May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month

 

May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month in the U.S., celebrating the achievements, culture, and history of AANHPI communities. It honors the first Japanese immigration (May 7, 1843) and the transcontinental railroad completion (May 10, 1869). Celebrations include community festivals, educational events, and supporting AAPI businesses. 

Key Details about AAPI Heritage Month:

• Purpose: The month recognizes the profound impact and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to American history, society, and culture.
• Scope: The designation encompasses individuals with origins from across the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.
• Official Recognition: What began as a week-long celebration in 1979 was expanded to a full month in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.
• 2026 Theme: According to the Federal Asian Pacific American Council (FAPAC), the 2026 theme is "Power in Unity: Strengthening Communities Together".
• Activities: Celebrations often feature cultural performances, food festivals, workshops, and educational programs held by museums, libraries, and community organizations. 

For more information, visit official sites like  AsianPacificHeritage.gov, which is presented by the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and other national institutions.

Here are the Asian-themed books that I've read since last May.

The Last Island:  Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth.  Adam Goodheart.  David R. Godine, Publisher, 2023.  272 pages.

In November 2018, most of the world heard about North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman Islands off the coast of India,  for the first time when a young American missionary broke Indian law by landing on the island, intending to share his Christianity with the Sentinelese tribe that lived there and had violently repelled almost all previous attempts to contact them.  His death was the result, and it became a big international story for a minute as people debated his mission:  arrogant, racist, colonialist, superiority complex or misguided, brash young man attempting to do God's work?  Eventually, the world moved on, but the story continued to resonate with Adam Goodheart, a journalist and historian who had visited the Andaman islands in the late 1990s and even briefly (and illegally) visited the coast of North Sentinel Island. Twenty years later, he answered the urge to return and to learn more.  He recounts his research and his journeys in this book, along with the history of the Andaman tribes and their interactions with explorers, travelers, and the British, then Indian governments.  During these interactions, the Andamanese natives were abused, killed, enslaved, and infected with devastating diseases.  However, the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island had successfully, and forcefully, resisted all contact with the outside world, and they continue to do so today, living much as they have for tens of thousands of years, but modernity's threat is intense.  Like Goodheart, I have always been fascinated by stories of first contact between cultures, and this was a great read.

1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow: A Memoir.  Ai Weiwei.  Crown, 2021.  400 pages.

Before our recent trip to Seattle, I was vaguely aware of the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei.  As it happens, the Seattle Art Museum is hosting the largest Ai Weiwei exhibition ever staged in the US, over 100 pieces on view through September 7, 2025.  I must admit the very first pieces in the exhibit did not impress me.  "Great," I thought to myself, "he thinks flipping the bird is art."  There are a lot of birds flipped.  As I got deeper into the exhibit, however, I was duly impressed and saw more, a much more varied and interesting body of work.  Ai is very prolific, and his work challenges the viewer and makes him/her think.  Isn't that what art is supposed to do?

His memoir explores his philosophy of art and particularly his unshakable belief that artists must also be activists.  It's also a history of communist China.  Ai's father, Ai Qing, was once an associate of Mao Zedong and the other leaders of the Communist Revolution.  He was hailed as the poet of the Revolution, widely known and appreciated throughout China and in international literary circles.  Then, he fell from grace during the Cultural Revolution, arbitrarily labeled a "Rightist" and an "Enemy of the Revolution."  As a result, he and his family were banished to the hinterlands for much of Weiwei's childhood, and Qing was subjected to public shaming and sentenced to hard labor, including cleaning public toilets.  Ai Weiwei recounts his family's struggles and the oppression that the Communist Party has constantly subjected the people to, most of which westerners are unaware.  The stories make it easier to believe the rumored genocides being conducted currently against ethnic Tibetans and Uyghars, among others, Westerners are also largely unaware of the long history of dissidence that has occurred in China.  Ai Weiwei was hugely influenced by his personal and family experiences and the acts of dissidence that he witnessed.  His art caused him to be persecuted and imprisoned as a dissident himself until he was allowed to leave the country.  Today, Ai Weiwei is more or less a citizen of the world, and one of the leading proponents of freedom of expression.

While I must admit that I slogged through this book, even skimming a few sections, it is not a bad book.  In fact, it's pretty good, and it's an informative, thought-provoking, and important book.  I can't explain why it took me so long to read.

Zodiac.  Ai Weiwei, Elettra Stamboulis, and Gianluca Costantini.  Ten Speed Graphic, 2024.  176 pages.

Ai Weiwei is one of the world's best known living artists.  His father, Ai Qing, was a well known poet and devoted Communist Party member in his native China who was denounced during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were forced to spend 18 years in labor camps and in exile.  Young Weiwei emerged from that experience as an artist and a political and social activist.  In his mind, the two, artist and activist,  can not be separated; an artist must be an activist.  His pro-democracy activism in China led to his work being censored, his workshops being destroyed, and himself being imprisoned without trial or even charges.  Finally allowed to leave China in 2015, he has become a citizen of the world and continued his artistic work in multiple media and his activism.

Here, Weiwei takes the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac and interweaves their ancient Chinese folklore and the ascribed human characteristics with stories from his life.  It's more than his life story, however.  It's also an insight into his philosophy  on the meaning and importance of art and freedom of expression.

Stranger in the Shogun's City.  Amy Stanley.  Scribner, 2020.  352 pages.

