Aristotle: The First Teacher

By Philip Freeman

Yale University Press 2026

Popular historian Philip Freeman’s new book is a svelte little biography of the great Greek philosopher and proto-scientist, famed as a prolific author and student of Plato. Aristotle: The First Teacher appears as part of the “Ancient Lives” series from Yale University Press, and despite the mountain of verbiage that still survives from Aristotle and the mountain of verbiage that’s been written about him in the last two thousand years, Freeman’s book weighs in at scarcely 130 pages, plus a first-rate bibliography that extends well beyond our only even remotely reliable biographical sources for Aristotle (Diogenes Laertius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, each, like all other ancient sources here, translated by the author).

Naturally, not all those sources nor any others tell us anything like as much as we’d want to know about this foundational figure, which prompts even as old and experienced a hand as Freeman to the kind of blandly unhelpful generalizations that so often lard out the lives of ancient figures. What was Aristotle like as a child, he wonders, for instance? “Probably it would have resembled that of any boy in ancient Greece, at least a boy of the upper classe,” we’re told. “He was undoubtedly a good student, but there are no reliable stories of the extraordinary abilities he was to show later in life or any hint of what he was to become.” Was he maybe not typical? Did he have a limp? A bad stutter? Was he a blockhead who bloomed late? Did he kick the slaves who were his tutors? We don’t know, we’ll never know, and simply punting to the mean isn’t a very interesting substitute.

Considering how thickly legends have accumulated around this subject, these kinds of extrapolations and guesses perforce continue into his adulthood and persist right through the years when even casual onlookers in Athens could have assumed biographies might one day be written about him. Those legends say he was something of a dandy in dress and affectation, for example, and who can say how much truth there is to any of it? Freeman again makes informed stabs based on likelihood. “During Aristotle’s twenty years in Athens as a student and researcher at Plato’s Academy,” he writes at one point, “one of his favorite activities must have been attending the plays performed at the Theater of Dionysius on the south side of the Acropolis.” Unless he hated going to plays.

Freeman is on much stronger ground when writing about the one absolutely concrete part of Aristotle’s story: his writings. This is the route most Aristotle biographers have taken in order to reach their word counts, and Freeman is good enough at it to make the reader wish he’d do it more often in these pages. “What is striking about his work on storytelling is how well it has aged,” he writes, for instance, about the Poetics. “The book that may have begun on the slopes of the Acropolis when the young man from Stagira was watching a play is as relevant today as it was centuries ago – yet another example of the astonishing mind of Aristotle.”

There’s not enough of Freeman in this little book and necessarily not enough of Aristotle. As an introduction to “the Master of Those Who Know,” it works as well as anything might, but the real introduction will always be the works themselves.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric

By Paul Cartledge

Reaktion Books 2026

At the beginning of his new book, a short biography of Pericles of 5th century Athens, veteran popular historian Paul Cartledge gamely alludes to the ten “rules” of biography proposed by the great Hermione Lee: 1) the story should be true, 2) the whole life should be covered, 3) nothing should be omitted or hidden, 4) all sources used should be named, 5) the biographer should know the subject if the subject is still alive, 6) (and yet) the biographer should be objective, 7) a reminder that biography is a form of history, 8) biography is “an investigation of identity,” and, of course, 10) there are no rules to writing biographies.

Lee’s tongue was firmly in cheek, and Cartledge would know this in any case since, as he promptly admits, “there is no ancient figure (Greek or Roman) about whom it is possible to write an acceptable, cradle-to-grave biography in the strong modern sense.” This is immediately made clear by the wreckage any life of Pericles makes of Lee’s rules. Living institution though he is, Cartledge never met the man; the sources (fewer than a dozen of them from the ancient world) are named, but the story they tell is almost certainly not true; and perhaps most tellingly, in over two thousand years, it’s been oddly difficult for most biographers to be objective about this particular figure (“Pericles for as well as against,” as Cartledge puts it).

This book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, part of Reaktion’s “Great Lives of the Ancient World” series, manages to do right by the rest of those rules and by its readers. In fewer than 200 pages, Cartledge covers much of the same ground as Plutarch or Thucydides, from the man’s naval military experience to his time as leader of Athens to his unconventional domestic life, with the usual digressions about the Parthenon and the odd shape of the man’s head.

In all of this, as Cartledge notes, there are sometimes sloppy admixtures of fact and fiction, since Pericles was apparently a fruitful source of satire on the stage of his own day. “There he was mocked alike for his personal appearance, for his irregular, even immoral private life, and above all, for being a kept man, the pupped as well as the poppet of a – foreign woman. Horrors!”

Cartledge relates as much of all of this as is reliably relatable, and he provides a fantastic Bibliography to guide his readers beyond the knowing but minimal account he provides here. The “Great Lives of the Ancient World” series has sometimes been a bit uneven, but this entry is a solid, unassuming work of marble, the perfect place for any curious reader to start.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

All the Queen’s Men: Power, Ambition, and the Making of Elizabeth I

By Sophie Shorland

Pegasus Books, 2026

When Elizabeth Tudor came to the throne, no one expected that a woman could rule on her own, and the entire world was consumed by the question of who this most eligible woman would – or should – marry. Ever since, the world has wondered how she avoided this trap. All the Queen’s Men: Power, Ambition, and the Making of Elizabeth I gives a comprehensive account of this marital (or, rather, non-marital) history, its larger context, and how it was experienced inside and outside England.

Drawing on ambassadorial dispatches, secret intelligence reports, and Elizabeth’s own letters, author Sophie Shorland explores the courtships that created and enhanced political alliances, chronicling the sometimes dizzying oscillations in Elizabeth’s stances.

Elizabeth I has her own contradictory and resonant mythos today, a mythos that formed during her lifetime. Virgin queen, Renaissance prince, head of the Golden Age. Alternately a grotesque, paranoid figure burning holes in her own skin with corrosive make-up, and a poised monarch who led her country fairly and inexorably to greatness.

It has long been understood that political necessity drove Elizabeth’s marital decisions. And while few historians have revisited this focus separately from larger biographical concerns, Shorland doubles down, revealing how Elizabeth used courtship as diplomacy and flirtation as statecraft while establishing her single status as the key to England’s survival.

The book is structured to emphasize this: each chapter describes a separate political option, starting in Elizabeth’s infancy to describe the early considerations and wranglings around her hand. Three more chapters cover the dealings in her brother’s and sister’s reign, all adding to a long list of personal reasons that would discourage Elizabeth from marriage. When the book reaches Elizabeth’s accession, Shorland abandons a strict chronology to explore each option fully, with the result that Robert Dudley’s candidacy is not raised until Chapter Nine. Not that we miss it – she does let us know it is coming, and in the meantime treats her readers to the plumbing of a suitor we do not hear enough about: Ivan the Terrible. While envoys first got access to the leader during her brother’s reign, Elizabeth pursued and expanded the relationship for all it was worth:

Not only would the English establish trade with Russia, but through it they would be able to trade with Persia, shipping woolen cloth and acquiring in return fine Russian furs and Persian silks. Elizabeth’s palaces would later glow with that valuable commodity Russian wax, while as historian Mildred Wretts-Smith has put it, ‘the fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada was largely rigged with Russian cordage and cables.’

The author was a semi-finalist in the New Generation Thinkers competition, a talent-search and media-development program run jointly by the BBC and the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council to help early-career arts and humanities researchers turn complex academic research into engaging communications. Perhaps in that spirit, Shorland peppers analyses with contemporary phrasings (“rat Elizabeth out”, “lame dad joke”), and offers modern references like The Bachelor (and even trade sanctions) to bring to life situations and their nuances. The result is a delightfully fresh perspective on an ever-fascinating subject.

Janet Wertman is the author of the Seymour Saga trilogy. Her latest work of Tudor historical fiction is What Love E’er Meant, the second installment in her Regina series

Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World

Richard Louv

Algonquin Books 2026

“Counterintuitively, even as we mourn the destruction of so many species, lands, and waters, the natural world offers us an antidote to our growing despair,” writes journalist and Audubon Medal-winner Richard Louv in his quiet and quietly odd new book Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World. “We can find relief right there in our peripheral vision, in a deep and wavering current followed by native trout, in a line of swifts living most of their lives in flight, in the tracks of a mountain lion along a worn path.”

