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How to Steal a Presidential Election

Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman. Yale Univ, $26 (176p) ISBN 978-0-300-27079-2

Harvard law professor Lessig (The Future of Ideas) and Stanford legal scholar Seligman investigate in this labyrinthine study several pathways by which a “MAGA Republican” candidate might narrowly lose the electoral college vote, but triumph through legal chicanery. Included are several scenarios that hinge on the byzantine Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which governs how Congress counts electoral college votes from states. In one such scheme, a rogue Republican governor alleges nonexistent election fraud to certify a bogus slate of electors, and a Republican House majority votes to accept it. Other scenarios include faithless Democratic electors coerced by right-wing threats; the passage of state laws declaring the state legislature the judge of election results; and state legislatures simply canceling a presidential election and choosing the state’s electors themselves, a procedure that the authors worry could be interpreted as constitutional. Lessig and Seligman explain these strategies in intricate detail while keeping their arguments lucid and comprehensible for laypeople. They recommend legal tweaks to make subversion harder, but warn that no law can protect election integrity if politicians won’t defend it. Though the authors’ forecasts sometimes seem far-fetched, for the most part, this is a sobering look at how a coup might proceed through the courts. It’s worth checking out for legal observers and those involved with electoral law. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle

Michael Andor Brodeur. Beacon, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8070-5936-4

Brodeur, a classical music critic for the Washington Post, debuts with a winsome and insightful blend of cultural history and memoir that tracks the idealized beefcake body from ancient Greece to today and chronicles his own queer coming-of-age transformation from “wispy, waify string bean of a boy” to “meathead.” The historical segments shed particular light on contemporary fitness culture’s development, explaining how it first emerged in early 19th-century Germany in deep entanglement with nationalist principles, and was brought to the U.S. by failed 1848 revolutionaries. Throughout, Brodeur maintains a sharp focus on the way Western culture’s perceived mind-body divide has shaped ideas about masculinity (during what he calls American men’s “first identity crisis” in the mid-19th century, the Atlantic Monthly lamented that “a race of shopkeepers, brokers and lawyers could live without bodies”). This ideological undercurrent also surfaces in the autobiographical sections. Of his teenage years, Brodeur writes: “I longed to forget I even had a body. I started thinking of myself as my thoughts.” He builds up to an intriguing hypothesis concerning today’s extremist online culture of men seeking to reclaim a lost masculinity characterized by physical fitness and misogyny. Its catalyst, according to Brodeur, was the internet itself, which, by chipping away at real-life interaction, has set in motion another identity crisis over the separation between mind and body. Punchy, entertaining, and perceptive, this delivers. (May)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Rapture

Christopher Hamilton. Columbia Univ, $20 (176p) ISBN 978-0-231-20155-1

King’s College London philosophy professor Hamilton (A Philosophy of Tragedy) presents a wide-ranging exploration of “rapture,” or that which causes one “to be taken out of oneself” and simultaneously “returned to oneself unburdened, with a sense of freedom.” Among other examples from history, philosophy, art, and literature, Hamilton examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s rapturous mid-1880s return to health after a long illness, which reacquainted him with everyday sensual delights, and director Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, which followed a self-stylized “protector” of bears whose obsessive pursuit of the animal ended in his being killed and eaten by one (this courting of death is a kind of rapture, according to Hamilton). Also discussed is Anton Chekhov’s 1887 short story “The Kiss,” in which a man is kissed by a woman who mistook him for someone else, inspiring rapturous romantic imaginings that he eventually realizes are futile. Hamilton’s take on his subject is more belletristic than analytic, with scholarly rigor sometimes sacrificed for lyrical and moving meditations on living a life that’s sensuous, daring, and authentic. Of tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s “rapturous” 1974 high-wire stroll between New York City’s Twin Towers, Hamilton writes, “he becomes wholly animal, his body completely at one with his mind. And both are at one with the wire.” The result is a captivating if somewhat murky reverie on the extremes of existence. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words: Unpublished, Unvarnished, and Told by the Beatles and Their Inner Circle

Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. St. Martin’s, $32 (352p) ISBN 978-1-25028-501-0