When asked why they don't appreciate history, many people might say that history is just the stories of kings and queens and the upper class, and, honestly, a lot of history is exactly that.  The lives of kings and queens are the most likely to be documented and written about, creating lots of material for historians to comb through.  "Regular" people don't often leave paper trails.  That's what makes a book like Stranger in the Shogun's City really stand out.  Stranger is the story of Japan just before the 1853 arrival of the American fleet which resulted in Japan's emergence onto the world stage, told through the life of Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest.  Tsuneno grew up in a small village, and her parents ran the local temple.  The family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle, and the children were all educated.  Tsuneno's eldest brother was set to inherit his father's position, and Tsuneno and her sisters were expected to follow the normal path for priest's daughters, probably an arranged marriage with a priest in another village and a life managing the day-to-day operations of the local temple.  However, that life didn't appeal to Tsuneno; she had dreams of life in the big city, Edo (now Tokyo), the seat of power of the Shogun, the de facto ruler of Japan.  She finally makes it to Edo in her mid thirties, having been divorced three times.  Alone and penniless, owning little beyond the clothes on her back, she has to make her own way, and it's a struggle.  Her struggles are documented in numerous letters between her and her family, and they also present a detailed look at life in Edo.   The book is a great window into the culture of 19th century Japan, and specifically into the life of a Japanese woman at the time. 

Anna May Wong:  From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend.  Graham Russell Gao Hodges.  Chicago Review Press, 2023.  304 pages.  Updated 2nd edition, first published in 2004.

Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong appeared in over 50 movies, and she was one of the biggest celebrities in the world.  American, European, and Asian movie magazines constantly published photos of her, stories about her, and stories written by her.   She socialized with other A-list celebrities and with European royalty.  She was recognized as an excellent actress, but she was also a stage and nightclub star, as an actress, singer, and monologist, often performing in multiple languages.  She was incredibly talented at presenting herself, thoughtfully using her own hairstyles and wardrobe to develop fuller characters and to advance the film plots.  During the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, she contributed most of her income and much of her time to raising funds for aid to Chinese civilians and refugees.  She invested wisely and made a comfortable living, enough for herself and to educate her siblings.  She was one of Hollywood's brightest stars --- quite an accomplishment for the daughter of a laundryman born in Los Angeles in 1905 who made her on-screen debut at 14.

Yet, few people know her name today, and far fewer have ever seen one of her films.  Her career and legacy were handicapped from the beginning by outside forces over which she had no control.  Strict movie codes of the day forbade any hint of romance between characters or actors of different races, so she was not considered for leading roles.  Her roles were often stereotypical, reflecting American racism. She played the devious Chinese female, almost always a villain or a servant, and almost always forced to kill herself in the end. Hollywood refused to hire Asian actors, casting white actors in "yellow-face," instead.  While she had many adoring fans in China, the Nationalist government condemned her because she embraced being a flapper, bared her legs and arms in films and photos, and she often played prostitutes or slave girls.  She was accused of shaming the Chinese people and their culture.  Wong was a very complicated and interesting character, and there has been a bit of resurgence in curiosity about her in recent years, with new biographies, documentaries, and even a Wong Barbie and U.S. quarters.  This bio was ahead of the curve, however, and this new, updated edition is a thorough look at her life and career, although it's a bit dry.

The Kite Runner.  Khaled Hosseini.  Riverhead Books, 2003.  371 pages.

Another classic down.  Few books appear on as many contemporary "Best Books" as this one does.  On one level, it's the story of two Afghan boys, Amir and Hassan.  Amir is the son of a wealthy and powerful local merchant, a highly respected pillar of the community, and Hassan is the son of the family's faithful servant and a member of a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.  A horrible crime committed against Hassan drives the two boys apart, and the families separate.  It's also a story about fathers and sons.  Finally, it's the story of Afghanistan.  Over the next decades, the upheaval of the Soviet invasion and occupation, civil war, and Taliban theocracy further disrupts their lives and destroys the country.  Amir and his father migrate to the US where they struggle to survive, and Amir struggles with guilt over the end of his relationship with Hassan.  Years later, he's drawn to return to Pakistan and Afghanistan by a dying family friend who reveals family secrets that push Amir to risk his life to find Hassan's son and to bring him back to the US.  It's an extremely moving and heart-rending novel, well worth a  read, even though elements of the plot are pretty  predictable.

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in April 2026

 

Author interview

Heart of American Darkness:  Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier.  Robert G. Parkinson.  W.W. Norton & Company, 2024.  480 pages.  

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the gold standard when it comes to searing critiques of European imperialism and colonialism in Africa around the turn of the 20th century.  Charles Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Mr. Kurtz, revealing large scale brutality, repression, and racism in the process.  Here, Parkinson deftly uses Conrad's novella as a starting point for an exploration of the colonial American frontier in the 18th century, viewed through the lives and actions of members of two families who were at the center of the efforts to colonize the Ohio River Valley.  The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen - the very word "frontiersman" may have been coined to refer to Thomas Cresap, the patriarch, also nicknamed "the Maryland Monster" - who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. From the 1730s, when Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies literally fought each other for control of the Ohio Valley, through the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, these two families were involved in, and linked to, horrific acts of carnage and destruction that were discussed throughout the colonies and in Britain.  Parkinson not only demonstrates how the frontier shaped the American nation, but also shaped new interpretations of race and citizenship, and he also reveals how reputations, legacies, and heroic status are constantly changing.

Death of the Mantis.  Michael Stanley.  Harper, 2011.  448 pages.  Detective Kubu series, # 3 of 8.  

This find was a dollar well spent at a local public library book sale.  (Hillsborough County public libraries have permanent sale sections in their branches. Other libraries have temporary sales from time to time.  Always worth checking out.)  This is a natural for fans of The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series or Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee series, detective series set in exotic locales.  This series, like the Ladies Detective Agency, is set in Botswana, where Detective David "Kubu" Bengu is drawn into murder mysteries that often involve indigenous Bushmen, or the San people.  This story opens with the discovery of a dying park ranger named Monzo, with three Bushmen on the scene.  Were they trying to assist him or were they his murderers?  The investigation brings long-standing prejudices against Bushmen to the surface, making things more complicated for Kubu.  The mystery deepens when more murders occur, and stories of undiscovered diamond fields are thrown into the mix.  It's a good murder mystery, the setting and cultural landscapes are intriguing, and Kubu is a really interesting character.  I'll be on the lookout for more of the books.

Author conversation

The History of Sound:  Stories.  Ben Shattuck.  Viking, 2024.  320 pages.

The History of Sound is a collection of 12 short stories set in New England (except for two set in Newfoundland) over three centuries.  The stories revolve around memories, artifacts, artworks, or journal entries which are used to reveal secrets, misunderstandings, and the ups and downs of love set in various landscapes across the region.  History is woven through each and every story, reinforcing the idea that we are shaped by history.  The really unique thing about this collection is that the stories are paired, connected through time somehow, and the second story often contains a revelation that adds to or illuminates some aspect of the first story. The stories are both thoughtful and thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive and original, sometimes sad, and sometimes humorous.  One word of caution, though:  I know some people have problems with stories that don't seem to have a neat ending.  Shattuck's stories have loose ends.  I'm not a big short story reader, but I enjoyed this collection. (Note:  The title story was adapted into a 2025 film of the same name.  The audiobook version features great narration by the like of Paul Mescal, Ed helms, and Nick Offerman.)

Sick Puppy.  Carl Hiaasen.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.  341 pages.  Book 4 of 7 in the Skink series.

Tim Dorsey is my all-time favorite "Florida Man" author, and his Serge Storms is one of my favorite literary characters ever.  Carl Hiaasen is a good second.  Sick Puppy is the fourth of Hiaasen's Skink series.  Skink is the former Florida governor who couldn't take being in politics, abandoned his office, and disappeared into the swamps where he survives on roadkill and fights a one-man battle against developers.  However, he's really a minor character.  The real lead character, Twilly Spree, appears to be a pale imitation of Serge Storms, a psychotic vigilante whose mission in life is to punish those who despoil Florida, from litterbugs to evil developers - and, of course, ALL Florida developers and politicians are evil and corrupt degenerates.  Sick Puppy was published a year after the first Serge Storms novel appeared.  I know Hiaasen and Dorsey were friends.  Maybe they discussed ideas?  Maybe Serge was originally inspired by Skink?  Anyway, this book is good, the plot and characters are as crazy as you would expect, but it reads like a Serge novel with all the trademark Dorsey humor removed.  It makes me really miss Dorsey and Serge.

Book Trailer

Grasshopper Jungle.  Andrew Smith.  Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2015.  416 pages.  

Austin, his best friend Robby, and his girlfriend Shann are just three sixteen-year olds in tiny, boring Ealing, Iowa.  Like all teens, they don't feel like they fit in even though they've only ever lived there.  Not only are they square pegs in a round hole world, but they are also dealing with their own family issues and confusion about life, the universe, and everything, including their own relationships with each other, adolescence, and sexuality.  BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!  Literally overnight, Ealing is besieged by a plague of six foot tall grasshopper/mantis creatures who are seemingly unstoppable, and their entire existence is driven by two violently primitive instincts: to eat and to mate, instincts often gratified simultaneously.  As the creatures hatch, eat, and mate, Ealing's population is devastated, and the whole of humanity is threatened.  It's up to Austin, Robby, and Shann to stop the plague before it's too late.  Imagine a combination of "Lost," "Stranger Things," "Fallout," and all of those 1950s apocalyptic creature movies, and you've got Grasshopper Jungle.  I grabbed it as soon as I saw the cover and the blurb "Raunchy, bizarre, smart, and compelling" and happily paid the dollar at the library book sale and found a quick and fun read.  Note:  while it is marketed as a young adult novel, it is frank and graphic, one of those books that would be put on a list these days, and readers will likely have differing opinions on whether it is truly suitable for young adults, and just how young those adults should be.

Author Interview

This Other Eden.  Paul Harding.  W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.  224 pages.

At the mouth of the New Meadows River in Casco Bay, Maine lies a 41-acre island called Malaga.  From about 1860 to 1911, it was home to an interracial settlement of no more than four dozen people of mixed white, black, and indigenous residents that traced their community's founding, perhaps apocryphally,  to a free black man named Benjamin Darling.  In the 1890s, people in neighboring communities - perhaps offended by the interracial character of the community, perhaps inspired by the potential profits of developing the island, perhaps some of both - began spreading stories that the islanders' culture was one of incest, sexual deviance, poverty, deformity, and imbecility.  It was a time when the "science" of eugenics held major sway in public opinion and in the halls of government, and state and local authorities took action, condemning the island's structures, seizing the land, forcing the islanders to relocate, and even committing several islanders involuntarily to institutions.  When novelist Paul Harding came across the story of Malaga, it inspired him to create his own version, an island called Apple Island, in this novel.  He only took inspiration from history and never intended to write a history.  He created his own island origin story and his own cast of characters within a loose historical framework.  The result is a moving story of people with great resilience, pride, strength, and will to survive as the outside world invades their peace.  It's one of those quiet, thought-provoking novels.   

Author podcast

G,I, G-Men:  The Untold Story of the FBI's Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe.  Stephen Harding.  Citadel, 2026.  416 pages.  Thanks to Citadel/Kensington Publishing for the review copy.

