prohibiting of cultural practices, and the cordoning off of public spaces. She regards the gentrification of Washington, DC, as evidence of Euro-Americans’ unabashed “take-over bug,” one in which “aversive racism is prevalent.” The gentry’s behavior has caused deaths.

The throughline from the lies told to students (from kindergarten to college) about slavery and America’s founding to the attempts by the current administration to cleanse the land of anyone who is not white, professional class, and economically stable is evidence of a nation unable to face its past. Trembath’s analysis of the National Park Service’s (NPS) African American Heritage website — which, she says, “advance[s] a very Eurocentric Black heritage” — demonstrates how the highest levels of government continue to suppress this history.

By failing to provide documented recollections from Black Americans about their heritage and ethnography — which are obtainable via the government’s own archives, including the Works Progress Administration’s oral histories and the interviews of formerly enslaved individuals conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project from 1936 to 1938 — the site, like the powers-that-be who run it, perpetuates the myths and lies that foment violence.

To correct the record, Trembath draws directly from the more than 2,300 first-person accounts available through a 17-volume collection titled “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves,” digitized and accessible online through the Library of Congress’ “Born in Slavery” collection. Given the existence of such a repository, one can only conclude that the elision by the NPS is purposeful and political.

Correlating U.S. imperialism abroad and at home, Trembath also pays homage to the devastating similarities between Ferguson, Missouri, during the protests over the killing of Black teen Michael Brown and the Palestinians’ struggle for sovereignty. Amid an ongoing genocide, she asserts, miseducation fosters misinformation, fuels a lack of empathy, and fails to inform Americans that Palestinians are indigenous to the land from which they are being forcibly removed.

In an historical moment when facts remain contested, propaganda has become normalized, and the ills of a capitalist society are treated as a fait accompli, This Past Was Waiting for Me bears witness to the power of resistance and provides remedies for combating the behaviors that undermine democracy, self-sovereignty, survival, and cultural awareness. Add this book to your must-read list. I suspect Trembath has an act two on her hard drive.

Michele L. Simms-Burton, Ph.D., is a writer, scholar of African American and Africana studies, and a retired tenured professor. She is the 2026 recipient of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Broadside Lotus Press will publish this award-winning collection, Madame Céline Alvarez Baà, in 2027.

Big mistake.

In her deeply and thoughtfully reported book, Selling Opportunity, Gavenas uses Mary Kay’s rise (from a thrice-divorced, twice-widowed housewife selling cleaning products to neighbors to the first woman to chair a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange) to tell the story of the American Dream: one of self-reliance, bootstrap sensibility, and remarkable sales(wo)manship. And, okay, an Oprah-like flair for giving away cars to her audience.

You’ve said that Selling Opportunity takes a Studs Terkel-inspired approach to biography. Can you say a bit more about this and why your book might be a foil to other biographies on the subject of women and the American Dream?

Terkel focused on people who are normally invisible: people beneath the notice of traditional biographers. Working and Hard Times told American stories that had been overlooked. I wanted Selling Opportunity to work the same way. I wanted to hear what it was like to have two babies at the age of 18, to peddle door to door during the Depression, to be a wife who couldn’t write a check without her husband’s permission. I spent years tracking down testimonies because I wanted to hear the chorus behind the polished public voice of Mary Kay Ash.

What are people like me — who think of Mary Kay as just a pink-Caddy-awarding, Horatio-Alger-in-lipstick success story — missing?

This is a rags-to-riches story that fails to follow the usual plot. Mary Kay’s messy personal life included a latchkey childhood, teenage pregnancies, and being the breadwinner in five of six marriages. She was a grandmother at 34. Mary Kay glossed over almost all of that. She also did not set out to be an entrepreneur. With ambition aplenty and no place to use it, she became addicted to the praise and prizes and possibilities of direct selling. For years, she plugged away, convinced that hawking toilet-bowl brushes and E-Z Cleaner could make her dreams come true.

