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.

Women's History Month 2026: Women's History Books Reads Over the Last Year (Part 2 of 2 )

 

A Fatal Thing Happened On the Way to the Way to the Forum:  Murder in Ancient Rome.  Emma Southon.  Harry N. Abrams, 2021.  352 pages.

Although I reject the stupid social media trend a short while back claiming that men constantly think about ancient Rome, I know that it is a major topic of interest for many people who like history.  Here, however, author Emma Southon illuminates an aspect of Roman history that few, if any, consider.  To paraphrase Southon, ancient Rome was an exceptionally "murder-y" place.  That in itself is not very different from our own society which has a morbid fascination with murder.  Think of how much of our entertainment - books, television, movies - is murder based.   

In this book, Southon examines a number of murders, including of course the assassination of Julius Caesar.  After all, Rome was conceived in murder when mythical founder Romulus murdered his twin Remus.  The Roman Republic was founded when the last king was overthrown following the suicide of a noble woman raped by the son of the king.  Crowds thronged arenas to cheer as men, women, and animals slaughtered each other. Criminals were crucified.  In one fifty-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.  Rome was an exceptionally violent society. This book is much more than just a recitation of cases, though.  It is an examination of Roman society and culture as a whole, through the prism of murder.  We, as readers, discover how ancient Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.  It's complicated. For much of Roman history, murder was not viewed as a matter for the state to handle.  It was a family issue.  If a person was killed by another person, the victim's family handled it. Then you throw in murders of family members, murders of slaves by masters and masters by slaves, murders of emperors and political figures, and state-sponsored murder.   This book is extremely informative and thought-provoking, and it's also quite entertaining.  The author is a British podcaster with a PhD in ancient history, and the tone of the book is very "podcast-y," and she has that very British sense of humor that I love.  I highly recommend this book for those who are interested in ancient Rome.

The Fifties:  An Underground History.  James R. Gaines.  Simon & Schuster, 2023.  288 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

Too many people think of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and complacency, picturing sock hops, soda fountains, and poodle skirts, but, as I tried to impress upon my students each year, there was always turbulence under that placid surface.  There was the rise of rock and roll and teenage rebellion which shocked older generations.  Beatniks challenged middle-class norms.  Artists shook up the art world.  The Red Scare and the Lavender Scare sent shock waves through government and society.  The civil rights and feminist movements started ramping up.  There was a lot of angst, anger, confusion, and conflict.  This book celebrates several individuals who were brave enough to stand - often alone - on their principles and lead fights that they believed needed fighting.  In particular, Gaines selects gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmental movements.  A couple of the people discussed are familiar names, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and Rachel Carson for example, but the others aren't nearly as well known, or as celebrated as they should be.  There's Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and computer scientist who is considered the father of cybernetics, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence.  There's Harry Hay who first envisioned a national gay rights movement in the 1940s.  There's Pauli Murray whose law school thesis provided much of the legal basis for Thurgood Marshall's arguments in Brown vs Board of Education and whose legal work made sexual discrimination unconstitutional. Gerda Lerner pioneered the concept of women's history as an academic field, despite being told by superiors and colleagues that there wasn't enough material to study.  Isaac Woodard was a black WWII veteran who was blinded by a South Carolina sheriff because he dared to look him in the eye.  These are all important stories that should be shared.  This book should be widely read.  Almost makes me wish that I was back in the classroom in order to share them. ... Almost.

The Taking of Jemima Boone:  Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America.  Matthew Pearl.  Harper, 2021.  288 pages.

In July 1776, twelve-year old Jemima Boone, the daughter of the best known frontiersman in the American colonies, and two of her friends were kidnapped by a small group of Cherokee and Shawnee warriors.  Over the next few days, Boone and a group of men from the settlement of Boonesborough took off in hot pursuit. After about fifty miles, the pursuers caught up, rescued the girls, and killed some of the warriors, including a son of an important war chief named Blackfish.  This incident, fueled by British efforts to tamp down colonial resistance on the frontier before it blew up, led to a broader conflict as the Shawnee, the pro-war faction of the Cherokee, and elements of other tribes launched a major effort designed both to seek revenge and to end, once and for all, white encroachment into the region known as Kentucky.  The actual kidnapping and rescue are dealt with rather quickly in the book, but the real story is the aftermath.  The summer of 1776 was extremely consequential in American  history.  As delegates in Philadelphia argued over the Declaration of Independence and the opening months of the Revolution, white settlers were crossing the Appalachians into Native American territory, foreshadowing the conflict and extermination that was to follow.  This book is an excellent account of the events.

