Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in August 2026

 

The Wandering Hill.  Larry McMurtry.  Simon & Schuster, 2003.  320 pages.  Book 2 of 4 in The Berrybender Narratives.  

The wildly eccentric English noble family, the Berrybenders, continue their western odyssey in the early 1830s.  The winter has forced them to abandon their riverboat and to seek refuge in a winter outpost near the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, alongside real-life mountain men who led the American exploration of the West.  Historical figures like "Pomp" Charnonneau, the son of Sacajawea and Toussaint Charbonneau, Hugh Glass (the inspiration for "The Revenant"), Kit Carson, and  Jim Bridger are also sheltering there, and they find very quickly that dealing with the Berrybenders may, in fact, be more harrowing than their routine clashes with hostile Indians and grizzly bears.  Tazmin Berrybender takes center stage in the book as she prepares to give birth, along with her father's mistress, and struggles to make her marriage to mountain man Jim Snow work.  Snow, meanwhile, fears that the headstrong and independent Tazmin may be too much for him to handle.  Amidst all of the melodrama, the outpost is threatened by a Lakota band of 200 warriors led by a war chief named Partezon, while the Berrybender group of family members, servants, and employees continues to shrink, both in number and in body parts.  

The World of Tomorrow.  Brendan Mathews.  Little, Brown, and Company, 2017.  560 pages.

This is the story of the three Irish Dempsey brothers in 1939:  Martin the struggling musician trying to support his family in New York City, Francis the glib wheeler and dealer of black market items serving prison time, and Michael the sensitive youngest who goes into a Catholic seminary following his first broken heart experience.  Francis and Michael are brought together at their father's funeral and use the opportunity to escape from their respective prisons.  During the escape, they are unwittingly entangled in the operations of the Irish Republican Army, and a series of unfortunate events unfolds.  The result is that Michael suffers serious injuries and Francis ends up in possession of a large sum of money contributed to the IRA by a powerful backer in New York.  Francis decides to take Michael to the US to reunite with Martin, escape the IRA, and seek medical help.  That puts the whole family in the crosshairs of the IRA patron who wants his money back and to punish Francis Dempsey.  The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and I liked the story well enough to finish, but I have to say I would only give it a generous 3 out of 5 stars.  It's very melodramatic. It's a perfect example of a horrific case of editing.  IT'S TOO LONG!  The author's philosophy is why use two sentences to say something when you can say it in twenty sentences?  There are whole pages, storylines, and characters that are totally superfluous and only serve to slow things down.  In the middle of an action scene - such as they are - a character will go through what seems like pages of flashbacks to childhood.  More bad editing:  the title is pretty irrelevant.  The 1939 New York World's Fair is supposedly the backdrop for the book, but it's actually pretty irrelevant, important only for about an hour of book time, at most. 

Lamb:  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.  Christopher Moore.  William Morrow, 2002.  464 pages.

Two thousand years after his death, Levi bar Alphaeus from Nazareth, known to all as Biff, is resurrected by an angel named Raziel who sequesters him in motel and orders him to write a new, fuller testament of the life of Jesus Christ.  Why Biff?  Biff was Jesus', that is Joshua's to use his actual Hebrew name and not the Greek version, best friend from the moment they first met, when they were around 6 years old.  They were together almost continuously from that moment until the crucifixion as Joshua grows to accept his role as the Messiah, with assistance from Mary of Magdala or Maggie.  In their teens, Joshua and Biff set out to on a trek to the East to find and to learn from the Three Wise Men who had visited Joshua as a baby, hoping to get guidance from them about how to fulfill his divine role.  Over the next twenty years, they learned a great deal about the world and themselves through a series of madcap adventures.  Joshua learned how to hone and to use his powers and adopted bits and pieces of various philosophies to shape the message that he had to deliver to the world.  The more worldly and sarcastic Biff is there by his side the entire time, balancing Joshua's idealistic, even naive personality.  Lamb  is a hilarious, irreverent, and satirical masterpiece, the best biblical-era comedy since The Two Thousand Year Old Man and The Life of Brian.  I'm sure some readers would call it sacrilegious, and, yes, the humor can be earthy and crude, but, at its core, Lamb is true to the basic truths of Christ's real teaching, love and compassion. Definitely a 5-star read.  

Author Talk

Tocqueville's Discovery of America.  Leo Damrosch.  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010.  304 pages.  

Every student of American history is familiar with Alexis de Tocqueville.  Two hundred years later, his work is still quoted, often more often than it is read, regularly invoked by historians, documentarians, authors, and political commentators from across the spectrum, and he is regarded as an oracle who defined America and American democracy during the Jacksonian era.  In 1831, Tocqueville, a lawyer and minor French government official, and a colleague hatched a plan to preserve their careers during a particularly tumultuous time in French political history, basically by escaping observation and supervision while appearing to make themselves look useful and productive.  (You know, typical government workers) They proposed a fact-finding mission to the United States, ostensibly to gather information about the Auburn and Pennsylvania penal systems. For nine months in 1831 and 1832, the pair traveled through the US.  While much of their time was spent attending balls and dinners with the upper crust, they also met and interacted with Americans of all classes and with Native Americans and enslaved people, and they made astute observations about American government and culture and why American society was different from European society.  Generally, they were impressed with America and found much to admire, but Tocqueville and Beaumont did see worrying issues, and they made cogent predictions about the future that seemed to be extremely accurate.  In this book, Damrosch uses a wide variety of documents and letters, some of which had not been translated into English before, to trace their journey.  He paints a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and provides great context for Tocqueville's work, while illuminating the life and personality of the man himself.  It is an excellent introduction or supplement to Tocqueville's original work.  However, it's a great read for America250 whether you've ever read Tocqueville or not.

The Rediscovery of America:  Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.  Ned Blackhawk.  Yale University Press, 2023.  616 pages. 

This is a phenomenal book that very nearly achieves its author's incredibly lofty goal:  to reshape and reset American history by recognizing that Native Americans and government policy toward Native Americans have been essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.  It is destined to become a classic, and it would easily be a 5 out of 5 read for me, except there is one glaring factual error that I think is beneath a Yale University history professor and his editor(s).  (He refers to Henry Knox as "the future Secretary of State."  He was the first Secretary of War, never State.)  But otherwise, it is an incredibly informative retelling of American history from the Native American perspective, an overview painted in broad strokes and covering five centuries. Native Americans and government policy toward them have been both affected by and have affected every major period and event in American history.  It is a suitable companion to Dee Brown's iconic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I highly recommend it.

The Superman Wars:  A Battle For Truth, Justice, and an American Icon.  William Bernhardt.  Permuted Press, 2026.  416 pages.

The history behind the creation of Superman is even more gripping and interesting than any Superman story ever conceived in a comic book or movie.  During the Great Depression, two shy and socially awkward first-generation Jewish-American kids in Cleveland become best friends, bonded by their mutual love of science fiction, fantasy, and movies and by their shared dream of one day dominating the comics industry.  Jerry Siegel was the writer and visionary, and Joe Shuster was the artist who brought his creations into existence.  After repeated false starts and nonstarters, one character finally catches: an alien baby adopted by an Earth couple who grows into adulthood with superpowers and dedicates himself to truth, justice, and the American way.  As Superman became an international icon, Siegel and Shuster encountered what some cynical people might call the true American Way.  Enter two low-level mobsters and pornographers who hijack Superman and found the modern DC Comics company based on their ill-gotten proceeds.  In the process, they strip Siegel and Shuster of all creation credit, cheat them of their fair pay and share of Superman-derived profits, ruin their reputations, constrain their ability to work, and render them destitute. For the next 8 decades, Siegel and Shuster and their families battle, often seemingly in futility, battle for real life truth and justice.  It's one of the best books that I've read so far this year.

By Sorrow's River. Larry McMurtry.  Simon & Schuster, 2003.  347 pages.  Book 3 of 4 of The Berrybender Narratives.

The British aristocratic Berrybender family continues their year long odyssey through the American West in 1833, albeit missing even more members of the original entourage and more fully functioning limbs and body parts than they had when they started.  The harsh natural elements and hostile Indians continue to take their toll.  Tasmin, the eldest Berrybender child, continues to be the center of things in this novel. As headstrong and independent as ever, she realizes that she has at least four males in her life that are clueless about how to handle her, and she is equally confused by her feelings about them.   There's Jim Snow, the "Sin Killer," her husband who keeps leaving her for the trails but always returns, her toddler son Monty, mountain man Kit Carson who worships the ground she walks on, and Pomp Charbonneau, the son of Sacajawea whom Tasmin desires but doesn't seem to match her desire, Meanwhile, she's pregnant with her second child. Domestic chaos aside, the Berrybenders and the mountain men in their company encounter Le Partezon, the feared rampaging Sioux war chief, a mixed renegade group of slavers led by the equally deadly Obregon, the Ear Taker, an Indian who sneaks into camps to slice ears off of sleeping victims, two European journalists crossing the plains in their hot air balloon, and a group of Pawnee youths out to become warriors. Another fun McMurtry adventure.

