Reviews
Attention! At Ease! Florida’s Military Role Preceded Disney World
Roger Chapman reviews State of War: A History of World War II in Florida by Anthony D. Atwood (University Press of Florida, 2025)
A smoke-ringed mirror
Elizabeth Stice reviews House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home by John T. Edge (Crown Publishing, 2025).
It’s Complicated
Elizabeth Stice reviews Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Thesis, 2025).
The Dunnes: Literary Family Royalty
Michael Jimenez reviews The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne (Penguin, 2024).
A Feral Child and the Fringes of Human Knowledge
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron by Roger Shattuck, with introduction by Jed Perl (New York Review of Books, 2025).
Composing the Revolution Across the Atlantic
Matthew J Sparacio reviews The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution by Zara Anishanslin (Harvard University Press, 2025).
Don’t Buy This Jacket… Do Read This Book?
Elizabeth Stice reviews Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away by David Gelles (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
From the Stacks of Yesteryear
From the Stacks: Nadya Williams wishes we had some of the works of Tacitus that are permanently out of print.
A new book about Kant: not imperative, but interesting reading
Elizabeth Stice reviews Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek (Harvard University Press, 2025)
All is fair in love, war, and fashion: from court fashion to fast fashion
Saija Wilson reviews Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV by Amanda Wunder (Yale University Press, 2024)
The many men, so beautiful!/ And they all dead did lie:/ And a thousand thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany The War by Robert Cowley (Random House, 2025)
World War II and the Fight for Freedom
Elizabeth Stice reviews 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe by Peter Fritzsche (Basic Books, 2025)
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).
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)