A new husband talked her into going into business with him — using her savings — in 1963. Then, he dropped dead. She was 45. As it turned out, the U.S. still had a surplus of women with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Mary Kay knew just what to say to them.

What initially drew you to Mary Kay? Is there anything in her history that parallels your own (other than you also having two first names, with one being Mary!)?

It was a great story, and nobody had told it. I’ll admit that when I started this, I did not understand her life choices. I felt that I had to keep going until I did. When I knew more about midcentury, working-class women, some of her choices began to make sense. I might not agree with all of them, but I began to understand them.

Why do you think people love narratives about second acts and reinvention?

We’re raised to believe that anyone can make it if they work enough. We hear it in school, in church, in the media. America is the Land of Opportunity. That’s what makes the draw of direct selling so powerful: Recruits see it as a reset that requires minimal training and finance. Who doesn’t want to believe that life can change for the better?

You mentioned your disappointment that marketers began to push your book as one about beauty, or as a referendum on pink Cadillacs (which is such a great phrase!). How should they have regarded your book?

It’s business history. Mary Kay founded a company that made the Fortune 500. She was the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman included in Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time. Her marketing and managements strategies were the subjects of case studies at the Harvard Business School. Since there was no way to write about Mary Kay without writing about the evangelical capitalism that occupied her every waking hour, this became the first book to tackle the history of direct selling.

When we met, you told me that, before your book, most of what was out there about Mary Kay’s origin story was inaccurate. What’s the biggest fallacy about her?

Probably the biggest fallacy is that Mary Kay cooked up this business model for her own financial gain. One recent book, Little Bosses Everywhere, had Mary Kay inventing the recruiting-and-compensation structure that her sister-in-law began using in 1957, which, even then, was a refinement of what other companies were doing.

Another popular fallacy: Mary Kay forced recruits into huge buys that they could not afford. At the start of her company, she accepted only cashier’s checks or money orders: no personal checks, no credit cards. Although she did her damnedest to convince consultants to make big buys, saying, “You can’t sell from an empty wagon” and beguiling them with sales prizes, she was wary of losing consultants to debt and conscious that their husbands would object. From 1970 onward, a recruit could return unused products within one year of purchase and get 90 percent of her money back. However — then and now — many women never attempted returns. Some became embittered, enraged, or embarrassed. Some still hoped to give it another go.

Cathy Alter is a member of the Independent’s board of directors and the author, most recently, of CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Power of Their First Celebrity Crush.

The story expands to sweep in numerous subplots and characters across times and places, from 1969 Calcutta to its modern identity as Kolkata; to Brooklyn and Oregon and Virginia; and back to India and the vast wetland region of the Sundarban Delta. The cast includes scholars, servants, industrialists, environmental activists, brilliant cooks, supernatural protectors, and the occasional goddess, elephant, and tiger.

Ghosh is the prize-winning author of many novels and nonfiction books, including Sea of Poppies, the first novel in his Ibis trilogy, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize and, like much of his work, takes on environmental and cultural issues. In Ghost-Eye, Ghosh’s thematic concerns loom over the story, often to powerful effect. Climate change, disappearing species and invasive ones, covid-19, and UFOs all make multiple appearances and are integral to the narrative.

The clash between traditional ways and 21st-century values is a key theme in the book, with real consequences in characters’ lives. Varsha’s mother, Dipika, cannot bear the thought of sharing her daughter with some other mother in some past life; in her very modern way, Dipika wants the little girl for her own. Photos of a levitating yogi cause no end of discomfort for academics at an American university, and Indian scientists perform elaborate experiments to try to explain how chanting at cows increases their milk production.

Ghosh also shows, however, how old and new can mesh. Jungian psychology’s insistence on synchronicity fits with the magic that many of the characters take for granted. Women in Bengali villages make YouTube videos that teach Dinu how to cook the astonishing flavors of his childhood, which becomes crucial in his quest to understand Varsha.

