Ribowsky (Hank) rehashes the musical career and personal feuds of country-rock duo the Everly Brothers in this bloated biography. When their father, Ike, discovered that Don and Phil Everly could sing together with a “harmony that grew as they learned,” he put together a family band. Despite the brothers’ reluctance to team up (Don was the more insular and musically advanced of the two, while Phil resented being the “little shaver” to his older brother), they secured a record deal and released their debut album in 1960, distinguishing themselves with “delicate” harmonies that produced an almost ethereal sound (“I swear that there are times that what comes out is not either of us but the voice of a third person,” Don once said). Yet even as their careers took off, resentments festered—the brothers were polar opposites, “unable to stand each other” behind closed doors, and as the 1970s began both sank into drug addictions, exacerbating tensions until they called it quits in 1973. Ribowsky garnishes the meat-and-potatoes biographical details with florid prose that seems drawn from a rambling album review: “They hit some splendid low-string shuffles and made hard dramatic stops at the end of lyrical passages, driving home that something more interesting was happening that made the night as memorable as paradise by the dashboard light.” This falls short. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this stimulating report, nature writer Streever (In Oceans Deep) recounts traveling around Mexico’s Gulf of California to interview the fishers, nonprofit directors, scientists, and volunteers who are working to protect endangered sea turtles. Surveying the threats facing the reptiles, Streever notes that the black market for turtle meat has boomed since Mexico banned its consumption in 1990, that beachgoers sometimes unwittingly crush buried nests underfoot, and that tens of thousands of sea turtles are estimated to die each year after getting trapped in fishing nets and drowning. Among those striving to save the turtles are veterinarian Elsa Galindo, who runs a program that relocates nests away from well-trafficked beach areas, and Agnese Mancini, a scientist who evaluates the effectiveness of turtle hunting bans for a nonprofit organization. Streever sometimes drifts off topic, going on tangents about his fondness for Jainism (a religion that espouses an extreme form of “do no harm,” to the extent that some adherents refuse to step in puddles for fear of killing microbes) and whether it’s unethical for humans to continue reproducing at current rates. Still, the profiles of individuals leading conservation efforts offer reason for hope even as they make clear the direness of the sea turtle’s situation. Animal lovers will be galvanized. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

This disquieting debut from Van Duyne, a writing professor at Stockton University, examines how Ted Hughes’s physical and psychological abuse of his wife, Sylvia Plath, shaped her life, work, and legacy. Chronicling Hughes’s violent outbursts, Van Duyne notes that he strangled Plath on their honeymoon in 1956 and hit her while she was pregnant in 1961 (she miscarried two days later). A particularly devastating chapter details the life of Assia Wevill, whose affair with Hughes provoked Plath to leave him. Hughes also abused Wevill, Van Duyne writes, suggesting he likely contributed to Wevill’s decision in 1969 to gas herself and the four-year-old daughter she’d had with Hughes. Shedding light on how Hughes hid his misdeeds from public scrutiny, Van Duyne explains that he excised “poems about a violent marriage and disrupted love affair” from Plath’s posthumous poetry collection, Ariel, and destroyed the unfinished manuscript for her second novel, which was reportedly “about the breakup of a marriage.” Van Duyne argues that Hughes’s subterfuge was abetted by male literary critics who interpreted Ariel as a “poetic death wish” while glossing over its “critique of marriage and motherhood,” ensuring that Hughes “was excused of any responsibility” for Plath’s death. An incriminating account exposing the depths of Hughes’s cruelty, this is sure to reignite debate in literary circles. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Rooks (Cutting School), chair of Africana Studies at Brown University, meditates in this probing study on the “talismanic” significance civil rights trailblazer Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) holds in the annals of African American political struggle. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Bethune “moved the needle” on issues including voting rights, child labor laws, and educational opportunities for African Americans. But those are simply “the things Bethune did,” Rooks writes. “To feel her impact, to understand her genius, is a more subtle matter.” Her legacy is nowhere and everywhere, Rooks suggests, overshadowed by movement superstars of the 1960s even as her radical thinking formed a foundational layer of civil rights history; it was Bethune, Rooks shows, who set the movement on the path away from “individualistic” uplift via mutual aid toward lobbying the U.S. government for structural change and collective betterment. Rooks also grapples with Bethune’s promotion of “Black capitalism”—a segregationist-inflected line of thinking that encouraged Black people to primarily do business within their communities—and her late-in-life involvement with the cultlike Moral Re-Armament movement, which sought to defeat capitalism, colonialism, and communism alike with radical selflessness. What emerges from Rooks’s ruminative narrative is a layered portrait of a roving mind that pushed constantly against bounded systems. It makes for a rewarding window onto the nuanced political thinking of the early civil rights movement. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Psychotherapist Dean debuts with a well-intentioned if haphazard guide to recovering from harmful romantic relationships. Breaking her program down into three parts, she encourages readers first to focus on self-care and introspection, before identifying how such defense mechanisms as denying abuse make volatile relationships feel more stable and examining how “parts of ourselves that we have... repressed”—including formative childhood experiences—shape one’s relationship patterns. Lastly, readers can look toward the future by identifying the core values they share with their partner, setting boundaries, and forging a “conscious love” that affords each person space to evolve within the relationship. Though Dean weaves in valuable insights gained from surviving her own “toxic rollercoaster” of a marriage, she introduces a surfeit of concepts that often go underdeveloped and crowd out room for hands-on exercises. Part two, for instance, covers shadow and ego work—which involves exploring repressed parts of one’s psyche, toxic shame cycles, attachment styles, trauma respose styles, “survival-based relationships,” and “repetitive compulsions” in relationships. There’s some solid information here, but readers may want to look elsewhere for a more actionable guide to healing from heartbreak. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this misguided report, Bartkus (Getting It Right) and Block, business professors at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alberta, respectively, distill lessons from the successes and failures of a program they oversee that pairs MBA students with international corporations to solve problems related to operating in foreign markets roiled by unrest. Among the successes are Green Mountain Coffee, whom the authors credit for developing secure supply chains by “embedding their staff in communities of coffee growers.” Bartkus and Block take for granted that the incursion of American multinationals into foreign countries accrues benefits to their civilians and workers, even as critics of that idea linger on the edges of their own account. For instance, they describe their unsuccessful attempt to broker a partnership between an American mining company and an “international humanitarian NGO” to offer microloans in Ghana, blaming the failure on differences in the parties’ internal decision-making processes instead of the NGO’s reservations over partnering with a major player in an industry “notorious [in its] disregard for both safety and the environment.” Further raising doubts about whether the authors’ efforts actually “improve lives” is their admission that “fully half of our projects have failed to have the impact on the ground that we aspired for them.” This doesn’t convince. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Shifts in labor markets, capital flows, and inflation can’t always be foreseen, but they can be navigated, according to this thought-provoking debut guide. Carlsson-Szlezak and Swartz, both economists at the Boston Consulting Group, warn against putting too much faith in long-term economic models, suggesting that they provide a false sense of certainty. Instead, the authors favor an unsystematic approach called “economic eclecticism,” which encourages consulting empirical data, historical examples, and pithy rules of thumb (tight labor markets are the spark for productivity growth, for instance) to craft “narratives” about where markets are headed. Applying that framework to today’s economy, the authors anticipate that the next 10 years will bring tight labor markets, heavy investment in green technology, and the onshoring of supply chains, which they argue will lead to higher inflation that will be mitigated by productivity gains stemming from AI. Carlsson-Szlezak and Swartz demonstrate a welcome recognition of the shortcomings of traditional economic models, though the implication that their services and those of other consultants will always be necessary for reading economic tea leaves feels self-serving. Still, this is a stimulating primer on how business leaders can keep abreast of changing economic tides. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

This perceptive if esoteric study from Mobley (Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison), an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, examines how Toni Morrison’s novels investigate the significance of literal and figurative “spaces.” Mobley argues that Jazz explores how place shapes identity by following a woman who blames a violent outburst on the alienation she felt after moving from Virginia to Harlem in the 1920s. Morrison’s fiction “creates spaces... to interrogate the meaning” of history, Mobley contends, positing that The Bluest Eye’s epigraph, an “excerpt from an elementary school primer that contains a description of home as a physical space that is a normalized space of whiteness,” calls attention to the white supremacist narratives that dominated schoolbooks for much of American history. Elsewhere, Mobley suggests that the Nobel winner employed disorienting prose in Beloved to mimic the mental state of the book’s grieving protagonist and expounds on how characters in Sula and Song of Solomon navigate the “space” between how others view them and how they see themselves. Mobley is a capable interpreter of Morrison’s oeuvre, but the determination to connect every observation back to “spaces,” most of which are metaphorical (“hyper-visible space of trauma”; “deep psychic spaces”; “space of metanarrative”), stretches the word beyond coherent meaning. Still, literature scholars will appreciate the insights into Morrison’s fiction. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

“The last years of Alexander were not just the sordid aftermath of a once impressive career; they were in fact what made him ‘Great,’ ” according to this beguiling biography. Historian Kousser (The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture) argues that, during Alexander’s “quixotic” push eastward after his defeat of the Persian empire in 330 BCE, he experienced a string of “failures” that tempered and matured his outlook. These included his poor handling of mutinies, conspiracies, and the deaths of beloved companions; strategic blundering in response to enemies’ guerilla tactics; and a brush with death on the battlefield. Kousser portrays these setbacks as feeding into Alexander’s larger struggle “com[ing] to terms with a world far more complicated than the one in which he was born” as he traveled, and governed, farther from home than people of his era typically ventured. In so doing, Alexander gained an unprecedented glimpse of the way in which human culture varies across vast distances, which altered his political philosophy, Kousser argues; he developed a “hard-won understanding of his enemies and a willingness to compromise” that led to his empire’s most significant legacy, the forging of an “interconnected Hellenistic world” that promoted a new kind of democratic pluralism. Kousser’s novelistic account, with its emphasis on personalities and intrigues, makes for compulsive reading. The result is a fresh and propulsive take on an ancient figure who grappled with how to govern a diverse society. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this endearing autobiography, cowritten with journalist McCarter (Hamilton: The Revolution), Crazy Rich Asians filmmaker Chu digs into his childhood, influences, and struggles to define himself. Growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and ’90s, Chu—the youngest of five children—worked at his Chinese immigrant parents’ restaurant and learned early to “fade into the background and simply observe, then get what I want without the drama.” As he became enamored with theater and cinema, Chu took advantage of the rapid development of digital technology, running a “mini movie studio” out of his bedroom by the time he was 18, complete with high-tech cameras and top-shelf editing software. He followed his passion through film school at USC and the production of a short film that caught the attention of Steven Spielberg and led Sony to tap Chu for a remake of Bye Bye Birdie. Dizzied by the sudden success, Chu felt both devastated and relieved when the project collapsed, allowing him to regroup before breaking through with Step Up 2 the Streets in 2008. Chu and McCarter enliven the standard-issue celeb memoir beats with bits of wisdom aimed at aspiring filmmakers (“Stock Your Pantry”; “Check the Projector”) and welcome humor. Film fans—especially those with hopes of working in the business—will enjoy this. Photos. Agent: Lacy Lalene Lynch, Dupree/Miller & Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink