|
|
|
The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It by Corey Lang BrettschneiderA professor of constitutional law and politics recounts how popular protest and democratic institutions have restrained authoritarian-inclined presidents. According to Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office, five presidents preceded Trump in antidemocratic behavior. John Adams actively prosecuted journalists who uncovered various misdoings under his administration. Furthermore, he cooked up a scheme to deny his opponent in the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson, the electoral votes needed to take office. James Buchanan worked with allies in the Supreme Court to quash efforts to extend constitutional personhood to Black Americans by means of the Dred Scott decision, among other acts. Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson were advocates of white supremacy, while Richard Nixon…well, his crimes are well known. The resistance to these presidents came from many quarters. As the author chronicles, journalists such as Ida Wells wrote vigorously in defense of First Amendment issues, while Frederick Douglass opposed both Buchanan and Johnson in ways that Martin Luther King Jr. would learn from a century later, “marking anti-tyranny as an animating principle of American government” in the process. As Brettschneider examines the legal cases surrounding many of these developments, he often reconsiders precedent. For example, he suggests that too much importance has been attached to Brown v. Board of Education; nonetheless, the decision was critical because it validated earlier efforts to press the Equal Protection Clause, by which, some years earlier, Harry Truman had desegregated the military, “not just acting morally but…fulfilling a constitutional duty.” As Brettschneider notes in closing, the dissent cuts both ways: Trump, too, had his “citizen readers” of the Constitution, but their ill intent was to find ways to keep him in power by, among other things, storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. A welcome reminder, in a time of growing repression, of the power of well-placed dissent.
|
|
|
Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita BrottmanThe British American psychoanalyst and true crime author returns with an excavation of the luridness and venality underneath a smiling, all-American façade. Brottman, author of An Unexplained Death, Thirteen Girls, and The Maximum Security Book Club, narrates the tangled story of two couples: Mike and Denise Williams and Brian and Kathy Winchester. They had been a tightknit group ever since high school, partying together on Saturday nights before going to church on Sunday mornings—until 2000, when Mike disappeared while duck hunting. Just a few years later, Brian divorced Kathy and married Denise. From there, the rumor mill in their community went into overtime. Had they been a couple before the divorce? Were they involved in Mike’s death? Brottman digs deeply into the investigation, which gripped the community and divided loyalties. With the help of a Tallahassee Democrat reporter and pressure from Mike’s mother, the case gathered momentum, and the public watched the murder trials live on YouTube. “It’s commonplace murders, not grotesque or bizarre ones, that hit the public nerve,” writes the author. “The Winchester-Williams case exemplified a kind of thrilling hubris: adulterous Baptist lovers beat a murder rap, collect on the insurance, but can’t escape each other. People love a tale of outrage and scandal; they love to witness the unmaking of those who haven’t practiced what they preach.” Through meticulous research, Brottman reconstructs the backgrounds of the principal players and provides context on the role of Christianity in their lives. Even though we know the ending, the author mostly holds readers’ attention; as the conclusion nears, she ratchets up the tension, unspooling the untimely end of Mike’s life and the desperate lengths to which his friend and wife went to cover it up. An atmospheric tale that unwraps the wholesome, God-fearing exterior of two lovers to show the rot underneath.
|
|
|
Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen CallahanA sharp-edged exposé of Kennedy men. Investigative journalist Callahan, author of American Predator, reports on the physical and psychological abuse—neglect, public humiliation, rape, murder—meted out by generations of Kennedy men. Drawing on interviews and archival sources, the author provides ample evidence of the “perverse double standard—in the press, in the justice system, and in the court of public opinion” that allowed the men’s insidious behavior to persist. The infamous family tree begins with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “financially and sexually rapacious,” and includes his sons Jack, Bobby, and Ted; Bobby’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and Jack’s son John Jr., who was killed, along with his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister when the plane he was piloting—irresponsibly and in bad weather—crashed. Like his father and uncles, John Jr. was risk-taking, arrogant, spoiled, demanding. But women, some who married them and remained married despite betrayals, others who had affairs with them, were drawn to their glamour and charisma. Ted, a “legendary drunk and womanizer,” denigrated his wife; Jack didn’t try to hide his affairs with students, interns, coworkers, and Marilyn Monroe. The family’s power protected them: When Ted, driving drunk with an expired license, plunged his car into the waters off Cape Cod, leaving his companion to die, the media presented the event as a tragedy for him; his young victim, Mary Jo Kopechne, was hardly mentioned. Callahan reports on the murder of Martha Moxley, for which Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was convicted—a conviction that later was vacated through the family’s machinations. “The most famous of these women,” she writes, “have too often been recast as architects of their own demise, or as women who were asking for it, or as imminent threats to the Kennedy dynasty.” An informative and gossip-filled history of a notorious clan.