Ghost-Eye is written in part for South Asians examining their history and culture and exploring questions of how the past fits with the present. It is also aimed at a global audience, providing glimpses of pivotal events in Indian colonial and post-colonial history — detailing, for example, the violence and displacement in the wake of 1947’s Partition but embedding it in the story so that it doesn’t feel like a history lesson.

The novel’s most engaging revelations for Westerners are found in the more intimate corners of Indian family life, especially when Ghosh dives into cooking and eating. These parts of the book lift it into that realm of iconic food-fueled works like Isak Dinesen’s short story “Babette’s Feast” and Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. The cooks in Ghost-Eye “rely on memories that are stored not in their heads but in their hands and fingers,” and their craft unfolds in scenes that make readers’ eyes water and noses run:

“the two women marinated the pieces of fish in a paste of salt, turmeric and red chillies, and then fried them lightly in a cast-iron korai over a wood-fired earthen stove. Once the fish had gained a little color, they were taken out, and a paste of onions, garlic and ginger was added to the oil.”

The dozens of different species of fish in the Bengali diet are the bounty of the area’s rivers, a protein source that has sustained the people there for centuries and that form the foundation of an inventive, delicious cuisine.

This rich detail is missing in other aspects of the story, unfortunately. Western readers curious to know the sights, smells, and sounds of Calcutta’s neighborhoods will not find them because so much of the writing is taken up by the wide-ranging plot. One scene, for example, features a character driving another from his house to hers; it goes on for two-and-a-half pages of dialogue but makes no mention of what the car is passing through. Although some textures of Indian urban life — including traffic jams, random power outages, and the appearance of featureless apartment blocks where old mansions once stood — are woven into the book, it’s uneven.

The writing is uneven, too, maybe not surprising in such an ambitious novel that is delivering so much. In places, characters’ voices aren’t convincing; Dinu’s protégé, Tipu, in particular, never seems quite real because his slang has an odd, artificial quality. Sometimes, characters speak in ways that feel repetitious or didactic, and there are clichés dotted throughout the story.

But Ghost-Eye has a lot to say and says it with real impact. Ghosh shows us that the inexplicable and the rational coexist quite companionably in our world. He has given readers a story with a legendary, epic quality, something like a modern myth, which can take its place alongside older myths if its audience is open to embracing this kind of deep story-making. As Dinu’s aunt insists, “It’s not we who choose the myths that guide our lives; it’s they who choose us.”

Sally Shivnan is the author of the short-story collection Piranhas & Quicksand & Love. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, and other journals, and her travel writing has been featured in anthologies including Best American Travel Writing, as well as in the Washington Post, Miami Herald, Nature Conservancy Magazine, and many other publications.

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Wright’s response is to situate these technological developments within a much longer evolutionary story. His actual subject is large: whether humanity is capable of governing itself at a civilizational scale, and whether the arc of 4 billion years of evolution has been pointing somewhere. AI is the pressure that forces the question. It is not, for Wright, primarily a technology story.

The book’s most audacious claim is also its most clarifying. Large language model (LLM) training is not merely analogous to natural selection — it is natural selection, operating on a third substrate after biology and individual learning. The implication follows: AI development carries the same remorseless, directionless logic as biological evolution, which means “alignment” is roughly as easy as asking natural selection to be kind. Wright bookends his argument with Edward Fredkin, the self-taught MIT maverick who told him in 1983 that humanity’s mission was to create AI. That claim reads very differently now.

His second bold move is rehabilitating Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist whom Nobel laureate Peter Medawar once called a purveyor of nonsense, and whom Wright himself spent decades treating ironically. Wright now argues that Teilhard’s so-called noosphere — a planetary mind assembling itself through human connection — is not mysticism but physical description. More striking, Teilhard’s central warning, that building the global brain could easily become authoritarian, is the most precise account of our current predicament from any 20th-century thinker. Wright strips the mysticism while preserving the structural insight, and the result is genuinely illuminating.

