Richard Evans is the author of, among other things, a critically-acclaimed trilogy of WWII books charting the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany: The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War, and his newest book, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, is an 800-page biography of a bestselling historian written by another bestselling historian. If this sends a clammy shiver down your spine, you are a canny book-shopper.

As anybody who’s read those Third Reich volumes could attest, Evans is an extremely readable author, and in this book he’s been granted open access to Hobsbawm’s enormous archives. But historians generally overestimate the intrinsic interest of, as Evans’ subtitle puts it, “a life in history.” A worry that the general-interest reader might find a nearly thousand-page life of an academic historian a bit of a crawl is not unfounded.

Two things save this book from falling entirely into this kind of purgatory. The first is that, as mentioned, Evans is a smart, smooth writer. The second is that Hobsbawm led a more interesting life than most historians. He was on the faculty of Birkbeck, University of London, for decades, which threatens a kind of monotony. He was also a vainglorious heel, a charismatic teacher, a lifelong storefront-window Communist (the book toils on for 300 pages before Evans nonchalantly mentions “Eric was anything but a militant Communist”), and, most famously, perhaps the world’s least-likely bestselling author. As Evans writes, his 1962 book The Age of Revolution was a sensation:

The Age of Revolution was an outstanding success. It has remained in print continuously since its first publication and was eventually translated into eighteen foreign languages including Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Japanese. Some of its arguments, for example the thesis that early industrial capitalism experienced a falling rate of profit, now seem outdated, and its portrayal of political movements as direct products of social classes reductionist, but the clarity with which it expresses these views make it a continuing and fruitful source of discussion and debate for students, academics and the general reader alike.

This despite the fact that AJP Taylor sniffed that the book was “all done by sleight of hand,” and Cambridge historian Peter Laslett wrote damningly: “It is in ugly taste ... Anyone who could believe in this as a cultural history can scarcely be trusted as a scholar.” Evans’ assessments don’t read all that much better; we can sincerely doubt that Evans himself would like any of his own books described as a “fruitful source of discussion.” It’s marginally preferable to “boring,” but then, Hobsbawm’s books have been called that too.

The book is uneven. There’s far too much detail about Hobsbawm’s garrulous, bookish, but otherwise unremarkable youth, and the book’s two best chapters, dealing with Hobsbawm’s burgeoning professional life from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, cover fewer than 80 pages. “This is a very long book,” Evans writes, “not least because Eric Hobsbawm lived a very long time,

He remained active, intellectually undiminished, and politically committed, into the second half of his tenth decade, writing and publishing all the time. But the book is also long because I have tried to let Eric tell his story as far as possible in his own words. He was a compelling and engaging writer, not just in his chosen field of history, but in many other genres as well,. His immense output included short stories, poems, descriptions of the natural world, travelogues, political tracts, personal confessions, and much more besides. He knew how to tell a good story, not only about the past but also about his own life.

That varied and always-interesting synopsis of a long writing life is realized inconsistently throughout the book that follows it; the adventures of a writer constantly hustling for better stories, better contracts, better conversation, better extramarital affairs, and better professional treatment (he claimed throughout his life that his Communist sympathies hampered his academic advancement, but readers who make it all the way to the end of Evans’ book will be able to think of a few alternate reasons) are regularly bogged down in the kind of departmental minutiae that would perhaps have been curtailed or cut by a more practiced biographer (this is Evans’ first).

The portrait of Hobsbawm that results from all these pages of effort and detail is almost certainly lifelike, and although that’s of real value to future biographers, it’ll provide some challenges for normal civilian readers who might want a more generally likable subject instead of the sniping, egotistical, smarmily gregarious swanning pedant inadvertently revealed in these pages. The book has a pervasive feeling of a long-standing debt being paid, and a private conversation being brought to a close.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Super-skilled cave diver James Tighe is no sooner towelled off from a hair-raising cave-disaster rescue in the opening pages of Daniel Suarez’s new book Delta-V than he finds himself the guest of eccentric billionaire Nathan Joyce and getting a lecture from Nobel Prize-winning economist Sankar Korrapati about US financial policy and the nature of debt-based banking. It’s just a bit of a curveball; Tighe won’t be the only one who’s a bit disoriented.

Korrapati patiently explains that his financial models clearly show that the global economy will soon fracture and fall apart unless this enormous debt bubble is popped somehow - and there’s nowhere to go but up. “Let me get this straight,” Tighe says, “you’re saying humanity must expand into space - not for the sake of science or exploration, but to stop the banks from going broke?”

That’s about the size of it; Nathan Joyce wants to hire an experienced cave-diver to lead a mining team to a distant asteroid. Tighe immediately points out that it took him years to accumulate his cave-diving experience and that he knows nothing at all about space travel. He’s informed that since he’s a character in a thriller, this won’t be a problem, and we’re off to the races: cue the assembling of a wacky crew of characters, cue the percolating of connected sub-plots, and of course cue the dumping of copious amounts of exposition.

For instance, the question naturally arises: if you’re interested in off-worlding that expanding bubble of debt (and aren’t even remotely considering, you know, regulating the banks), why not colonize Mars? True, it has only about a third of Earth’s gravity, but one defender of the idea says we can’t be sure that would be much of a problem - and gets a wad of exposition in response:

“We have some idea. The human body evolved over millions of years to function in one Earth gravity. Astronauts suffer health issues from just a few months in microgravity ... Bone and muscle loss, eye damage - to say nothing of the viability of pregnancy in a low-gravity environment. You’re willing to send people all the way to Mars before we find out if that’s a problem? Why not build a station in cislunar space that can rotate to simulate various levels of gravity long-term before we send people to colonize Mars? Oh, but then, I guess if you did that, you’d be halfway to building a space colony, wouldn’t you?”

Readers are taunted a couple of times with the vision of a novel about colonizing Mars, but what they get instead is a big, boisterous book about mining an asteroid in order to shore up banking collateral. The mission is intensely predictable; Tighe himself an action-hero mannikin; the Act Three surprise isn’t actually surprising; and there are stretches of operational chatter:

We are at t minus ten minutes local time for a 1.9-kilometer-per-second postinjection burn.

“Fuel systems go. “Engines are go. “Comm systems are go. “Telemetry looks good.

A verbal countdown began ten seconds before the engine ignition - which mission control called correctly despite the transmission delay, and at t minus zero a gentle vibration reached the crew as they were gently pressed into their seats. After a ninety-five-second delay the radio confirmed what they already knew ...

“We have main engine start. “Throttle at 30 percent. “Trajectory normal.”

In other words, very little in Delta-V should work. But Suarez is an old and practiced hand at creating silk purses out of sow cave divers. Delta-V never falters because it never doubts its own storytelling virtue; it’s a purely silly and purely effective thriller, exactly the kind of plot-driven potboiler that would once have been put before the reading public in a $3 paperback with an eye-catching cover. The cover of Delta-V is a beautifully eye-catching thing, although the book itself is nearly $30. There’s that ever-expanding bubble again.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Medical historian Mark Honigsbaum’s new book The Pandemic Century is in large part about the complacency that mistaken professional confidence can create in the public, and although the book is about killer viruses, the opening example is far more dramatic: the series of shark attacks that shocked the eastern seacoast of the United States in the broiling-hot summer of 1916. A whole array of experts, including the director of the American Museum of Natural History, had been telling the public for years that they were in no danger of being attacked by sharks in the waters off the Northeast’s beaches. There was no chance of attacks in those waters, those specialists declared, and no shark had the jaw-power to sever a human leg with a single bite:

Then in July a young broker named Charles Vansant went swimming off a New Jersey beach, had his left leg taken off by a shark with a single bite, and died almost immediately after being pulled from the water.

It’s an arresting way to open a book about pandemics but not a misleading one. As Honigsbaum makes clear throughout The Pandemic Century, unwarranted certainty has been an ankle-weight slowing research and response to possible pandemics throughout the twentieth century. How easily can viruses leap from species to species? How likely is it that a disease previously confined to some small and remote area might find its way to a nearby big city, much less a big city on the other side of the planet? How simple a matter would it be to educate the locals at ground zero of any such viral outbreak? Unwarranted certainty has attended each of these questions, hence the “hubris” in Honigsbaum’s title.

The book is unfailingly fascinating reading, despite its appalling subject matter. The author dramatizes epidemics like Ebola or Zika and draws vivid portraits of many of the people at the front lines of those epidemics, and the emphasis is always on the tension, the race between knowing enough and doing enough. Many of the stories can be maddening, as when a faith healer named Finda Mendinor in Sierra Leone, who’d gained a reputation among the local villagers for her claims of being able to cure ebola, inevitably died of the disease. Dozens and dozens of people flocked to her funeral rites and kissed her corpse - thus enormously spreading the disease.