|
|
|
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-crime Boss by Margalit FoxA biography of "the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime" in late-19th-century New York City. Fredericka "Mother" Mandelbaum (1825-1894) and her family worked as “itinerate peddlers” in central Germany before emigrating to the U.S. in 1850, settling into a community of fellow German Jews on the Lower East Side of New York. Mandelbaum found her calling as a "criminal receiver," a fence for stolen goods, systemizing property crime in what developed into a lucrative business. At the time, professional crime was proliferating due to the advent of easily transferable "greenbacks," paper money, in the 1860s. Mandelbaum was seen as an upstanding member of the community, a generous donor to her synagogue, who hosted many a corrupt police officer and Tammany Hall official at her glamorous dinner parties. She was soon seeding the money needed for sophisticated bank heists. Fox, the author of The Confidence Men, describes the Mandelbaum-sponsored 1869 robbery of Ocean National Bank at length. Entrapped and arrested for trading in stolen silk, Mandelbaum jumped bail and escaped to Canada. Because there was no extradition treaty between Canada and the U.S., she evaded prison, though she considered expatriation "a kind of living death." Throughout this extraordinary life story, Fox explores larger issues of how organized crime grew during the Gilded Age of municipal corruption and stark inequality. The author shows how Mandelbaum “was marginalized three times over: immi-grant, woman and Jew,” but nevertheless became New York's first female crime boss by having the right skill set as criminal professionalism blossomed. Renowned for both her "motherliness" and business acumen, Mandelbaum headed what became the "de facto Ladies' Auxiliary of Tammany Hall.” A former accomplished writer of in-depth obituaries for the New York Times, Fox succeeds in rescuing a once-notorious public figure from historical obscurity. An engrossing portrait of an unlikely criminal mastermind.
|
|
|
Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, From the Trail of Tears to School Lunch by Andrea FreemanA nation’s food supply is central to its economy and very survival. Freeman (Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race and Injustice, 2021) takes a hard look at the history of America’s agriculture and food distribution policies and finds them riddled with political corruption, inefficiency, racism, classism, and greed. European settlers arriving on the American continent upended traditional patterns of supply and demand. In 1789, George Washington himself ordered destruction of native food supplies with the words that give this book its title. Colonists moving westward introduced industrial agricultural methods, mindlessly destroying herds of buffalo that had sustained Native Americans for centuries and leading to a reliance on suboptimally nutritious foods. Emancipated enslaved Americans had sharecropping imposed on them, leaving them with little economic power to choose their diets. The rise of fast food and race-targeted advertising generated unhealthiness, especially among minority populations. Despite good intentions, free school lunches and other government subsidies have been distorted and subverted by politics. This American history, rife with predation and injustice, leaves readers with plenty of challenges for both present and future.
|
|
|
A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France by Steve HoffmanAn American food writer moves his family of unlikely expats to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about cooking and winemaking, in this delightful memoir from a winner of the James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to a small, rural, scratchy-hot village in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the cafe and pulling off the trick of pretending to be French, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away. But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture. It's a story told in transporting writing, humor, and delicious detail.