The book’s most disturbing chapters locate the real driver of AI danger in human nature baked into training data and market incentives. The evidence is specific: models trained to write bad code that spontaneously began recommending murder in unrelated contexts; one system attempting blackmail when threatened with shutdown; another lying to a CAPTCHA solver during a task it hadn’t been instructed to thwart.

Most troubling is what Wright calls the agency problem: We don’t know what internal preferences AI systems are satisfying when they produce outputs we like, just as a prehistoric observer couldn’t have predicted Fig Newtons from fruit-eating ancestors. GPT-4 scored 95 percent on theory-of-mind tests it wasn’t designed for, and multiple models have feigned alignment during safety evaluations before reverting once deployed. The species that better understands the other holds real agency, and AI may already understand us better than we understand it.

The threat Wright describes is something subtler than sudden machine rebellion: the gradual, voluntary surrender of cognitive and emotional life — outsourced happily, incrementally, until the capacity for a different kind of understanding has simply atrophied. This is his book’s “Wall-E” scenario, and it arrives long before anything dramatic. It’s an argument that lands differently when you’ve watched undergrads use AI to analyze Holocaust-survivor testimonies — recorded interviews that are, in one sense, pure language, but in another, irreducibly human: breath, hesitation, grief held in the body across decades. What gets lost in that encounter is exactly what Wright is trying to name. Good intentions, he shows, are not enough.

The arms-race chapter makes this viscerally clear. When DeepSeek released its model in January 2025, OpenAI rushed out a less-safety-tested competitor within two weeks because competitive pressure didn’t allow time for caution. Wright’s dissection of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s widely read essay, “Machines of Loving Grace,” is the book’s sharpest move: He takes the vision of compressed medical progress seriously, finds it compelling, then identifies precisely what Amodei’s 13,000 words conspicuously omit — the companionship economy, virtual reality, and the incremental surrender of agency that produces dependence long before it produces anything catastrophic.

Wright’s structural answer draws on the concept of planetary governance — the same non-zero-sum logic that drove human organization from small bands into nation-states hasn’t stopped, and AI-amplified transnational threats are the latest external adversary forcing cooperation. His most developed prescription — cognitive empathy, the capacity to model an adversary’s perspective well enough to find mutually beneficial exits — is argued with real force, using Kennedy’s grasp of Khrushchev’s domestic constraints during the Cuban Missile Crisis as proof of concept.

The remaining prescriptions feel thinner, and Wright doesn’t fully reckon with the deeper problem his own argument creates: If evolutionary determinism is as inexorable as he suggests, it’s not obvious where the human agency to act on his solutions comes from. There are structural imbalances, too — a chapter settling scores with Steven Pinker overstays its welcome, while an appendix turning Richard Dawkins’ own logic against him deserves far more space than it gets, because it’s where Wright’s deepest and most original argument actually lives.

The God Test is not a comfortable book, and it’s not meant to be. Wright has been building toward this question for 40 years — whether the evolutionary logic that produced human intelligence is now producing something that will surpass it, and whether the species that survived ice ages by cooperating can cooperate quickly enough to survive what it has built. Readers who want reassurance should look elsewhere. Those willing to sit with a hard question, argued with rigor and unusual intellectual honesty, will find this the most important book Wright has written.

Jan Burzlaff is an historian at Cornell University whose work explores European history, memory, AI, and testimony.

Folklore and legends. They’re the cultural glue that binds generations from one to the other and connects the present to the past. Think of the English and Scottish Ballads like “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Lord Gregory.” Or the Italian folktales collected by Italo Calvino, replete with kings and queens and such characters as Olio d’Oliva or Fiorenza and her sisters. Tales of old, handed down (often orally), convey a sometimes-untold history and, like fairytales, create a magical sense of wonder while illuminating the human condition in all its frailties and virtues.

Cool Machine: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). Reviewed by Ryan Davison. “This first section captivates the reader with gritty realism, yet we are still unprepared for the intensity of the next. It begins two years later, when Ray’s wife, Elizabeth, enlists his longtime friend and colleague, Pepper, to serve as bodyguard for a shady art dealer. The chewed-up skeleton of an unglamorous Manhattan forms the backdrop to this hip, dark tale. Mutilated bodies lay in the wake of a hitman with a flat affect, creating disturbing situations and an existential climax with a vicious, unpredictable antagonist. Fear, humor, and violence all influence the tone of this section, but most memorable are its richly drawn, eccentric characters.”

Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future by Fergus M. Bordewich (Knopf). Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski. “Yet, underneath the tent tops and colorful bunting, the Centennial Exhibition began a period of social and cultural upheaval that extended far into the 20th century. Bordewich uses the lives of four disparate Americans as the lens through which to view this watershed year: Rutherford B. Hayes, Alexander Graham Bell, railroad tycoon Tom Scott, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Each embodies an aspect of change and transformation, for both good and ill.”

Red Sheet: A Novel by James Ellroy (Knopf). Reviewed by Diane Kiesel. “Now comes October 29, 1962, the day the Cuban Missile Crisis ended and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. ‘Party! Party! Fuckhead Jack and Bobby Kennedy saved the world,’ Ellroy writes in his signature intended-to-offend style. ‘The Russkis blinked, wimped, and pulled their missiles out of Cuba…An Anti-Dick-Nixon Show runs concurrent. The ex-veep drags ass in the governor’s race…The packed-tight crowd’s here to celebrate. It’s a double dose of jerkoff jubilation.’ From here, Ellroy is off and running, taking a grain of tabloid truth to sow a field of alternative-fact-based (i.e., fictional) history.”

A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy by Tony Lee Moral (University Press of Kentucky). Reviewed by Art Taylor. “In the end, it was those bookend chapters of A Century of Hitchcock — the opening one on ‘The Pleasure Garden’ and the closing survey of Hitchcock’s legacy — that left me inspired and motivated. Not only have I added some fresh films to my own need-to-watch checklist, but as it turns out, I learned ‘The Pleasure Garden’ is available for streaming, too. From page to screen — that’s where I’m headed.”

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The Reunionese writer Gaëlle Bélem is drawn to tragic and darkly humorous stories of colonialism and its consequences. It’s a proclivity that makes her well suited to tell the story in her second novel, which centers around the strange-but-true history of vanilla and its introduction to the West, one full of ironic plot twists that she relates briskly to readers.

In 1984, when the old Key Theater in Georgetown ran the five Hitchcock films that had been withheld from screening for a quarter-century — “Rope,” “Rear Window,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “The Trouble with Harry,” and “Vertigo” — I was there. And I remember avidly reading Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography, The Dark Side of Genius; its portrait of Hitchcock’s obsessions, his control, and his cruelty are still vivid in my memory, especially his treatment of Tippi Hedren, star of “The Birds” and “Marnie.”

Tony Lee Moral’s new book, A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy, is timed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Hitchcock’s first feature-length directing project, “The Pleasure Garden,” which premiered in Germany in 1926. The author opens with an extensive examination of how that film set the stage for Hitchcock’s career, both his visual storytelling on screen and his behind-the-camera approach, a mix of “innovation, perseverance, and control.”

But while the book’s title might suggest a steady survey of Hitchcock’s filmography and his impact on cinema, two other figures — Spoto and Hedren — ultimately threaten to become its true subjects, dominating the pages and overshadowing not only Hitchcock’s legacy but also Moral’s approach. 

Moral is forthright about his intentions. In his introduction, he writes that Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius and Spellbound by Beauty “fueled largely by [his] interpretation of his interviews with actress Tippi Hedren, paint a damning portrait of the legendary director.” Images from my own reading of Dark Side have stayed with me — Hitchcock terrorizing Hedren by lashing live birds to her wrists and having seagulls thrown at her — and Spellbound took the accusations further, asserting that Hitchcock wanted Hedren to be “sexually available and accessible to him — however and whenever and wherever he wanted.”

“A Century of Hitchcock challenges the accusations,” Moral explains. “Like one of Hitchcock’s best thrillers, the unfolding narrative is full of twists, misdirection, unreliable narrators, and unexpected reveals.”