The Sinners All Bow:  Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne.  Kate Winkler Dawson.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025.  320 pages.

Kate Winkler Dawson has made a name for herself as a true-crime author and podcaster, and her newly published book is a great one.  It's a great topic, a story-behind-the-story, a whodunnit, a true crime story, a story-that-inspired-a great-story story.  On December 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead,  hanging, on a small New England family farm.  Sarah was a mill girl.  Like many other single girls in New England, she had been drawn to the textile mills and long, hard work days, far from their families.  Her life was difficult, and she struggled.  She found solace in Methodist churches and meetings.  The Methodists were a relatively new denomination, and the established Congregationalists looked down on them, aghast at their fervent - in their eyes, frenzied and wild -  worship style and their loud, frantic, "hell-fire and damnation" style of preaching that didn't require formal education. In their eyes, Methodists were drunk, ignorant, promiscuous, and criminal, blasphemers Traditional, staid New Englanders also tended to look down on mill girls in general, often considering them wanton women, challenging societal mores.  Sarah's death stirred up a lot of controversy, especially after it was discovered that she was pregnant.  Questions arose.  Was it murder or suicide? Who was the baby's father?  As to the latter question, evidence soon pointed to a local, married Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery.  Was he also a murderer?  A noted author of the time, Catherine Read Williams,  immediately began investigating and published her own book about the case in 1833, perhaps the first true crime book in American history.  The case, and Williams' book inspired another book that you may have heard of, a little novel called The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Nearly two hundred years later, Dawson takes up the investigation, using Williams work, her own research, and modern forensics and experts to answer the questions and determine the truth, successfully weaving the stories of Sarah, Hawthorne, and Williams together.

Cher:  Part One:  The Memoir.  Cher.  Dey Street Books, 2024.  432 pages.

Cher is the Icon of all Icons.  Before Chappell Roan, there was Gaga.  Before Gaga, there was Madonna.  Before Madonna, there was Cher.  And she's bigger than all of them. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only artist to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center. It's hard to name another entertainer whose life has been filled with re-inventions and rebirths.  Now, she's telling her story.

And what a story it is.  Her family's history and her childhood were chaotic, to put it mildly.  The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road look like happy fairy tales by comparison.  It becomes even more surreal (Speaking of surrealism, the later story about Sonny and Cher meeting Salvador Dali is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book.) when she adds stories about playing with Dean Martin's children and Liza Minnelli.  Part one covers her childhood through the 1970s, focusing, of course, on her marriage and partnership  with Sonny Bono and their rise to stardom,  and their divorce.  It ends with her divorce from Greg Allman and with Cher on the verge of launching her acting career.  Cher's always been known for her honesty, openness, and humor.  She pulls no punches here, and I'm looking forward to part two.

She Came To Slay:  The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.  Erica Armstrong Dunbar.  37 Ink, 2019.  176 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

If any American deserves a fresh, thoroughly researched, well-written, originally illustrated, biography that is equally accessible and enjoyable for everyone from grade school to adulthood, it is Harriet Tubman, and this is the book.  Of course, we all know the basics, that Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who personally escorted hundreds enslaved people to freedom after her own escape.  Some of us may know of her long career as an abolitionist before the Civil War and her service as a spy and nurse during the Civil War.  Fewer know that she became the first woman to lead an armed combat mission - a very consequential mission.  Even after the war, she never stopped, becoming an active suffragist and an advocate for veterans and for the aged.  Tubman's always been near the top of my list of greatest Americans, and this biography is great introduction to her life for yourself and for any younger readers in your life.  

The Mirage Factory:  Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles.  Gary Krist.  Crown, 2018.  416 pages.

Gary Krist is one of those authors at the top of the narrative nonfiction writing game, along with authors like Erik Larson and Abbott Kahler.  In this 2018 book, Krist tells the story of Los Angeles through the lives of three towering figures and their careers from 1910 to 1930:  William Mulholland, the engineering visionary who brought power and water to a formerly written-off barren wasteland in order to make the city even possible, D.W. Griffith, the "father of American film" who built a powerful culture-shaping industry out of a minor novelty, and Aimee Semple McPherson, the charismatic evangelist who built a church that drew tens of thousands of believers each week and who reached millions more each week through magazines, newspapers, tours, and broadcasts on her own radio station.  Singly, they became American icons.  Collectively, they created Los Angeles and made it a major city physically, economically, creatively, and spiritually.  Krist makes the case that all three were both masters of their crafts and masters of illusion, capable of dreaming big dreams and making those dreams come true, overcoming major obstacles in the process.  Yet, the mirages or illusions that they created all dissipated because of their own tragic flaws, "a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design." Each of them saw his or her fortunes and legacies suffer, but the city remained and prospered.  It's a riveting history. No, wait, it's boffo, epic, spectacular, stunning, thrilling, legendary, unforgettable, electrifying, breathtaking, awe-inspiring,  .... etc.

Ring Shout.  P. Djeli Clark.  Tor Nightfire, 2025 (paperback, originally 2020).  192 pages.

If you liked the movie "Sinners," or other horror films by directors like Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele, then this is the book for you.  It's horror, fantasy, and history all wrapped in one virtually non-stop action package.  The setting is 1922 in Macon and Stone Mountain Georgia.  The Ku Klux Klan has been reborn following the release of the movie "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.  As black veterans returned from World War I and started standing up for their civil rights in Jim Crow America, the Klan mobilized and ramped up violence in response.  The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and a spike in lynchings are just some of the events referenced in this book.  In Clark's re-imagining, the KKK actually consists of two factions, the Klan, comprising the average American racists, and the Ku Kluxes who are actually demonic monsters created and fed by hate and who only exist by stirring and escalating hate.  A small band of women forms for the purpose of destroying the Ku Kluxes.  There's Maryse, armed with a magical sword gifted to her by three spiritual aunties who appear to her in visions, Sadie, a sharpshooter, and Chef, who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Harlem Hellfighter in WWI.  They're aided by Maryse's spiritual advisor Nana Jean and Molly, a self-taught Choctaw scientist and engineer who devises weapons and strategies along with her female apprentices, and Emma, a German Jewish social revolutionary communist.  Following some skirmishes and a major Klux attack on a juke joint in Macon, everybody heads to Stone Mountain, the site where the Klan was reborn and the first crosses were burned, for the final apocalyptic, the-fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance battle.   Clark blends history and horror with Gullah, African, and Caribbean folklore and delivers a very creative and original read and a great ride from beginning to end.

Harlem Rhapsody.  Victoria Christopher Murray.  Berkley, 2025.  400 pages.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance.  Poet Langston Hughes called her "the Midwife" of the literary explosion that was a huge part of the Renaissance.  At a time when publishing companies refused to publish black authors or employ black proofreaders or editors and even white women couldn't find employment higher than stenographer or secretary, Fauset became the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, founded by W.E.B. DuBois.  In that role, she was responsible for the discovery and mentorship of almost all of the leading literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, to name just a few, and she made The Crisis a thriving and vibrant publication.  She published lots of her own poems and essays and four novels, the first novels to ever portray authentic middle class, college-educated, professional black characters living everyday lives and facing everyday challenges.  Yet, few people know about her or her contributions.  Author Victoria Christopher Murray endeavors to correct that in this historical fiction work.  She delivers a suiting tribute to Fauset and a rich depiction of 1920s Harlem and the culture of the Renaissance.  Fauset's life, however, is more than just literary achievement.  For over a decade, Faucet carried on an extramarital affair with The Crisis founder, and her own boss, W.E.B. DuBois.   Murray imagines the ups and downs of that relationship and its effects on the individuals involved and affected, and on the movement itself, revealing the faults, foibles, and flaws of both Fauset and DuBois.  The novel is a really good read and a history lesson at the same time.

Georgia's Historical Recipes:  Seeking Our State's Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them.  Valerie J. Frey.  University of Georgia Press, 2025.  400 pages.

As I always say, there's not much better than combining history and food.  There are few elements of culture that reveal as much about peoples, places, and times as a culture's foodways do.  Valerie J. Frey is a writer, researcher, and an archivist who specializes in finding and preserving history through food.  It's also obvious that she's an avid baker and collector.  Her discoveries of old cookbooks led her to do a deep dive into the history of cookbook publishing in Georgia, and she presents her findings here.  She finds examples from the antebellum period through  World War II and organizes them into fifty sections presented chronologically.  Each section contains a biography of the cookbook writer, the historical and cultural context of the time in which it was written, and sample recipes.  Frey also usually includes her own personal memories, connections, or attempts to re-create recipes, making the history all the more relatable and approachable.  The recipes and cookbooks provide windows onto Georgia history:  what was available, who could afford it, how was it presented, who cooked, who consumed, what did the home look and feel like, what did the larger society look like, and how did all of this evolve over time.  Beyond being a fun and educational read, this book is truly a great addition to the genres of food history and Georgia history. 

Women's History Month 2026: Women's History Reads Over the Last Year (Part 1 of 2)

 

    March is Women's History Month.  Here's a recap of the books that I've read since last March that deal with women's history themes or have notable women characters.

Kugels and Collards:  Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina.  Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey.  University of South Carolina Press, 2023.  256 pages.

South Carolina became home to some of the first Jews to ever live in North America, with the first recorded Jewish settlers arriving in Charleston in the 1690s.  Over the centuries, more Jews arrived, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, then Germans, Russians, and Eastern Europeans, at the turn of the 20th century and, later, escaping the Holocaust.  Jewish families adapted and blended their traditions and foodways in their new home, influenced by contact with other ethnic groups, black and white, and by new and different ingredients that they found.  The result is this history and cookbook, containing some 80 recipes alongside dozens of stories about their creation and history.  As I've said lots of times in the past, it's hard to go wrong when combining food and history, and this book is a revealing insight into a particular culture.

Paper Bullets:  Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis.  Jeffrey H. Jackson.  Algonquin Books, 2020. 336 pages.  

Another book about anti-German resistance in occupied territory during WWII, but this one is unique.  First, it's set on the island of Jersey, one of the Channel islands between France and the UK which doesn't get a lot of ink.  Second, it's the first book to tell the story of two queer artists, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe (known in the art world as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore), whose lives and resistance were almost forgotten.  Third, their resistance involved no weapons, no espionage, and no hiding of Jews or Allied pilots.  Their resistance was writing anonymous notes.  That might sound benign and low-key, but their actions were still punishable by death.

Schwob and Malherbe were well-to-do French women (childhood friends who actually became stepsisters when their parents married) who became lovers and were deeply involved in the cross-dressing, homosexual, gender-bending, artistic, and literary free-for-all that was Paris in the 1920s.  They socialized with all the big names (Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Aldous Huxley, among others) of the Lost Generation and Surrealism.  They became avant-garde artists themselves, dabbling in various media but mostly photography focusing mostly on gender and challenging social norms. As the European situation deteriorated, they decided to move to the quaint peaceful island of Jersey.  There, they had to closet themselves as just sisters because it was a different world from Paris.  Their respite was brief, however, as Jersey was occupied by German troops.  The pair began a propaganda war against the occupiers, conducting psychological warfare by creating and distributing "paper bullets" — small typed notes containing wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops.  They would sneak the notes into soldiers pockets, on and in vehicles, and various other places.  Finally arrested and sentenced to death, they continued resistance in prison, reaching out to other prisoners to lift their spirits.  It's quite an interesting story.

Harriet Tubman Live in Concert.  Bob the Drag Queen.  Gallery Books, 2025.  239 pages.  (Audio version 4hrs, 17 minutes)

Wow!  I had no idea what to expect when I first learned about this book, but I immediately pre-ordered it.  We've been fans of Bob the Drag Queen since his first appearance on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and have seen him on a couple of stand-up comedy tours, but a book about Harriet Tubman?  It blew me away.  Pure creative genius and one of the most original things that I've read in a very long time.

Picture it:  NYC, present day.  People from the past, including many major historical figures have suddenly returned to life.  There's no explanation, almost no attention paid to it in the story.  It's just the mechanism which makes the story possible.  Don't worry about it.  "The Returned" live their lives and integrate into the present.  Cleopatra, for example, becomes a hugely successful makeup and fashion Instagram influencer.  Harriet Tubman, and several of the people she led to freedom on the Underground Railroad, have returned, and she's on a mission, again - a mission from God.  She contacts Darnell Williams, a once-hot hip-hop writer and producer whose music career is struggling, and tells him that God has chosen him to assist in her mission.  While one might deny God, nobody dares to say No to Harriet Tubman!  Her mission:  create an epic hip-hop album and stage show, a la "Hamilton."  In her first life, Tubman freed about 700 people from physical chains, and many more indirectly.  Now, she's back to free millions from metaphorical chains of all sorts.  Darnell has his own metaphorical chains to break, and he goes to work, with Harriet's guidance, to break free into his own authentic self.  This is a fantastic work, and I so hope that Bob is actively working to create a real album and show; it could be bigger than "Hamilton."  I highly recommend the audio version.  Not only is Bob the reader, but it also includes two of the show's songs at the end.  (NOTE:  The photo above was generated using AI.  There is no known photo of Harriet Tubman spittin' fire.)

