1. John P. Loonam’s review of What We Can Know: A Novel by Ian McEwan (Knopf). “Absent the actual poem, Tom relies on reading or rereading every note, text, email, journal entry, interview, or article about the Blundys and the six others who attended the birthday dinner where the great verse was read aloud. This recounting of the events of 2014 raises thorny questions regarding history’s effect on language, the role of biography in assessing and understanding literature, and the use of speculation in the telling of history. These are all matters we struggle with today, and McEwan magnifies them by focusing on a poem no living person has ever seen. But Tom is convinced a copy exists and that paying attention to the details of past events will help him find it.”


2. Sarah Trembath’s review of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf). “He is refreshingly brutal about such folks. Modern centrists are ‘transactional,’ he writes; the liberal is morally ‘vacuous.’ Middle-of-the road Democrats failed profoundly, committed as they long have been to begging voters to simply ‘hold their nose and align with the least worst thing’ between the two major parties…They have ‘stepped too far into complicity with something evil’ to turn back now.”


3. Robert Beauregard’s review of American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate by Eric Lichtblau (Little, Brown and Company). “In American Reich, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eric Lichtblau puts the country’s hate crimes into cultural and political context, giving singular attention to geography — Orange County being the ‘epicenter of violent bigotry in America.’ At the core of his story is the spread of far-right extremism and the rising temperature of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and antisemitism, all part of the divisiveness and intolerance at whose center was and continues to be the incendiary rhetoric of the once and current president, Donald Trump.”


4. Charles Caramello’s review of Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed by Ron Rosenbaum (Melville House). “Rosenbaum’s thesis about Dylan’s theological bent shouldn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention, nearly six decades ago, to the album John Wesley Harding, or even, as the author correctly allows, to anyone paying attention to most of Dylan’s writing since then. In any case, he grounds his thesis in well-executed, persuasive readings of individual songs and albums. To that extent, Bob Dylan offers a rewarding and at moments compelling read, such as when Rosenbaum powerfully presents Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture.”


5. Chris Rutledge’s review of Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6th by Mary Clare Jalonick (PublicAffairs). “This book will make you very angry. Storm at the Capitol is an oral history told by those who were at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. On that tragic day, domestic terrorists attempted to subvert democracy. If you’re like this reviewer, you’ll find it hard to go more than a few pages without wanting to throw the book across the room, furious all over again about what happened that afternoon and amazed that some people still don’t grasp how serious it was.”

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