7 minute read
EDITOR’S NOTE
NONFICTION | Eric Liebetrau
talking about fall titles
Photo courtesy Leah Overstreet Every year, we get hundreds of submissions for the Fall Preview issue, and each editor must trim that list to a mere 30 to highlight. It’s simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding tasks of the year. Of course, there were dozens of worthy books that didn’t make the list, but I believe strongly in the value of each of the 30 titles on our list. Of those, here are seven that I have been discussing with and recommending most to family and friends. (All quotes are from the Kirkus reviews.)
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong (Vintage, Sept. 6): “A mixed-media collection of prose and other work by Asian American disability activist Wong. In the introduction, the author, who was born with a form of muscular dystrophy, claims that she never intended to be an activist. On the contrary, she writes, ‘Ableism conscripted me into activism’.…A stunningly innovative, compulsively readable hybrid of memoir, cultural criticism, and social activism.”
Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz (Avid Reader Press, Sept. 13): “A celebrated political satirist eviscerates know-nothing politicians, mostly Republicans.…Ravaging this seemingly endless rogues’ gallery of buffoonery and corruption, Borowitz marshals mind-boggling, breathtaking evidence.” Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone (Pantheon, Sept. 13): “Beginning with the founding of the republic, writes Yacovone, textbooks have been primary instruments for transmitting ‘ideas of white American identity,’ even asserting that this identity is definitively White and that, as one 1896 textbook stated, ‘to the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.’ Current textbooks have plenty of problems, as well. An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.”
The Petroleum Papers: Inside the FarRight Conspiracy To Cover Up Climate Change by Geoff Dembicki (Greystone Books, Sept. 20): “Big oil knew about greenhouse gas–related climate change more than half a century ago—and did nothing but lie about it.…Even as one Exxon oil scientist warned 40 years ago that climate change would be catastrophic for people around the world…the company still is ‘trying to convince people the emergency wasn’t real.’ A damning, necessary exposé of corporate malfeasance with lethal consequences.”
Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday, Sept. 27): “A Taiwanese American writer remembers an intimate but unexpected college friendship cut short by tragedy.…This memoir is masterfully structured and exquisitely written. Hsu’s voice shimmers with tenderness and vulnerability as he meticulously reconstructs his memories of a nurturing, compassionate friendship.”
Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs by Greil Marcus (Yale Univ., Oct. 11): “Casual Dylan fans will know at least a couple of the author’s seven chosen songs…but his explorations of lesser-known tunes…with all their allusions to the lost history of America, should inspire them to dive deeper into the discography. Marcus delivers yet another essential work of music journalism.” The World Record Book of Racist Stories by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar (Grand Central Publishing, Nov. 22): “A perfect follow-up to the authors’ You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey.…Ultimately, Ruffin and Lamar provide a muchneeded wake-up call for anyone who still doesn’t believe the severity of anti-Black racism in America.…An excellent look at lived experiences of Black Americans that should be required reading for all Americans.”
Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.
profiles in ignorance
SURRENDER 40 Songs, One Story
Bono Knopf (576 pp.) $34.00 | Nov. 1, 2022 978-0-525-52104-4
The U2 frontman considers his life through the lenses of faith, family, activism, and, occasionally, music. It’s not that Bono avoids discussing his world-famous band. He writes wittily about meeting future band mates (and wife) in school in Dublin and how he first encountered guitarist The Edge watching him play music from Yes’ album Close to the Edge. “Progressive rock remains one of the few things that divide us,” he writes. Bono is candid about the band’s missteps, both musical (the 1997 album, Pop) and ethical (force-feeding its 2014 album, Songs of Innocence, to every Apple iTunes customer). At nearly every turn, the author spends less time on band details than he does wrestling with the ethical implications of his successes and failures. Dedicating each of the book’s 40 chapters to a U2 song gives him a useful framing device for such ruminations: “Bad” deals with the loss of a friend to heroin, “Iris (Hold Me Close)” with the death of his mother when he was 14, “One” with the band’s own struggles. Considering Bono’s onstage penchant for sanctimony, his tone is usually more self-deprecating, especially when discussing his efforts to address AIDS in Africa and find the “top-line melodies” that would persuade politicians to release funding. He concedes being imperfect at the job; after a weak negotiation with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he recalls being berated by George Soros, who tells him he “sold out for a plate of lentils.” There’s little in the way of band gossip, and the author has a lyricist’s knack for leaving matters open to interpretation, which at times feels more evasive and frustrating than revealing. But he also evades the standard-issue rock-star confessional mode, and his story reveals a lifelong effort of stumbling toward integrity, “to overcome myself, to get beyond who I have been, to renew myself. I’m not sure I can make it.”
Chatty and self-regarding but pleasantly free of outright
narcissism. A no-brainer for U2’s legions of fans. (This review is printed here for the first time.)
Borowitz, Andy Avid Reader Press (320 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-66800-388-6
A celebrated political satirist eviscerates know-nothing politicians, mostly Republicans.
Over the past 50 years, the Republican Party has continuously nominated incurious, poorly read, and laughably unprepared candidates for public office, with puppet masters in the wings to minimize the damage. Such is the all-too-convincing premise of Borowitz’s exhaustively detailed, devastatingly funny takedown of a veritable Mount Rushmore of incompetents: “People sometimes call our nation ‘the American experiment.’ Recently, though, we’ve been lab rats in another, perverse American experiment, seemingly designed to answer this question: Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?” If this parade of intellectual lightweights began its “Age of Ignorance” with Ronald Reagan, writes the author, it reached its nadir with Donald Trump. In the hallowed tradition of Will Rogers, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, and other cleareyed satirists, Borowitz skewers all manner of chronically befuddled, willfully ignorant dolts: Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene (a “prolific QAnon loudmouth”), Matt Gaetz (the “ultimate specimen of Florida Man”), Lauren Boebert, and former football coach Tommy Tuberville, who once said, “There is one person that changes climate in this country and that is God.” Ravaging this seemingly endless rogues’ gallery of buffoonery and corruption, Borowitz marshals mind-boggling, breathtaking evidence. In pillorying Trump, he’s shooting fish in a barrel, but even worse are the unprincipled “handlers” behind the scenes: Roy Cohn, Stu Spencer, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, et al. Democrats don’t get a pass, but Borowitz clearly demonstrates that Republicans are unrivaled in behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. While there are countless laughs in the book, they have a rueful edge given that we are all affected by such widespread ignorance. “In this book,” he writes, “I’ve made nothing up. All the events I’m about to describe actually happened. They’re a part of American history. Unfortunately.”
Top-notch political satire from a practiced pen.
BLACK SKINHEAD Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future
CollinsDexter, Brandi Celadon Books (304 pp.) $28.99 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-1-250-82407-3
An influential media commentator on racial justice explores politics and Black voters in this sharp blend of memoir and cultural criticism.
In her debut book, Collins-Dexter, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, chronicles her “journey to get to the heart of Black political identity, a process that involved extensive interviews with Black people from all across the ideological spectrum.” She narrates a powerful story “about a Black America that had become disillusioned with the failed promises of their country.” In the 1960s, before it became known for White nationalism, the skinhead movement was a political movement comprised of the British working class, most of whom felt “left