Trespassers at the Golden Gate:  A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco.  Gary Krist.  Crown, 2025.  400 pages.

First things first:  the title is horrendous, "Trespassers at the Golden Gate" has next to nothing to do with the story.  But don't let that put you totally off, there's a good story inside.  On November 3, 1870, Laura D. Fair shot and killed her married lover in front of dozens of eyewitnesses, including the man's wife and a few of his children on a ferryboat in San Francisco Bay.  The victim, A.P. Crittenden was a well known lawyer and former California state legislator who had told Fair for years that she was his one, true wife and that he was going to divorce his wife and marry her.  When she finally realized that he was lying, she snapped, setting into motion a legal episode that captured the interest of the entire country.  The resulting trials led to public and private debates about marriage, morality, gender issues, and justice in California and beyond.  

Krist not only relates the now forgotten affair, but he also places the story in a larger context of the development of San Francisco which was a tiny little insignificant village in 1848 that became a wild and rough Gold Rush den of vice and corruption and, by 1870, was struggling to become a cultured and progressive metropolis.  During its meteoric rise, the fortunes of women, blacks, and Chinese in the city rose and fell, and Krist tells the stories of select representatives of those marginalized groups in parallel storylines.  He also introduces characters like Mark Twain, Brett Harte, and Susan B. Anthony who were swept up in the Laura Fair story.  It all makes for a really interesting story and a good history of San Francisco.  My only complaint is that, while I appreciated the tangents and the larger context, I can see that some readers would find them distracting and maybe even consider them filler material to pad a pretty cut and dried, straightforward story.

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. 

Starvation Heights:  A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest.   Crown, 2005.  432 pages.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard.  They were always open-minded when it came to new health treatments and crazes, and Dr. Hazzard's treatment looked promising to them.  Hazzard and her husband were building a sanitarium outside of Seattle that they dreamed would rival Kellogg's famous sanitarium in Battle Creek Michigan.  The sisters entered into her care and submitted to weeks of enforced fasting, subsisting on weak tomato and asparagus broths, and daily enemas.  Claire died, and her sister Dora finally made contact with the girls' childhood nurse in Australia and an uncle who arrived to rescue her.  What they found on their arrivals made no sense, and they got British and American authorities involved, discovering many more deaths caused by Hazzard's "medicine."  It's a real life horror story and a story of extreme quackery tinged with pure evil.

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 Vice President's Black Wife:  The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.  Amrita Chakrabati Myers.  The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  296 pages.

Even the buffest of history buffs outside of Kentucky have probably never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States and presidential contender who was a US Representative and Senator for years and whose political career was enhanced by stories that he was the man who killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames. His family was among the first white settlers of Kentucky and was a prominent family in the area of Georgetown for decades.  However, Johnson's story goes much deeper, and it is an incredibly important and quintessential part of southern history and the legacy of slavery.   

For six months each year, Johnson lived in a boarding house in Washington while doing the young nation's business by day and attending the young society's most exclusive society affairs by night.  As far as Washingtonians knew, he was a lifelong bachelor.  His Kentucky neighbors knew different, and, later, political opponents used that knowledge to tarnish his career and to thwart his presidential aspirations.  The secret?   He was married.  To an enslaved woman that he "owned," a woman named Julia Chinn.  He and Julia had two daughters who were legally his property as well.  He never officially freed wither Julia or his daughters.  Julia died enslaved, and her daughters weren't freed until the ratification of the 13th amendment.  That doesn't make Johnson that unique.  The history of American slavery is the history of interracial sex, consensual and not consensual.  Slaveowners viewed enslaved women as their sexual property, and that view was universally accepted even if it was not stated aloud.  Slaveowners raped, cajoled, bribed.  Some treated their concubines as wives.  Some freed their lovers and children. Some sold them when there was too much gossip and people started noticing resemblances.  A few left their property to their enslaved or freed wives or children.  