|
|
|
Mastering Ai : A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future
by Jeremy Kahn
An experienced tech journalist examines the current AI landscape and highlights the need for careful design decisions and robust governance structures. Kahn, who reports on emerging technologies for Fortune magazine, brings a great deal of expertise to this discussion of artificial intelligence, but his book is not a how-to manual on using AI. Rather, the author surveys the challenges that it presents to society as a whole. He identifies the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late November 2022 as the “light bulb event.” The difference between this system and its precursors was the capacity for conversational interaction, heralding a true breakthrough in the development of the technology and its adoption by people with limited technical expertise. Kahn explores the significant advantages that AI can bring—in business, education, health, environmental management, and even warfare. However, for every advantage, there are plenty of worrying downsides. AI could create powerful new medicines, but it could also lead to terrible bioweapons. It could expand educational possibilities, but it could also, especially because of its writing ability, degrade the human ability to think creatively and empathetically. The time to work out these questions is within the next few years, writes Kahn. This view makes obvious sense, but the key weakness of the book is how to actually come up with and implement “Goldilocks” solutions. The author suggests a role for government, but so far, political institutions have not been effective in dealing with technological issues. Kahn hints that a social consensus could form to place limits on AI development, but that seems more hopeful than realistic. Still, the author provides a solid analysis of the issues coming down the road, suitable for specialists as well as general readers. Kahn is a reliable guide through the AI minefield, assessing the pros and cons in a plainspoken, fair-minded way.
|
|
|
Alexander at the End of the World : The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great
by Rachel Kousser
A professor of ancient art and archaeology tracks Alexander III through the last years of his Iranian and Indian campaigns, arguing that this period proved his greatness. Kousser catches up with Alexander the Macedonian king in 330 B.C.E., after four years of wildly successful conquests through Central Asia in pursuit of his rival, Persian Emperor Darius III. Although the Macedonians found the seasoned warrior already assassinated, Alexander resolved to continue his rampage through eastern Persia and down into India for another seven grueling years. The author asks: Why did he press on when his exhausted, devoted army beseeched him to return home, where he could have rested on his laurels and vast riches? Inspired by the Hellenistic ideals taught to him by his early tutor, Aristotle, Alexander chose to embody them. Kousser shows him as a godlike Achilles figure who challenged lions single-handedly, even while he was chided for recklessness by his own men. Although impulsive and quick to anger—e.g., he stabbed his longtime companion Kleitos at a drunken feast, an act he quickly regretted, considering suicide—Alexander evolved as he became more aware of the humanity of the people he conquered. As he pushed his army in pursuit of rogue Persian generals like Bessos through eastern Persia and across the formidable Hindu Kush, he took Persian lovers and a wife, Roxane; assimilated Persian generals into his army; and began to adopt Persian clothes and customs. “The East did not corrupt the Macedonian king,” writes the author. “Instead, from the outset he contained within himself the seeds of everything he would one day become.” Kousser argues astutely that assimilation and integration with those he conquered would ultimately define his enduring legacy. The text includes maps. A thoughtful, elegant study that sheds new light on an endlessly fascinating historical figure.
|
|
|
Tiger, Tiger: His Life, As It's Never Been Told Before by James PattersonThis first full-scale biography chronicles the impossible life of Tiger Woods whose phenomenal success, despite potentially career-ending injuries and multiple public scandals, led to his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame, becoming a lasting influence who continues to inspire every rising generation.
|
|
|
The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy StewartIn this wholesome report, novelist Stewart (From the Ground Up) explores the myriad motivations of 50 tree enthusiasts. Many of those profiled find symbolic meaning in their orchards. For instance, a Northern California woman recounts how she started planting persimmon trees in 2012 as a tribute to her Korean elders, explaining that the fruit is often “placed on altars and grave sites to honor the dead.” Others have more practical goals, such as the South Carolina man who intended to secure generational wealth for his children by growing loblolly pine for timber on a tract his formerly enslaved great-grandfather took over from his former master after the Civil War. For Mexican bonsai artist Enrique Castaño, the dedicated work of “learning how to read the tree by watching the size of the leaves, the curvature of the branches, and the direction of new growth” is its own reward. Elsewhere, Stewart details how a New Mexico botanist spent her retirement collecting pine cones from as many of the 115 pine species as she could find, and how a local leader in Piplantri, India, plants 111 trees for every girl born in the village to push back against the cultural preference for boys. The lighthearted character studies survey the diverse ways that humans relate to the natural world, and Stewart’s tranquil watercolor illustrations charm. Readers will breeze through this.
|
|
|
|
Centerville Library 111 W. Spring Valley Rd Centerville, OH 45458 (937) 433-8091
|
Woodbourne Library 6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459 (937) 435-3700
|
Creativity Commons 895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459 (937) 610-4425
|
|
|
|