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in May 2026

 

History Nation:  A Citizen's Guide to the History of the United States.  David Hanna.  Morris & Essex Books, 2024.  357 pages.  

David Hanna has written an excellent and concise overview/review of American history, just in time for America's semiquincentennial, and I'm extremely jealous.  Hanna is a high school history teacher and author, and he's basically written up his class curriculum.  It feels like his curriculum and mine were very similar.  Here, he's told America's story, albeit in broad strokes, the good, the bad, and the ugly, using the "city on a hill" theme as bookends, from John Winthrop's use of the phrase in 1630's "A Model of Christian Charity" to Ronald Reagan's invocation of the phrase throughout his political career.  He connects events and ideas across time and makes them incredibly accessible.  It is a progressive and inclusive historical summary, but it's much more balanced and objective than Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a book that some reviewers have compared it to.  If you're interested in celebrating "America250" with a solid review that will encourage thinking about America's story and how it should be studied and taught, this is a great book for you.

Author Talk

Democracy:  A Case Study.  David A. Moss.  Belknap Press, 2019.  784 pages.

David A. Moss is a business administration professor at Harvard, and a proponent of the Harvard Business School Case Study Method of classroom discussion.  He designed a course in which he applied those principles to the study of history and began training secondary and college history teachers to use it in their classrooms.  The idea is to begin with an objective summary of a case and break it down in an open student-led discussion of 5 questions:  1.  Define the problem, 2. What is the context?, 3. What key facts must be considered?, 4.  What alternatives are available to decision makers?, 5.  Finally, as the decision makers at the time of the case, what action should we take?  In this book, Moss has selected 19 cases that represent challenges to democracy in American history, some you're familiar with and some you're not.  The case is left open-ended to allow contemplation or discussion, but the outcome of each event is discussed in an appendix.  The whole point of this book is to encourage discussion.  As we are becoming more and more anxious about the state of our country and the rising divisions and tensions that threaten us and our ideals and discourage constructive debate, discussion of these cases in classrooms, book clubs, friends groups, etc. is a powerful antidote.  I'm engaged with it as part of a lifelong learning class, and I thoroughly enjoy the thoughtful and respectful discussion of history and politics that I haven't been able to enjoy for twenty years or more. The structure of the book allows a facilitator to pick a few of the cases to study as a group (My group is only doing 4 cases together.   The facilitator does the classes at other times with other groups and picks other cases.), but be sure to include Moss' introduction and conclusion as well, because they contain great insights.  This is another fantastic book for America's semiquincentennial, and I highly suggest it as a group read.

A Podcast episode reviewing the case and book

Bringing Down the Colonel:  A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington.  Patricia Miller.  Sarah Crichton Books, 2018.  384 pages.  

I can summarize this book in three words:  Men are pigs.  And those three words are a major slander against pigs everywhere.  It's 1894, and Madeline Pollard does the unthinkable, she files a breach of promise lawsuit against the popular and powerful Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge, alleging that the pair had begun a decade-long affair when she was a teen, despite the thirty year age gap and the fact that he was married.  That affair, she charged, had led to multiple pregnancies, and, when Breckinridge's wife died, he promised to marry Pollard before abruptly marrying another woman, leaving her abandoned and broken.  Shockingly, she won, and the case captured America's attention and mobilized Kentucky's women to enter the political world for the first time, ending Breckinridge's political career.  However, much of the book is a history of the cultural and legal abuse suffered by women in the 19th century.  The double standard applied to the genders was staggering.  A woman who had premarital sex was considered to be irredeemably "ruined" for the rest of her life while there were no negative consequences for men.  A woman who had the temerity to work in any mixed-gender environment or exercised any sort of social independence was widely considered to be automatically sexually available.  In the South, society conformed to the old English aristocratic patriarchal idea that every woman in a man's household was his to do with as he pleased, whether she was an indentured servant, slave, wife, or relative.  Rape was impossible to prosecute because prevailing legal opinion held that a woman could only be penetrated if she was willing.  "Doctors" wrote medical textbooks arguing that education caused women's internal organs to dry up and to fail, creating chronic invalids and early deaths.  Thousands of babies conceived out of wedlock were murdered, dumped, and abandoned.  The author creates a quite vivid, disturbing, and enraging context for the society that was shaken when Madeline Pollard defied the status quo and took her stand, becoming an unlikely women's rights crusader and icon.