Johnson stands out because he called Julia his wife.  The preacher of the church that Johnson's family co-founded married them.  He gave Julia complete and total authority to run his plantation and the Choctaw Academy (a federally funded school for young Choctaw men that provided a major income for Johnson) that was located on his property.  His daughters married local white men, and they and their descendants have "passed" ever since, with the vast majority of their descendants never knowing their family history until the last few years.  In this book, Myers digs deep to tell Julia's story for the first time.  Because there isn't much of a paper trail,  (Johnson's papers are sparse for such a political man.  It is thought that his brothers destroyed most of his letters and documents upon his death due to shame.), there is a lot of "could have," "probably," "possibly," and the like, and a lot of references to similar stories, but she does an excellent job of telling the important story and bringing it to light.  Important and extraordinarily complicated.  Spoiler alert: don't go thinking Johnson was heroic.

Dinner With King Tut:  How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.  Sam Kean.  Little, Brown and Company, 2025.  464 pages.

I'm a fan of Sam Kean's podcast, "The Disappearing Spoon," and all of his books. He tells great, little-known stories that blend history and science.  His most recent book is one of his best and one of my favorite reads so far this year.  In it, he explores the field of experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeologists are not content to study documents and artifacts.  They seek to experience life as the people of the past did, and they carry out controlled, scientific experiments designed to replicate ancient human behavior and lifestyles, all in hopes of answering the questions that simply analyzing artifacts can't answer.  Some traditional archaeologists look down on the field and consider it frivolous or sensationalistic.  

Kean seeks out the experts and learns the skills that they study.  He learns and practices mummification, hide tanning, trepanation (skull surgery), flint knapping, beer brewing, open ocean navigation, Roman roadbuilding, and ancient tattooing among other skills.  He learns to cook and eat ancient foods including ostrich eggs, guinea pigs, walrus, acorn bread, and various insects.  He plays the ancient Aztec ball game and learns how to build and fire a giant trebuchet (a medieval siege sling weapon).  He relates these experiences with great deference and respect for his teachers, who are - not surprisingly - extremely interesting and unique people, and he incorporates lots of humor, often at his own expense.  (I really wish he had made a video series of each chapter.  I think it would be a huge streaming hit.) But wait - there's more! Each chapter also includes a gripping short story that immerses the reader in each culture that he addresses.  This is a must-read book for people who love history!

Masters of Sex:  The Life and Times of of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How To Love.  Basic Books, 2009.  432 pages.

Thomas Maier's newest book is the biography of a secret British agent who worked his way up high into the FDR administration and helped to inspire Ian Fleming's creation of James Bond.  When I picked up that book, I looked at his past works and decided to read his biography of pioneering sexologists Masters and Johnson.  It was the basis for a Showtime drama that I watched from 2013 to 2016.  For more than four decades, William Masters and Virginia Johnson were the leading American experts on human sexuality, following the groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey.  They changed Kinsey's paradigm, however.  Whereas Kinsey relied on interviews with thousands of subjects to learn about sex in America, Masters and Johnson actually watched and recorded thousands of people having sex in their laboratory, and they used scientific instruments to take thousands of measurements during the process.  They published their findings and offered physical and mental therapy to thousands  of couples and individuals who traveled to their St. Louis offices for solutions to sexual dysfunctions of all varieties.  They went from working in secret isolation -fearful of condemnation from the scientific and medical communities, the legal establishment, and the general public-  to becoming media darlings and pop culture icons.  During their journey, America's experts on love and sex had their own relationship issues with other people and then entered into their own relationship with each other, a relationship fraught with each individual's personal foibles, egos, insecurities, and character flaws.  Maier uses interviews with both principals and many others in their circles as well as Masters' own unpublished memoir to tell their story.  It is a thoroughly engrossing story.  One thing that I took from it was the truth behind the aphorism "There's a fine line between insanity and genius."  It's interesting that so many people hailed as scientific geniuses throughout history tend to be mentally unbalanced in some way and often not very nice people.  The word "hubris" definitely comes to mind while reading this book as well.  Note:  As a person with common sense might suspect, this book is full of extremely graphic language and descriptions.