Honigsbaum spends a good deal of time crafting an account of “parrot fever,” the outbreak of psittacosis that spread in the US in the 1930s, pointing out that although the spread of the disease was arrested by the development of specially-designed feed distributed for use by bird breeders, complacency re-grows like shrubbery. “Unfortunately, today, as in the 1930s, some breeders refuse to believe their aviaries are latently infected,” he writes. “Instead, they dilute the seed or fail to administer the full course of antibiotics, resulting in the persistence of subclinical infections of psittacosis in domestic bird flocks.” It doesn’t take much effort to imagine what the worst results of such carelessness might be.

Every element of a new and incredibly deadly world-wide pandemic is in place in the early 21st century. More humans than ever before, driven by dire economic need, now hunt and eat “bush meat” comprised of kinds of animals that have never been eaten before. More humans than ever before are penetrating into every remote corner of the world. And more of those humans, having penetrated into those remote corners, are then packing themselves onto planes and flying in mere hours to all big cities on Earth. Honigsbaum is unsparingly blunt in his assessment:

Tens of millions of us annually make such trips in aircraft either for business or pleasure, and as flights become cheaper and passengers make more and more journeys, the risks are only likely to grow. Herded into airline waiting rooms, then crammed into economy row seats, we resemble nothing so much as the captive Amazonian parakeets who introduced psittacosis to Baltimore and other US cities in 1929. The difference is that the parakeets had no choice about their accommodation, whereas we do. As the environmental historian Alfred Crosby put it, international jet travel is like “sitting in the waiting room of an enormous clinic, elbow to elbow with the sick of the world.” Yet budget airlines continue to grow in popularity.

The Pandemic Century shows very similar patterns recurring again and again whenever a new pandemic has threatened in the last century, and its implicit advice ought to be heeded. The flashes of potential disasters, outbreaks that catch a brief round of headlines and then fade from the collective attention span, flicker like warning lights throughout Honigsbaum’s book. Readers frightened half out of their wits by what they’ve read will be universally hoping the right people are heeding those warnings.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Military historian Robert O’Connell is probably best known to the general reading public for Fierce Patriot, his biography of American Civil War general and high-functioning psychopath William Tecumseh Sherman, and his new book Revolutionary: George Washington at War he looks to another American military leader, the most famous of them all: George Washington, who had the luckless job of commanding the Continental Army against the British forces amassing against the Colonies.

The fact that Washington immediately proceeded to make that job even harder through an exorbitant combination of stupidity and incompetence is usually politely overlooked by the man’s legion of hagiographers, and O’Connell is mostly willing to overlook it as well. But his book is at least more tempered than most; he admits that “there is no turning Washington into anything resembling an egalitarian,” and, more crucially, he cites an element most Washington biographers avoid like a radiation zone: “It would be imprudent to state flatly that George Washington was the luckiest human being who ever lived,” O’Connell writes with the light tone of wry humor that runs throughout the book. “But surely he remains at the pinnacle of good fortune.” This would be promising enough, but of course it’s followed by: “GW was an exemplary person; it was natural that others treated him well and things broke his way.”

Like chronicles of Washington’s military career, Revolutionary is a long account of things not breaking Washington’s way. For 300 pages, readers follow “GW” from bungle to blunder, from overreach to incomprehension, with our hero either failing upward through no merit of his own or saved by his staff from charging into catastrophe. And at every turn, O’Connell is on hand to smooth things over and put their good profile toward the sunniest window. Even at the end of the book, when a 60-something Washington is dealing with a farmers’ revolt in Pennsylvania in 1794, His Excellency gets a pass:

Even in the face of a threat he considered critical enough to militarize himself, Washington behaved with emblematic moderation. He simply wanted to overawe and deter; it a all an exercise in political theater. He might have been ready to shed blood; but that was never his objective. He always minimized violence, and that was at the heart of his genius as a revolutionary.

O’Connell is so persuasive that readers will have to squint a little to remember that this is a description of a United States President leading thousands of armed and mounted soldiers in person against American citizens. Probably those miserable debtors had it coming.

When O’Connell isn’t engaged in this kind of public relations, when he’s writing about Washington’s world instead of Washington’s military record, his book is brightly energetic, although often curiously refracted. His account of the Colonies on the eve of rebellion, for instance, is effectively evoked:

It was a time of taking sides and taking names, a time of paranoia and fear, one of emotions strung tight enough for friends to denounce friends of a lifetime. Suspicion of trading with the British, not showing up for militia muster, or simply loose talk could land you in front of a committee of safety to explain yourself, sign a loyalty oath, or face the consequences. Most complied, but a minority of under 20 percent never would; they could not countenance the suppression of royal authority and ultimately independence.

“For many their sole crime was a failure of imagination,” O’Connell writes, “they simply could not conceive of life without king and empire.” This is odd, and not merely because that “under 20 percent” reference is, to put it euphemistically, intensely debatable; it appears not to conceive the possibility that this minority had plenty of imagination but just didn’t agree with the rebels.

Ultimately Revolutionary presents an insightful overview of the birth of the United States right alongside the usual starry-eyed heroic poem about Washington himself. Readers will need to assess the balance between the two for themselves, but those readers are unlikely to get a better Washington book this year.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

At one point in Bret Easton Ellis’s new collection of essays, White, he recounts a second-hand anecdote of somebody who evacuated the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11/01, stumbling out of the lobby into the street, and found herself, while feeling blindly through a cloud of soot and dust, suddenly sprayed in the face with water, again and again, an ostensibly helpful maneuver, probably from firefighters, that only made her more disoriented, panicked, until she realized it wasn’t water she was being hit with but blood. Arterial spray from a jumper who’d hit the lamppost above her.

In that same essay he talks about the stalker who’d been haunting him in earlier weeks and about his slight coke problem at the time, exacerbated by his slight drinking problem, which of course wasn’t helped by a slight pill problem nor the absent boyfriend, nor the rotation of casual partners, nor the seizure he suffered at the gym. It’s an unsettling milieu. A collage of bad things that pile up and exacerbate one another.

Same goes for his account of the 1991 publication of his third novel, American Psycho, and the ensuing controversy (the book’s first publisher cancelled its release, after a leak of some explicit scenes garnered blowback from readers, forfeiting the six-figure advance they’d already paid Ellis and freeing him to collect a second one with a different publisher), and even the story of his first journalistic assignment, by editor Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, where, after an intimidating lunch, he was tasked with profiling the actor Judd Nelson.

It isn’t confession, necessarily, and it isn’t reportage or evaluation. He’s just telling stories.

And the reason those stories are so engrossing is because he’s a natural novelist—and, given the frequency with which he talks about his boyhood precocity in reading and studying horror, Ellis seems to appreciate this about himself: he loves stories and he’s good at telling them. But on his podcast, The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, he’s constantly proclaiming the death of the novel, and asks his guests about it all the time. He asked it of Joyce Carol Oates when Interview Magazine collected questions from her colleagues to assemble an interview. There’s an essay in here about a novel he started tinkering with a few years ago (after a rough weekend in Palm Springs, naturally) that hasn’t come to fruition.

That’s unfortunate.

The folly of White, though (which is also, strangely, part of its performative redemption), is that Ellis assumes here the hat of Cultural Commentator, of Critic. And his prose is swift and clean, some of his insights are solid when it comes to movies, his opinions are voiced with a compelling strength and good style and his humor is blessedly in check.

But he, Ellis, is the focus of the book. Ellis as a narrative construct.

His novelist’s inclination is to lean, always, on character, on voice (each of his novels is written in the first person, by narrators who sometimes think they understand what’s going on but clearly don’t), and while that can be frustrating and irksome if you’re trying to appreciate White for the book of criticism that it’s billed as, it’s much more enjoyable when read as, if not fiction, a kind of literary performance art. His account of things is always anecdotal. He talks about Hollywood drama and scandal, he names names, supplies motives—and never cites a thing.

Again, it’s annoying if you’re taking it seriously; funny, though, if you’re appreciating it for what it is: 200 pages of wine talk with a scathingly opinionated, fairly obnoxious, very smart friend whose observations are often clouded by ego and indignation and nostalgia for the wood-paneled anonymity of the 1970s, or the carefree affluence of the early ‘80s.

He actually espouses, in the prose, uncertainty about whether he’s remembering things correctly. He says, at the end of one chapter, that he doubts he’s ever deleted a tweet from his notoriously controversial Twitter account.

He has.

He knows that he has.

But this is an author who allegedly cut his favorite passage from his last novel, Imperial Bedrooms, because it manifested a description of something that his midlife-crisising narrator would have been too self-absorbed to notice.