Forty years after The Love You Make, Brown, former COO of Apple Corps, the Beatles’ media corporation, and journalist Gaines reunite for a revealing oral history of the forces that spurred the band’s breakup, which was first announced in 1970. Drawing from a trove of never before published conversations with each band member, except for John Lennon, and their intimates, the account touches on shifty characters within the group’s orbit, including “Magic” Alexis Mardas, who almost talked the Beatles into buying four Greek islands; Lennon’s descent into heroin addiction; and the fraying friendship between Paul McCartney and Lennon as the two fought over shares in the Beatles’ business ventures. There are also plenty of tender moments, including Yoko Ono’s musings on the genesis of her relationship with Lennon while he was still married to his first wife, Cynthia; their love was “bigger than both of us,” Ono claims. Taken together, the interview transcripts reveal that “the time had come” for the band’s split: “Realistically, how long could they go on being a Beatle and feel creatively satisfied?” Brown and Gaines write. Nearly all the interviews were conducted in the two months before Lennon’s 1980 murder, casting a melancholy shadow over his estrangement from McCartney, who seemed to have been softening toward his former bandmate (“I still do feel for the guy.... I still see that he thinks he’s the one who was hurt”). Beatles fans will be impatient to get their hands on this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Gravity of Math: How Geometry Rules the Universe

Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. Basic, $30 (272p) ISBN 978-1-5416-0429-2

Science journalist Nadis and Tsinghua University mathematician Yau follow up 2019’s The Shape of a Life with an esoteric exploration of geometry’s role in explaining gravity and the structure of the universe. The authors chronicle advances in physics and mathematics alongside highly technical discussions of the theory and details behind those advances. An overview of how Albert Einstein combined Bernhard Riemann’s “ideas about curved space with [Hermann] Minkowski’s concept of four-dimensional spacetime” to develop a theory of gravity is challenging yet comprehensible. The historical perspective intermittently intrigues, covering how astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild first posited the existence of black holes in 1916, and how mathematician Theodor Kaluza’s belief in “the presence of dimensions that have so far remained invisible” provided the premise for string theory. Unfortunately, discussions of more recent advances made by Stephen Hawking and Yau will be exceedingly difficult to grasp for most readers. For instance, the authors write of Yau’s efforts in the late aughts to figure out the “conditions that a definition of quasilocal mass should satisfy”: “The ‘correct limit’ realized at a point—after a procedure called normalization is done to obtain a nonzero limit—would, in fact, be the value of the stress-energy tensor at that point.” This is best suited to those with advanced knowledge of the field. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science

Erin Zimmerman. Melville House, $28.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-68589-070-4

Evolutionary botanist Zimmerman discusses her passion for plants and inveighs against sexism in the sciences in her marvelous debut memoir. Zimmerman grew up in southwestern Ontario, where she spent much of her childhood exploring “open spaces full of green in every direction.” Her lifelong fascination with the natural world led her to a PhD in molecular plant systematics and research on rare plant species in South America. Zimmerman writes rapturously of her work (focusing closely on a specific specimen “felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos”) and argues that botany, despite its waning popularity, is crucial in combating the effects of climate change because it aims to understand and catalog changes in biodiversity. She also writes of the hostility she faced from superiors when she became pregnant, which drove her to abandon her research career for one in science reporting and medical ghostwriting. Intriguingly, she compares the “impoverishment of genetic potential” that results from plant extinction to the exodus of new mothers like her from the sciences. Throughout, Zimmerman’s enthusiasm and expertise make the science accessible even to those without a background in the subject. The results are as edifying as they are galvanizing. Illus. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Bomb Cloud

Tyler Mills. Unbound Edition, $28 (330p) ISBN 979-8-9892333-0-4

In this potent and formally inventive memoir, poet and Sarah Lawrence writing professor Mills (City Scattered) unravels the circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s possible witness to the Trinity atomic bomb test. When Mills and her mother visited Mills’s grandfather near the end of his life, he handed them a personal scrapbook he claimed had long been “classified.” Thumbing through the album later, Mills discovered a photo of “an atomic cloud towering in the sky,” which set her on a quest to determine whether the image came from the 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb in White Sands, N.Mex.—and if so, to what degree her grandfather may have been involved. The investigation took Mills from conversations with her mother to research about the bomb’s ecological effects, and eventually, to White Sands itself. She recounts her questioning and meditates on “the erasure of peoples, places, and facts that cloud the development of the atomic bomb” in lyrical, sometimes cryptic essays, which are accentuated with collages, photographs, and poems. The results draw immense power both from Mills’s forceful prose and her urgings to “think about the self in relation to history... and ways of experiencing the catastrophic.” Adventurous readers will treasure this poetic, haunting excavation of family legacy, national history, and the nature of memory. Photos. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon

Lyn Slater. Plume, $27.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-47179-1

Former social worker Slater celebrates her late-in-life successes and shares tips on aging gracefully in her punchy debut. Encouraged by her mother to live as a “belligerent woman,” Slater entered middle age with a conviction that “how old I am is hands down the most boring fact about me.” In her 50s, she supplemented a hip replacement with a PhD in social work and her first trip to Europe. At 61, she launched a fashion blog, Accidental Icon, which catered to older women who lived “interesting but ordinary” urban lives, and found a sturdy following for her photos and passionate musings on style and design. Now pushing 70, Slater notes that her @IconAccidental Instagram account has nearly 770,000. Much of the books is structured as a manual to help readers achieve the kind of confidence Slater radiates online (“I’m a badass in part because I’m an older woman who is decidedly not trying to look young”), but she allows for flashes of vulnerability, admitting, for instance, the shortsightedness of her onetime mantra that aging “isn’t real” and disclosing her occasional insecurities about getting older. The result is a radiant self-portrait that will charm readers of any age. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Maria’s Scarf: A Memoir of a Mother’s Love, a Son’s Perseverance, and Dreaming Big

Zoro. Blackstone, $28.99 (448p) ISBN 979-8-212-41733-4

Drummer Zoro, who’s toured with acts including Bobby Brown and Frankie Valli, debuts with an upbeat account of his musical career and deep connection to his Mexican immigrant single mother. Zoro grew up in Compton, Calif., as Daniel Donnelly. He and his five siblings, each with different fathers, bounced between tenement houses and spells of homelessness under the loving eye of their mother, actor Maria Islas-Bravo. The daughter of a Mexican Supreme Court justice, Maria remained unflaggingly spirited and optimistic even as her romances fizzled and her family’s money dried up. She took her children to the beach, to see movies and live music (including a Frank Sinatra show that proved formative for the author), and—when they were low on food—to a county fair eating contest. She provided early support to Zoro when he built and played makeshift drums from coffee and Almond Roca cans, a hobby which soon blossomed into a full-fledged passion for music and performance. As a teenager, Zoro marched into Beverly Hills High School’s band classroom, despite not being enrolled in the school, and met Lenny Kravitz, who connected him to his first professional gigs with groups including New Edition. Without downplaying his hardships, Zoro composes a tremendously hopeful ode to music and family. This bewitching rags to riches tale keeps an infectious beat. Photos. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Redemption of Morgan Bright

Chris Panatier. Angry Robot, $18.99 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-915202-89-5

A sinister sanatorium with a history of escapes and deaths is the centerpiece of this eerie splice of psychological and supernatural horror from Panatier (The Phlebotomist). Using the alias Charlotte Turner, Morgan Bright voluntarily commits herself to the Hollyhock House, an asylum in Hay Springs, Neb., to undergo a short stint of treatment for purported “domestic psychosis.” Really, Morgan is seeking to uncover the undisclosed facts behind her sister Hadleigh’s death after she fled from Hollyhock two and a half years earlier. To Morgan’s dismay, the character of “Charlotte” soon takes over and begins cooperating complacently with the asylum’s bizarre treatment regimens—as revealed in postcommitment interviews conducted between Morgan and police and medical authorities and laced throughout the text. These transcripts suggest Morgan harbors two strong personalities in conflict with one another and call into question how much about Morgan’s identity the reader can trust. Though the description of Hollyhock’s strange therapies becomes repetitive in spots, Panatier conjures an unsettling mood of suspicion and disbelief from his depiction of the asylum’s cultish caregivers and their oddly ritualized behavior. Fans of paranoid thrillers like Catriona Ward’s Last House on Needless Street will devour this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

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