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THE LITERATURE ON the American Civil War is endless. Scholars estimate that on average one book about the war has been published every day since the war ended — about 60,000 since 1865. Even the most minor battles have a volume or two explaining the mistakes and successes of the combatants. The number of trees felled to print all the tomes on the great battles — Gettysburg, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Antietam — easily exceeds the number of human casualties in each battle. There are shelves of books on the great generals and heroes, and countless books about minor military figures. There are some significantly interesting and important books about a few famous brigades — most notably the 54th Massachusetts (the Glory Brigade), the Iron Brigade, or the Stonewall Bridge. However, there are also a numbing quantity of books about regiments, brigades, or even companies that almost no one remembers. We have biographies of almost all the major political leaders and most of the minor ones, and endl...

THICK IS A COLLECTION of essays that deals with very personal issues, including body image, sexual abuse, and the loss of a child. Yet, as the author Tressie McMillan Cottom asserts, the category of personal essay does not adequately capture her writing style or approach. This is to be expected, as McMillan Cottom generally defies single categories and genres in ways that have simultaneously helped her public image and given ammunition to academic gatekeepers. She’s a sociologist who balances a remarkably active research program and university teaching with guest appearances on Fresh Air and The Daily Show . In her own words, she’s “country” and, since entering academia, “middle class.” She’s an intellectual leader on Black Twitter but she can still be told by colleagues that, as a research pursuit, “black is over.” While black women make up two percent of higher education faculty in the United States, McMillan Cottom is unapologetically “black-black,” which to her means not only hav...

Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Aliza Kolker. ¤ ON VALENTINE’S DAY 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a death sentence on British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses , along with any who helped its release: “I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” The Ayatollah accused Rushdie of blasphemy, of sullying Islam and its prophet Muhammad, though many saw it as a desperate cry for popular support after a humiliating decade of war with Iraq. There followed riots, demonstrations, and book burnings across Europe and the Middle East. Death threats poured in. Viking Penguin, Rushdie’s UK publisher, was threatened with bombings. The author himself was forced into hiding under the pseudonym “Joseph Anton,” a mash-up of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov and the title of Rushdie’s 2012 memoir of the controversy. The media and public still remember it as “The Rushdie Affair,” though most people born after the 1980s have never he...

“HERE IS A MAN who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.” This famous line from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) encapsulates the pathology of far-right vigilantism, not only in its narcissist delusion but also in its telling use of language: the quintet of dehumanizing metaphors betrays the abject neuroticism at the heart of fascism, the hyper-fastidious revulsion that is its psychic bedrock. Travis Bickle’s yearning for redemptive violence — “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” — is echoed in the worldview and rhetoric of today’s far-rightist demagogues, from Jair Bolsonaro’s grandstanding on crime to Donald Trump’s anti-migrant slurs and his promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington, DC. In You Are Not Human: How Words Kill , Simon Lancaster explores the power of metaphor in political rhetoric. Lancaster, a former UK civil servant turned speechwriter and occasional giver of T...

IT’S ONE OF those unspoken “dirty little secrets” of American life: a fascination with your city’s past is often born of disgust with that city’s not-so-charming present. Dipping into David Kipen’s Dear Los Angeles: The City In Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018 , you will of course feel pangs of yearning and nostalgia when you’re reading, say, some rapturous passage of nature-ecstasy over our once wild, flower-and-orange-grove-perfumed Southland (yes, John Muir was here, and Kipen quotes him), but you will also be reminded what a mixed bag of the great and the frustrating this town of ours has always been. Nostalgia so often cruelly corrects itself. In the bad old days, before “L.A. history” took off as a hot subject for books, you’d typically have to dig through the biography of this or that movie star or studio head to glean what life was like in the old-time Land of Sunshine. But that’s really the fast-food equivalent of L.A. history. Our genial editor is after a broad and more se...

BEGINNING WITH its very title, Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War is a maverick book. “Russia without Putin,” an actual battle cry of the opposition, is not used here to build a political case against Putin, nor does it seek to forecast Russia’s fate after Putin’s last term in office ends in 2024. Believing the media is “overly fixated” on Putin, Wood sets himself the task of describing today’s Russia not as the result of one man’s will and vision but of the greater forces that preceded his assumption of office, function independently of him in the present, and will outlast him. This a work of background, context, and systemics, not history as biography. And that of course makes this book part of a centuries-old debate about who and what drives history — the heroic individual or impersonal forces. War and Peace , for example, was largely written to expose strutting egotists like Napoleon who can never see that history is just another name...

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, maybe 13, my mother and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wanted to show me everything. I only remember one painting: N. L. Peschier’s Vanitas (1661). Today, vanitas — literally, “emptiness” or “futility” — refers broadly to a genre of 17th-century Dutch still life that contains symbols of vulnerability and death as a reminder of the inevitability of both. In this specific case, Peschier painted a skull, set on a table, next to a ream of crumbled folios. My mother thought I was bothered by the skull, but it was the paper, all those words on all that fragile paper, that gripped me to the brink of horror. I’d been taught that books, and the facts and truths therein, were sanctified, or at least relatively durable. The vanitas gave me another picture. It wasn’t long until I discovered Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s 1628 Books and Pamphlets , a still life consisting exclusively of moldering books. The image would haunt my consciousness as I grew into a bookish adul...

MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER Simon O. Sinek has made his name by promoting a self-help program for the digital age. The best-selling author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009), Sinek got his start working for some of the largest marketing firms in the world, eventually founding his own business and hitting the speaker circuit. His motivational videos, in which he tackles issues of leadership and corporate success, have racked up millions of views. Although he seems to be a legitimate advocate for education and media literacy, he is at bottom a company man who preaches that meaningful work gives life its purpose , employing a signature faux-deep mélange of business speak and bootstrappism. And even though he criticized Donald Trump before the 2016 presidential election, Sinek was reportedly paid $98,000 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in early 2018 to boost the morale of its agents and teach leadership skills. He knew, as any good corporate lead...