NYU psychology professor Way (Deep Secrets) provides an insightful analysis of the stereotypes that shape boys’ psychological development and undergird a patriarchal society. Drawing on more than 30 years of research, the author observes that boys in elementary school tend to be “openly expressive” of their emotions and that those who maintain strong friendships in their teenage years are less likely to become depressed, use illicit drugs and alcohol, or partake in other high-risk behaviors. However, prevailing beliefs that men and boys lack sensitivity, are “driven mostly by their desire for sex and money,” and seek “independence, autonomy, and freedom” over emotional connection, isolate boys from friends and family and reinforce a patriarchal culture that denies their ability to express themselves and cope with life’s challenges. Much of the author’s research is fascinating, particularly her extensive interviews with boys of color, though readers may wish for more robust solutions than the advice to ask male teens and children “real questions” and “allow for real answers.” Still, parents of adolescent boys will find much food for thought. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this jaunty account, biographer Hughes (George Eliot) details the Victorian and Edwardian cat craze that transformed pitiful-looking agents of pest control into sleekly gorgeous, companionable house pets. Commercial illustrator Louis Wain, known for his big-eyed, round-faced felines, was a prominent force behind the making of “the modern cat.” Though Hughes structures her narrative around his life story (which ended with a 15-year stint in an asylum—still drawing cats, but abstract and multicolored ones), she also ventures beyond his influence, tracing a web of individuals who, from 1870 to 1920, built a cat-centered subculture. Among them were Frances Simpson, who popularized breeding standards, and Harrison Weir, whose reputation as a naturalist “bestowed scientific legitimacy” onto cat shows (his 1889 “manifesto” Our Cats and All About Them claimed that the only reason cats were so ill-behaved—a common perception at the time—was because they were generally mistreated; he recounts a friend’s great shock at encountering cats sitting quietly and purring). Other topics include the “cat’s meat men,” who sold cat food door-to-door in London, and the queer undertones sometimes apparent in the era’s cat obsession (Hughes contends Edward Lear’s children’s poem “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” is a queer allegory). Hughes narrates her invigorating wealth of information in a clever prose style. It makes for a unique and amusing window onto turn-of-the-20th-century art and culture. (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

The decision to build a port in Los Angeles’s San Pedro Bay was driven by commercial interests, local and national politics, and personal agendas, not by thoughtful analysis of geography and geology, according to this enthralling debut. Historian Tejani documents the mid-19th-century political maneuvering and “machines of the modern state and corporate capital” that heedlessly “tore apart” 3,400 acres of mud and salt marsh, which engineers at the time considered wholly unsuitable for a commercial harbor. But others—among them landowners, surveyors, railroad magnates, shipping merchants, and U.S. senators—saw opportunities to get rich via land speculation, lucrative government contracts, and monopolistic port access. Tejani’s narrative revolves around these men and the conflict, competition, and deception involved in their ambitious decades-long efforts to get the port built, which unfurled in parallel with America’s westward expansion and displacement of Native peoples and the acquisition of Mexican territory by force. Powerful players massaged government policy on these and other issues in the direction most beneficial to the port, which subsequently became central to U.S. imperial aspirations in the Pacific. Tejani astutely conveys the deep entanglement of political and economic interests at the highest echelons of power. The result is a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Gregg’s gleeful debut recounts how he and his best friend, Bert Jones, got into the maple syrup business. The two became friends after meeting in a poker league and starting a “seven-piece dad band” in Upstate New York. In 2013, they decided to build a sugarhouse on Gregg’s property, which straddles the Vermont state line, and convert tree sap to syrup as a hobby. Though they produced just under three pounds of syrup in their best year, Gregg decided in January 2022 that he wanted to “hold [his] head high at the urinal” beside Vermont’s commercial syrup producers, who average five pounds per year. Jones jumped at the idea, and together, the men fought squirrels, equipment mishaps, and inclement weather as they spent the winter and early spring trying to meet their benchmark. Gregg’s effortless humor lifts the proceedings as he describes reactions from mystified family members and gently ribs his partner (“Bert tends to move at the velocity of plate tectonics”). Readers will quickly develop a taste for this. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this vibrant report, journalist Grayson (Unlatched) profiles farmers across the U.S. who are developing sustainable approaches to agriculture. Lamenting that the price of farmland doubled between 2000 and 2020, Grayson explores how some farmers are doing more with less, describing how spouses Carys Wilkins and Benji Nagel maximize the productivity of their one-acre Oregon farm by planting crops close together and rotating them seasonally so that all plots are always in use. The profiled farmers value community as much as sustainability. For instance, Bonita Clemens founded a South Carolina program that teaches Black women how to grow crops for “themselves and their communities,” aiming to build solidarity among participants while alleviating the dearth of healthy foods available in the state’s Black neighborhoods. Grayson provides colorful accounts of the farmers’ life stories, recounting how Alexandra Rosenberg-Rigutto dropped out of high school and struggled with drug addiction before becoming the director of a northern Michigan farm that teaches Jewish children how to grow produce, and how Natalie Bogwalker spent five years “in a hand-built dwelling, cooking roadkill over a stick-sparked fire, cloaked in buckskin” before starting a North Carolina permaculture school. Unfortunately, the biographical background sometimes crowds out the often brief descriptions of what makes the farmers’ techniques notable and environmentally friendly. Still, it’s a spirited look at the lives of small, eco-conscious farmers. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Science journalist Keim (The Eye of the Sandpiper) investigates what animals think and feel in this bracing inquiry. Pushing back against the long-held scientific consensus that animals lack consciousness, Keim notes studies indicating that many birds model their nests on others they have seen and practice making them sturdier over time, behavior that suggests conscious decision-making about what materials to use and how to incorporate them. Insights into the emotional lives of animals surprise, as when Keim discusses research showing that garter snakes form “friendships” and that rats are “especially generous” when sharing food with anxious companions. Such revelations should compel humans to reconsider their relationship with the natural world, he argues, discussing how a recent campaign to gain legal personhood for a Bronx Zoo Asian elephant envisions what a more considerate relationship might look like. Research on honeybees that deliberate as a hive and Italian tree frogs that can count looks beyond the usual subjects of animal intelligence studies, and Keim provides fascinating insight into ways humanity might take animal rights more seriously (political parties dedicated to animal rights in Canada and the Netherlands aim to provide creatures with parliamentary representation). The result is a potent complement to Martha C. Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals. Illus. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Actor Rogers (1879–1935) helped audiences cope with the dislocations of a modernizing world, according to this perceptive biography from University of Missouri historian Watts (JFK and the Masculine Mystique). Growing up in what’s now Oklahoma, Rogers pined for the glory days of the open plains that were quickly being divvied up into homesteads and farms. Seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1893 sparked the realization that “riding, roping, and cowboys” could be commercialized and inspired Rogers to join the vaudeville circuit performing lariat tricks. His ability to bridge the Victorian and modern ages was core to his appeal, Watts argues, suggesting that by playing rustic cowboys in early western films, Rogers injected nostalgia for the bygone frontier into the medium. Rogers also burnished his everyman persona in a weekly syndicated column that skewered urbanization and the ascendant white-collar class (in response to a report of job openings on the Wall Street stock exchange, Rogers quipped, “No conscience necessary; all you need is six hundred thousand dollars, but you get it back the first good day”). The liberal quotations from Rogers’s personal letters and public writings attest to his charisma, and Watts’s incisive historical contextualization illustrates how, for Rogers’s audience, he acted “as a beloved guide across shifting social terrain.” The result is an immersive look at a beloved performer negotiating a country in transition. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Sanghera follows up Empireland, his study of how Britain was shaped by its imperial past, with a comprehensive if occasionally off-key look at imperialism’s legacy abroad. Sanghera aims to bridge the “gap” between Britain’s limited sense of its global impact and the former colonies’ far more extreme perceptions of that impact. His position isn’t simply anti-empire; though he comes down in favor of Britain paying reparations and points to ongoing harms (like how international charities continue to finance businesses in former British colonies with indentured servitude–like conditions reminiscent of imperial plantations), he meditates repeatedly on the impossibility of weighing imperialism’s negatives against its positives. Instead, he focuses on establishing a baseline of facts that will help further “dialogue” between Britain and its former colonies. His analysis is fascinating insofar as it delves into the empire’s systemic ramifications, especially in chapters on its agricultural and legal systems. But the argument at times verges on absurdity in its search for balance (“It’s entirely natural that the residents of, say, Jamaica, would be exercised about Britain leaving its population impoverished after slavery, even while they benefit from another imperial legacy such as, say, the introduction of cricket”); this is likely due to the ongoing British “culture war” over scholarly work on this topic, which Sanghera touches on briefly. By turns informative and confounding, this reveals even more about Britain’s present than its past. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Essayist Waite debuts with a bracing account of her husband’s sudden death and the secrets she unearthed after he was gone. In 1995, a 22-year-old Waite met and fell for Sean while they were both teaching English in Japan. They married and spent 20 years cycling between happy days and rough patches, owing in part to jobs that required frequent travel and Sean’s bipolar disorder. In 2015, Sean died of a heart attack, and as Waite combed through his belongings, she made some rattling discoveries: Sean kept massive stores of digital pornography, hoarded cannabis despite insisting he didn’t use it, carried on multiple affairs, and lied about the couple’s finances. Reeling, Waite threw herself into grief support groups and writing to cope with the betrayals. Eventually, she came to a fragile acceptance of her husband’s messy humanity. “What if the function of grief... is to guide human beings to a deeper understanding of the nature of life,” Waite asks in the book’s final pages. With startling compassion and surprising wit (“I’m looking at nine vaginas at the same time... laid out in a three-by-three grid, like the Brady Bunch family,” she writes of finding Sean’s porn stash), Waite shows how such an understanding might be achieved. This stirring study of loss and forgiveness isn’t easily forgotten. Agent: Stacy Kondle, Rights Factory. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

American culture, politics, and technology have profoundly influenced Israeli society, according to this enlightening study. Historian Frankel (States of Inquiry) writes that Israeli culture began Americanizing in the 1950s; but after 1967, when the U.S. replaced France as Israel’s primary military supplier, “the meeting points between the two societies grew exponentially.” These points range, in Frankel’s telling, from the impact of American-style electioneering on the 1973 Tel Aviv mayoral race—which former Israel Defense Force major general Chich Lahat won by adopting such Americanized tactics as “pressing the flesh”—to the introduction of “Hasidic folklore” into Israeli pop culture via Fiddler on the Roof. Frankel pulls insight from quotidian details; looking at the 1968 arrival of Coca-Cola in Israel, he notes that the bottles, designed with leak-proof caps so they could be laid horizontally in Israelis’ smaller fridges, helped realize new U.S.-inspired consumerist notions that living in Israel should not require giving up luxuries. The most fascinating chapter profiles the Israeli Black Panther Party. Founded in 1971 to combat unequal treatment of Jewish immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the movement’s imitation of American-style racial politics “scandalized Israeli society,” Frankel writes, since it “threatened to expose” that the country’s projected image of “social cohesion” wasn’t an on-the-ground reality. Readers will be rewarded by this perceptive history. (July)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink