New Nonfiction
November 2023
Events
Book Ends - "Mad Honey"
Thursday, November 16, 6:30 pm
Conference Room
Join us for a discussion of Mad Honey (2022-Fiction) by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan (464 pp. - 4.14/5 of 255,579 ratings on Goodreads). The shocking murder of a teenager thrusts a small town into the headlines and destabilizes the lives of everyone who knew her. Olivia McAfee, a professional beekeeper and single mother, fled Boston and an abusive husband to try to give her son, Asher, a better life in small-town New Hampshire.Copies book will be distributed at the October meeting and, afterward, are available by visiting the front desk at either Centerville or Woodbourne Library. The title is available in Regular Print, Large Print, and CD-Book, eBook and eAudio. No registration is necessary, but participants are encouraged to read the book prior to attending the discussion. 
New and Recently Released
Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
by H. W. Brands

An astute historian chronicles the less-than-harmonious beginnings of the American republic. Brands, author of The Last Campaign and many other acclaimed, bestselling books of U.S. history, adds to his sterling reputation with this comprehensive account of the intense political partisanship and personal animus among the Founding Fathers. Despite their best intentions and stated aims, this partisanship predated the Constitution and shaped the competing visions and sometimes shifting alliances of the Federalists and Antifederalists during the debates over its ratification and the Bill of Rights. Brands thoroughly describes how partisanship undergirded and informed the most significant events in the life of the nascent nation: the maneuvering of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison surrounding the Constitutional Convention and scuttling the Articles of Confederation; Hamilton's forceful rallying of the Federalists to support a powerful centralized government; Antifederalist claims that the Constitution not only usurped the power of the states, but was perhaps drafted illegally; George Washington’s methods for dealing with disagreements within his Cabinet; the influence of the French Revolution on Thomas Jefferson and American neutrality; Hamilton's insistence on the establishment of a national bank and the outcry against it from purist republicans who distrusted the financial class; the peculiar personality of John Adams and his bizarre term as president; and the crumbling of a once-congenial relationship between Adams and Jefferson and their brutal presidential contest of 1800. Brands employs his agreeable approach of largely permitting the principals to tell the story while deftly weaving his own balanced analysis within an enlightening, contextually clear narrative. The result is a cogent history of how partisanship and faction shaped the early U.S. and a valuable repository of some of the most important speeches, letters, and declarations produced by serious men who wrestled with serious ideas. An essential book for understanding the foundation of American partisanship.
I Am Bunny: How a "Talking" Dog Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About Being Human
by Alexis Devine

Devine debuts with a charming memoir about her relationship with her dog, Bunny, who’s gained a massive TikTok following thanks to her communication skills. “This is not a book about a talking dog,” Devine begins, careful to clarify that her adopted sheepadoodle communicates with her only through “assistive technology”—buttons on the ground that play recordings of words when pressed. Shortly after taking Bunny home, Devine placed an “outside” button by the door for the dog to press when she wanted to leave the house. From there, she gradually added new buttons to expand Bunny’s vocabulary. In essaylike chapters broken up by playful photographs of Devine and Bunny (plus illustrated sections about other notable figures in human-animal communication throughout history, including Koko the gorilla), Devine addresses criticisms she’s faced online (“Just let her be a dog. She doesn’t ever seem happy”; Devine insists that Bunny’s reward is “feeling connected and understood”) and shares how her experiments with Bunny have “allowed me to examine the ways I communicate with the world, and also with myself.” The result is a quirky account of self-discovery and a lighthearted testament to the power of human-animal bonds.
What the Taliban Told Me
by Ian Fritz

A linguist for the U.S. Air Force chronicles his service in Afghanistan. During his deployment, Fritz, an airborne cryptologic linguist, realized that language has the ability to humanize the so-called enemy. The author worked as a direct support operator, translating Dari and Pashto over two deployments in 2011. Hailing from a poor family in Florida, Fritz enlisted at age 20 in order to access college, and he spent a year studying Dari and Pashtun during accelerated Air Force language training in Monterey, California. As the author demonstrates, the work conducted by airborne linguists aboard military gunships is strategic and important, even though “the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground.” In a vernacular account full of military abbreviations and slang, Fritz frankly reveals some of the chatter he heard and had to translate quickly. Listening to Taliban combatants exulting at their kills on the one hand, and the U.S. soldiers celebrating theirs on the other, prompted decidedly uncomfortable emotions. “Because I could hear it all, both sides of this strange and eternal war,” he writes, “the boundary that was supposed to separate them from us no longer existed.” Fritz’s first deployment was 322.5 hours and earned him two medals; the next lasted only two months. He writes poignantly about his increasing dread before the second deployment, hearing of other DSOs “losing it” and falling into binge-drinking and other destructive behavior. Ultimately, Fritz grew disenchanted with the gung-ho killing and questioned the motives of the U.S. government. Never diagnosed with PTSD, Fritz calls the damage he sustained “moral injury,” defined by psychiatrists as “the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs.” A fraught, moving account by a conflicted soldier.
Ufo: The Inside Story of the Us Government's Search for Alien Life Here - and Out There
by Garrett M. Graff

A history of the decades-long government involvement in reports of lights in the sky, odd flying shapes, and peculiar radar images. Veteran journalist Graff, author of Watergate, The Only Plane in the Sky, and Raven Rock, tracks the popular obsession with UFOs, but his real interest is the way that various agencies of the U.S. government, mainly connected to the Air Force, have responded to sightings and other pieces of evidence. He readily admits that many UFO claims can be debunked, but notes that the Air Force seems to have taken a lot of them seriously. Graff recounts reports of officers turning up to interview people who said they had seen a UFO, often with a view to persuading them that they were mistaken. They were usually unsuccessful, and their attempts often backfired, feeding a growing network of conspiracy theories. Graff keeps his tongue in his cheek when discussing the range of books and articles claiming that the truth was out there but hidden away, and he notes that connecting disparate dots doesn’t necessarily add up to hard evidence. However, America in the 1970s, after Watergate and Vietnam, was fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There were even rumors that the government not only knew about UFOs, but also had alien ships in storage. Meanwhile, some respected scientists were taking the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously, looking for radio signals and sending their own into space. Some exploratory spacecraft carried messages of friendship. Graff admires the open-mindedness and imagination of these researchers, although he concludes that their work has yet to produce substantial returns. He avoids taking a firm stand on the existence of UFOs but acknowledges that it is a big universe and there are plenty of inexplicable phenomena. An entertaining tour through the world of flying saucers, aliens, and weird science.
Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets
by Jeff Horwitz

An award-winning tech journalist takes a deep dive into Facebook and finds a morass of deceit and hubris. Wall Street Journal reporter Horwitz won a huge coup as a key player in the release of “The Facebook Files,” a massive trove of inside information leaked by former employee Frances Haugen (her memoir, The Power of One, was released earlier this year). In this book the author provides a wealth of background about the leak and subsequent publication of the material—although even before he made contact with Haugen, he had been covering the company for long enough to know that much was amiss. Horwitz had once admired the goal of connecting people through technology, but the obsession of Mark Zuckerberg with usage data had infected the whole enterprise. The Haugen material showed the extent to which Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram knew about the problems, from political polarization, to fake news, to body image issues, especially among teen girls. Despite protestations that it always acted responsibly and fairly, in the end, all the company really cared about was gluing people to their screens; if that meant keeping them in a constant state of worry and resentment, then so be it. Facebook’s main response to the publication of the leaked material was to graft another layer of curators onto a structure driven by AI systems, so it achieved very little. Horwitz concludes that many of the issues he describes are intrinsic to the nature of social media and are essentially unfixable. He worries, as well, that although Facebook (now Meta) has suffered reputational damage, it does not seem to have affected the user metrics, profitability, or stock price. Perhaps Facebook has become so embedded in the culture that it is effectively invulnerable. It is a worrying idea but one that Horwitz makes us seriously consider. A well-researched, disturbing study of a tech behemoth characterized by arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed. 
Teddy and Booker T.: How Two American Icons Blazed a Path for Racial Equality
by Brian Kilmeade

The story of an unlikely partnership between a president and civil rights leader. Fox News host Kilmeade, author of a variety of books about American history, describes fascinating similarities and contrasts between Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt and their roles in advancing civil rights for Black Americans from their respective positions of prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author narrates their stories in parallel, volleying back and forth between Roosevelt, asthmatic son of a wealthy aristocrat who remade his body to match his mind and rose to the heights of American politics; and Washington, born enslaved, who employed his formidable ambition and ingenuity to found Tuskegee Institute and become a respected orator. Kilmeade tracks Roosevelt's audaciousness at various positions in New York State and federal government and Washington's nimbly prudent manner in balancing the advancement of Black Americans with the entrenched mores of the South, eventually leading to a collaboration between the two. While the book is full of useful information, capably framing the times in which Washington and Roosevelt operated and frankly assessing each man's shortcomings, Kilmeade's prose is saccharine and overly colloquial. Readers searching for a more scholarly approach to—and deeper analysis of—the lives and times of the primary subjects can easily find both elsewhere. This book may be considered a primer for learning the fundamentals about both Washington and Roosevelt; this “story of triumph and tragedy, of cooperation and disagreement,” embodies the phrase accessible history. Yet in this age of general historical ignorance, apathy, and slander, accessible history is better than internet rabbit holes and rampant disinformation. Kilmeade reintroduces readers to the unique and fruitful relationship between these titans of American history and their efforts to bring justice and equality to the republic. A straightforward, fast-paced read about two American originals.
Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education
by Stephanie Land