2012 movie trailer

The Great Gatsby.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.  208 pages.  

For years, I believed that I didn't like The Great Gatsby.  Maybe because in ninth grade I couldn't relate to the fast, alcohol and jazz drenched, social world, but then again, more than forty years later, I still can't relate. I mean, invited to parties?  What's that like?  However, in the past couple of weeks, I've come across multiple references to it and figured that the universe was telling me that it was time for a re-read.  Now I see why it's remained a touchstone in American culture for a century.  This time, I enjoyed it.  It's such a classic, quintessentially American story and so incredibly modern for a novel published over a hundred years ago.  Just to refresh your memory: The Great Gatsby follows narrator Nick Carraway as he becomes entangled with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties in hopes of rekindling his past romance with Daisy Buchanan. As Gatsby pursues this dream, tensions with Daisy’s husband Tom Buchanan lead to betrayal, tragedy, and ultimately Gatsby’s downfall.  My enjoyment may have been heightened by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version read superbly by actor Tim Robbins.

Author Talk

Circe.  Madeline Miller.  Little, Brown and Company, 2018.  400 pages.  

I'm a big fan of modern retellings of myths, if they are well done, Stephen Fry's latest books for example.  This book got all the buzz and lots of acclaim when it was published, and, although it took me a minute to get into it, and the language is sometimes a little overwrought, I found it to be successful and entertaining.  Circe, a daughter of the Titan and sun god Helios, feels weak and powerless by comparison and just doesn't fit in too well amongst the gods, constantly struggling to find her niche.  She discovers that niche in pharmakeia, the art of using herbs, potions, poisons, and drugs to perform transportations and other magic.  Soon, that ability and the great skill which she develops are seen as a threat to Zeus and the other Olympians, and Zeus forces Helios to banish Circe to a deserted island for the rest of eternity.  Despite being banished, Circe manages to cross paths with many of the famous characters in Greek mythology like the Minotaur, Scylla, Daedalus, Icarus, Ariadne, Hermes, Athena, Jason, Medea, and, of course, Odysseus.  The result is a great story told from a fresh, new feminist perspective.

Author Talk

Paradox.  Douglas Preston and Aletheia Preston.  Forge Books, 2026.  352 pages.  Book 2 of 2, Cash and Colcord series.

I took a little action thriller detour for the newest book by one of my favorite thriller authors, Douglas Preston.  For this one, he teamed with his daughter, "a reformed lawyer and prosecutor turned thriller author," to continue a series he began with Extinction, starring Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frankie Cash and local Sheriff Jim Colcord.  That book set up a "Jurassic Park"-type resort in the Colorado mountains where scientists had brought extinct megafauna mammals back to life with, of course, dangerous unintended consequences.  Specifically, in this case, the scientists went the extra mile and re-created murderous Neanderthals.  Now, sometime later, with the "Neanders" still hiding in the mountains, Cash and Colcord are called in for a strange murder.  A reclusive, schizophrenic hermit is found ritualistically tortured and murdered in his cabin.  Meanwhile, a holy relic in Rome is inexplicably defaced.  As Cash and Colcord investigate,  they discover not only a connection between the two, but also have to deal with more murders, intrusive press, violent protesters for and against the "Neanders," UFO/UAP researchers, and a fanatical secret society.  It's another fast-moving and thought-provoking page-turner, consistently Preston.  

A Persistent Echo.  Brian Kaufman.  Black Rose Writing, 2023.  225 pages.

This was one of those books that I discovered through a Facebook ad, and it seemed interesting.  It's 1897, and August Simms, an old man who has lived an adventurous life of exploration, returns to Rhome, Texas to die.  Fifteen years earlier in Rhome, Simms had experienced two great personal tragedies, events that have haunted Simms ever since.  He's also drawn back to Rhome by newspaper reports of mysterious flying machine sightings in the area, and he's always up for a mystery.  As he collects eyewitness accounts of the UFOs, he discovers that tensions are still roiling just under the surface, both tensions going back to that 1882 lynching and more current tensions arising from the rapidly evolving economic, social, and technological climate of the turn of the 20th century.  The book has lots of very strong reviews, but it didn't quite live up to that mark for me.  I would give it 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5, but maybe my rating is marred by the fact that I listened to the audiobook version and found the narration to be extremely poor.  It was so poor that I thought that it was maybe the author reading, and I was shocked to find that it is done by a professional narrator and actor.   He was so numbingly monotone that it made me think that even I could have a career in narration.