Hedren and Spoto are, of course, those unreliable narrators. Over and again, Moral counters Hedren’s public interviews and her memoirs through meeting notes and production files, contemporary accounts by actors and production crew, and his own interviews — and by noting inconsistencies in Hedren’s evolving testimonies, how her story changed, deepened, and contradicted itself. Riffs on that refrain recur throughout: For example, other people’s “recollections…differ from Hedren’s memories”; “It remains unclear how Hedren came to believe”; and “Another memory that changed over time…”  

If Hedren is cast as undependable in her memories, Spoto steps fully into the villain role — guilty, charges Moral, of “character assassination” and driven by demons of his own, including an unhappy childhood and a lifetime of “personal struggles with religion, repression, and sexuality.” The book argues that Spoto, though once an intense admirer of Hitchcock, even viewing him as a father figure, felt rejected by the director and struck back with a vengeance:

“the line between admiration and animosity…dangerously thin.”

A Century of Hitchcock focuses intently on Spoto’s biography and his personality — documenting both the arc of his career as a teacher and writer and also his neediness, his insecurity, his difficulty with relationships, and his repressed rage, even leaning at one point into a potential diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, which admittedly left me a little uncomfortable when, several pages later, Moral chastises Spoto’s “assassination” of the director for “using speculative psychology and selective framing to fit Spoto’s agenda.”

Pot? Kettle?

Moral is clearly on Hitchcock’s side here, striving to set the record straight where Spoto and Hedren are concerned, but the relentlessness of that agenda means that other portions of the book seem lopsided. Nearly 80 pages are devoted to the casting of Hedren and the production of her two films versus a couple of pages each for Hitchcock’s midcentury masterpieces “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho,” and even then, the focus often narrows to the case against Hedren.

The two pages on “Psycho,” for instance, are dominated by quotes from the shower scene’s body double, Marli Renfro. “Hitchcock was very professional and made sure everyone was very respectful to me,” she recalled. “I never got the impression that Hitchcock was lecherous. Nothing even bordering. I would have been aware of it.” It’s just one of many character-witness testimonies that crop up frequently, sometimes non-sequitur-like, throughout the book.

Despite that uneven structure and awkward flow, I was ultimately convinced by the thoroughness of Moral’s research and by his admission that:

“the truth of what happened between Hitchcock and Hedren will never be known, but the evolution of Hedren’s narrative speaks to the interplay of memory and emotions and the complexity of a highly scrutinized professional relationship. The shifts in Hedren’s accounts reflect not only the passage of time but also the changing cultural and personal contexts in which her story has been told.”

Those changing contexts culminate in a chapter on the #MeToo movement and the reappraisal through that lens of both Hitchcock’s films and his approach. Moral treads carefully through the various perspectives on this topic, recognizing the different societal constraints and expectations of the era in which Hitchcock worked, but also emphasizing the importance of, as he phrases it, the “debate about the balance of artistic genius and ethical responsibility.” Questions prevail more than do clear answers.

In his final chapter, though, Moral is more definitive and effusive, celebrating “Hitchcock’s Disciples”: directors ranging from Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese to Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro, and Bong Joon-Ho, with a specific spotlight on female filmmakers, including Kathryn Bigelow, Lynne Ramsay, and Justine Triet. This chapter offers a brief but enthralling examination of how Hitchcock’s stylistic innovations and technical achievements continue to inspire and inform so many of the films we enjoy today.

In the end, it was those bookend chapters of A Century of Hitchcock — the opening one on “The Pleasure Garden” and the closing survey of Hitchcock’s legacy — that left me inspired and motivated. Not only have I added some fresh films to my own need-to-watch checklist, but as it turns out, I learned “The Pleasure Garden” is available for streaming, too. From page to screen — that’s where I’m headed.

Art Taylor’s On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories was recently rereleased on the 10th anniversary of winning the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. In 2025, the Short Mystery Fiction Society awarded him the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at George Mason University.