Mountain lions haunt the book, including in some of its appealingly ghostly black-and-white photos, since Louv seems to want to concentrate on a wispy, evanescent view of the natural world, one which isn’t necessarily bounded by science, one in which kobolds and puk-wudgies and other supernatural creatures jostle alongside bobcats and turkeys and wild hogs. Indigenous “spirits” cluster in tree branches. Ancient indigenous beliefs that rocks are alive are treated as alternative possible truths rather than object errors of fact. Gaia comes up, inevitably. Well-done and sometimes genuinely funny anecdotes are rounded off with silly fortune cookie gnomic utterances:

As the group of friends stood looking at a gathering of turkey vultures on a house with a For Sale sign, my neighbor – an athletic woman who is a font of nature knowledge and who once biked across the Sahara – told us about a turkey vulture innovation. “When they’re sitting up there and they get too hot, they cool down by defecating on their own legs,” she said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

Nature is beautiful but not always pretty.

Fortunately, this kind of dippy nonsense, which actually hurts public acceptance of conservation by making the natural world sound like something that’ll exist just fine in Narnia no matter what we do to it here on Earth, is steadily counterweighted throughout Noticing by serious inquiry and agile curiosity. Louv relates plenty of nature stories from his own life, but he also talks to scientists and specialists of all kinds, including, for instance, Paco Calvo, author of the legitimately unsettling book Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence, which assembles some of the latest research into how plants think, anticipate, empathize, and cooperate without the benefit of brains or even neurons (Calvo is interviewed here but not recommended; oddly, Planta Sapiens doesn’t appear in the “Suggested Reading” list of Noticing). “Science,” Louv summarizes, “may be poised at the beginning of a new research era that will confound what humans (or at least modern humans) have assumed for generations about cognition in the green world.”

Again, it’s probably (you should pardon the word) natural that mountain lions should flit through these pages with the regularity they do, since they’re far more often rumored than observed (a guide in Louv’s book alludes to the age-old axiom: you don’t see the mountain lion, but the mountain lion sees you). They largely symbolize this author’s view of nature as both powerful (a 150-pound mountain lion can turn completely invisible in shin-high shrubbery one arm’s length from where you’re standing with your camera) and fragile, necessary to preserve.

The other, overriding sentiment of Noticing is less ambivalent and totally undeniable: walking out into wild spaces and quietly noticing the life that fills them is not only valuable but deeply personally reviving. Almost spiritual, one might say.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Shakespeare at Thirty

By Rory Loughnane

Princeton University Press 2026

For some literary folk, the title of Rory Loughnane’s new book Shakespeare at Thirty will recall the literary phenomenon of John Berryman’s 1951 series of lectures at Princeton, the first of which was titled “Shakespeare at Thirty.” Loughnane goes straight to this story and opens his book by recounting the effect the unexpected acclaim of the series had on the life and career of Berryman, then in his thirties and not yet an American poet of international renown. Rather, just like Shakespeare at thirty, he was “a relative nobody trying to find his way.”

Berryman asked his listeners to suppose with him Shakespeare the man in 1594, “waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed,” and “been congratulated” on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, and Loughnane’s book asks the same supposition and proceeds to inform it. With readable, informed ease, he paints a very detailed version of the old familiar story: the young Shakespeare deciding to leave married life in Stratford and make his way to London, where he would begin writing and attempting to enter the stage world. Loughnane cleverly invokes COVID-19 in the form of the plague that shut the London theaters at about the same time Shakespeare was first attempting to make his living in those theaters, forcing him to scamble to make ends meet. Then there were the tentative early years, writing poems dedicated to a potential patron, hacking out amateur plays, working with a host of collaborators until he’d gained enough skill and confidence (and, implicitly, acclaim) to work on his own instead of subjecting himself to the sometimes slap-dash nature of collaborative work. “The fact that Shakespeare worked with other dramatists so frequently in his career,” writes Loughnane, “and then chose to work almost exclusively on his own until much later in his career – suggests that there must have been so incentive at this time.”

In order to walk the narrative up to the doorstep of that solo career, Loughnane asks several questions: What set young Shakespeare apart from his peers? “How did he lean upon and learn from them? Who supported him? What social mechanisms, personal circumstances, and professional networks fostered his creativity?” Attempting to answer these kinds of questions, Loughnane writes this book, “which presents the available evidence with minimal conjecture.”

What follows is, of course, a Mount St. Helens eruption of conjecture.

“Sometime in 1594, most likely late that year, [Shakespeare] joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men playing company and became their de facto company dramatist,” Loughnane writes. “Young Shakespeare was connected professionally with other dramatists – George Peele, Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nashe,” he writes at another point. Statements like this droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven throughout the book, and they garland a pleasant narrative of a young man on the make. Is it a fact that Shakespeare became the de facto company dramatist of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men? Is it a fact that he was connected professionally with Christopher Marlowe? Is there even a single fact about Shakespeare’s “personal circumstances” from the mid-1580s to the mid-1590s that touches on his creativity in any way? Do we, in fact, actually know much of anything about Shakespeare at thirty? When Loughnane declares “These are the facts, plain and simple,” long-time readers of Shakespeare books will heave a sigh. The heart is sorely charged.

Loughnane necessarily offers periodic qualifications to all his plaster-of-Paris. Documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s whereabouts during the mid-1580s is “lacking,” he concedes, and he buffers many other passages with the customary “we can have little doubt,” “a best guess,” “it would have been natural,” and the ever-reliable “surely.” As in all Shakespeare books, these kinds of hedges begin to pile up like the snows of  yesteryear. “Reading retrospectively,” Loughnane warns his readers at one point, seemingly unaware of likewise needing the warning himself, “we are tempted to recognize the potential for certain actions in others that they may not have recognized in themselves.”

Shakespeare at Thirty makes for very lively reading, and when Loughnane veers into simply analyzing Shakespeare’s writings, which he thankfully does often, he’s invariably sharp and insightful. He brings the theatrical world of early-1590s London vividly to life in all its brawling, tawdry multiplicity. And if he ever felt like writing Berryman in His Thirties, for which there are ample facts plain and simple, he should be encouraged to do so.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Hobbit

By JRR Tolkien

Illustrated by Tove Jansson

William Morrow 2026

From a publishing point of view, just as from a normal-human point of view, the main problem with JRR Tolkien is he eventually stopped writing and died. Every jot and comma of his writing has been published and re-published; every piece of his work, major and minor, has been packaged and re-packaged. The challenge becomes one of sheer inventiveness: after all this time, how do present the old familiar masterpieces in new and interesting ways, in order both to entice new readers and titillate the collector impulses of old fans. Some of these efforts will be misfires, obviously, but others will be genuinely fascinating.

Firmly in the ‘fascinating’ camp in 2026, on the eve of 2027’s 90th anniversary of the book’s appearance, comes a new edition of Tolkien’s beloved 1937 children’s classic The Hobbit, with illustrations by Tove Jansson, the genius artist of the Moomin books. She was commissioned to illustrate Tolkien’s book in 1960, went at the job with her usual fervid obsession, and saw the finished results in 1962 when the Swedish-language Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr appeared. The Jansson-illustrated Hobbit has never appeared in the English-language market before, so this hefty pink-and-blue edition, with its heavy stock paper and its full-color end papers and its cloth bookmark marks a publishing event that should please every Tolkien fan.

The publisher’s presentation of the book is downright odd. It arrives like an orphan in wicker basket, without so much as a word pinned to its blanket. There’s no Introduction, no details of Jansson’s life or work for readers who might not know the story, no context of any kind except a seven-line two-sentence bit of business printed on the back. The story of the Swedish Hobbit isn’t given here. The translator of Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr isn’t even named, much less detailed (or even interviewed, if that translator hasn’t moved on to the halls of Mandos). And perhaps the most intriguing lost opportunity of all: this is simply the text of The Hobbit, not a new English-language translation of the Swedish translation. Ten years ago, for instance, Overlook brought out an English-language translation of the Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; they called it Powers of Darkness, and it was as fascinating for its eccentricities as for its loyalties to the original. Did Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr have the same kind of eccentricities? Might this sturdy pink-and-blue volume have been called Bilbo and read teasingly different from the book readers know and love?

There’s none of that here. Like an unexpected party, it just shows up and raps on the door. There’s an odd-looking little fellow on the cover, carrying a shield and halberd but wearing a nightcap, and there’s a dragon flying over jagged mountains, and the interior illustrations are likewise full of surprises, including, famously, a Gollum who towers over Bilbo Baggins.

But it’s just that and nothing more. Tove Jansson gave interviews about her experience illustrating The Hobbit; they could have been translated and included here. Her editor, a Tolkien enthusiast, likewise wrote about the process of producing Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr; she’s not included here. That Swedish edition’s odd and ambling series of post-publication adventures make interesting reading and could have been written up here – a dozen Tolkien fans would have been happy to do such basic contextualizing for free if Harper Collins decided to get stingy.

At least it’s here, and it’s pretty. It’s a terrible lost opportunity on many fronts, but it’s here, and it’s pretty.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Chaucer’s England

By Nicholas Orme

Yale University Press 2026

For “Chaucer’s England,” the title of Nichols Orme’s new book, we can set rough guidelines extending either for the length of Chaucer’s own life, from the early 1340s to 1400, or more broadly for the whole of the 14th century, and we can immediately celebrate the fact that no previous century of human life has had a more generous and knowing portrait than the one Chaucer gave to his own time in the pages of The Canterbury Tales (no subsequent era has had such a portrait either, unless maybe the “USA” trilogy of John Dos Passos qualifies). In that work, Chaucer imagines a group of diverse travelers on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, beguiling their travel by telling stories that range across the whole of their world and flesh it in such detail that an actual historical study of “Chaucer’s England” seems almost unnecessary.

The fourteenth century famously saw war, massive social upheavals, and, in Chaucer’s boyhood, the Black Death sweeping away an unthinkable percentage of Europe’s population and leaving, as Orme notes, a far less populated world for Chaucer to bustle about in than the one his grandparents would have known.

In other words, Chaucer’s England was anything but boring, which raises the question of why Chaucer’s England too often is. One suspects this is partly the effect of rote habit. Who knows how many times Orme, an Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, has covered this same material for drowsy students? Explain who Chaucer was; explain what Canterbury was; explain what The Canterbury Tales are; at least attempt to explain whatever the hell a “manciple” was. There’s no other practical route. The whole thing itself can start to feel like the one thing Chaucer’s own book never does: a dutiful pilgrimage.

This can be avoided only through generous helpings of historical insight and literary verve. Both of these things were present in abundance for Orme’s earlier book, Tudor Children, but they’re comparatively thin on the ground in Chaucer’s England. The book is beautifully produced by Yale University Press: sharp color pictures of manor houses, taverns, gravesite monuments, and deep forests fill the pages. And Orme’s command of The Canterbury Tales itself is sweepingly, easily complete. Every time Chaucer so much as alludes to a chapel or a mixing bowl or hunting dog, Orme is right on hand to explain the thing within an inch of its life. The Shipman’s vessel, for instance, the Maudelayne, is “technically a barge propelled by sails and oars, and so, more easily maneuvered in harbors or sea fights.” Good to know.

“The literary writers of the late fourteenth century offer valuable insights towards our understanding of their England,” Orme writes. “Chaucer and Langland in particular observed so much that was going on, as this book has shown.” Orme also provides insights, as when he mentions how Chaucer’s Prioress is so tender-hearted to animals that she feeds stray dogs with meat, milk, and bread, prompting Orme to remark, “Here Chaucer is at his most censorious,” he writes. “This was food for humans. It was a Christian’s duty to give up any surpluses left to the poor.”

Orme’s Chaucer’s England is better designed and more visually engaging than the Chaucer’s England by Diana Childress in 2000. It’s far more readable and less pedagogically dense than Barbara Hanawalt’s Chaucer’s England from 1992. It has less sweep and only a fraction of the eloquence of Matthew Browne’s Chaucer’s England from 1869, but it costs around $40 rather than whatever gouging amounts the dealers are charging for Browne’s volumes. Nobody wins any prizes for original titling, but as a companion to reading and enjoying The Canterbury Tales, Orme’s book works hard to be indispensable.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City

By Daniel Burke & Scott Detrow

Flatiron Books 2026

As the life stories of so many public figures demonstrate, writing biographies of still-extant people is inherently perilous. Lincoln goes to the theater. Byron dies in Greece. Prince Charles finally gets a new job. And suddenly, every existing biography written in the hope of pro tem viability is tinnily outdated.

NPR religion editor Daniel Burke and “All Things Considered” cohost Scott Detrow are likely aware of this danger, particularly since it hovers over their new book American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City. This is the story of Robert Prevost’s dorky youth and hyper-earnest young manhood as he entered the Church and the Augustinian Order, and although in their telling he seems to have been a cheerful, intelligent, multifaceted figure, there’d even so be no book about him if he weren’t going on to become Pope Leo XIV in 2025.

It's interesting to watch him deal with the Church matters of his day, including the massive sex scandal that broke into public awareness twenty years ago, although his response was circumspect to the point of being mealy-mouthed, with him writing to his Augustian leaders in 2003, “I am sorry to have to write such a letter, but it is extremely important that we be prepared to respond compassionately and responsibly if there are cases of wrongdoing on the part of any of our brothers.” Which is, given the fact that the wrongdoing is decades of child molestation and the intentional shuffling around of known child predators, pretty much the bare moral minimum (particularly since the comment is unclear on who’s receiving the compassionate responses).

The portrait presented here is, oddly enough, that of a comfortingly ordinary man. This underscores what is naturally the most remarkable thing to happen to this ordinary man. At the death of Pope Francis, the princes of the Church assemble to discuss and debate (and, as our authors make clear, eat, good Lord, how cardinals eat). The book sees some of this through the perspective of US Cardinal Timothy Dolan, a charismatic Trump-thug who relates the dark horse nature of Prevost’s chances at ascending to the throne of Saint Peter:

Dolan had been a public face of the American church for two decades. But sitting in the General Congregation meetings, he began to consider that the first American pontiff might be a radically different kind of figure. During one of the meetings’ many coffee breaks, he brought an espresso to an older cardinal, one who was too old to vote in the conclave. They sat there together in the auditorium sipping their drinks.

“So, who do you think?” Dolan asked.

The older cardinal looked down toward a group of their peers at the front of the room. He pointed at Prevost.

The authors do their best to highlight the position of this new Pope facing an uncertain future and “massive technological change.” “The math major and canon lawyer had taken note as artificial intelligence, in particular, had exponentially advanced by leaps and bounds, largely without any moral guidelines or boundaries shaping its use and development.”

AI, yes indeed. But American Pope was likely still in drafts when US Vice President James David Donald Bowman Vance said the Pope should be “careful” when talking about theology. The book had not yet been printed when the US President called this Pope a “loser.” The book was only just in bookstores when Pope Leo underwent surgery for lung cancer. His Holiness is over 70, but even so, American Pope is something of a prologue. The papacy will be the point of the life, and with any luck, that papacy might still have ten very eventful years to go. Maybe we can look for a sequel in 2036.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Weimar Republic: The Death of a Democracy

By Victor Sebestyen

Pantheon 2026

How and why the Nazis gained power in the 1930s, ultimately unleashing the deadliest war in human history, has been the subject of immense historical analysis and debate for decades. The bottomless inquiry is largely led by a desire to prevent the next potential catastrophe or vile dictator-to-be. While the ‘how’ is relatively clear, the ‘why’ remains an enigma, one that is particularly relevant in today’s tumultuous political climate. In his latest book Weimar Republic: The Death of a Democracy, Victor Sebestyen attempts to untangle the cultural, political, economic, and psychological forces that dissolved democracy and opened the door for fascism. In a blended work of history and journalistic storytelling, Sebestyen immerses readers within the short-lived Weimar Republic, a booming, blistering culture utterly unaware of the horrors looming on the horizon.

The fallout of WWI left Europe in a state of unprecedented devastation, not merely in terms of human casualties and financial ruin, but political devastation as well. The 1917 Russian Revolution saw the overthrow of the Romanovs and Germany, too, witnessed the abdication by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty’s 400-year rule as the war on the Western Front drew to a close. In Weimar Germany, Sebestyen quickly catches readers up to speed with an overview of the German Revolution of 1918, establishment of the Weimar Republic, and the political assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The focus then shifts to the newly formed Ebert government, whose initial moves included removing previously restrictive censorship and giving free rein to artistic expression–reforms that immediately “began to divide the country and became one of many aspects of modern life that drove people further apart.” From the revolutionary Bauhaus school to the hypnotic dancing of Anita Berber to raunchy cabaret numbers, Sebestyen dazzles in his intertwining of artistic and cultural developments into the historical narrative at its foundation. Spanning thirty-six chapters, the work follows a largely linear timeline, but frequently dips into isolated chapters on the emergence of the “New Woman,” rampant drug use and prostitution, American-imported Jazz, and all sorts of distinguishing characteristics that mark this infamous era.