Author Talk

Ten Caesars:  Roman Emperors From Augustus to Constantine.  Barry Strauss.  Simon & Schuster, 2019.  432 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.  

Barry Strauss has written a history of the Roman Empire, nearly four centuries, told through the lives of ten emperors:  Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine.  A while back, social media informed us that men think of ancient Rome constantly, and it must be true because social media said so.  I am not one of those men.  Nevertheless, this book is an easily accessible general history of the Roman Empire and an examination of its legacy still felt today. 

1945.  Robert Conroy.  Random House, 2007.  432 pages.  

Hours before Japanese Emperor Hirohito made the announcement of Japan's surrender to end World War II, a group of military officers staged a failed coup, intending to kidnap the Emperor and to prevent the surrender.  They wanted to follow the way of the bushido, fighting until either victory or death; surrender for them was never an option.  Fortunately, the coup collapsed rather quickly, but what if it had succeeded?  That's the premise of Robert Conroy's alternate history, 1945, and it allows him to explore a lot of very interesting questions.  Would the US have used more atomic bombs?  How many more American and Japanese casualties would have occurred and how long would it have taken to conquer Japan?  How would the American public respond to the continued death and devastation and what would be the effects on the home front?  What would happen to the relationship among the Big Three Allies?  What would the new post-war world look like?  Here, Conroy creates a comprehensive novel addressing all of these questions, using a number of characters, both fictional and historical. The real life characters and events are portrayed in a manner that reveal thorough research, and the speculation is sound.  It all makes a great story.  This was my first discovery of Robert Conroy's work which seems to be mostly alternate history.  It reminds me of Herman Wouk and Ken Follett, two of my all-time favorite historical fiction authors, and I will definitely explore more of his work.

2002 Movie Trailer

The Quiet American.  Graham Greene.  William Heinemann, 1955. 208 pages.

Another classic read, and there are many parallels between this book and another classic, The Great Gatsby.  Both are popular and critically acclaimed short novels that masterfully capture the zeitgeist of their decades, the 1920s and the 1950s - the decadence and the turmoil.  Both stories are told by jaded and cynical narrators and revolve around idealistic men who are secretly leading double lives, and there's a love triangle in each book.  Both books offer commentaries on the American psyche, particularly the "American Dream" and the idea of American exceptionalism.  Both books remain incredibly fresh and modern decades after their publication.  In The Quiet American, the narrator is British reporter Thomas Fowler, in Vietnam to cover the futile French effort to restore colonial control, and the idealistic young American leading the double life is Alden Pyle, a US Aid representative/CIA agent who is secretly coordinating with unsavory characters to carry out his own agenda, resulting in even more death and destruction.  Their personal conflict arises because they both love - or is it desire to own? - the same young Vietnamese woman named Phuong.  When Pyle is murdered, French colonial police lackadaisically investigate, and Fowler relates the story of their relationship against the violent backdrop of the Vietnamese war for independence, with daily explosions in Saigon and other cities and pitched battles in the countryside.  Beyond the human story, this is most definitely an anti-war and anti-imperialism novel, and its message is incredibly relevant today.  Published in 1955, it's amazing how insightful and prescient a British novelist was about America's upcoming war in Vietnam.  And yes, both books reflect the sexism and racism of their time, perhaps making them problematic for some sensitive readers.  

The Kaiser's Web.  Steve Berry.  Minotaur Books, 2021.  432 pages.  Book 16 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.

This is another entry in the Cotton Malone history thriller series by Steve Berry.  Retired Justice Department Special Agent Malone and his lover Cassiopeia Vitt are back in action, solving a historical mystery and preventing a world shattering tragedy, this time at the behest of former US President Danny Daniels who enlists them to assist his friend, the German Chancellor, as she attempts to thwart a takeover by a right-wing extremist.  The twist: is the said extremist possibly the son of escaped Nazi war criminal Martin Bormann or even the son of Hitler himself?  Everything is typical Berry, lots of action, twists, turns, and betrayals.  With only one or two exceptions, each Malone adventure is pretty consistently entertaining.  

