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 April 2026

 

Author interview

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

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

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

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

Author conversation

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

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

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

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

Book Trailer

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

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

Author Interview

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

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

Author podcast

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

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

Author interview

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

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

Ragtime movie trailer 1981

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in November 2025

 

Author Talk

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.

The Invisible Spy:  The Untold True Story of an NFL Player Turned Spy and His Role in America's Covert WWII Operations.  Thomas Maier.  Hanover Square Press, 2025.  480 pages.

During WWII, American comic books, movies, radio shows, and propaganda convinced Americans that Axis spies and saboteurs were at large throughout the country and carrying out diabolical missions.   And as far as Germans were involved that premise was more correct than they knew.  What Americans didn't know, until quite recently, was that there were as many, if not more, British and Russian spies, agents of our allies, at work in the United States.  During the late 1930s and the war itself, the British acted with impunity, employing hundreds of agents, including future literary figures like Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, who operated out of an office on the 36th floor of Rockefeller Center in New York City.  The British spy operation had the full support of President Roosevelt and reported directly to Prime Minister Churchill and his trusted subordinates.  They investigated and shared information with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, planted disinformation and propaganda in American media, and actively carried out their own missions on American soil to further British war aims.  British expats in Hollywood like Cary Grant, Noel Coward,  and Alfred Hitchcock contributed helpful information gathered on the west coast and at New York cocktail parties.  The man who served as the bridge between British and American intelligence was Ernest Cuneo, a first generation Italian-American who had been a standout football player at Columbia University and in the earliest days of the NFL, the late 1920s - the kind of player who played for the entire sixty minutes of regulation play, both offense and defense, often for as little as $50 per game.  He was instrumental in making the connection between the established and professional British espionage organizations and the brash, upstart (sometimes reckless) American OSS founded by "Wild Bill" Donovan, the forerunner of the CIA.  He had personal and professional connections to the two biggest media figures of the time, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, read and listened to by tens of millions of Americans weekly, and he became a master manipulator of the press. He and Fleming became extremely close and life-long friends.  Bits of Cuneo are sprinkled throughout Fleming's James Bond novels, inspired by their collaboration at Rockefeller Center.  All the while, he remained invisible and kept his pivotal role largely unknown, not only during the war but throughout his life.  This book is really thorough and fascinating look at his incredible life and at the world of WWII espionage.

Author talk

Midnight Burning.  Paul Levine.  Blank Slate Press, 2025.  374 pages.  Book 1 of Einstein-Chaplin Thriller series.

It's 1937 Hollywood, and two of the most famous men in the world, Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein - geniuses at the top of their respective fields, are close friends living privileged lives, but the events of the world soon intrude and shake their world.  As Europe begins its descent into war, Chaplin is in the process of creating "The Great Dictator," his political magnum opus, his one-man frontal assault on Adolf Hitler and fascism, his biting satire and personal attack against the Fuhrer.  Meanwhile, the Silver Shirts, the West Coast fascist paramilitary thugs, just one of multiple pro-Hitler groups operating throughout the country, make plans to prevent its completion.   With support and encouragement from Berlin, the Silver Shirts' plan goes beyond that, however, to include murders of dozens of top Hollywood movers and shakers who are either Jewish or anti-fascists and to light the fuse for a fascist coup to overthrow the American government.  When Chaplin and Einstein accidentally uncover the plot, they realize that the movement has deep roots in California law enforcement and the FBI, so it's up to them to leap into action to thwart the evil plot.  The result is a super, action-packed, buddy action thriller, based on real historical facts and including lots of cameos from real people including Douglas Fairbanks, Bob Hope, Bugsy Siegel, William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Goebbels, and Charles Lindbergh, along with Georgia Ann Robinson, the first black female police officer in Los Angeles.  It all works to make a really great story.  This book is billed as the first of an Einstein-Chaplin thriller series, and I would definitely read more.  (And it led me to go back and watch "The Great Dictator" again, also highly recommended.)

Circle of Days.  Ken Follett.  Grand Central Publishing, 2025.  704 pages. Thanks to Grand Central Publishing for the review copy.