Most of the books dealing with the history of the FBI that I've read have not painted very flattering pictures, with the Bureau, especially during J. Edgar Hoover's reign as Director, coming across as incompetent at best and corrupt, evil, and political at worst, but there was at least one seemingly successful and honorable operation.  During the first years of World War II, Hoover had convinced President Roosevelt to dispatch specially trained FBI agents to Latin American countries in order to thwart Axis efforts to develop and to operate espionage networks there.  That program worked, and it worked well, and,  in 1943, Hoover convinced FDR to authorize the next step.  A special unit of 21 highly qualified and trained agents, each fluent in multiple languages and most having had extensive experience living or traveling in Europe, was created and named the Army Liaison Unit.  The agents were given courtesy military ranks and uniforms and embedded within US Army units.   Their mission was to work with US and Allied military intelligence organizations to track down and arrest American citizens living in Europe who were suspected of collaborating with Axis powers to betray their home country and to return them to the US for trial as traitors.  Their efforts led to many arrests and convictions and uncovered a great deal of evidence that would be used in the Nuremberg and war crimes trials following the war.  Stephen Harding has researched and written an excellent history of the program that readers of military history and espionage buffs will enjoy.  

Author interview

Nonesuch.   Francis Spufford.  Scribner, 2026.  496 pages.  

I really enjoyed the three other Spufford novels that I've read, Golden Hill, Red Plenty, and Cahokia Jazz, so I was looking forward to reading his latest, Nonesuch.  The historical fantasy fiction opens in 1939, as Britain prepares for war, and ambitious young Iris Hawkins works as a secretary at a financial investment firm, struggling to break through the glass ceiling which prohibited women from actually being brokers or traders.  A night at a club leads to a chance encounter with Geoff, a brilliant young BBC engineer working in the emerging field of television.  She thinks the encounter is going to be a fun one-night stand, but, instead, she's drawn into a dangerous other-world, a world in which spirits, or angels, can be summoned, trapped, and forced to do the bidding of the summoner.  In this case, Iris and Geoff discover that a British fascist has learned the secrets of summoning the angels and plans to use their powers to go back in time and assassinate Winston Churchill before he becomes Prime Minister, with the ultimate goal of forcing Britain's surrender.  It's up to them, with a little assistance form the angel Raphael, to thwart the plot.  Like Spufford's other novels that I've read, Nonesuch is kind of smoldering, slow burn in the beginning, but once you're in, you're in..  The historical details of Britain in the early years of the war and through the Blitz are great, as I've come to expect from the author, and the magical fantasy time travel elements are inventive and intriguing.  Note:  it simultaneously sort of concludes and sort of ends with a cliffhanger; a sequel is forthcoming.

Ragtime movie trailer 1981

Ragtime.  E.L. Doctorow.  Random House, 1975. 270 pages.  

My latest classic read is Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, an icon in the genre of historical fiction.  Although relatively short, it is epic in terms of scope and the huge cast of characters.  In turn-of-the-century New York, three families - black, Jewish, and WASP - interweave with historical figures like Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, Robert Peary, Booker T. Washington, and Emiliano Zapata, just to name a few,  during America's ragtime era, in the early 20th century. The reader is immersed in the time period through vivid descriptions of settings and of movements swirling through American society at the time.  However, Doctorow famously never claimed to be writing accurate history, famously saying, "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." While he paints historical figures in broad strokes of accuracy, he takes liberties with their characters, but those liberties don't feel out of place. A huge part of the book is atmosphere, but there is a plot involving an upper-class family in New Rochelle, New York, a nouveau riche family whose fortune is derived from manufacturing fireworks, bunting, flags, ribbons, and other patriotic accoutrements.  We don't even know their names; they're referred to as Mother, Father, Younger Brother, and Boy.  The family finds itself and the town dragged into violent chaos when a successful black ragtime pianist is victimized by the local fire department and exacts a horrible revenge.  It's easy to see why the book is a classic of historical fiction.

London Falling:  A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for the Truth.  Patrick Radden Keefe.  Doubleday, 2026.  384 pages.  

WOW! I love Patrick Radden Keefe's books, and this one is absolutely incredible.  In 2019, a security camera on the London headquarters building of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, captured a horrible moment on the balcony of a neighboring luxury apartment high-rise.  Nineteen-year old Zac Brettler paces the fifth-floor balcony for a minute and then leaps to his death in the Thames River below.  Days later, his parents are notified that his body was recovered.  From his birth, Zac had been an intelligent, charismatic, and likable kid, and his family lived a very comfortable, but modest, lifestyle.  His parents paid over 50,000 pounds a year for Zac and his brother to attend prestigious private schools, but they lived in a modest apartment in a quiet London neighborhood, and the family car was a Mazda.  Zac wasn't satisfied, however. He craved luxury and wealth, and he developed an obsessive fascination for the flashy and loud Russian oligarchs who had come to dominate much of London's business and organized crime worlds since the days of Margaret Thatcher.  Zac even admired Vladimir Putin, and many of the oligarchs in London either had close ties with Putin or were/are on Putin's enemies list.  Following his death, Zac's parents learned that he had crafted an elaborate fictitious alter ego, beginning in his early teens:  Zac Ismailov, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch with access to a large family fortune.  As Ismailov, he gets enmeshed in a relationship with two of the slimiest and most crooked individuals in the city, and that relationship leads to his death.  His parents are forced to become investigators because, contrary to what those gritty British police dramas lead viewers to believe, Scotland Yard, London's Metropolitan Police, is an utter failure at anything related to criminal investigation --- a bastion of corruption, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and raging indifference.  Keefe takes the minimal police investigation, the parents' investigation, and multiple other sources to create an unbelievable story, not just of one tragic death and its impact on a family but of modern London.  This very well might end up being my favorite read of 2026.  