Podcast interview

American Rambler:  Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.  Isaac Fitzgerald.  Knopf, 2026.  352 pages.  

I'm only just realizing that "white trash memoir" is a literary subgenre.  I'm aware of many of the titles and authors associated with it, but I haven't really read any of the big ones.  When I chose this book, I wasn't really aware that it is an example.  I was intrigued by the subject matter, the search for the man behind the Johnny Appleseed myth, and the "tracing his footsteps across contemporary America" format.  I might not have picked it up had I known more about Fitzgerald.  He had a rough childhood, including long homeless stretches and emotional, if not physical, violence.  His parents had psychological issues.  He is/was a heavy drinker and drug user.  At almost 40 years old, he had never owned a car or signed a lease, spending his life sleeping out in the open or on somebody's couch or floor.  He freely admits that he has no compunction whatsoever about accepting handouts.  And he's not the brightest bulb.  For example, he actually planned to float down the Allegheny River on a cheap inflatable raft from Walmart, and, in one episode, he spent half of a baseball game rooting for the wrong team.  I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with him, but that's just me.  I'm not typically drawn to Jack Kerouac types. All that being said, I actually enjoyed the book.  The meat of the story, of course the myth of Johnny Appleseed, real name John Chapman.  In the minds of many, Appleseed is an American legend like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the subject of many fantastic tall tales, but he was very much a real man with an incredible real life.  Unfortunately, the myth has become greater than the man, clouding his place in American history.  Fitzgerald dispels those myths and does a good job of developing a picture of the real man.  Along the way he has great interactions with average Americans and offers great insights into the American psyche. Of the three genres attempted here - history, memoir, and travelogue - history is maybe the least successful, but I did learn a bit more about Appleseed and discovered a few people connected to his story that I want to learn more about, and Fitzgerald's thoughts and ruminations on the subject of history and legend and the often very fine differences between the two are interesting. 

Author interview

The Hooligans of Kandahar:  Not All War Stories Are Heroic.  Joseph Kassabian.  TCK Publishing, 2022.  257 pages.

There's a long list of books that document the insanity of war, too long to list here.  And yet humans have always done it and, it seems, will always continue to do it.  We've all heard the famous quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results."  (Incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, the quote is actually much more recent.)  This book documents an Afghanistan deployment of a squad of soldiers who took their nickname "The Hooligans" to heart and forged the bonds that only soldiers experiencing combat together can forge, forever sharing the life and death moments of their deployment and the lifelong damages that they will carry after deployment.  Joseph Kassabian was a 21 year old team leader in that squad; he had joined the army at 17.  He and his squad are deployed to Kandahar, the birthplace and stronghold of the Taliban, tasked with training and supporting the corrupt and often Taliban-sympathetic Afghan police who are just as likely to torture and execute their neighbors as Taliban fighters are.  Think "Animal House" meets "MASH," but hard "R' or even "NC-17" rated, the book is funny, sad, and infuriating all at once, an honest and unflinching look at the horrors of war that is a great addition to the shelves of war stories.  It made for a very fitting Memorial Day weekend read.  

Author Interview

The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel:  Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World.  Douglas Brunt.  Atria Books, 2026.  368 pages.

Most people know of the Nobel prizes  awarded each autumn in various fields of human achievement.  Some know a little about Alfred Nobel, the inventor and industrialist who funded the awards in his will at least partly to assuage his guilt over profiting from manufacturing explosives.  However, very few people are aware that the Nobels were a dominant, perhaps the most dominant, industrialist family in Europe, on par with, and often going head to head against the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds.  The real driving force behind the Nobel wealth and power was actually Alfred's nephew Emanuel.  He also is most responsible for the ensuring that the Nobel prizes exist.  As the executor of his uncle's will, he was pressured by Alfred's heirs, and even the King of Sweden, to disregard the prizes, but Emanuel stood firm and created and served as the chief steward of the Nobel Prize and his uncle's legacy for the rest of his life.  Emanuel was a visionary who built the largest oil industry in Russia and in Europe and amassed a huge fortune, while making powerful connections within the Russian bureaucracy and royal family, but he was not a "robber baron" in the American mold.  Workers in Nobel industries were among the happiest, most loyal,  and best taken care of in the world. Of course, all of that changed with World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing civil war.  When it was all over, Emanuel was no longer an industrial titan, and he was relegated to being even less than a footnote in history.  This excellent biography is extremely interesting and informative, and it offers at least some of the illumination that Nobel deserves.  

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.