In an engaging follow-up to her first memoir, Maid (2019), which became a Netflix series, Land continues her story of struggling to survive as a single parent. At 35, she attends the University of Montana, hoping a degree will lead to economic security and a writing career. Land’s deeply personal stories offer a firsthand look at the inequities involved in navigating higher education from a position of poverty: the judgment from faculty and peers, the dysfunctional bureaucracy, and the crushing burden of student loans. Add constant insecurity about both housing and food, abusive relationships, and the author's own ambivalence about accepting assistance, and her challenges seem insurmountable, but she prevails with resilience and resourcefulness. The popularity of Maid as a book and as a show, along with the compelling, honest way Land shares her experiences, will ensure wide reader appeal and will be of particular interest to those who want more books like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House.
Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America's First Black Generals
by Doug Melville

A descendant of the first two Black generals in U.S. military history traces the difficult course of their careers. Benjamin Oliver Davis (1877-1970) was the brilliant, driven son of a Black civil servant in the post–Civil War federal government who “demonstrated for others, foremost his children, what it meant to work within a system to help evolve it—to build political and financial capital.” Louis Davis’ networking skills didn’t help Ollie much, for, determined to become a military officer, he discovered that, “for political reasons, President William McKinley wouldn’t appoint a Black man to West Point.” He enlisted instead, and so distinguished was his service that he became one of only two commissioned Black officers in the entire Army. Eventually he would attain the rank of general, as would his son, Benjamin Davis Jr. (1912-2002), Melville’s great-uncle, who attained renown as one of the Tuskegee Airman, a group that has since been subjected to “Disneyfication.” Ironically, after the war, when the military began planning to integrate, Ollie was forced to retire by President Harry S. Truman, who “was no saint when it came to race relations.” The newly minted Air Force beat Truman to the punch by voluntarily integrating, and Davis Jr. was instrumental in that fact. Melville traces the travails his ancestors faced while building records of excellence in a military that, it often appeared, only grudgingly accepted them. Moreover, he recounts his own efforts to be sure they are properly recognized and honored. “I can see how the quest never ends,” Melville writes, and one aspect of that quest is for his military ancestors to be thought of as they wished: Americans, period. “Black history,” he writes, “is American history—even that which has been invisible until now.” A thoughtful, highly readable blend of family and military history.
Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich

Delving into the takeover of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk uncovers rampant bad judgment and ego-driven hypocrisy. Bestselling author Mezrich has written a string of nonfiction books and novels, and sometimes it isn’t easy to know which category this one falls into. This is partly because the story and its central character are both so strange, but also because the author plays fast and loose with the narrative. “Some dialogue has been reimagined,” he acknowledges, “and the dates of some of the events have been adjusted or compressed. Also, at some points in the story I employ elements of satire.” Mezrich also occasionally presumes to know what Musk was thinking, even though Musk refused to participate. The book should be read with a grain of salt, but the author has plenty of intriguing material to work with, and he turns up a few useful insights. Mezrich admits that Twitter was already somewhat broken before Musk took over and sought to merge his philosophical and political views with the management of a social media company. It had a bloated payroll and confusion about its role in the marketplace; begun as a digital venue for the free exchange of ideas, Twitter increasingly censored or banned contributors. Musk apparently wanted it to be a completely open platform but soon ran into numerous practical realities. At the management level, he did not so much trim fat as run a chainsaw through the company. Twitter’s financial indicators spiraled downward, and by the time Musk stepped down as CEO, “the blowback had tarnished his reputation, perhaps irrevocably.” As for Twitter, now re-branded as X, the real question, which Mezrich avoids, might be not whether it can survive, but whether it deserves to. Significantly flawed, but with some important things to say about business in the social media age. 
Anatomical Oddities: The Otherworldly Realms Hidden Within Our Bodies
by Alice Roberts

University of Birmingham anatomist Roberts (The Complete Human Body) spotlights obscure human body parts in this offbeat survey. She explains that pillars of the fauces are “a double set of vertical ridges” at the back of the mouth that help push food toward the esophagus and that the islets of Langerhans are small “heaps of cells” in the pancreas that “dedicate their lives to producing the hormone insulin.” Discussing the etymology of each body part’s name, she notes that the sella turcica, or the cavity that holds the pituitary gland, was “named after a Turkish saddle because it curves up at the front and the back, just like the pommel and cantle of its namesake.” Throughout, Roberts highlights the amazing abilities of the human body, as when she notes that typically functioning “kidneys effectively filter some 400 gallons of blood daily.” Unfortunately, Roberts’s illustrations vary in quality; the stylized sketches amuse (one depicts a bagel-like sphincter with legs), but the lack of realism means readers won’t necessarily know what the parts look like in real life (the thyroid illustration unhelpfully mimics an ancient Greek frieze, a play on the word’s etymology). Still, as a compendium of anatomical trivia, this entertains.
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