Narrow the Road.  James Wade.  Blackstone Publishing, 2025.  306 pages.

It's 1932 in rural east Texas, and 15-year old William Carter is struggling.  His father has been away for weeks in Washington as one of the leaders of the Bonus Army, WWI veterans occupying the capital to demand immediate payment of promised future payments, and was supposedly on his way home, weeks after the event had been violently broken up.  Meanwhile, William's mother is dying, their cotton crop is failing, and the banker is threatening imminent eviction.  When a letter from his father, mailed from a town just 40 miles away, is delivered, William decides to go find his father and bring him home.  His best friend Ollie joins him, and the two begin an odyssey that takes them through still untamed land occupied by eccentric backwoods characters, many of whom are so impoverished that they aren't even aware of the Great Depression.  They encounter moonshiners, murderers, a witch woman, and an evil medicine show peddler with a gorilla along the way.  It's another great James Wade historical fiction, full of great atmospheric and historic detail, interesting characters, and beautiful language.  One word of warning, though: If you like stories that end neatly, with everything wrapped up and tied up with a bow, James Wade may not be the author for you.

Keeping Current: Books on Iran

 

    Here are a few books about Iran that I've read that illuminate Iran's history and Iranian-American relations.

Target Tehran:  How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination and Secret Diplomacy to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East.  Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar.  Simon & Schuster, 2023.  368 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

My default position is usually "Truth is stranger (and more interesting) than fiction," and this book definitely makes that case.  I am not a spy thriller reader, but this book should appeal to that group and to those that are fans of political shows like West Wing and The Diplomat.  It is an incredibly inside look at Israel’s covert operations aimed at thwarting Iran’s movement toward becoming a nuclear power. The authors show how Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has combined sabotage, cyberwarfare, assassinations, diplomatic efforts, and intelligence gathering over the last 20 years or so to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear arms and to reshape power dynamics in the Middle East. It concentrates on events since Israeli agents and Iranians opposed to their government stole Iran's top secret nuclear archives in 2018 in order to prove that Iran was violating previous agreements and actively deceiving the world.  Twenty-first century warfare is in full force as Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force use cyberwarfare and drones in addition to embedded agents and on-the-ground assets and targeted assassinations to destroy Iran's program.   In the process, both Israel and Iran have become Top 5 world cyber-powers. At the same time, there have been some unbelievable diplomatic gains as Israel has forged relationships with several of the Gulf states because they all see Iran as their greatest existential threat.  The book does have some shortcomings.  It is largely one-sided;  the authors had much more access to US and Israeli participants than to Iranians.  Much of the subject matter is still, of course, highly classified, so the authors had to rely on limited declassified documents and interviews with individuals involved, and intelligence agencies and those people involved all have their own agendas.  Finally, time is an issue.  The authors completed writing the book in April 2023, and lots of new developments have already occurred.  Nevertheless, it was a more satisfying read than I anticipated, and I learned a lot about the current climate in the Middle East.

King of Kings:  The Iranian Revolution:  A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation.  Scott Anderson.  Doubleday, 2025. 512 pages.

The Iranian Revolution and the resulting American hostage crisis happened exactly because of the reasons cited in this book's title:  hubris, delusion, and miscalculation. Add stupidity, incompetence, impotence, and entrenched bureaucratic insanity.  Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi  was one of the most ill-suited men ever to be called "King of Kings."  He was not that bright and had led a totally isolated and exalted life from his birth that separated him from reality.  He had almost no competent advisors that ever dared to tell him the truth.  Negative reports and statistics were routinely changed to positive ones before they were presented to him.  He was incapable of making decisions, especially under duress.  Instead, he relied on others to take action and, consequently, to take the blame if the action failed.  Jimmy Carter was an inept, incompetent boob, totally in over his head from the second he stepped into the White House.  Like the Shah, he was far too involved in petty details, didn't have competent and honest advisors, but he was further handicapped by his outsider status that made him the subject of ridicule, mistrust, and derision by the Washington bureaucrats and professional politician class who actively kept information from him and had no interest in carrying out his policies.  Neither man saw the world as it was.  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a provincial hardline religious zealot who had no idea about or interest in how a country should be run.  His small group of advisors rallied around him simply because he was a viable alternative for the people's support and ignored his brutal medieval core philosophy.  A coalition of wildly disparate factions including socialists, communists, modernists, republicans, and religious fundamentalists came together, only united by their desire to depose the Shah, and they each thought Khomeini could be used to attain their goal and then discarded, but almost none of them had any real confidence that a revolution would be successful.  The CIA was totally incompetent (as usual), reporting to the White House, even days before the revolution, that the Shah was secure in his position for decades to come.  The US Ambassador to Iran was an idiot, and embassy and consulate officials in Iran were not Iranian experts and couldn't even speak the language, just marking time until their next ill-fitted posting.  They routinely ignored and buried the reports and observations of the one staffer who saw what was happening well before it did, and he was threatened with dismissal and frozen out of any meaningful role within the staff.  Scott Anderson does a fantastic job of explaining what happened and why in this book, and it is incredibly readable.  This is the book to read if you want to know about modern Iranian history and the history of the revolution, the effects of which still resonate almost 50 years later. 

Publisher's blurb:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

“A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years"

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.

Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in March 2026

Between Two Fires.  Christopher Buehlman.  Ace Books, 2012.  433 pages.