If Ellis is obsessed with anything as a craftsman, it’s voice. And Ellis the author—here as in other books—is well aware of things that his narrator is not. Things that, in this case, his narrator cannot be bothered to look up.

Same goes for an opening chapter where, setting the stage for a book-length screed against Millennial hypersensitivity (he refers to Millennials as “Generation Wuss”), Ellis remembers, and celebrates, the freedom-allowing parenting style of his father:

I remember seeing National Lampoon’s Animal House with my father at a Saturday matinee in the summer of 1978 at the Avco Theater in Westwood, when I was fourteen and where he and I laughed pretty much nonstop. My father had no problems with the nudity, the sex with a minor, the racy humor (including the dildo Otter holds up), the hand jobs and the topless pillow fights, or the overall anti-establishment vibe of the picture, which he seemed to enjoy immensely even though he was clearly very much a member of the establishment.

Ellis’s love-hate relationship with his father has been the base engine of at least three of his six novels. He’s spoken in the past about how, after the release of American Psycho, his father mailed to his mother the cover of a 1992 issue of Newsweek that featured the picture of a newborn baby and asked, with a bold headline, “Is This Child Gay?” (A headline above the photo advertises a Joyce Carol Oates essay on Mike Tyson.) Ellis’s 2005 novel, Lunar Park, is about a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who’s haunted by the ghost of his father.

But now he espouses something like pride about how his dad—like every other California dad of the ‘70s, Ellis argues—didn’t care about his kids seeing R-rated movies.

But so how do we reconcile this passage describing how his parents took him to see Shampoo:

…my parents…didn’t mind that we saw it but were mortified that we turned out to be the only children in the packed theater at the eight p.m. show. As boomers, they thought it made them look bad. Shampoo was risqué in a way that my parents weren’t expecting….My pleasure was intensified by how sure I was that my father would have a fit after the movie was over—again, not because of the content, but because bringing his child to this film in front of hundreds of other people had embarrassed him.

So his dad was fine showing his child R-rated movies, but he didn’t want other adults to know it. That’s normal enough—but if he thinks this will make him look bad in front of other adults, it’s probably because most adults wouldn’t take their kids to this movie. Because it’s rated R.

Does our narrator realize this inconsistency?

Apparently not.

Does our author?

I think so.

Or like when he tells us, on one page, that he tweeted about Katheryn Bigelow’s mediocrity as a director in order to get a rise out of people and then tells us, on the very next page, that people who think he was trolling us are totally mistaken.

So the question: why does he do it? Why make people so apoplectic? Why stake his legitimacy as a critic and essayist on this performance art?

The answer resides in one of the book’s chief fascinations: actors. Ellis devotes as many words to the study of actors and acting as to anything else:

But being an actor involves turning into a blank, hollowing yourself out so you can replace whatever was there with the character you’re playing next. What does it mean to be real as an actor? What does transparency mean if you’re essentially a vessel waiting to be filled again and again and again…If you get to know an actor intimately you might or might not have access to that true self in private, but rarely will you see it in public, where the actor always continues to play a part.

Same goes for Ellis: the novelist, the inhabitor of voices.

White is not a prank. I believe that all of these opinions are genuinely his own. But Ellis is a performer above all else. He creates a character and gives that character a voice—but with what agenda? On behalf of which cause?

No reason at all. The book itself is a commentary on our over-eagerness to ascribe political and social meaning to everything.

Ellis has none. He complains about the left on every episode of his podcast, but he clearly isn’t part of the right, and when a guest espouses any serious political leaning Ellis will usually shruggingly lean that same way, telling them they have a point, and then change the subject.

I’d say he’s an actor flexing a muscle here, but he’s not that. He’s a novelist. And if you approach this “nonfiction” accordingly, you’ll definitely enjoy it more than if you’re looking for a stream of well-reasoned insights. It’s a 200 page monologue. Smart and funny, often self-defeating, but well-realized, and rendered in effortlessly fluent prose:

If everything’s available without any effort or dramatic narrative, whatever, who cares if you like it or if you don’t? And the pulse-pounding excitement—the suspense—of the effort you once put into finding erotic imagery has now been lost with the lo-fi ease of accessibility, which in fact has changed our experience of expectation. There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.

The book is brazen, and fun. It would’ve been better if he’d given us a novel, but this’ll do for now.

—Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.

Metropolis: A Bernie Gunther Novel
By Philip Kerr
A Marian Wood book/ Putnam 2019

This is the 14th and final Bernie Gunther novel (after 2018’s Greeks Bearing Gifts) due to author Philip Kerr’s untimely death in March 2018. Metropolis is Bernie’s origin story. We meet the gimlet-eyed gumshoe with a penchant for wiseass humor in the summer of 1928.  Berlin is a modern Babylon, bursting with artistic creativity as well as unprecedented sexual freedom, yet it’s also witnessing the rise of virulent anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant and anti-gay fervor, and street battles between political extremists on the Right and Left. Like Bernie, its people are still suffering from the devastating psychic and physical wounds of World War I, with which he is only too well acquainted from his four years on the Western Front.

Bernie’s skills as a vice cop have earned him a place on the Berlin Murder Commission.  It’s the elite homicide investigation unit irreverently known as the Murder Wagon. Insiders often refer to it as the Alex because of the address. As Bernie explains when he’s put on the Commission:

In 1928, vice in all its permutations was my departmental responsibility at the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Criminalistically speaking—which was a new word for us cops—I knew almost as much about the subject of vice as Gilles de Rais.

And in the words of Berlin’s chief of police, Bernhard Weiss:

In our opinion you’ve the makings of a fine detective, Gunther. You are diligent and you know when to keep your mouth shut; that’s good in a detective. Very good…. So welcome to the Murder Commission, Gunther. The rest of your life just changed forever. …From now on, whenever you stand next to a man at a bus stop or on a train, you’ll be sizing him up as a potential killer.

Bernie’s first assignment is the so-called Silesian Station Killings—four local prostitutes murdered in as many weeks. Always at night. The first one near Silesian Station. All of them hit over the head with a ball hammer and then scalped with a very sharp knife. He’s just about through the case files, when another girl is murdered. This one’s father is heavily connected to organized crime, German style and will stop at nothing to find his daughter’s killer.

Mid-assignment, so to speak, there is an outbreak of killings among the city’s maimed veterans. These are the half-men begging on wheels called cripple-carts or klutz wagons. Claiming responsibility for their murders in taunting letters to the police is a man who signs himself Dr. Gnadenschuss (which translates as coup de grâce or death blow). Bernie agrees to go undercover posing as a disabled vet. To pull off the deception, Weiss introduces him to Brigitte, a beautiful young make-up artist who transforms his appearance. Natürlich, they begin an affair.  She is working on the inaugural production of The Threepenny Opera. She has also worked for the film studio UFA on Fritz Lang’s recently released silent film masterpiece Metropolis.

As Bernie moves through the seamy side of Weimar Germany, he encounters a mindboggling array of suspects. From the heights of Berlin society to its depths, from pimps to party girls, gang bosses to philandering government ministers. The city itself is also a protagonist:

A great big department store of debauchery. The city was like a large ship, Bernie thinks, that had slipped its mooring and was slowly drifting further and further away from the coast of Germany. It’s not a place for the fainthearted, either, especially after dark. There is something about all that neon light at night that seems to bleach out a man’s spirit.

Ultimately, Bernie concludes that there is only one killer eliminating the prostitutes and the cripples and that he’s a cop. The problem is that his cohorts in crime-solving think he’s crazy. And even if he can prove it, can he risk putting the already shaky reputation of the Berlin police department in further jeopardy, at a time when the voice of Nazism is becoming a roar that threatens to drown out all others?

Incisive, intelligent, mesmerizing, mordantly witty, masterfully written, Metropolis is the author at the top of his game. Auf wiedersehen Mr. Gunther and Mr. Kerr—you will be sorely missed.  

--Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.

The first volume of Norwegian biographer Ivo De Figueiredo’s life of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen. Mennesket appeared in 2006; the second volume, Henrik Ibsen. Masken, followed in 2007, and the one-volume abridgement, Henrik Ibsen. Mennesket og masken, came later in 2010, and that abridgement, miraculously, now appears in a 700-page English-language translation by Robert Ferguson, a stately brick of a thing from Yale University Press that presents for English-only readers what is certainly the most lauded and complex life of Ibsen since Michael Meyer’s book nearly 50 years ago.

De Figueiredo is a wonderfully sympathetic chronicler of what is an almost unrelievedly somber, angry, and thwarted story, and translator Ferguson’s English translation is a marvel of fluidity - it takes a good deal of skill to make an enormous biography of Henrik Ibsen, of all people, page-turningly readable, but “The Man and the Mask” never flags at any point in its generous length.

Part of the reason for this is doubtless the way Di Figueiredo approaches every aspect of his famous subject with energetic freshness. The tortured life, the black moods, the constant roil of the art, the broader world of 19th century politics ... all of it comes in for clear-eyed re-evaluation, even the basic DNA of Ibsen’s craft itself:

Ibsen was a poet before he became a dramatist, and he remained a poet long after he had committed himself to the theatre. It was here that his talent was most obviously visible, that remarkable talent for chopping and cutting words into rhyming shapes that so impressed those around him - and possibly even impressed himself. His command of drama as a form took considerably longer to acquire.

There’s a risk endemic in writing a long book about a mass of morose melodrama like Ibsen, and the risk is that the writer of such a book will find the abyss staring back. If Ferguson’s translation is as true as it seems, De Figueiredo succumbed to this risk early on in his labors, describing the young Ibsen in terms that sound like they came straight from the older Ibsen:

He was a writer, and a writer did not belong in church, in the society of others. His home was in the steeple, condemned for all eternity to see the world from outside, from above, to describe it, and the tragedy of human life.

And to feel aways the eyes of the devil on his neck.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of devil-eyes later in the book, our author is still insisting that

“Henrik Ibsen’s life was a dance with angels and demons.” This biographer keeps that dance going with a surprisingly light tempo and an unerring instinct for, oddly enough, zingers - the flying summaries throughout the book are both thoughtful and aphoristic. It’s thoroughly enjoyable to have this work in English.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

It’s been very nearly 50 years since the appearance of Taylor Caldwell’s big, full-throated historical novel Great Lion of God, an exhaustive dramatization of the life of Saint Paul, the principal architect of Christianity and the mercurial star of his own fascinating letters and the Acts of the Apostles. Even in those 50 ensuing years, there’ve been many, many thousands more books of all kinds about Paul, from theological studies to travel guides to science fiction and back again to historical fiction (including The Kingdom of the Wicked, the Anthony Burgess novel that features a decidedly cranky Paul). The latest in this bombardment is Jay Parini’s new novel The Damascus Road, the title referring of course to the signature moment in the Paul story, when Saul of Tarsus, zealous persecutor of the fledgling Christian sect, is thrown from his horse by a blinding white light on the road to Damascus and emerges from the experience certain that he’d been remonstrated by none other than Jesus Christ. In that moment, Saul the zealous persecutor becomes Paul the equally-zealous preacher.

As even such a brief summary suggests, this bombardment is entirely understandable. In old newspaper lingo, Paul makes top-notch copy. His story is irresistible: a hard-charging enemy of the new Christian religion is specifically told to stop doing that by a personage of the triune God and becomes instead the foremost Christian of them all, traveling indefatigably all over the world of his day, visiting Christian communities, improvising edicts in the name of Christ, and eventually running afoul of the same Roman forces whose oppressing work he used to do. In other words, it’s not surprising that Paul has been a darling of Christian historical fiction; Christian historical fiction started with him.

The Damascus Road highlights some of the puzzles in Pauline fiction, foremost that signpost Damascus Road moment. For Parini, those revelation moments are not only real but the realest things that ever happened to Paul:

It was all uncounted time and beyond measure. It filled me though I wanted to fill myself again and without quantity. I was satisfied yet still learning, hungering. Eager yet full. I didn’t know what this meant in ordinary hours and days, where I commonly dwelled, in the usual cascade drawn into dusk, the rude passage into night. This was uncharted and unrestricted time.

“By the grace of the Lord my God dear savior, I rose and rose, and was met, and needed never again to think about life in the same way,” the account goes on. “Or fear the prospect of death.”

It’s in ways like this that Paul fiction wavers on the borderline between history and fantasy. Parini’s book is less a historical novel in which a man believes he’s had a vision and more a historically-based fantasy novel in which a man actually does have conversations with a god. The upshot is the same in either case, naturally, but the extent of piety is noteworthy in every case.

The glimmers of hard, gemlike sardonic humor that flicker through Parini’s earlier historical novels like The Last Station or The Passages of H.M. or his durably sublime Benjamin’s Crossing are not entirely absent in The Damascus Road, although this latest book is clearly afraid of this tendency. And there’s an aphoristic touch to Paul’s own characterizations of the upheaval at the center of his world, particularly when he returns home and confronts his relatives on the subject. To the skepticism of his relative Amos, he says simply, “He [that would be Jesus] invited us to give ourselves to him. We do not live in this world.” And when his brother-in-law Ezra hears this “we do not live in this world” business, he likewise tries to make things as clear as possible - and gets a wry little response from Paul:

“You must understand that we have no time for the people who follow the Nazarene. Yet another of those fools who trouble our faith. We are the people of Moses, the Jews. Never forget that.”

“And of Abraham,” Paul said. “More Abraham than Moses.”

But for the most part, The Damascus Road is a squarely straightlaced affair, a prosier elaboration of the Epistles, an Act Two of the Apostles. Parini’s atmosphere-creating talents are in full power in these pages; his Paul is wonderfully situated in the dusty streets and stuffy synagogues of the first century Roman Judea. The extent to which such verisimilitude is wobbled by the book’s main character talking to a god will be for each reader to decide, but the book surrounding that moment is as impressive as anything Parini has ever written.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Spectator, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National,  The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

The biographical note attached to Julie Albright’s new book Left To Their Own Devices: How Digital Narratives Are Reshaping the American Dream claims she’s “a sociologist specializing in digital culture and communications” and elaborates that her research “has focused on the growing intersection of technology and social/behavioral systems.” Left To Their Own Devices itself is about the “digital divide” between older people and younger people, a divide that, according to Albright, “encapsulates an entire constellation of cultural capital and technological savvy that goes hand in hand with living immersed in a digital culture,” resulting in major differences in how older and younger people perceive the world itself. “This fracture is more than simply differing use of electronics; it, instead, signals the emergence of separate cultures, with very different behaviors, social rules, and value propositions.” The effect of this cultural split will be, she claims, tectonic.

Other books have made this kind of claim, most notably Jean Twenge’s iGen from 2017, but in fact the taxonomy extends much further back. The upcoming generation has always been tectonically, and by easy extension ominously, different from the generation presently writing books. Considering the stakes involved, it’s lucky for readers that trained professionals like Albright are the ones currently writing those books, since they’re best suited to explain the nature of this two-culture shift that’s allegedly taking place. A sociologist specializing in digital culture should be ideally positioned to make sense of it all.

The first footnoted claim in Left To Their Own Devices happens in the Introduction: “Four out of five young people can’t even read a paper map anymore; instead, they rely on Siri or Waze or Google Maps to get them to their destinations.” The source is a CNET article by Rory Reid titled “Most under-25s Can’t Read a Map Because They Rely on Sat-Navs-Roadshow.” Albright’s note claims the article was written in 2011, but the link she provides actually leads to a 2013 Rory Reid article that in turn cites an article on MyVoucherCodes, which is a UK travel discount website. That’s where the trail runs cold; in support of her belief in the urban myth that digital-native young people can no longer read maps, Albright cites a website that cites a travel discount business with no polling or research credibility.

The second footnoted claim in Left To Their Own Devices, also in the Introduction, is: “The highest frequency cellphone users touched, tapped or swiped their phones an unbelievable 5,427 times a day.” The source is a Chicago-based marketing research firm called Dscout, whose research team “People Nerds” conducted a study originally designed for 100 paid participants over the course of five days. Only 94 participants actually showed up, and only 60 or so completed the “study” for the whole five days. Of those roughly 60 people, roughly 6 touched their phones anywhere near that 5,427 total; most of the 60 people touched their phones half as much or less. And that’s where the trail runs cold: in support of her scare-mongering about young people compulsively touching their phones 5,000 times a day, Albright cites a marketing website that conducted an incomplete study of 60 people.

The third footnoted claim in Left To Their Own Devices, again still in the Introduction, is: “So as to never miss a text, tweet, Facebook update, Snapchat, Instagram, or - streaming video on Facebook or Periscope - now more than 70 percent of Millennials sleep their cellphones (as compared to only a third of Baby Boomers).” The source is Liveperson, an AI Software company that requires visitors to join their mailing list before looking at the “study” they say was conducted for them in 2017 by Survata, a market research company with clients ranging from Microsoft to Chipotle. And that’s where the trail runs cold: in support of her claim that 70 percent of Millennials sleep with their phones so they never miss an Instagram update, Albright cites a walled-off marketing scam by a branding company.

That’s the first three footnoted claims of the book’s Introduction. That’s not touching the rest of the book, and it’s not including all the claims in the Introduction that aren’t footnoted (including the Twitter meme about young people no longer being able to read analog clocks). Three footnoted claims in a row, not a scrap of actual science or valid research contained in even one of them, and the claims themselves nearly lost in a sea of undifferentiated Chicken Little alarms about a tectonic shift in culture.

Since it’s just as easy for a sociologist specializing in digital culture to debunk those three claims as it was for a non-specialist book reviewer to debunk them, there can only be two explanations for their presence here: either Albright is credulous to a degree that’s unusual even in specialists, or she went looking for websites, however spurious or obviously conflicted, that supported the conclusions she’d already reached before a word of the book was written.

Either way, who on Earth would trust this book? Young digital natives might spend a lot of time looking at their phones, but they deserve better than this hyperventilating wad of pseudoscience to explain why.  

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

The portraits created by the great artist Nicholas Hilliard - the most famous ones are no bigger than your hand - so perfectly capture the faces of his era that they have become our own visual shorthand for Elizabethan and Jacobean times, every bit as much as the glorious paintings of his idol Hans Holbein. Hilliard rose to prominence at just the right time to have virtually all of the most powerful and influential people of his day and area as the objects of his art. And yet, despite this crucial role for an artist, Hilliard has for decades lacked a truly formidable biography.

Until now: historian Elizabeth Goldring in Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist has written a comprehensive and almost certainly definitive life of Hilliard and a richly involving portrait of his time. Hilliard was born in 1547 to a prosperous Exeter goldsmith and through a combination of luck, good timing, and self-evident genius, he became apprenticed to Robert Brandon, the jeweller to England’s Queen Elizabeth I (he also married his master’s daughter Alice). This gave Hilliard access to the highest echelons of Elizabethan society, and his talent for miniatures quickly made him a vogue. “Hilliard’s rendering of his sitters’ eyes was also innovative,” Goldring writes, “ - and much remarked on for its liveliness, a quality which, after Holbein’s death in 1543, had been in short supply at the English court.”

Goldring patiently follows Hilliard through all the stages of his life, noting with a little wistfulness that he’d peaked in 1588, the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada:

Business was booming. Hilliard was, as ever, hopeless at financial management. But his services were in demand in an extraordinary range and variety of media; he was without competition in the field of miniature painting; and he could count on his rich and powerful father-in-law for financial assistance  when needed. Hilliard could not have realised it at the time but his personal and professional lives were at their apogee.

No life of Hilliard has ever come close to the level detail and empathy Goldring deploys here, and her treatment of the artist’s life is matched by the interest and insight of her treatment of the artist’s work:

Hilliard’s miniature continue to beguile - for their liveliness, their delicacy, their grace. Rarely do Hillard’s sitters appear static. Most seem on the verge of speaking, about to reveal an intimate confidence to the viewer. Many look directly, and penetratingly, into the viewer’s own eyes, creating the illusion of a connection, geographical distance and the passage of time notwithstanding. Even when greatly magnified, the most accomplished of HIlliard’s work suffer no loss of detail.

This is fascinating stuff although at times a bit confusing; Hilliard’s subjects virtually never look directly into the viewer’s own eyes - their faces are almost always pointed offstage at some angle, with only their sparkling eyes turned to watch the viewer. Cumulatively, in the course of this big, beautifully-designed book, the effect of all those furtive glances is quite deliciously creepy.

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist contains not only Hilliard’s own work in all its forms but also a wide array of contextual artwork that informed his aesthetic world; this wonderfully detailed biography is also a seminar in Tudor-era artwork. Yale University Press has spared no expense in the creation of this oversized volume, and the result is magnificent.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Christopher Reich’s readers will scarcely have had a chance to catch their breaths since the barrel-over-the-waterfall climax of his previous Simon Riske novel, The Take, and that’s their tough luck, because a new Simon Riske book is upon is: Crown Jewel drops readers almost immediately into the glittering world of high-end Monte Carlo casinos. In scarcely ten paragraphs, our stalwart hero is chasing down a card-sharp cheat and hurling himself into the kind of nonchalant derring-do that’s won him an international reputation as one of the best at whatever the hell it is he does.

In Crown Jewel, those glittering Monte Carlo casinos are having a bit of trouble: one of them reaches out to Simon Riske because recently the house has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and their own in-house security experts are baffled. Customers just seem to be winning more often, and naturally, such a travesty cannot be allowed to continue.

When Simon Riske isn’t leaping over tables or flinging his steely glance in all directions, he spends his free time fine-tuning expensive automobiles (you were expecting stamp collecting?), and yet despite this, the owner of the afflicted casino, who just happens to be the Duke of Suffolk (when Reich casts about for a currently-unused peerage title, he doesn’t footsy around with lesser rungs on the ladder), asks Riske to go to investigate. To his credit, Riske himself points out how ludicrously unqualified he is for such a job, but this doesn’t slow matters down for even a single paragraph. Can’t have a Simon Riske thriller without Simon Riske, now can we?

What follows is exactly the same Premier cru foamy nonsense that made The Heist so immensely enjoyable. At some point during the gestation of this Simon Riske series, Reich made the all-important decision to set the whole business in Cloud-Cuckoo Land rather than in the real world. This same decision has worked extremely well in the past for authors such as Ted Bell, Clive Cussler, and Jack Higgins, and it works extremely well here. The point in Crown Jewel isn’t the absurdity of the Duke of Suffolk asking an unqualified stranger to fly to Monaco (all expenses paid, of course) and stop a multimillion-dollar casino theft, no; the point is that the stranger is Simon Riske, hero extraordinaire:

Nothing revved his juices more than a little physical violence, even if he had been on the losing end of it. All measure of good sense had gone out the window the moment he’d given chase to the cheat. At that instant, his world had boiled down to him versus the bad guy, good versus evil, though it was a question of his ego run riot, not anything so grandiose as maintaining the universe’s order. Mess with me and you’re going to pay. It was as simple as that.

Crown Jewel takes its readers on many hairpin turn at breakneck speed, but in the end, things really are as simple as that. Readers of this kind of book expect nothing less, but the honest truth is that a great many of the current crop of such books don’t always manage to deliver even on their own very simplified terms. These first two Simon Riske novels deliver. Here’s to many more.

--Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Veteran sports writer and author of the bestselling Who’s Your Caddy? Rick Reilly opens his new book, inevitably a Trump book, Commander in Cheat, with one of countless anecdotes along the same lines:

More than one source described another time when Trump happened to walk into the Bedminster clubhouse just as a worker was putting up the name of the newly crowned senior club championship winner on a wooden plaque. Trump had been out of town and hadn’t played in the tournament, but when he saw the player’s name, he stopped the employee. “Hey, I beat that guy all the time. Put my name up there instead.” The worker was flummoxed.

“Really, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah. I beat that guy constantly. I would’ve beaten him. Put my name up.”

If that anecdote’s perfect storm of narcissism, pettiness, and lying gets your blood boiling, reading Commander in Chief will have you fuming from start to finish. Reilly has been a golf savant and one of the most entertaining sports writers for years; he’s golfed with many presidents and celebrities (George H. W. Bush “looked like a man trying to swat a horsefly,” readers will learn, as well as, a little wistfully, that President Obama’s game involved “no cheating, no mulligans, no do-overs”), see every kind of turf behavior, and kept his counsel throughout it all. He’s also uniformly funny when writing about presidents who golfed before his time:

Woodrow Wilson was such a worrier that his doctor ordered him to play golf to relieve his indigestion, even though Wilson couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie. He rarely broke 110. He’d putt hunched over 90 degrees, like a man talking to a pet mouse, with a putter that couldn’t have been taller than a toilet plunger.

Naturally, for a writer like Reilly, golf is the key to Donald Trump. Many, many writers have opined over the decades about how allegedly revealing a golf course is for a man’s true character. Those writers have all been golfers, and golfers are invariably the source of this man’s-true-character codswallop, but Reilly has a shrewd eye and, the reader quickly senses, a remarkably clear memory. And he’s certain this silly little sport is crucial to his subject: “Trump’s love affair with golf has far outlasted any romance he’s had with any woman or career or party affiliation.”

In this love affair as in all his others, Trump cheats incessantly, lies about it, and then believes his own lies. In scenario after scenario related by Reilly, Trump’s cheating and lying is compulsive, ridiculously operatic, and of course completely undocumented. Reilly has shared the links with many presidents, and the difference is clear to him: “It’s not so much the promises Trump breaks or the lies he tells, it’s the sheer volume of them.”

Trump is not the first US President to play golf - almost all of them have, whether they actually enjoyed it or not. He’s also not the first US President to cheat at golf - again, many of them have. He’s not even the first thin-skinned, morbidly obese US President to play golf - he’s got William Howard Taft for company (although Photoshopping didn’t exist in Taft’s day). Even so, the portrait in Commander in Cheat is, in fact, singular. Golf or no golf, no other US President has ever been a delusional psychopath. Golf or no golf, that’s what “explains” Trump - which makes all the book’s stories about people having fun while he lies to them fairly chilling.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Murder by the Book: The Crime that Shocked Dickens’s London
By Claire Harman
Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

This thoroughly engrossing tale of true crime begins with a grisly murder in London on May 6, 1840. Lord William Russell was found dead in his bed at his home on Norfolk Street in Mayfair, his throat so savagely cut that his head was almost severed. According to reports of the day, Londoners were shocked to learn of the macabre killing of an unobtrusive minor aristocrat in an upscale neighborhood. And Londoners in the Victorian London of Dickens were not easily shocked. As he wrote in Barnaby Rudge, one of two of his novels to be serialized in his short-lived (1840-1841) weekly Master Humphrey’s Clock and largely set during the Gordon Riots of 1780:

He [Barnaby] was beset by a crowd of unruly Londoners as part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police.

It is probably worth noting that Barnaby, save the very apt quote, is one of Dickens’ less esteemed novels. The other novel serialized at the time was The Old Curiosity Shop, which fared far better.

The crime occurred during wildly tempestuous times in what was the largest city in the world. New docks supporting the city’s place as the world’s trade center were being built in the east.  The coming of the railroad in the 1830’s displaced thousands and accelerated the expansion of the city. The price of this explosive growth was untold squalor and filth. The homes of the upper and middle class existed in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty. Street sweepers attempted to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city’s ubiquitous chimney pots belched coal smoke, resulting in soot which seemed to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city raw sewage flowed in gutters that emptied into the Thames. Street vendors hawking their wares added to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars and vagabonds of every description were a large part of the increased congestion.

At first, the motive for the murder appeared to be robbery, albeit a bungled one. The drawing room of Lord William’s house had been turned upside down. Piles of valuables were strewn about near the front door. More likely, since the evidence of theft was uncertain, there was fear among the affluent that the murder may have been motivated by the hatred of the privileged by the so-called lower classes. The crime became the talk of the town, gripping Londoners from all walks of life, including Dickens who was a neighbor of Lord Russell. Both he and William Makepeace Thackeray were among the prominent literati who were in the thrall of the crime.

Eventually, the police focused on Lord Russell’s valet, Courvoisier—yes, like the brandy. When he finally confessed, he cited a commercially popular novel, Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth, as his inspiration. It’s the saga of an unrepentant thief who cunningly escaped justice repeatedly  by making a series of spectacular, seemingly impossible, prison breaks. It was a so-called “Newgate novel” that glamorized vice and made heroes of villains—in this case, a dastardly housebreaker.  One infamous scene involved a slit throat and a botched burglary. Plus, it was soon revealed that Courvoisier was a great fan of the play version, which had various productions around the city. Performances of Jack Sheppard at the major theatres were packed. As author Harman recounts:

Almost as soon as the story was on the stage, the term “a Jack Sheppard” began to be used freely in the press to refer to any ingenious housebreaker or nimble-witted young criminal. A ruffian who had stolen from his own father was called “A Young Jack Sheppard”; three boys aged ten, eleven and twelve appearing before the Central Criminal Court, who had cut the glass of a toy-shop window to steal toy cannons from it, were called “Juvenile Jack Sheppards” (they got one- and to-month prison sentences); and two other ten-year-old “Jack Sheppards” were said to have displayed alarming “cunning and hardihood” when stealing from a snuff shop in Tower Hill…. The power of the story to rouse such youths was astonishing; it really seemed to speak to a whole class and generation of young people (specifically boys) who had not previously found much in the culture that reflected their own lives and concerns.

As Harman takes us through the many twists and turns of the case, she focuses on the appeal of fictional depictions of violent crime and criminals. She explores the harmful influence of such fiction on the mind of the reader. And she illuminates the powerful appeal of the lurid “felon literature” and its dangerous consequences.

While exploring concerns in Murder by the Book about the glorification of criminals in the fiction of the day, the author addresses some lingering mysteries. Did Courvoisier have an accomplice? Was Lord William already dead when his throat was slit? (Apparently, the Judge in the case thought “nothing turned on” information about the state of the corpse and curtailed further speculation about how the crime was committed.) And why was the single bloody handprint left on Lord Russell’s bedsheets ignored? (The idea of fingerprint identification didn’t emerge until the 1890’s.) And given the nature of the crime, why wasn’t there more blood? Why did the valet, Courvoisier, not flee the scene? What dark secret lay behind the killing?

Harman’s exploration of Dickens’ interest in the case, reaction to the book Jack Sheppard, and horrified account of the hanging, which he witnessed, add depth to this assiduously researched and splendidly written book. In the end she reminds us that truth is often stranger than fiction, particularly when inspired by it. Indeed!

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.

A publishing season wouldn’t be complete without an oversize full-color dinosaur book, and if such a book isn’t produced under the auspices of the great American Museum of Natural History, it will naturally wish it were. Such a book must be as up-to-date as the breakneck pace of paleontological developments allows; it must be as visually stunning as its subjects; and, if possible, it must be written by somebody with a CV as long as your arm.

New from the University of Chicago Press is just such a book: The World of Dinosaurs by Mark Norell, the chairman of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (the only true must-see destination for Manhattan tourists) and one of the specialists who oversees what is surely the most impressive collection of dinosaur bones and remains and artifacts in the world. In this book - extensively illustrated with photos and drawings - Norell takes readers through the whole sprawling story of dinosaurs, organized not by geologic era but by overarching phylogenetic groupings, everything from various ceratopsians to the famous Tyrannosaurus rex and hundreds of their lesser-known kin. This author is well-practiced at conveying vast amounts of complex scientific information in a smooth and accessible narration, and as a result The World of Dinosaurs is every bit as much a delight to read as it is to page through. Although Norell is quick to point out that readers themselves, like the millions of visitors to the American Museum, add a crucial ingredient:

To look at a skeleton of one of these animals stimulates our curiosity. We can’t directly observe the look, behaviour, or diets of these extinct beasts the way we can a New York City pigeon, but we can use our imaginations. And that is much of what people do. They bring the museum bones to life, each in their own way.

That re-animation of the lost marvels of dinosaurs is the heart of their perennial appeal - they were here for millions upon millions of years, and yet we will never see them - and it’s made considerably easier by books like this gem.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Anyone who’s ever gone down a Christopher Hitchens rabbit-hole on YouTube - and there are far, far more such people in the world than most people in the world would readily admit (among other things, for instance, that rabbit-hole is almost solely responsible for the entirety of YouTube’s vast, sprawling roster of rabidly sexist and xenophobic “rational” atheist channels) will instantly recognize not only the title of this new little book but also its exact provenance. In September of 2007, the four leading lights of the so-called New Atheist movement then in vogue, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), met in Hitchens’ Washington, D.C. apartment and had a long on-camera talk about atheism and organized religion.

Every self-respecting Hitchens fan has watched that video at least once, and now those fans, surely this book’s target audience, have a handsome keepsake volume of that conversation. The Four Horsemen has a Foreword by Hitchens’ friend Stephen Fry, introductory reminiscences by Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris, and footnotes running throughout to provide quick glosses on the various terms and names dropped throughout the two hours of talk.

Dawkins strikes his customary high evangelical note in his essay:

As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality.

Dennett dives deep into the intricacies of his positions (and spares a mention of Hitchens only to the extent of disagreeing with him), Harris, writing about the depredations of the Zika virus, manages to signal the same prickly hubris that characterizes his books:

In the absence of God, we find true sources of hope and consolation. Art, literature, sport, philosophy - along with other forms of creativity and contemplation - do not require ignorance or lies to be enjoyed. And then there is science - which, apart from its intrinsic rewards, will be the true source of mercy in the present case. When a vaccine or a cure for Zika is finally found, preventing untold misery and death, will the faithful thank God for it?

The dialogue is reproduced here without editorial intervention; there are no stage directions to help newcomers picture the interpersonal dynamics at play. Some of it can be (you’ll pardon the term) divined from the transcript: Dawkins’ smooth pedagogical attempts to balance the talk and keep it moving, Harris’ cool intellectual reserve and subtle bossiness, Dennett’s courteous bonhomie, Hitchens’ voluble discourse, but the subtleties of the interplay, particularly as the talk goes on (in the video, the light lengthens and then lessens in the apartment), are missing from these pages. There’s a written record of all the name-dropping Dawkins and particularly Hitchens do throughout, but there’s no feel of its reality. Likewise the subtle mental fencing match that sometimes breaks out between Hitchens and Harris, and also the tinny tone that appears when Hitchens strikes a note the others find too absolutist even for that table:

HITCHENS: No, … I don’t have a difference of opinion with the jihadist.

HARRIS: Well, you do, in terms of the legitimacy of their project.

HITCHENS: No, not really. There’s nothing to argue about with that. I mean, there it’s a simple matter: I want them to be extirpated. That’s a purely primate response with me - recognizing the need to destroy an enemy in order to assure my own survival. I have no interest at all in what they think. We haven’t yet come to your question about Islam, but I have no interest at all in what jihadists think. I’m only interested in refining methods of destroying them. A task for which, by the way, one gets very little secular support.

The natural pang of reading a book like this is of course that there can be only one. As all the participants point out in these pages, one resounding voice in the quartet is now gone, and the New Atheist movement itself has somewhat petered out - it’s extremely unlikely that it will field four simultaneous bestsellers again in our lifetime, and there’s an undeniable magic in this gathering, even on paper.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

William Burns spent thirty-three years in the US Foreign Service, retiring as a career ambassador after a stint as Deputy Secretary of State from 2011 to 2014, and as he writes in his important new volume, The Back Channel, he’s seen history being made:

Long before Trump’s election, my diplomatic apprenticeship exposed me to the best - and worst - of American statecraft and its practitioners, from the early rituals of my first overseas tour to a junior role in a Reagan White House recovering from the self-inflicted wound of the Iran-Contra affair. I saw adept American diplomacy under Bush and Baker and marveled at the skill with which they harnessed America’s extraordinary leverage to shape a post-Cold War order. In Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, I learned the limits of American agency when it is arrayed against the powerful forces of history. As ambassador in Jordan, I was reminded that American leadership could make a profound difference, especially to a partner undergoing a precarious and consequential transition.

Right to the end of his long years of service, Burns was deeply involved in pivotal diplomatic events, including most notably the controversial Iran nuclear deal he labored to construct under the leadership of John Kerry and President Obama. And the mention of that deal naturally goes hand-in-hand with the mention of Donald Trump. A diplomat of Burns’ standing would probably have been tempted to write a memoir even under the placid administration of a President Clinton or a President Sanders, but in light of the Trump administration’s “profoundly self-destructive shock and awe campaign against professional diplomacy,” the inclination becomes a duty. The bulk of The Back Channel details the dramatic high points of Burns’ long career, but the clear animating force of the book is the author’s worry that all the behind-the-scenes labors of his friends and colleagues over the years have been summarily invalidated by an idiot in the Oval Office. “American diplomacy is adrift at a moment in history in which it means more than ever to our role as the pivotal power in world affairs,” he writes. “It will take a generation to reverse the underinvestment, overreach, and strategic operational flailing of recent decades, not to mention the active sabotage of recent years under President Trump.”

“Active sabotage” is strong stuff, particularly coming from a former ambassador. More so than any other federal government employees, Foreign Service veterans traditionally have been very careful with language; in tense negotiations, even a single poorly-chosen word can have outsized consequences. The stark nature of the warnings Burns issues about the Trump administration are the alarm-bells ringing in the background of an otherwise calm and personable memoir.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

The optimist says, “The world needs more optimism.” The pessimist says, “The world needs more realism.” The realist says, “The world needs more balance.” It’s only the demagogue who says, “The world needs more me.” We naturally think of demagogues in their adult forms, having already achieved full-alligator length and leathery toughness, spreading their arms wide to cheering crowds of rubes and saying, “I alone can fix it.” But it’s important to remember that adult demagogues start off as baby demagogues, and these resemble baby alligators: slick and shiny instead of leathery, wide-eyed and innocent-seeming.

Daily Wire leader and top conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro is slick and shiny. He has black hair, a cherubic hairless face, and a high piping voice that occasionally still cracks with adolescent fervor even though he’s in his mid-thirties. He’s a happily married observant Jew, has two children, and is charming and funny. And despite a fairly chummy trafficking of audiences and a fairly clammy echoing of ideological talking-points, he emphatically denies that he is a member of or fellow traveler with the alt-right. He’s presentable; he gives off an air of being legitimately controversial instead of illegitimately so; he still gets invited to speak on college campuses. He has not been deplatformed on social media. He’s a living, breathing reminder of how popular baby alligators have always been as pets, before it seems quite fair to flush them into the New York City sewer system.

His spurning of the alt-right doesn’t stop him from imitating them, and in his new book The Right Side of History, his first and biggest alt-right gesture is certainly something he would describe instead as conservative, libertarian, or even just commonsensical: he posits a Golden Age, and it’s squarely located in the rearview mirror.

Weirdly, his Golden Age is some gauzy hybrid of something he calls “Judeo-Christian values” and something he calls “Greek teleology.” They’re conveniently shorthanded throughout the book as “Jerusalem” and “Athens.” The idea he lays out in the book’s earnest, leaden prose is that Western society has lost its sense of purpose, and that it can regain this sense of purpose by restoring its embrace of Judeo-Christian values and Greek rationality … that the perfect solution to the West’s problems, in other words, lies not in striving for a common brighter future but in going back roughly 2000 years to the ancient past. Since Ben Shapiro has never gone a single day of his entire adult life without Wifi and air conditioning, this seems like a bizarre idea - until you realize that hop-scotching back 2000 years is absolutely necessary if you’re going to do what Shapiro yearns to do above all things: retroactively cancel the Enlightenment. Glowing fitfully through the fog of his book’s windy pronouncements and half-digested undergrad history nuggets is Shapiro’s dead-set conviction that the Enlightenment, with its spirit of scientific inquiry, its prizing of repeatable, testable observations, and its groping toward intellectual freedom, is right where humanity’s train went off its tracks:

The death of Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos didn’t mean the liberation of reason from superstition. For some key philosophers, it meant the destruction of reason itself. That may seem counterintuitive - after all, philosophers had tossed out the Bible and Aristotle in the name of reason. But the Enlightenment did not merely involve utilizing reason to question Judeo-Christian values and telos. It involved turning reason in on itself, examining the human mind. It meant obliterating mankind as the jewel of the cosmos, bringing him low, returning him to the animals rather than allowing him to aspire to join the divine.

The destruction of reason itself … tossed out the Bible and Aristotle in the name of reason … mankind as the jewel of the cosmos … In passage after passage like this, The Right Side of History slips right through the floorboards of controversy and falls into simple gibberish. Shapiro has an idea of what the Enlightenment is, and it’s entirely bad - because its thinkers classified man as an animal, as a part of the natural order. It doesn’t matter to Shapiro that such a classification is demonstrable fact; his feelings don’t care about facts. To him, as he writes over and over again, mankind is “created” by God, and everybody would be much better off if they just remembered that.

Well, maybe not everybody. After all, in Jerusalem and Athens only adult white married male property owners had any say in anything. Everybody else had to settle for being worked, enslaved, or married (sometimes all three). In Shapiro’s conception, the West in general and America in particular could begin to fill the “meaning-shaped hole” at its center if it turned back to an arrangement much like the one he himself has: religious (monotheism only, please), science-denying, married, and male. The demagogue says, “The world needs more me.”

This would be sordidly amusing in its own way if the rest of The Right Side of History weren’t so often either sloppy or deceitful or both. Shapiro persists in claiming that “Judeo-Christian values” and “Greek reason” (it almost goes without saying that neither of these ridiculous concepts is ever defined in the book) “undergirded America’s founding,” and many of his case-in-point examples are riddled with rhetorical sleight-of-hand. He prizes his image as a kind of tough-cop intellectual ombudsman pointing out flaws all across the American ideological spectrum, but those examples invariably give away the game:

To take a minor example, in September 2017, Republicans and Democrats clubbed each other savagely over the exact same policy: President Obama had issued an executive amnesty for certain children of illegal immigrants, the so-called DREAMers; President Trump had revoked that amnesty, but called on Congress to pass a legislative version that would protect the DREAMers. Democrats called Republicans cruel, inhumane; one congressman called Trump “Pontius Pilate.” Meanwhile, Republicans called Democrats lawless and irresponsible.

Over the exact same policy.

As Shapiro himself must know perfectly well, this description - that issuing a clemency and revoking one are the exact same policy - is savagely false. Obama acted with mercy in the face of an obstructionist Congress; Trump acted with vindictive racism instead of passing legislation, and his own Attorney General admitted it was done in order to make punitive examples of helpless people, including many children. To draw any kind of equivalence between an act designed to help children and an act that’s resulted in children being traumatized, raped, and left to die is abhorrent.

This abhorrence runs through almost every page of The Right Side of History. In it, Shapiro pines for the good old days when the worship of a God was the primary act of society and the primary definition of its white, male, married householders. In that world, schools would certainly be places of worship, behaviors not sanctioned in 3000-year-old Near Eastern incunabula would be gently but firmly outlawed, and “we” would finally be able to fill that “meaning-shaped hole” in our hearts: children would fill it with their parents, wives would fill it with their husbands, and men would fill it with their interpretation of the Judeo-Christian God. The Right Side of History doesn’t add the two words that have always, always concluded such an arrangement: “or else.” But that’s only because this is still a baby alligator. Give it three or four more books.

And in the meantime, thank God for the Enlightenment.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Since the work of V. O. Key in the 1950s, historians and political scientists have often described American political history in terms of punctuated equilibrium. Long periods of stasis are interrupted by short bursts of dynamism. The stasis constructs “party systems” that endure a couple generations, then break apart in what the deadpan jargon of social science dubs “realignment.” The realignments are never as simple as pendulum swings from left to right or right to left, however. They are more like redefinitions of what right and left mean, and they come to be dated by elections that look in retrospect like paradigm shifts.

1828.

1860.

1980.

And if the flaying of the Republican and Democratic establishments in 2016 was not a realignment it at least portended that one is in the works.

In Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal, Eric Rauchway takes a timely look at another epic realignment — one of the biggest of all — in 1932. In the chilly months between Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in November and inauguration the following March, he and outgoing President Herbert Hoover engaged in a battle of wits as the latter tried to pin the former into as many conservative policy corners as he could. It didn’t work. Roosevelt had an agenda; it wasn’t Hoover’s; and both of them knew the outgoing administration could do little to stop it.

But Rauchway’s story is more than a titanic game of cat-and-mouse. It is also an account of one “party system” eclipsing another. When Hoover invited president-elect Roosevelt to the White House to talk about British and French debt, Roosevelt rejected Hoover’s suggestions less because he disagreed with them than because he wanted a new era of more personal and direct diplomacy. And when Hoover implored him to praise the gold standard, promise to balance the budget, and eschew indebtedness, Hoover sought to forestall what he knew would be an explicit rejection of laissez-faire. Leaders in both parties stood mouth agape as the inherited coalitions, strategies, and assumptions of both parties broke, balked, or backfired. Liberal Republicans like Henry Wallace realized their party had too many men like Hoover for it ever to embrace the New Deal, and older Democrats like Al Smith worried about Roosevelt’s capacity for recklessness. Before it was over, millions wound up voting in ways they had never though imaginable.

Winter War rejects the idea that FDR was an “ignorant but blithe spirit simply trying expedients” and not knowing where he was going. It insists that much of the New Deal, at least in contour, was shaped before Inauguration Day. It also challenges biographies of Hoover that have emphasized his Progressive streak, arguing that that had frayed beyond recognition by 1932. In doing so, the book offers striking parallels to our own predicament. For one thing, it reminds us that ideological warfare in American politics was hardly invented in the 1990s or 1960s. Not only is it much older, it has reached white-heat intensity before. By emphasizing Hoover’s right-wing obduracy — in some ways, he and not Roosevelt is the book’s central character — it also invites comparison between the politics of obstruction then and now. Finally (and hopefully for those disgruntled with the status quo), by casting Roosevelt as a wily parvenu striving to appear gracious while knowing that he only need run down the clock to get what he wants, it reminds us how much change the American system can produce when an old party system finally shuffles off its mortal coil.

—Kip Wedel is an associate professor of History and Politics at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas.

Almost immediately, in the wake of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in August of 1986, the Soviet power-structure indulged in one of its longest-standing and most-practiced political reflexes: it closed ranks and began lying. They covered up the reactor’s troubled history; they obscured the severity of the accident; and they drastically downplayed the death toll. Even once the details began to become known to the international community, that death toll, somewhere between 45 and 55 fatalities, remained stubbornly steady. It can still be found in plenty of current summaries of the Chernobyl disaster.

The true extent of the disaster’s toll in human life is the main focus of MIT history professor Kate Brown’s somberly fascinating new book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. The book is the latest in a small spate of English-language Chernobyl studies, following Serhii Plokhy’s 2018 Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Disaster and Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, and although Brown recounts the moment-by-moment practical details of the meltdown and subsequent Soviet reactions (including not only the cover-up but the remarkably dystopian measures the government took to help the residents of areas near the plant), her emphasis is on the long-term death-toll from low-dose radiation, a toll that quickly rises beyond the preposterous total of 55 into the tens and even hundreds of thousands.

Brown sifts through archives, conducts extensive interviews, and creates a damning portrait not only of callous Soviet bureaucracy but also of the shocking complicity of international regulatory bodies like the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency in muting the full horror of the disaster’s aftermath. Worst of all on some levels, much of this conspiring seems to have been motivated by a very mundane fear of legal retribution. ““Minimizing both the number of deaths so far and the ongoing health consequences of the Chernobyl disaster,” Brown writes, “provided cover for nuclear powers to dodge lawsuits and uncomfortable investigations in the 1990s when, with the end of the Cold War, the record for four decades of reckless bomb production emerged from top-secret classifications.”

And perhaps the most dangerous after-effect of Chernobyl is therefore not radioactive but political, with a pattern of governmental deceit weaving itself into what should be purely a narrative of safety and public trust. As Brown demonstrates with strictly controlled outrage, this after-effect has very measurable, real-world consequences, because it crops up in subsequent disasters, like the one in Japan eight years ago:

Without a better understanding of Chernobyl’s consequences, humans get stuck in an eternal video loop. The same scene playing over and over. After the Fukushima accident in 2011, scientists told the public they had no certain knowledge of the effects of low-dose exposures of radiation to human beings. They asked citizens for patience, for ten to twenty years, while they studied this new catastrophe, as if it were the first. They cautioned the public against undue anxiety. They speculated and stonewalled as if they did not recognize they were reproducing the playbook of Soviet officials twenty-five years before them. And that leads to the pivotal question: Why, after Chernobyl, do societies carry on much as they did before Chernobyl?

The obvious implications here are terrifying, particularly given the 21st century rise of authoritarian political movements in most of the world’s nuclear powers. After reading her book, Kate Brown’s phrase “a Chernobyl Guide to the Future” takes on many new and increasingly ominous undertones.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

Ted Floyd is the editor of Birding, the monthly magazine of the American Birding Association, so readers innocently encountering his terrific new book How to Know the Birds: The Art & Adventure of Birding will have no illusions about the wonkish experience that awaits them in these pages. The pages themselves are wonderfully illustrated in black-and-white drawings by N. John Schmitt, but that isn’t enough to save How to Know the Birds from the well-deserved mockery of bigger and cooler books in the school cafeteria.

Floyd himself has been an avid birder for nearly 40 years, as he freely confesses early on, noting that the birding world has radically changed in even so relatively short an interval:

Back in 1980, when I first started to self-identify as a birder, you could get by with binoculars (or field glasses, as some folks still called them), a field guide (there were two main choices at the time), and a notebook (for writing it all down). Going to the library was common, taking photos was rare, and recording birdsong was practically unheard of. It was a time when we used telephones, stationary objects in homes and offices, for talking to one another - and for no other purpose.

“Apps, blogs, and online social media have been huge; same goes for the photo sharing sites, multimedia checklists, and online libraries designed specifically with the bird lover in mind,” he writes. “We have accumulated a critical mass of new resources for bird study. And in doing so, we have arrived at a substantially revised conception of what it means to be a birder.”

These sentiments are entirely true, and they provide an extra note of irony to the fact that How To Know the Birds is, right from its rococo title, a decidedly non-revised birding production. Floyd calls it a “storybook for bird lovers” and knows with precise experience how many hundreds and hundreds of such books there have been in the past three centuries. Floyd organizes his book roughly by season and also by general type of birding experience, from encountering “spark” birds in mid-winter to grappling with the minutiae of identification in the field, extending even to the grubby House Sparrow (Passer domesticus): “The adult House Sparrow in spring and summer is complexly patterned in Quaker gray and chestnut above; below, the throat and breast are strikingly black,” we’re told (that “Quaker gray” is a good example of the rhetorical sharpness that runs throughout the book). “In fall and winter, however, the male’s markings are much subtler, with just a few black flecks on the throat and breast.”

200 of the 1000 United States bird species are profiled in these pages, and the energy Floyd brings to the project never flags - nor does the diplomacy he shows toward his fellow nature-nerds. “Sooner or later in the birding life, we get serious, or at least semi-serious, about the whole business of bird identification,” he explains, for instance. “Maybe ‘serious’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘Methodical’ is closer to the birder’s way of engaging bird ID.”

Normal, well-adjusted people, people who will never be found tramping through the Ramble on freezing-cold March mornings with up-to-the-second app-fed information about a rumor of an early migrating Eastern Phoebe, might, if pressed, supply even more accurate words than ‘serious’ or ‘methodical’ to describe the motley crowd to which Ted Floyd openly pledges fealty. How to Know the Birds will please that crowd enormously - and it will serve as a both field guide and meta field guide for the rest of us.

—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.