BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas
(7/17/2024)
The driving activities of The Anthropologists are Asya and Manu's hunt for an apartment and the documentary Asya is making about life in the park, a kind of cinéma vérité project where she interviews park-goers about their reasons for being there. But really, the plot is somewhat beside the point. The meat of the story is in the moments in between larger events, conversations had with family members, neighbors, and friends. A book where so little happens could easily become
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Fraud: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
(9/20/2023)
One of Smith's gifts is for creating complicated characters who don't know themselves as well as they think they do. There are many overlapping power structures at play in The Fraud, and its characters are often unaware of their own position within them. But as always in Smith's work, there is no easy moral to the story – there are only people and the lives they inhabit.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
by Tania Branigan
(6/7/2023)
Tania Branigan's Red Memory is an astounding and often harrowing study of Mao's China. Through a series of interviews with people who experienced the Cultural Revolution first-hand, she preserves the reality of one of the darkest and yet most elusive chapters in China's recent past.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Foundling: A Novel
by Ann Leary
(7/13/2022)
The Foundling by Ann Leary explores the exploitation of working-class girls at the time, whose so-called moral impropriety made them easy fodder for eugenicist experiments. At the same time, the story is packed with action, romance and drama — perfect for a little bit of escapism, or a break from watching TV soaps. Like a sweet candy with a bitter center, The Foundling is a feminist horror story wrapped up in a beach read. Leary is excellent at portraying the perversion of a
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
(5/4/2022)
Many of the themes present in Young Mungo will be familiar to readers of Stuart's first novel, the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, which is set around the same place and time. Yet Young Mungo is more varied and expansive. Stuart delves deeper into the culture of sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics through the character of Mungo's brother Hamish. A cornerstone of the novel is Mungo's relationship with James, a young pigeon enthusiast whose doocot (the Glaswegian
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
(2/2/2022)
From our earliest origins, it seems, human civilizations have evolved in highly particularized and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Here you will find examples of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies that lived in grand, architecturally complex temples, and nomad societies such as the Nambikwara, who had kings in winter, but not in summer. Graeber and Wengrow spend time delving into the rich political philosophies of early Native American peoples, expounding on a lacerating critique of colonial
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth: A Novel
by Wole Soyinka
(10/20/2021)
Whilst Chronicles is in many ways excellent, it would not be unreasonable to say that it is a difficult book. The plot is so densely woven that it sometimes feels like wandering blindly through a thicket, with so many layers that it veers towards the convoluted. Soyinka's writing is a little baroque, and he has a habit of dropping you into situations first and explaining later. Yet criticisms of style feel frivolous when placed against the importance of the themes he addresses, and the po
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It
by Helen Scales
(8/18/2021)
The most outlandish creations of science fiction can't hold a candle to the inhabitants of the abyss, and I enjoyed the even-handed way Scales bestows her attention on them. The great whales that "headbutt the sky" are lavished with as much admiration as the minute Osedax worms that feast on their decaying bones, which gave me an equal appreciation for both. In this way, the author subtly expresses the significance of even the smallest species for the health of the marine ecosystem — a poi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul
by Jamie Ducharme
(7/14/2021)
Ducharme writes in a level-headed, even tone, carefully weighing up her findings as though they were evidence presented in court. She allows for the possibility that in the early days Juul was not so much malicious as simply irresponsible. However, while Bowen and Monsees never actively sought out an underage demographic for their product, the colorful, aspirational aesthetic of Juul's early media campaigns makes its take-up by teenagers seem almost inevitable. Despite multiple warnings that the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Paradise, Nevada by Dario Diofebi
(6/9/2021)
Professional gambling is a fascinating niche, and Diofebi, an ex-professional poker player, provides the reader with insider knowledge. He also writes with real compassion about the lives of the frequently unappreciated waitresses and dancers — often young, attractive women whose careers are dependent on their looks and who are treated as expendable once they reach a certain age. Diofebi seems to be emulating writers such as David Foster Wallace, whose complex fictional worlds include the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
(3/3/2021)
Whilst the book's content is not exactly ground-breaking, its sharp comedy makes it feel fresh. The author also draws striking attention to the delicate, transitory details of everyday life — Martha appreciates, for example, the way a passing cloud makes the light flicker on her sister's face, and the way the veins in her husband's hands bulge as he grips the steering wheel. The precision of Mason's description elevates otherwise mundane scenes into something that feels extraordinary. S
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
(2/3/2021)
Peters, a trans woman herself, writes with intimate detail about trans culture in a way that I'm sure will be startlingly familiar to many who live that reality, but is likely to be revelatory for many outside of it. With wit and intelligence, she illuminates the pleasures, pains and psychological pressures of her trans protagonists as they navigate the world. In addition, Reese's irreverent discourses on femininity and the performative aspects of gender identity offer a helpful lens with which
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
(10/21/2020)
Wilkerson writes clearly and with a gravity that matches her subject matter. Her masterful and at times poetic use of allegory adds color and emotional resonance to her academic analysis, such as when she relates the story of a strange sickness that swept through Siberia in 2016, which eventually was discovered to have been caused by anthrax buried under permafrost. It had been there since World War II, but now, because a radical heatwave had hit the area, it had been released from the snow. The
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
(9/16/2020)
Through stories of not only his father but many individuals, the author attempts to portray the American experience as a whole. Like a literary Cubist, he draws upon the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders, showing a panoptic vision that brings us closer to understanding the nation's true form. Though telling stories of the past, Homeland Elegies ties itself to the present through the figure of Donald Trump. Trump looms throughout, an ominous specter in the book's peripheral visio
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code
by Michael E. McCullough
(8/5/2020)
McCullough is social scientist, not a philosopher. Although he writes with the disarming alacrity of a born optimist, The Kindness of Strangers is couched in hard, empirical fact. Beginning, suitably, at the beginning of life on earth, McCullough's book traces the origins of altruistic tendencies in various species, patiently explaining the theories of evolutionary psychologists and biologists as to why these tendencies might exist. The cumulative maxim is gloriously stark: "Selfishness b
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