I came across this book in a social media recommendation reel and decided to check it out.  It's an historical fiction horror novel set in France in 1348, when the country, and much of Europe, is being mercilessly trampled by the Four Horsemen:  War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence.  Pestilence, in this case, is the Black Death, or bubonic plague.  Lucifer and other demons have unleashed the plague on the earth as part of their latest war against God, angels, and humanity.  Thomas, a disgraced and excommunicated knight who has lost his land and family, encounters and rescues an orphan girl named Delphine. Delphine latches on to Thomas, telling him that angels have told her that she has to go to Avignon to do something to save the world, but she doesn't know what, and he has to help her.  What kind of knight can resist that?  So, they set out on their quest, and they're soon joined by Father Matthieu, a disgraced priest.  Together, the three face various dangers, human and monster, before they arrive in Avignon for a major showdown with a demon who has inhabited the body of the Pope.  Armed with assistance from the angels, Thomas' strength and experience, and a holy relic picked up on the journey, the heroes do, in fact, change the world.  It all makes for a fast read, a good historical fantasy.  I recommend it for fantasy readers looking for a good adventure.

 

Blood and the Badge:  The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation.  Michael Cannell.  Minotaur Books, 2025.  368 pages.

In Brooklyn in the 1980s, two of the dirtiest cops ever to serve in the New York City Police Department operated without check.  Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were detectives in the major crimes division, specializing in organized crime.  At the same time, they were also on the payroll of a boss in the Lucchese crime family.  He called them his "crystal ball" because they used their position to secure sensitive information about city, state, and federal investigations and passed it on, ensuring that he always stayed at least one step ahead. A big part of that information was the identities of snitches, associates that chose to violate their sacred  oath of secrecy and loyalty, called the omerta, and flip on their mob bosses, trading details of criminal activities for reduced sentences or witness protection.  Whenever a canary sang, Eppolito and Caracappa knew about it and informed their boss.  The boss then took action.  Dozens of canaries were murdered.  On some occasions, the bad cops volunteered to do the jobs themselves, for extra pay.  Meanwhile, they continued receiving accolades, commendations, and promotions for their police work.  Justice didn't catch up to them until almost two decades after they retired.  This is an absolutely incredible story that no screenwriter could even conceive of, and it's all true, and it's an immersion into an unbelievable world, a world in which organized crime is pervasive and dominates every aspect of daily life.  After reading this book, it's hard NOT to believe that every single Italian from New York and New Jersey is either mob-affiliated or at least mob-adjacent. As deadly as this world is, it's also extremely ridiculous.  The story rivals anything ever written by Tim Dorsey or Carl Hiaasen, for example, in their Florida man comedic crime fiction.  Mob nicknames alone make this a great read.  The real life mobsters involved in this story include Bagels, Bubble Gum, Fat Pete, Fat Anthony, Big Mike, Fat Gangster, Flounder Head, Duck, Quack Quack, Gas Pipe, and The Toupee.  I highly recommend this book.  

Author Talk

The Incorruptibles:  A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld.  Dan Slater.  Little, Brown, and Company, 2024.  432 pages.

American organized crime, as we've come to think of it, had its origins in the slums and tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900s, prior to World War I.  From the late 1800s, thousands of eastern and southern Europeans arrived and created the most crowded ghetto on earth.  Many were Russian Jews, escaping the centuries of discrimination, pogroms, and forced military service.  They often found work in the sweatshops of the garment district or performed some other manual labor.  Some, however, moved into criminal activities like gambling, pimping and prostitution, and drugs.  Graft, corruption, and violent turf wars ensued, and organized crime was born.  Author Dan Slater dives deep into that subject and marks the 1912 murder of bookmaker Herman Rosenthal, committed by gunmen hired by a NYC cop in order to prevent him from exposing police corruption, as the defining moment.  That murder led the more established German Jewish leadership in the city to launch an all-out war on vice and corruption conducted by the Russian Jews.   It's an interesting perspective that I had not been exposed to before.  The German Jews had arrived in the early 1800s, and, even though they faced outrageous prejudice, many had achieved levels of wealth, education,  and respectability, and they took on a mission to provide charity and assistance to those less fortunate than themselves.  They often looked down on the poorer, less educated, and less respectable Russian Jews.  The book also does an excellent job of portraying life in Lower East Side New York at the turn of the 20th century.  

Author talk

The Art Spy:  The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland - A True Account of Her Fight Against Art Theft and Tyranny in WWII Paris.  Michelle Young.  Harper One, 2025.  400 pages.

You've probably heard of the Monuments Men, the first-of-its-kind unit of curators and art historians tasked with preserving European art treasures threatened by World War II, but you may not know that the most effective "Monuments Man" was a French woman named Rose Valland.  As German troops stormed across Europe, Hitler, Hermann Goring, and other assorted German officials and officers systematically stole millions of art works from museums and private collections.  Valland, one of France's leading art experts - specializing in 20th century art, risked her life daily during the occupation of Paris and worked tirelessly for years after the war to protect and to locate tens of thousands of works and to return them to their rightful owners.  And, yes, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor, and many other accolades,  her memoir was made into a big 1964 Hollywood action movie, she has things named for her in France, and she's starting to become more well known, but I'm not sure all of that makes up for the incredibly terrible way she was treated during the war, not just by the Germans, but by her own superiors in the French national arts and museums bureaucracy.   For most of her career as a curator, not only was she unpaid, but her immediate supervisor actually went out of his way at every opportunity to deny her titles, promotions, and a salary and to make unfounded accusations and negative reviews of her work.  Still, she persisted, and when she found herself left solely in charge of the collection at her museum, the Jeu de Paume, she became the most important art spy in France.  The Jeu de Paume became the epicenter of art looting in France, not only because of its own collection, but also because it became the central collection point for many of the other works stolen across France.  Valland made exhaustive inventories of every work, its legitimate owner, and its planned destination, information that made recovery possible after the war.  Her courage and dedication deserve even more illumination,  This book provides that and honors her, and it also provides a very thorough history of the looting.  

 

author interview

All Things Left Wild.  James Wade.  Blackstone Publishing, 2020.  304 pages.  

I had never heard of James Wade or of his books before sitting in on a session at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October 2025.  The subject was historical fiction, and Wade was one of two authors discussing their books.  I immediately liked Wade and added his books to my list of books to check out.  All Things Left Wild is Wade's debut novel, and it won high critical acclaim and several awards.  At the turn of the 20th century on a ranch in Arizona Territory, Shelby Bentley decides to turn criminal and hatches a plan to exact revenge on wealthy rancher Randall Dawson for causing his alcoholic father to lose his sheriff's badge, leading to a tragic downward spiral.  When their mother dies, leaving them untethered, Shelby convinces his sixteen year old brother Caleb to join him.  The planned robbery goes wrong, of course, and Dawson's young son is killed in the process. The brothers are now murderers on the run, and Dawson sets out after them.  Two parallel stories unfold, two separate journeys,  As Shelby commits more and more evil, Caleb is torn between his conscience and family loyalty.  They ultimately encounter a Mexican girl on the run,  and then they fall in with a gang led by a madman  who believes that he has been selected by God to create a new world, even if that creation requires  murder, rape, kidnapping, and robbery. Meanwhile, Dawson, the reluctant bounty hunter who would have been more comfortable in his home library than on the trail of his son's murderers, crosses paths with Charlotte, a black woman well acquainted with the rugged western landscape and ways and exceedingly well equipped to survive.  It took a minute for me to get into this book, but I was soon hooked and drawn in.  It's an incredible story, told in beautiful language, and the characters engage in a lot of thoughtful conversations, internally and externally, about the nature of humanity.  While Caleb comes of age, Randall comes to grips with his own midlife crisis.  This book is just screaming to be made into a blockbuster movie or series.  I will definitely be reading more of Wade's novels.

author podcast appearance

Hell Put to Shame:  The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery.  Earl Swift.  Mariner Books, 2024.  432 pages.

About a hundred years ago and about twenty minutes from where we used to live, one of the most horrifying and most savage episodes in America's brutal racial history unfolded, and it is almost totally unknown and unrecognized today.  In the spring of 1921, the bodies of two drowned young black men, chained together and tied to sacks of stones, were discovered.  Over the next few weeks, nine other bodies were discovered, all black men who had been held in bondage and murdered by John S. Williams, one of the largest landowners and most respected men in Jasper County Georgia, a pillar of the community and stalwart member of his Baptist church.  Williams was part of the peonage and sharecropping system that arose across the South during Reconstruction, basically a continuation of slavery.  Southern states passed laws allowing land- and business owners to pay bails and fines of arrested individuals and employ them until their debts were repaid. Sharecroppers worked land for landowners in exchange for credit and a portion of their crops.  White planters needed labor, and they resorted to violence, threats, coercion, and indebtedness due to corrupt accounting to force laborers (black and white) to stay on the farm and to work without pay for years.  Williams and his sons kept their workers in check with physical violence and whippings, threatened their lives, locked them in a bunkhouse at night, and hunted down escapees with dogs for years before federal agents showed up to investigate charges of peonage.  That visit sparked the 1921 killing spree, but there may have been eighteen or more victims over the years.  Shockingly for Georgia in 1921, an investigation ensued, and, incredibly, a Georgia jury did the right thing.  Author Earl Swift provides a riveting account of the crimes, the trial, and the national reaction to the horror as the story unfolded.  It's also an excellent account of the history of peonage, which still exists today, albeit in slightly different forms.  Peonage cases are still investigated and prosecuted in 2026.   

Author talk

Four Against the West:  The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation and Created a Legend.  Joe Pappalardo.  St. Martin's Press, 2024.  400 pages.

You've probably heard of Judge Roy Bean, the notorious and colorful Justice of the Peace who declared himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos," but you probably didn't know that he was just one of four Bean brothers, and that each brother set out separately  from their "old Kentucky home" in the 1840s to go find his own adventure in the West, the wild, untamed frontier beckoning to many young Americans who were driven by a need for adventure.  Each brother had that need for adventure in spades, along with a strong helping of wanderlust, and they all had the knack of being able to find action wherever they landed.  Each was also driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, an enthusiasm for capitalism, and a desire to do public service. The combination makes for four extremely interesting and noteworthy lives.  The brothers become soldiers, judges, husbands, guerillas, lawmen, entrepreneurs, refugees, fathers, politicians, and pioneers, and they experience triumphs and tragedies and condemnation and praise.  This is a really great story of the American West and the Bean family's contributions to its legend and history. 

Author talk

Everybody Wants to Rule the World.  Ace Atkins.  William Morrow, 2025.  368 pages.

Now THIS is an Ace Atkins book that I loved!  It's a Cold War spy action thriller set in Atlanta in 1985, "The Year of the Spy," inspired by Atkins' own life growing up there and then and by real Cold War espionage events. Who knew that Atlanta in the 80s was crawling with secret agents? Fourteen-year old Peter is convinced that his mother's boyfriend is a dangerous Soviet spy, and he sets out to prove it.  Peter's a bit of a nerd, and he enlists the aid of one of his literary heroes, Dennis Hotchner, Hotch, and Hotch's friend, a former Atlanta Falcon and current drag queen named Miss Jackie Demure.  Hotch is a once well-known author of gritty pulp fiction action noir novels who's fallen on rough times and into a bit of a creative slump, supporting himself by working at the Oxford Too bookstore, one of my favorite Atlanta institutions of the past.  Meanwhile, a woman who works with his mother at an Atlanta company engaged in research on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI or Star Wars, is murdered.  Was Gary, Peter's mother's boyfriend, the murderer?  Peter investigates, and soon he, Hotch, and Jackie are dragged in to a complicated web involving the FBI, the CIA, KGB, KGB defectors, sleeper agents, not only putting their lives in danger, but also threatening to derail the upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit.  This book is full of great action and humor and lots of twists and turns, and it's jam-packed with 80s and Atlanta nostalgia that makes this Gen Xer very happy.  (There is one error that stands out, however, when Atkins refers to a highway that didn't open until 1995.)  A great read!

Author talk

Not Your Founding Father:  How A Nonbinary Minister Became America's Most Radical Revolutionary.   Nina Sankovitch.  Simon & Schuster, 2026.  400 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the free review copy.

In Cumberland, Rhode Island in October 1776, 23-year old Jemima Wilkinson was ill, drifting in and out of consciousness.  Her family held little hope. Miraculously, she made a full recovery, but she was different.  According to Jemima, she had died, but God returned her to earth with a new charge and a new message for humanity.  Oh, and Jemima no longer existed.  The new messenger of God was genderless and went by the name of Public Universal Friend.  Jemima's family had been Quakers, albeit not in good standing in their local meeting house.  Two of her brothers had been expelled for violating the Quaker tenet of nonviolence by joining the colonial militia, and a sister had been expelled for having a baby out of wedlock.  Friend's family and several friends and neighbors became followers of Friend's new message, and the Society of Universal Friends was born.  The Society was one of several religious movements that developed in the late 18th century, including Mother Ann Lee's Shakers, but Friend's philosophy and practices were unique and stood apart.  Friend's message seemed to be in keeping with the lofty aspirational goals of the new nation:  liberty, self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and equality of genders and races.  Like other new sects such as the Shakers,  members of the Society formed their own communities in New England and eventually New York.  However, unlike the Shakers, they didn't seek to separate themselves from the rest of the world, and they rejected celibacy, strict rules on behavior, and traditional division of labor by gender.  Families and children were encouraged.  Women took on leadership roles in Society communities and worship.  At its height, the Society had some 6,000 members.  It survived Friend's death in 1819 and many tribulations including repeated attacks by critics who often spread false rumors about Friend and society practices, including accusations of corruption, abuse, and even murder, and, more than once, unscrupulous men took advantage of Friend's naivete and reluctance to get involved in business and property transactions to steal Society land and cheat believers before the Society ceased to exist in the 1860s.  Although little is known for certain about Friend, who left little personal writing and few copies of sermons, this book is a very interesting biography and a history of the place and time that saw a bloom of religious fervor, expressed in various forms.

Author interview

Hollow Out the Dark.  James Wade.  Blackstone Publishing, Inc, 2024.  328 pages.

It's rural East Texas in 1932, and the Great Depression is under way.  The Preston lumber mill and timber operation that dominates the town economy shuts down, plunging the town deeper into despair.  Jesse Cole, a decorated veteran of the Great War, struggles to keep it together -"it" being his farm, his family, and both his own sanity and his own morality code.  Up to that point, his life had been all about honoring the memory and spirit of his dead brother, who had taught him that service to others should always take precedence over his own needs.  When his childhood friend and fellow WWI trench survivor runs afoul of  Squirrel and Frog Fenley, the criminal brothers who run the region's vast moonshining operation and control the town through terror and violence, along with a network of corrupt of law enforcement officers, Jesse is forced into their criminal underworld.  Unfortunately, it's at this moment that a rival criminal operation makes its move to take over the Fenley operation and territory, and Jesse is caught in the middle.  Also in the middle is Texas Ranger Amon Atkins, assigned to investigate a murder allegedly committed by the Fenleys.  Like Jesse, Amon discovers that he is in the middle of something so much bigger, and more deadly.  This is excellent southern gothic/noir-ish action read, and I've become a big James Wade fan.  His writing is uniquely his, although I think fans of Cormac McCarthy, S.A. Cosby, Walter Mosely, and James Ellroy will be fans of James Wade.  His storytelling is first-rate, he excels at description, imagery, and characterization.  His stories may start with a slow smolder, but they build to an explosive finale, and the reader is left with questions and lots to ponder about the human condition.  And then there's the language.  What other author uses phrases like "trammels of encumbrance," "raging rapacity," and, my favorite, the "sorrowed pairing of propinquity and heartache?" 

Burn Down Master's House.  Clay Cane.  Dafina, 2026.  288 pages. Review copy from Kensington Publishing.

Inspired by actual stories, this novel is about the unfathomable brutality and inhumanity of slavery and the violent resistance that it sometimes inspired.  It seems that every single sentence contains so much gratuitous  soul-crushing hate, wickedness, savagery, and cruelty that readers are left rooting for a giant asteroid to hit the earth and finally end all of humanity and the blight on the universe that humanity is.  This book is not for reading for pleasure, nor for education.  It's not inspiring, it's not uplifting, it's not a testament to human perseverance, and it's not a "tour de force." This book makes the films "Django Unlimited" and "Mandingo" (1970s exploitation film) look like high art.