Balancing these digressions, Sebestyen uncovers the forces leading to widespread desperation and frantic cultural unraveling across the nation. An examination of reports and public response makes clear that the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not the sole cause of resentment and political radicalism, but they thrust the country into deeper economic collapse, worsened unemployment, and fueled the reactionary Right, which already seethed at the so-called “November criminals.” Sebestyen outlines how the political center was already hollowing out by the 1920s, with an overwhelming number of youth aligning with the Right and as the country continued to drift toward ultranationalism. In addition to its lack of legitimacy and the radical cultural shifts that polarized the country, the republic was politically weakened by the refusal of the highest judges to rule in favor of the Reichstag’s sweeping reforms. Choked by political violence and financial strife, German citizens grew increasingly open to vitriolic rhetoric as long as it came from a zealous, seemingly forceful leader. And although popularity of the communist party persisted in the Weimar Republic, a division between socialists and communists crippled the Left as Sebestyen explains:

Despite the misery of the poor and the working class in the Depression, the mass unemployment and the fast-growing popularity of the Nazis, the socialists and Communists, for their own party reasons, could never find a way to work together - or even to stop fighting each other on the streets. A suicidal error, as it made life so much easier for the Far Right, which was adept at exploiting the splits on the Left.

Attempting to break new ground is quite difficult when the subject is the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, yet Sebestyen manages to deliver an intriguing examination of the pivotal and compelling period. His narrative is well-paced, seamlessly drawing upon quotes and experiences from prominent artists and revolutionary figures to construct thrilling accounts that paint a vivid image of mercurial Berlin. However, Sebestyen’s limitations and journalistic tendencies appear and hinder the work’s shelf life. He too often dates his analysis with modern references and draws upon the current political atmosphere to construct parallels—some useful and others paper thin. His explanations remain surface-level when discussing the major moments, such as the 1930 election and the dissolution of the Reichstag, which is recounted in a few paragraphs.

Written in the midst of global political uncertainty, Weimar Republic is a gripping and relevant historical work. More than a broad overview of post-war Germany, Sebestyen educates and entertains readers on the cultural and artistic elements that defined the era and became generationally influential. Limited in rigor and scope, it fails to deliver a thorough examination of the political and economic movements, but by sacrificing those details, sheds a brighter light on the artistic scene. Though not a defining work on the transient republic, it serves as an equally engaging and informative read.

Brock Covington is an entrepreneur and writer. He can be found on the YouTube channel "The Active Mind" and on his substack: brockcovington.substack.com

Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War

By Catherine Grace Katz

Viking 2026

If the 21st century knows anything at all about the disaster of the Hindenburg, likely two items suggest themselves: the quick black-and-white video taken on May 6, 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey, showing the massive airship being consumed in flames as it sinks to the airstrip, and the accompanying audio by news broadcaster Herb Morrison, famously sobbing “Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers …”

Historian Catherine Grace Katz fleshes out that bare-bones picture smartly and elaborately in her new book Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War, and the corny portentousness of the title is matched, unfortunately, by long patches of oddly clunky prose throughout the text itself, sometimes clogging the story’s momentum even at what should be the peak of excitement:

“It burst into flames! It burst into flames and it’s falling! It’s crashing!” Herb Morrison shouted as the Hindenburg, which had been standing still before him just a moment ago, was suddenly engulfed in fire. To some on the ground, it looked as if, just for a moment, a tiny light had appeared on the Hindenburg’s cover just in front of the tail like a flame from a paper match smoldering at a distance. Almost instantaneously, a neon glow ran along the nearby riblike girders. Then a burst of light appeared, which erupted into a giant inferno near the airship’s tail as the crowd around Morrison let out a terrified scream. Before anyone could register what they had just seen, the entire tail section of the zeppelin was consumed in a fireball spitting tongues of flames up into the sky as if the Hindenburg were made of flash paper.

That “giant inferno” occupies dead center of Katz’s narrative, which extends beyond it into the usual follow-up of what happened to all the witnesses and survivors, as well as what happened to the zeppelin industry itself. But more intriguingly, Katz also extends her story backwards from that immortal moment, examining in satisfying detail something that people tend to forget: the giant airship that died so famously at Lakehurst, New Jersey had a tail fin decorated with an enormous swastika. Katz chronicles not only the burgeoning of airships as a means of fast luxury travel (on the one hand, you could make an Atlantic crossing in half the time of a steamship; on the other hand, well, the Hindenburg disaster – ironically, the Hindenburg and the Titanic were about the same length) but also its increasing co-option by the Nazi state, which Katz views with a very effective combination of scorn and caution. “Beneath the Nazis’ regular bouts of buffoonery, the threat of what still could come lingered palpably over the correspondent corps,” she writes of those earlier, darkening days. “Small but obvious signs were everywhere.”

But it’s the few moments of the disaster itself that must ultimately command any Hindenburg book, and Katz has assembled an intensely-packed catalog of grotesqueries, from a mother throwing her little children out a window of the burning craft without being sure she wasn’t simply throwing them to their death to a passenger who was careful to remove his false teeth before he hurled himself from a rail way and hoped to survive the impact. Even here, at the heart of the story, an odd awkwardness lingers around the book’s prose:

“Everybody outside,” Lehmann commanded as he went out the starboard window. Pruss, Sammt, Wittemann, and the other officers did the same. It was still about a five-meter drop, and Sammt landed on all fours. Pruss was disoriented as he landed and ran backward into the raging flames, disappearing into a wall of fire as the bright-white smoke of hydrogen was quickly replaced by black clouds of burning diesel fuel.

Ran backward? Like in a circus act?

For the most part, Shadow Before the Flame manages to recover from this kind of bumpy passage. Certainly it’s the fullest and most richly contextualized history of the Hindenburg disaster to appear in English. Readers will approach those famous few seconds of Herb Morrison sobbing with an enhanced awareness of the bigger picture.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Forsaken Founder: Gouverneur Morris, the Unsung Patriot Who Wrote the Constitution, Stood Up to Slavery, and Survived the Reign of Terror

By Scott S. Greenberger

37 Ink/Simon & Schuster 2026

Ten years ago, Scott Greenberger produced his delightfully table-overturning book The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur, in which he took the 21st President of the United States and insisted he was not, in fact, a buffoonish walrus but rather a secretly significant trailblazer unjustly forgotten by history.

In his new book, The Forgotten Founder, his subject is that perennial Founding Father dark horse, Gouverneur Morris, who “reorganized the ragtag Continental Army into a force that vanquished the preeminent military power of the age,” “played a pivotal role in putting the new nation on solid financial footing,” and “rewrote the final draft [of the Constitution] so that it did not endorse slavery – either explicitly or implicitly.” Oh, and designed the street grid of New York. “James Madison? The president was often drunk on wine or high on opium and so withered that his wife had signaled her openness to an affair,” Greenberger writes, directing the reader’s attention instead to his man Morris: “He was the penman of the Constitution, and the sole author of its eloquent Preamble.”

As might be guessed from such opening remarks, Greenberger has no intention of being a faint-hearted fan. He can draw something of a decorous veil over the man’s scabrous philandering, although more public performances present a steeper challenge, as when Morris heaved and stumped to the front of a crowd in 1799 to mumble his way through a tribute to George Washington, who’d died a few days earlier (before reading the plea Morris had sent him at Mount Vernon, urging him to run for a third term as President):

The City of New York asked him to deliver a eulogy at St. Paul’s Chapel. “In him were the courage of the soldier, the intrepidity of a chief, the fortitude of a hero,” Morris said. “He loved glory, but still more he loved his country.” Though he fretted afterward that he had botched the delivery, he sent copies of the address to friends in Europe – a gesture not of vanity but of reverence. Washington had been his moral compass; he wanted the Old World to know what America had lost.

He had, in fact, botched his delivery, and his mass-circulation of his bland remarks was, in fact, a gesture of vanity, but it’s nice to have a talented biographer for a friend. It comes in handy, for instance, if you continue to botch your public speeches. Morris was ushered to the bedside of the dying Alexander Hamilton, most famously, and then later gave a eulogy for the friend who’d been his enemy for so many years. He botched this eulogy too, but Greenberger is ready:

Posterity judged the eulogy much as Morris had feared: less a stirring oration than an act of moral composure. Yet in its restraint lay its power. Where others demanded retribution, Morris offered dignity; where grief might have flamed into civil chaos, he preached order and mercy. History came to see it not as a failure of passion, but as the last service one founder could render another – a farewell that steadied a mourning nation rather than inflaming it.

Greenberger’s reclaiming zeal worked to make his President Arthur biography so enjoyable, and it works the same magic here. This forgotten Founding Father has had a great many biographies (somewhere, James Otis must be seething), but none so entertaining as this one. “Our most colorful Founding Father has been denied his rightful place in American history,” Greenberger insists. “It’s time to set the record straight.”

