Reviews
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Parting with parents: sweet or sorrow?
Don McCulloch reviews The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement by Eamon Dolan (Penguin Random House, 2025).
Capitalism in a bottle: what could go wrong?
Kimberly Bain reviews Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick by Murray Carpenter (MIT Press, 2025)
Not a Road to Nowhere
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks by Fred Haefele (Bison Books, 2025)
Murky Ecstasy
Geoffrey Reiter reviews Treatises on Dust by Timothy Jarvis (Swan River Press, 2024)
A Contest for the Ages: Deciphering Cuneiform
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Have Memoir and Geiger Counter, Will Travel
Elizabeth Stice reviews Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
There’s No Place Like…Home? Addressing Housing Insecurity in Five Acts
Kimberly Bain reviews There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone (Penguin Random House, 2025)
Jane Austen: Defense against the Dark Arts?
Geoffrey Reiter reviews Jane Austen’s Darkness by Julia Yost (Wiseblood Books, 2024)
History underfoot and on display
Elizabeth Stice reviews Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets by Dorothy Armstrong (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)
California frenemies: an unsent letter
Michael Jimenez reviews Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik (Scribner, 2024)
Book Club: “Joy in the Morning” by PG Wodehouse
We’re doing an online Book Club! Spend six weeks reading Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse with us!
The Poor Devils
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton (Belknap Press, 2025)
Can We Still Believe in Goodness?
Sarah Selden reviews The Lime Kiln and Other Enchanted Spaces by Geoffrey Reiter (Hippocampus Press, 2025)
Look Over There
Elizabeth Stice reviews Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird by Mike Stark (Bison Books, 2025)
Catching a Vibe: How Spotify Licensed an Experience and Commercialized a Culture
Kimberly A. Bain reviews Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (First One Signal Publishers, 2025)
A Fair Fight
Joel Tannenbaum reviews How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev (Hachette, 2024)
Profiles in Service
Elizabeth Stice reviews Who is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis et. al (Riverhead Books, 2025)
Summer Break!
We’re taking two weeks off, so enjoy some summer poems selected by our editorial assistant, Grace Mackey.
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Letters to the Editor and book recommendations welcome