Without a doubt, Ken Follett is a master of historical fiction.  His Kingsbridge and Century series are unmatched.  Each tells a thrilling story with incredible characters, and each is a virtual self-contained history class, the former a course on the Middle Ages and the latter a comprehensive survey of the 20th century.  For years, I've looked forward to new Follett novels.  Circle of Days is a major disappointment, chiefly because IT'S TOO DAMNED LONG!  Don't get me wrong, the other books are physically very long, but they don't feel like it.  Circle drags.  It is incredibly slow-paced.  The plot seems to cover decades and decades in the lives of a few main characters and three different communities, farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers who normally live separate lives but come together a few times a year at the site of Stonehenge for religious rituals. They work, they have sex (Follett is still one of the worst writers to have ever written a sex scene.), and they fight every few years.  Then, the cycle repeats.  Eventually --- in the last quarter of the book at most --- they build the stone structure that stands today.  It gets 3 out of 5 stars because it's Follett, but if you haven't read Follett before, don't start here; start with Kingsbridge or Century.

Stars of Alabama.  Sean Dietrich.  Thomas Nelson, 2019.  352 pages.  

Sean Dietrich, also known as Sean of the South, is a columnist, storyteller, novelist, and folk music historian and performer with a large following who focuses on the South.  I've seen some of his writings from time to time shared on social media, but I'd never really read any of his novels before. He will be a featured author at the Savannah Book Festival in February 2026, so we decided to read one of his earlier works and chose Stars.  Stars is a story about the importance of "found family" and enduring hope. It begins in the depths of the Great Depression and continues over the next two decades, weaving together three stories.  Coot is a former child preacher abused and exploited by an evil revival circuit preacher.  Marigold is a struggling teenaged girl who finds security keeping house in a brothel and discovers that she has a real faith healing gift.  Vern and Paul are middle-aged migrant workers who discover an infant baby girl abandoned in the woods and then a stranded mother and her children, eventually raising the children as their own.  Their lives converge at a huge revival in Mobile.  I imagine that this will be the only Sean Dietrich novel that I ever reader, just not my cup of tea at all.  Again, too damn long and slow.  Mawkish. Hallmark movie-ish.  Overly descriptive and sentimental and manipulative. I can see why he's popular.  It's like a Thomas Kincaid painting in historical fiction form.  Too much.

The 14th Colony.  Steve Berry.  Macmillan, 2016.  480 pages.  Book 11 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone, the retired Justice Department special agent who became a rare and old books dealer in Copenhagen, saves the world again in this 11th adventure.  In this case, he races the clock to thwart the plot of former KGB agent Aleksandr Zorin, an unreconstructed Soviet hardliner who has nursed an intense hatred for the United States and resentment of its role in the downfall of the Soviet Union for decades. Zorkin's plan? To use suitcase nuclear explosive devices secretly planted in the US in the mid 1980s to blow Washington DC on inauguration day, counting on the blast to devastate the federal government and to plunge the country into chaos.  It seems that the 20th and 25th amendments to the Constitution and the 1947 presidential succession act are all flawed, omitting important legal details and specificity that have the potential to reduce the country to complete and fatal weakness and collapse.  While the flaws have been noted over the years, Congress has never taken action to close the loopholes.  All of that would be triggered by eliminating both the outgoing and incoming executive branches in one fell swoop on inauguration day when all of the players are conveniently located in one place --- sitting ducks. This Malone thriller reads differently than the previous volumes.  The historical mystery at the center of the story is not really explained until about halfway into the book, very late for a Malone book.  The whole idea of the "14th colony," the hypothetical plans to invade Canada devised by the Society of the Cincinnati, seems like a superfluous red herring.  The mandatory violent shootout in a church or temple, a feature of every Malone book that usually occurs in the early chapters, doesn't occur here until the climax, and it's a bare-hands fight with no guns (when there was no good reason not to use a gun).  Another Malone book hallmark is at least one character flipping the switch and enacting a major surprise betrayal; that betrayal comes very late here, during the climax.  Overall, not the most satisfying Malone book, but still Malone, and, as usual, I learned new things, this time about the real-life origins and history of the Society of the Cincinnati and the technical flaws in the presidential succession act.  It seems like this book's purpose may have been more about developing the characters and their relationships than about the mystery itself.

North of Havana.  Randy Wayne White.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997.  241 pages.  Book 5 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

Marion "Doc" Ford, the former secret agent who retired to become a full time marine biologist on Sanibel Island, Florida, is just trying to live his life when he is dragged back into international intrigue.  His buddy Tomlinson is in trouble.  He's sailed his boat/home into Cuban territorial waters, and he finds himself and his companion under arrest and threatened with the permanent seizure of his boat, and possibly worse, unless Ford goes to Havana with cash to bribe officials and gain their release.  That presents a couple of problems:  1) it's the 1990s, and American travel to Cuba, especially with American cash, is highly illegal and potentially dangerous, and 2) Ford has a history in Cuba as an agent that makes it extremely dangerous for him personally to ever return to the island.  But, his friend is in trouble, and Doc accepts the mission, accompanied, against his preferences, by his female friend/lover(?)/fitness trainer, the pro tennis player and golfer Dewey.  Once they locate Tomlinson, they find themselves enmeshed in both a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro and a search for a lost treasure, including the long-missing remains of Christopher Columbus.  The result is a solid, short Doc Ford thriller that does have historic connections.  The reader learns about Cuban revolutionary history and the situation in the 1990s, the attitudes of Cubans and Cuban refugees toward each other, and the speculation about what was going to happen once Castro lost power or died.  (Of course, as we have seen, absolutely none of that speculation came to fruition.)

Author talk

The Martians:  The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.  David Baron.  Liveright, 2025.  336 pages.

The 1890s were an unsettled decade.  (I feel like I write that about nearly every decade, come to think of it.)  Radical socialists and anarchists used riots, bombings, and assassinations to further their political aims across both Europe and the United States.  The United States fell into a deep economic depression in 1893 that lead to unemployment, hardships, and desperation.  The labor movement was gaining steam, and robber barons and management responded harshly, and violent clashes between strikers and strike-breakers ensued.  Women began agitating for political rights and attempting to crack through long-established barriers in occupations, science, and the arts.  Fanning the flames of unrest, the "Yellow Press" proliferated and spread the wildest, most sensationalized stories, usually by twisting facts or excluding them altogether, in order to sell newspapers.  (I know:  it was such a wild and unbelievable time.)  Naturally, all of this made for fertile ground for a crazy mass delusion to take hold in popular culture.  (Again, such an incredibly foreign time to us currently.)  In this case, two astronomers, one Italian and one French, independently theorized that Mars, seen from the Earth, displayed evidence of intelligent life, specifically "canals" (a mis-translation of the Italian word for "channels").  American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell became the leader in the movement to prove life on Mars and maybe even to establish contact with Martians.  Brilliant scientist and engineer Nikola Tesla even hopped on board.  For the next couple of decades, basically up to the outbreak of WWI, the scientific world was embroiled in debates and arguments, and the average Joes, Giuseppes, and Jacques, imagined all sorts of ramifications of the discovery of, and contact with life, on Mars.  This book is a really fun and enlightening look at the whole episode in our history, and the ramifications that are still with us today, specifically the inspiration for many 20th century scientists and for the whole genre of science fiction.

Address Unknown.  Kathrine Kressman Taylor.  Ecco, 2021.  (originally published in 1938) 96 pages.

Originally published in 1938 in Story magazine, Address Unknown  is actually a short story or novella. However, its impact and its genius, both then and now, are very much inversely proportional to its length.  It was written by Kathrine Kressman Taylor and published  under the name Kressman Taylor, chosen to come across as more masculine, because publishers thought the subject was too dark and heavy for a female author.  The subject? The rise of Nazism and its insidious infection of seemingly civilized, intelligent, cultured, and reasonable people - a warning to Americans about how such a thing could happen.  When published, the story became an immediate sensation, published and republished in other magazines and eventually published as a bestselling book.   It was translated into several languages and printed across Europe, achieving the same interest there --- that is until the war started and the Nazis occupied more and more of Europe and immediately banned the work.  It is an epistolary work, written totally in the form of letters exchanged between two long-time friends and business partners in a San Francisco art gallery who consider themselves brothers, one a German-born Jew who remains in San Francisco to run the gallery while the other, a German Gentile, returns to Munich to live with his family in 1932.  The latter, with his American wealth, quickly becomes a big man in town, and he and his family soon fall head over heels into idolization of this young upstart politician named Adolf Hitler who is restoring pride and patriotic fervor to the long-suffering German nation.  The letters document the resulting collapse of the friendship - formerly brotherhood -- in a brutally heart-wrenching manner.  Even if you strip away the prescient warning against political extremism that still resonates today, Address Unknown is one of the most powerful pieces of fiction writing - and epistolary fiction - that I've ever read.