Melanie Miller had the same mission in her 2024 book on the unjustly forgotten Morris. So did Dennis Rasmussen in his 2023 book on the unjustly forgotten Morris. And James Kirschke in 2005. And Richard Brookhiser in 2003. Theodore Roosevelt, writing for the great old American Statesmen series, banged the drum of the forgotten Morris particularly stoutly in 1888. So did Jared Sparks in 1832, when some of the Morris bastards were just hitting puberty. These biographers are railing against the injustice of how history bestows its laurels, and of course they know better, know that this process can’t be forced and is indifferent to actual merit. Gourverneur Morris will go right on being forsaken, much to the relief of the publishing industry.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 4 – 1937-1946

Edited by Robert Bernard Hass, Henry Atmore, Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2026

The Belknap Press continues its superbly authoritative collection of the letters of Robert Frost with volume 4, the penultimate volume, covering the years 1937 to 1946. It’s a big hefty volume, lovingly and magnificently annotated, covering years that were full of tragedy for the great poet (the death of his wife, his son), surprise joy (falling in love, after the age when some men expect it), and the steadily-strengthening reality of his own celebrity. He’d already won three Pulitzers by the time this volume opens and would go on to win his fourth by the time it ends. Students, shop clerks, stock traders, and scholars read his work with the kind of shared enjoyment that had been known by figures like Longfellow before him but would be known to no American poet after him. And as editors Robert Bernard Hass, Henry Atmore, Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson make clear in their brief, insightful Introduction to this volume, the experience still had the power to amaze the man himself:

As the thirties gave way to the forties, and the forties to the fifties, he would attain bona fide celebrity. Already in March 1936 he could write his son Carol about the reception of the lectures he gave as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard: “I’ve never been welcomed anywhere with the noise and enthusiasm I met with … You’d think I was some musical hero.” It would grow harder for him to keep from being king when it was in him and in situation. His poetry had developed, if not a ring of false commerciality, than anyway an occasional ring of generalized Rotarian dicta.

In these letters, we see Frost’s fame steadily emboldening what earlier volumes in this series made clear was an inherent propensity for flintiness. At almost every turn in this latest volume, even, perhaps touchingly, in the missives that approach the closest to being love letters, we see the struggles of a man for whom expected kindliness was a distinct strain that often cracked. When he’s fretting about being appointed Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow in Poetry at Harvard, he protests a bit too much to his friend Robert Hillyer (eschewing, as per usual, apostrophes):

Listen! I have scared myself with what I have set going. It wont do for me to profess Latinity. I have been warned off already. [Arthur Stanley, of Harvard] Pease though writing warmly to welcome my idea, yet winds up with the suggestion that I might like John Finley as a watcher in my classes. Don’t I know those bozos from of old? They are too humanistic to be human. I am only fooling myself if I think that large treatment can make them over into anything but what they are. Dont let me speak scornfully of them. They have their proper pride in their peculiar knowledges that I would be the last one to want to reduce.

These are the first years when Frost can feel free to fully embody the talismanic grumpiness that would go on to become an even visual reference for the man. Partly, as these letters make clear, this was a measure of self-defence. Fame brought fame-seekers. Opportunists, schemers, and good-hearted but overreaching folk started to want more from Frost than he was willing to give, and they got blunter and blunter responses, as in 1942 when the representative of the Rocky Mountain Writers’ Conference were congenially snapped at:

Now listen. You dont want me kicking round at my age for nothing. I can’t run here and there for the sake of running. There must be some return proportioned to my expenditure of strength. Seven hundred dollars wont be enough to bring me to the Coast. And there must be some warmth of assurance that somebody wants me besides you and Earle Bernheimer. I haven’t had one word of invitation yet from anybody but you. Unless you make things look better – more inviting – right away, Im afraid you will have to give me up, and make up your mind to get along with only my ghostly presence at your conferences …

As with the earlier volumes in this series, this fourth volume is a quiet marvel of concentrated scholarship. Every quotidian detail undergirding these letters, every recoverable reference big and small, is provided as promptly, smoothly, and unobtrusively as a Buckingham Palace equerry slipping you a breath mint before you fully realize you want one. And the result is something at once more demanding than a standard biography of Frost would be (not that these are exactly thick on the ground, Jay Parini’s terrific book being now distinctly long in the tooth) but entirely more satisfying.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

In Paperback: Paul of Dune

By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Tor 2026

Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have written 19 books set in the “Dune” science fiction universe created by Herbert’s father Frank, author Dune and its five sequels. Those original six novels covered thousands of years of a future history in which humanity has developed a quasi-feudal arrangement in which the noble houses of the Landsraad counterbalance the more mercantile organizations, and all are ruled by an emperor. And since this history is not scrupulously contiguous, there are gaps in the storyline that act like dinner signs to any writer seeking to fill them in.

There were plenty of those fan fiction writers before Herbert’s own son tried his hand at it, teaming up with Kevin Anderson for 1999’s Dune: House Atreides. But this and all subsequent novels had the imprimatur of Brian Herbert’s surname and the aegis of Tor Publishing, and they fed the appetite of Dune fans who earnestly wished Frank Herbert had written more books about Paul Atreides, the spice, the sand worms, and the desert planet Dune.

Herbert and Anderson dutifully recreate the names and settings of those original six novels by Herbert’s father, and they zero in on virtually every gap or lacuna found anywhere in Frank Herbert’s books.

One of the most notorious of those gaps is the one between Dune and Dune Messiah. At the end of Frank Herbert’s blockbuster original novel, widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, young Paul Atreides has managed to seize the emperor’s throne, marry the emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan, and positioned himself to unleash his savage Fremen hordes on a complacent galaxy. At the beginning of Dune Messiah, years have passed, the Fremen jihad has conquered the galaxy under his flag, and Paul has learned the bitter realities of imperial rule.

2008’s pastiche novel Paul of Dune seeks to tell the story of that gap, and after nearly 20 years, Tor has re-issued the book in a little trader paperback with lovely new cover art by Sonia Lai.

In this book, Paul is facing the practical nuances of establishing his rule. In a thematic concentration that runs throughout the book, this process involves an intricate balancing act between Paul’s two halves: the son of House Atreides who managed a successful coup against as sitting emperor, and Muad’Dib, the religious leader commanding the fanatic loyalty of the Fremen (some variation of “If Muad’Dib commands it, we will obey” is repeated roughly 500,000 times in the course of this book’s 500 pages). And instead of reading Frank Herbert delicately sketch this balancing act in fine brush-strokes, we get his son and co-writer … simply explaining it all:

Though Paul’s prescience told him he had to win many victories, he hoped to prevail on most leaders of the Imperium with subtlety and intelligence, using sophisticated means of persuasion. His mother had already begun to make overtures for him. He had to demonstrate that surrender to and alliance with Muad’Dib was a smart decision, the best alternative. The only alternative. But in order to accomplish that, he needed to employ the Paul Atreides side of his brain, rather than the raw Fremen side of Maud’Dib. Through all available means, he needed to control what remained of the Landsraad. He needed to gather allies.

Paul has the support of his Fremen, including the fanatical but scheming Korba, and he relies on his mother, Lady Jessica, and his family’s faithful retainer, Gurney Halleck. And when he briefly returns to his home planet of Caladan, he seems to gain another supporter, the foppish Ginaz Swordsmaster Bludd (every bit as cringe-worthy has Frank Herbert’s character Hayt — it seems to be a family trait; Brian’s lucky he wasn’t christened Wheelbarrow or Moonblossom). Bludd is easily the book’s most memorable character (not exactly a reassuring recommendation, considering the book’s title), a fascinating combination of pomposity and deviousness. He knew Paul when the Fremen savior was a child, and this gives him the kind of presumption that leads him into intrigue and eventually peril. The process is skillfully put forward as an exemplar of what a great many old Atreides retainers must have experienced during this period in Frank Herbert’s story. Every time Bludd confronts Korba, each bristles with possessiveness over the side of Paul they know best:

Bludd couldn’t believe this desert fighter would try to engage in a game of one-upmanship with him. In response, he said, “I knew Paul Atreides when he was just a stripling, and I saved his life when your mother was still scraping out the stink of your swaddling clothes. Read your history, Korba — Imperial history. Divvy Dinari got most of the credit, but I was there with him at the wedding massacre. I know the truth, and so does Paul.”

“Imperial history,” Korba sneered. “Paul Atreides. I speak of Muad’Dib, not the son of a Landsraad nobleman. His life before he came to Sietch Tabr and took the name of Usul  has little relevance now.”

“You cannot know a man by half his life,” Bludd said, annoyed. “Isn’t that why Princess Ireland wrote his biography, which you all carry around like a holy textbook?”

Paul of Dune never quite feels like any of Frank Herbert’s original Dune novels. But Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson are by this point old hands at spinning science fiction yarns, and this one satisfies.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

1942: Crux of War

By Jonathan Parshall

Oxford University Press, 2026

Take every quality of every conflict prior to it that your mind can conceive of, then begin multiplying, intensifying, widening, or deepening them, as the case may be. Next, stir in a host of new ingredients from radar to rocketry and the atomic bombs. Finally, reach for every superlative in your repertoire and apply them liberally – you’ll run out, but at this point you will start to have a decent picture of the Second World War.

It isn’t possible, in other words, to really get your arms around the subject. As a result, every historian has an angle, a remit, or a premise that guides them. Sometimes it’s Ian Toll expertly recounting the naval war between the United States and Japan, Rick Atkinson narrating the US Army’s role in liberating Europe, or Pritt Butar attempting (apparently) to write about everything that happened on the Eastern Front. In more revisionist ‘idea-based’ instances, we might read Sean McMeekin arguing that Stalin, not Hitler, was the driving force behind the war, or Phillips Payson O’Brien reasoning that “there were no decisive battles in World War II” and instead focusing on the theater sized “super-battlefields” of the air and sea.

Adding to the immense literature of this colossal war is Jonathan Parshall’s new and exactingly titled 1942: Crux of War, which seems to try to scale itself to the subject, right down to its physical construction. It is a non-standard sized hardcover clocking in shy of 1300 pages, chalked with rich maps and visuals, a deep bibliography in which he cites all the ‘right’ people (Glantz & House on Stalingrad, Richard Frank on Guadalcanal, Mark Harrison on economics, and so on), and peppered full of lively and knowing notes (sometimes just the former, when Parshall first cites Clausewitz, his footnote hilariously reads: “Drink! For it is written that all serious students of military history shall raise glasses when the name of the great Prussian military thinker is invoked”).

Parshall argues that 1942, with the U.S. having entered the war in December 1941, was “the critical year of World War II, and its tipping point.” Specifically, it “was the only year either side could have shaped a course to ultimate victory.” So concatenated to the facts of this crucial year itself, Parshall is giving his theory of the case, of the war as a whole. The drumbeat of that case comes down to a word: contingency.

Parshall effectively situates his approach between books “. . .purporting to describe the critical battle or turning point in this or that theater of the Second World War,” and conceptually novel (Sean McMeekin, Phillips Payson O’Brien) and deterministic accounts (Paul Kennedy): “The moral of the story is that the outcome of this global conflict, at least during 1942, was contingent on hundreds of events and on the gradual improvement of Allied military performance.”

He simultaneously draws on these accounts, and gently pushes against them, by narratively taking the year globally and month-by-month while answering an array of outlined fundamental questions, “the answers to which, cumulatively, compose the answer to the most important matter of all: who was going to win this war?”  That is to say, he gives battles like Guadalcanal and Stalingrad their due, in authorly zest and page dedication, while not assigning them war-changing status; likewise, he marvelously details the practical and administrative nuts-and-bolts of war economy and engagingly illustrates the personalities and consequences of commanders at war, while equally denying them any sort of monocausality: “The Allies couldn’t win the war by virtue of their larger wallets alone. They had to fight, and fight well, when things looked really bleak.”

Still, it must be said, a principal impression of this book is that given a certain level of military competence, organization and economics were the rub of the war - and here it was not an equal fight. The punch-drunk Axis Powers were running on fumes from the start:

Despite Goebbels’s successful propaganda efforts to portray the Reich as an industrial and military juggernaut, Germany was in no way positioned for a sustained effort when war broke out in 1939, because it was already living hand to mouth. The only reason Germany had subsequently been able to undertake BARBAROSSA was because of the haul of war booty, trucks, and petroleum that it had captured after its campaign against France.

And then in 1942 we see that “Deep in America’s heartland, and behind the shield of the Urals, the armories that would pound the Reich to rubble were already being put in place.” Furthermore, as he understates the point, “it certainly didn’t hurt to have their [the Allies] war effort underwritten by the hefty bank account of the world’s richest nation.”

In short (perhaps an inappropriate phrase for this behemoth book), the arc of 1942 has a definite form: 1941 ends and 1942 begins with the Axis Powers malevolently and freely stomping over their theaters of operations, from Russia and North Africa to Southeast Asia and the Pacific; as the year progressed, the “foundational bankruptcy” of Axis strategy began to show and they could only hope their “excellence on the operational level” would compensate; by the end of 1942, as Parshall masterfully demonstrates, they had “failed most of their crucial tests” while “the Allies had passed most of their own.” Finally, looking ahead, the brute result of the morbid drama of the year was that “After 1942, the Allies would never ultimately be denied in any theater.”

This book, of course, is not so businesslike in its exposition. Incessantly informative at every level and rendered in sprightly idiomatic prose - where which German attacks hit like a “spring-loaded cement block to the face” and American “soldiers and sailors” are “greener than St. Paddy’s Day” - Parshall’s communicable love for the subject will, at its heights, have even veterans of the subject bouncing in their easy chairs (see The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal) – and, in the end, left deeply impressed.

In his generally forgotten history of the Second World War, Francis Trevelyan Miller described the event as “the greatest story in the annals of mankind.” It is a story that affronts comprehensiveness and requires simplification, but goads authors to set fire their pen and write history worthy of it. With 1942: The Crux of War, Johnathan Parshall has delivered and raised a banner title of Second World War literature.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.

Country People

By Daniel Mason

Random House, 2026

Literary critics are fraud investigators.  Our jobs are complicated because what we investigate are admitted frauds—fictions and poems.  We are on the lookout for what can be called secondary fraudulent activity, works that are not what they pretend to be.  Zadie Smith’s novel The Fraud?  A historical novel pretty much innocent of unnecessary fictionalizing.  I looked into Daniel Mason’s novel Country People for admittedly personal reasons.  It was described in glowing reviews as about college life in a small Vermont town.  I grew up in Calvin Coolidge’s home hamlet Plymouth, worked in the woods and on roads with old Green Mountain Boys (probably called “hillbillies” in West Virginia), and even taught at a college in little Northfield, Vermont.  By the way, reviewers can be fraudulence accomplices, sharing the fraud’s desire to please readers.  Another by the way: we fraud investigators take no pleasure in our work; we serve to protect you, the literary consumers.

Country People is called a novel, but really it’s a tale like the anything-can-happen Russian folk tales that the 44-year-old protagonist collects, writes about, and adapts for bedtime stories he tells his two children.  Mason mentions Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” It’s necessary to appreciate tall or small tales, but try as I might the further this tale went on the more my suspenders stretched out and I began to feel manipulated. 

I resented Mason’s bait and switch.  Country People does begin like a novel, an academic novel, the visiting professor subset that David Lodge made popular years ago.  A brilliant Milton scholar and her husband, who has spent 14 years not writing his Ph.D. dissertation, and their two primary school children leave the familiar world of Silicon Valley so the professor can teach at Greensbury College in southern Vermont.  Not to be confused with Middlebury College or Bennington College or any other factual locations, for all are invented.  The investigator had just a flicker of suspicion.  Reportedly someone who escaped COVID in New England, Daniel Mason may have never lived in Vermont.

I almost forgot the lovable dog, described as a member of the family who gets about as much space in the book as the two children.  Homeless people know the appeal of having a dog lying next to their signs.  The son seems to have escaped from one of Richard Powers’ novels about child prodigies.  The younger girl becomes a remarkably skilled skier.  Their father Miles is a familiar figure in college novels, a good parent but socially inept and an incurable procrastinator.   Arriving in the summer, the family loves Vermont, even though their rented house is full of rats.  They also have minor problems with small-town food and men who can talk only about lawnmowers.  But Miles eventually takes unlikely pleasure in learning how to use a scythe from another husband accompanying a wife teaching at the college.  In the winter, Miles takes unlikely joy in learning how to cross-country ski from a Norwegian import.

The tale is not outrageous, but where are the promised “country people”?  I know Vermont has been overrun by foliage fanatics and snow-sliders, what natives call “down-country folks.”  But given Mason’s title, I was led to expect some Vermont-born characters I’d call “country people,” someone like Josiah Coolidge, Cal’s cousin who tended the Plymouth dump, or Josiah’s son Warren, who, dressed in coat and tie, sold Christmas cards door to door in the summer.  Given the novel’s plethora of recent arrivals and part-time residents, and the cliches that could have been plucked from Vermont Life, I had difficulty suspending my belief that Mason’s story could have been set just about anywhere.

Anywhere with snow, because it’s in a long winter chapter that my suspension failed and my investigation activated.  Maybe Country People wasn’t a tale but a self-referring fantasy.  When Miles is injured while skiing, he meets in the local emergency room a man who uses a disability scooter and gives Miles a ride home—and then spends three nights snowbound with the family.  The man is a Black autodidact who has an old library card catalogue in his repurposed ambulance.  He collects hundreds of index cards about follies, wacky ideas, crazy theories, and persistent fraudulences, all about as fantastically unlikely as he is.  Around 1.5% of the population of Vermont is Black, so this small-town savior is quite a fortunate find or DEI discovery for Mason.  Except for his race, the man could also be a character in the Russian tale “The Blind Man and the Cripple.”

After this meta chapter on fraudulence, Mason’s tale becomes even taller or the fantasy becomes even more fantastic when Miles attends a secret coven—composed of both Vermonters and aliens—of people (including his savior) who believe in a “hollow earth” beneath the rocky ground.  Mason has made up a source and text for this belief, Jeremiah Wylkes’ Colloquies.  Maybe if Mason, like his wife, had finished his dissertation and taught in a literature department, he’d have known an American fraudster named Poe had been there first with “holes at the poles” references in his tales.  We get the names and occupations of Wylkesians but not enough to judge if they are country people.

My distrust of Mason increased when I discovered the novelist was a psychiatrist who taught at Stanford, not some starving artist in a Brooklyn or Oakland warren who is trying to make some easy money from an easy fantasy. Of course, a psychiatrist is free to make up tales or fantasies (though he might not want his patients to do so).  But wouldn’t a psychiatrist have more serious things to do?  Couldn’t he be expected to be interested in what real undereducated individual country folk were depressed by—such as woolen mills closing, family dairies losing to Big Milk, old folks putting their “antique” junk out on their lawns to sell, once proudly independent Vermonters becoming—like him the tale-teller—participants in the entertainment industry, selling farms to become building lots for second homes, cleaning rooms at ski resorts, moving into garages to become AirBNB hosts?  About the author, the investigator can only ask questions, not bring charges. 

If anything, Mason appears to mock the natives’ problems by including “transcripts” of a radio talk show where people call in to the host and his “expert guest” for practical help.  In Mason’s book, these transcripts are about the only elements that didn’t require suspension of disbelief, but the transcripts don’t address the alienation many individual Vermonters feel from their old way of life before their state became a “Winter Wonderland” for others.  Yet another, possibly relevant by the way: the investigator no longer lives in Vermont and didn’t vote for Vermont’s immigrant truth teller Bernie Sanders.

Only occasionally entertained by Mason’s casually solicitous style and burbling congeniality, I kept waiting for something I might call real or, at least, realistic, something like the sharp wit and dangerous comedy of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.”  Even a psychiatrist using “country people” as his title must know that story, where a soft-soaping Bible salesman seduces an educated woman and ends with the salesman running off with her wooden leg.  Country People has several happy endings covering everyone and the dog.  They weren’t promised but were expected and delivered.

O’Connor’s story of local color fraudulence actually applies to both Mason’s readers and to Vermonters.  Reviewers and then, presumably, readers may be seduced and pleased by his entertainment.  Vermonters were seduced by the promise of dollars that entertaining tourists could bring to the state.  Mason’s tale could be harmless; it cost me just thirty bucks.  The country people of Vermont are seeing a much higher cost: the destruction of their local culture.  Vermont was once a republic, then a state, now a playground.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, one of which, Passing Away, is about cultural change in Vermont.

The Living Realm

By Jordan Tannahill

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2026

A horrible searing drought is afflicting Berlin in Jordan Tannahill’s new novel, The Living Realm, scorching the grass and cracking the ground, all except Teufelssee, a glacial lake deep in the Grunewald forest whose waters stay every bit as cool and refreshing. Those waters attract overheated bathers, various nudists, and an assortment of gay men seeking anonymous pleasure regardless of meteorological conditions. It’s a place that attracts the narrator of Tannahill’s story, along with his friends, Birgit and Gabor, for innocent outings.

Our narrator (he doesn’t have a name, which is economical since he doesn’t have a personality either, but he’s an archeology postdoc from Cambridge) originally came to Berlin years ago at the behest of Birgit, who set him up in an archeology program at Freie Universität, straightened out his visa, and even found him his first apartment. He and Birgit and Gabor (a former elementary schoolmate of Victor Orban, obviously in self-imposed exile from Hungary) take to spending time in the woods around Teufelssee to cool off.

But things cool considerably for our narrator when he spots a man in the forest who’s an exact double for one of his long-lost lovers. It’s more than mere similarity; he’s certain it actually is Lukas, somehow transposed to the way he looked thirty years ago at his physical prime, and naturally, the vision haunts him.

He’s not overly alarmed, because he knows he’s a character in a novel. And since Birgit and Gabor likewise realize they’re supporting characters in a novel, they suggest he seek psychiatric help, but they’re not insistent about it, even when their friend starts seeing other old lovers in the forest. Even the ghost lovers seem to be wondering who’ll play them in the Hollywood adaptation.

Since Tannahill is also a playwright, the main problem with his book will be very familiar to him: that deadly second act. Once our narrator has started seeing old lovers in the forest, once those visions have no real effect on either him or anybody else, once it all starts to seem like a mere trick of the omnipresent heat (or, as distantly and whimsically suggested at one point, maybe leftover Chernobyl radiation – after all, if it can irradiate hogs, might it not resurrect hotties?), well, then what?

Tannahill’s answer, lieber Gott, is … municipal history, page after page of it, as our narrator learns the extremely detailed history of Berlin, Teufelssee, gayness, and being gay in Teufelssee in Berlin. The book is chary of paragraph breaks as it is, but that’s only made worse by frequent passages like this:

As Maes explained it, in 1134, a great storm broke through the Flemish coast and carved a fifteen-kilometer tidal inlet that, through another channel, suddenly offered sea access to the formerly inland city of Bruges, and caused the city to rise in prominence as one of the foremost centers of European trade. But this new waterway and economic lifeline, named the Zwin, began to fill with silt from the late thirteenth century onward, and by 1500 it had grown so shallow as to render it unusable, cutting off Bruges again from the sea. As merchants shifted their business activities to nearby Antwerp, Bruges stagnated, and it was during this time of economic decline and hardship, when scapegoats were sorely needed, that an explosion of sodomy cases were brought forward and prosecuted by municipal authorities. In the public records, Maes had found a marked increase in sodomy trials, convictions, and public burnings in the Grote Markt between the years 1450 and 1525.

In non-professional circles, this is what’s known as padding, and The Living Realm has more of it than a furniture showroom. This is a dead giveaway that a novel should have been a short story, and it’s hardly saved by our narrator’s eventual inner crisis, when he decides to surrender himself to whatever the heck is going on in the woods:

As much as I could grasp, I understood that there was a force that dwelled within the Teufelssee so vast, so heavy and ancient, it bent the very fabric of reality around it, bent desires, lives, and lured us to our destruction, to the very making and unmaking of meaning … I would walk deep into the darkness, as deep as it took, and I would present myself to Teufelssee, and I would demand from the shadows that they appear.

It turns out he’s not that demanding, and by the time a cute little plot twist happens in the Teufelssee late in the book, even the ghosts seem to have lost interest.

Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent

By Devon Cox

WW Norton 2026

Devon Cox visited hundreds of archives and scrutinized heaps of primary records in preparation for his new book Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent (readers will largely have to take his word for it, since the book inexcusably includes no bibliography). Sargent is described by him as the premiere artist of the Gilded Age, and what Cox found after all this research was something of a revelation:

From this reappraisal, a more complex and nuanced version of him soon began to emerge from the shadow of history. The stolid, severe, two-dimensional man was replaced with a sensitive, cerebral, flesh-and-blood man, an ambitious, wickedly funny, occasionally mischievous, modern aesthete and outsider with an insatiable curiosity, irrevocably drawn to the ‘bizarre and outlandish’ with an ‘unavowed love of rare kinds of beauty’ and for ‘incredible types of elegance,’ a man with a daring rebel spirit and antiestablishment sentiments, who harboured a fascination for criminology and the underworld; a man preoccupied with sin and salvation, who even as a child reading Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, found sympathy with the great rebel Satan, whom he considered an ‘altogether different character from what we sinners imagine.’

Quite apart from the occasionally appalling prose and whimsical punctuation, this may be the standing world’s record for the largest number of euphemisms crammed into a single paragraph of normal length. What Cox means is: Sargent was gay. Sargent might have taken pains to obscure that fact when painting socialite swells in Boston (although he was considerably less careful when cruising the demimonde of Venice), but it was never an impenetrable obscurity (the lascivious nudes of young men being something of a giveaway), and it would be a stretch to characterize it as an overriding categorization. But at least it underpins the freshness of Cox’s account, which is more up-to-date than Stanley Olsen’s life from a quarter-century ago and more energetic than Paul Fisher’s account of the painter from 2022.

The writing doesn’t get much better throughout, alas. When he’s writing about Sargent’s art world debut in 1880 at Boston’s St. Botolph Club, for instance, Cox seems actually anxious to work in as many cliches as possible:

It was the perfect venue for Sargent to stage his first solo exhibition. He needed to make a splash to draw the attention of wealthy and fashionable Bostonians, who would be his prospective patrons. He pulled out all the stops and diligently cherry-picked his very best work to showcase his broad talent.

But mostly, this life of Sargent is less concerned with wine and roses and more with whine and poses. Once Sargent’s brilliant society portraits made his professional repute and began floating a thoroughly comfortable lifestyle, he began complaining about those portraits and denigrating them as rote soulless exercises, burdensome obligations he undertook with maximum eye-rolling. Throughout the latter half of the book, these portraits are unflatteringly contrasted with the more impressionistic work he did on his own initiative. “For Sargent,” writes Cox, “the watercolours were intended to ‘keep up my morale’ and ‘console me from the rotten stuff I am doing.’” The prospect of trudging back to portraiture work was, Cox writes, “a nightmare.”

Sargent managed to complain even about commissioned work that had nothing to do with painting flattering portraits of Lord and Lady So-and-So, constantly griping about “the damned picture that is expected of me,” regardless of what the damned picture in question happened to be. When living in a gorgeous suite of rooms at Boston’s legendary Copley Plaza, he moans about the “dreary regularity” of his sumptuous catered meals and laments the prospect of spending a summer in “this empty town.”  It’s a portrait of the artist as insufferable kvetch.

Even so, it’s all undeniably entertaining. Sargent’s portraits stand in their vibrant, chatty beauty well apart from the pampered little popinjay who produced them, and the fact that a distinctly different Sargent emerges from each new biography is an amusement so fitting for a portrait painter that it almost feels contrived.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

Mahalia Jackson: Moving On Up a Little Higher:

The Story of an American Civil Rights Pioneer

By Timothy B. Tyson & Mary D. Williams

Liveright 2026

Mahalia Jackson: Moving On Up a Little Higher, a collaboration between civil rights historian Mary Williams and bestselling writer Timothy Tyson (author of 2017’s excellent The Blood of Emmett Till), highlights the great New Orleans-born gospel singer not primarily as an international recording sensation but as a Civil Rights advocate, singing and enthusing crowds at Birmingham and Selma and lending her burgeoning stardom to the cause.

It's a fascinating look at a figure who’s now known exclusively for her music. Although this isn’t a full-dress biography, it’s nonetheless a comprehensive reflection on a handful of some of the most important elements of her life: her faith, her music, and her very active social consciousness. Jackson the superstar repeatedly cedes the spotlight to Jackson the black woman living in the shadow of Jim Crow. She tells her friend Studs Terkel:

When I’m on stage and television working with white people … they just come up to me and hug me and love me, and say I am so wonderful. But when I am walking down the street like an ordinary person, they don’t recognize me. When I go into a department store in the South, I can’t get a sandwich, I can’t get a bottle of pop, I can’t even get a cab, and I am just the same Mahalia Jackson that they just got through saying how wonderful I am.

And the authors repeatedly reiterate it: “Mahalia longed for an America where she could walk down the street and be respected just like any other American citizen,” they write. “She wanted to be able to travel across the country without worrying if she could get a hotel room or eat at a restaurant.” Jackson is quoted as experiencing a dull pain in her gut at the thought that one of her musical tours will now travel to the American South. “Everything is fine, as long as I am singing,” she says. “But as soon as I walk off that stage, I’m just another colored person. Where can I stay that night? What motel will give me a room? Where can I find a place that will serve me food?”

As the authors point out, politics were intimately connected with gospel music from its origins in the “hard history of slavery and oppression,” and therefore Jackson’s faith and politics “mirrored one another with near precision.” “One thing that tied her faith and her politics,” they write, “is that she acted on both, often in the same motion.”

The book’s narrative can sometimes be oddly evangelical on the matter of Jackson’s faith. The text under a photo of her performing at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, for instance, ecstatically reads: “As always, she did not merely perform, but opened her sails to the Spirit and let the wind carry her to wherever God wanted her to go” (in fact, she merely performed, unless Williams and Tyson would like to provide additional photos showing this singer-carrying “spirit”) – but the passion of Jackson’s beliefs, religious, social, and political, are more visible in these pages than in any previous work about this fascinating figure. And if it sends younger readers out to find her music, so much the better.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News

The Enigma Challenge

By SC Godfrey

Viking 2026

Cryptology, those of us who find it boring rather than fascinating are constantly told by those who find it fascinating, is not boring. Certainly this must be the position of Zoe Wilder, the main character in SC Godfrey’s debut thriller The Enigma Challenge, since she’s gone into the field professionally, as a postdoc at the small private Chessmont University specializing in decoding ciphers; as she helpfully puts it, “God, I love a puzzle.”

 Zoe is visiting Madrid with her postdoc boss (and, just this minute, ex-boyfriend) Eric, where she’ll present a paper at the International Conference on Cryptology, and Eric has warned her sternly, as the novel’s opening note, that no matter what she does, she must not enter the infamous Enigma Challenge. It’s dangerous, he tells her, and people get hurt.

While he’s at it, Eric has another warning for Zoe: by all means steer clear of an American named Dane Seaver, since he’s guilty of a long litany of academic misdemeanors and is generally bad news.

This is on Page 4. Any guesses who turns out to be “obscenely handsome” on Page 19?

“He’s handsome in profile, lean, with a muscled chest and arms,” Zoe is soon in a perfect position to observe. “His black hair is short, and the side of his face has gorgeous contour.” At this point we still don’t have any idea what Zoe herself looks like, or her personality beyond loving puzzles, or what she saw in schlubby Eric, or what he saw in her. It’s almost as though she’s some kind of cipher.

Zoe presents her paper in due course, and even in the blunted precis given to readers, it’s fairly deadly:

I start with a general overview of cipher types: Caesar, Patristocrat, pigpen, homophonic, polyalphabetic, columnar transportation, and abbreviation. I present case studies on the Playfair cryptogram used by Dorothy L. Sayers in her 1932 crime novel, Have His Carcase, Rudyard Kipling’s Patristocrat puzzle from his 1902 Just So Stories, and a 1957 text that makes the intriguing, if unlikely, argument that Francis Bacon wrote William Shakespeare’s plays, based on a number of ciphers in the works. I notice people jotting notes and nodding along, which I take as a good sign.

Those poor saps in the audience might be nodding along, but readers of this slog of a novel are far more likely to be nodding off. Zoe (later on in the book, characters get chummy with her and shorten that to “Zo,” even though this doesn’t shorten anything and is the exact same pronunciation effort, like shortening “Joe” to “Jo”) immediately ignores all of Eric’s advice. She enters the Enigma Challenge because it would be damn odd in a book called The Enigma Challenge if she didn’t, and what with all that obscene handsomeness flying around, it would also be strange if she didn’t fall in with Dane Seaver, so she promptly does.

We learn more about the Challenge itself, including some of its potentially deadly consequences in the event of failure, and the narrative immediately jets off to half a dozen exotic locations as the stakes of the Challenge grow steeper. Once again, since she knows she’s a character in a novel and is naturally hoping to be in a movie based on a novel, Zoe obligingly describes her own basic character arc: “I’ve been sitting in front of computer screens for the past ten years, studying,” she tells dreamy Dane. “My nose was buried in texts. I’ve seen and done more in the past two days than I have in ten years.”

The cryptological adventures continue right to the end of the book, but they don’t happen at anything like the pace that’s needed in order to make the thing work. Zoe and Dane never have even a drop of chemistry; all the characters talk in cliches, the exotic locales are listlessly evoked, and, most crucially, the actual process of cryptology, which inevitably becomes central to the plot’s payoff, is never made the least bit interesting, much less exciting.

The cliffhanger ending is well-orchestrated, but the Berlin Philharmonic couldn’t orchestrate its way out of this murk.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News