Lobbyists have cemented corporate control over the federal government, according to this savvy debut from Wall Street Journal reporter Brody Mullins and his brother, Luke, a writer for Politico. The account begins in the 1970s, when corporations began pouring vast resources into lobbying firms that steered federal policy in a business-friendly direction. The authors then survey lobbying milestones of the last 50 years, including Paul Manafort’s Reagan-era efforts promoting oil interests, as well as lesser-known episodes like Tommy Boggs’s 1978 quashing of an FTC initiative to limit TV advertising of sugary foods to kids and Evan Morris’s 2010 insertion of extra patent protection for Genentech drugs into Obamacare legislation. The narrative unfolds as a soap opera starring colorful lobbyists who fit the cigar-chomping, champagne-swilling, secretary-harassing stereotype, and who reveled in petty corruption until it brought many of them down. (Morris, for example, embezzled millions from Genentech, then shot himself at his country club when federal investigations closed in.) It’s also a canny study of the evolution of political corruption, as influence-peddling advanced from surreptitious envelopes of cash to meticulously coordinated PAC bundling to the subtle orchestration of far-reaching PR campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion rather than bribing legislators. Deeply reported and punchily written, this is an entertaining—and disturbing—account of the devious subversion of democracy. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wilford (America’s Great Game) argues in this vibrant account that the CIA came into being as a continuation of European imperial ambition. The CIA’s early, Ivy League–educated leadership “shared British values,” Wilford writes, and fancied themselves adventurers in the mold of T.E. Lawrence and Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s romantic portrait of the British Raj. (A bizarre number of early CIA agents were nicknamed “Kim.”) Founded in 1947 and freed from the wartime goals of its predecessor the OSS, the CIA latched onto fighting communism as its raison d’être—a so-called anti-imperialist effort that was carried out with supreme imperialist flair, Wilford contends, as the agency sought to prove America was “the rightful heir to European modernity.” Wilford structures his argument around profiles of prominent agents, including Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, architect of the CIA’s 1953 Iranian coup, who constantly played “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls in the lead-up to the operation, and James Angleton, an obsessive orchid-growing loner and modernist literary scholar who went nearly insane trying to shake out the agency’s communist moles. The book is full of such striking character portraits, as Wilford evocatively suggests that the CIA’s tendency to overthrow foreign governments emerged from paranoia and personality defects among its leadership. This eye-opening slice of American history should not be missed. (June)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Career coach Hellerer’s savvy first book is aimed at “underfulfilled overachievers” who are living “great-on-paper lives... but still find themselves secretly dissatisfied.” After obtaining a prestigious position at Google by age 29, the author was riddled with anxiety about her inability to appreciate her success. Upon quitting, she set out to discover “what the fuck I was meant to do with my life” and found fulfillment as a life coach. Drawing lessons from her own experience, she encourages readers to move in their “own personal right direction” without worrying about the outcome. To do so, they must strip fear-based thoughts away from their “true self,” which she describes as a type of intuition that “lives in the body” as “a sense of warmth and alignment.” As an example of how accessing one’s true self can help with decision-making, she describes how a medical student deciding between specialties found that imagining a future in neurosurgery made her “feel hot and nauseous,” while psychiatry “resonated in her body.” Throughout, Hellerer debunks myths that undergird a success-driven society, including that difficulty has inherent moral value (“There’s no gold star or fulfillment bonus for extra struggle”), while outlining a positive, individual-focused approach that prioritizes happiness over certainty. It’s a smart, refreshing look at what it means to build a satisfying life. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Actor and playwright Kingston delivers a knockout debut about coming to terms with her mother’s death. When Kingston was seven years old, her mother, Kristina, revealed that her once-manageable cancer had become terminal. Four years later, Kristina died, leaving behind a chest of letters and gifts for Kingston to open on birthdays and other milestones, including her first period and her high school graduation. Those missives taught the teenager things about Kristina she’d never known, including her professional achievements and family history, and kept Kingston feeling that “my mother anticipated what I needed before I knew it myself.” When, shortly after Kingston left for college, tragedy struck her family again, she clung to her mother’s letters harder than ever, relying on them and her surviving relatives to make it to graduation. Kingston shares many memorable moments, including how she tried to forestall her parents from sharing news of her mother’s diagnosis by cracking jokes, without allowing the proceedings to become maudlin. This gorgeous, openhearted meditation on grief and family deserves a wide readership. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this rollicking memoir debut, Smith reflects on the crime spree that led a judge to label her “a threat to the United States of America.” As a preteen in 1970s Minneapolis, Smith was so infatuated with Michael Jackson that she tracked down his grandfather’s phone number. Wanting more, she called the phone company and got transferred between departments enough times that her call appeared to be coming from the billing division, at which point she pumped employees for Jackson’s home address. Using the same method, Smith conned utility companies, pretending to pay off bills for family and friends, and eventually learned to fake bank transfers and pocket millions of dollars. Her purchases of diamonds and luxury cars caught the attention of the FBI, who started investigating Smith when she was in her teens but refused to believe a young Black woman could organize such a sophisticated scheme. Her run of luck first ended in 1986, when she was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison—then again in the early 1990s, after she’d escaped from prison and was arrested on new charges. Smith is deliriously entertaining company, keeping her foot on the gas all the way through. It’s a gripping real-life caper from a charismatic antihero. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Co. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this fun and far-ranging account, sociologist Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World) explores the topic of women’s breasts from a female perspective—tying in multiple aesthetic, professional, and spiritual threads of analysis while eschewing the “male gaze.” Relating her own anecdotes on breastfeeding in the 1990s—when it still had a strongly taboo feeling, especially in public—and her postmastectomy mismatched synthetic breasts (nicknamed Bert and Ernie), she explains that losing her natural breasts for medical reasons inspired her to discover more about how other women (including trans women) relate to their tits. In sections covering the sex industry, breastfeeding, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and the body positivity movement, Thornton draws from informative, intimate conversations with experts. These include a wry, thoughtful plastic surgeon; sex workers who perform feats of asymmetric breast movement; cheerfully aging hippies who revel in the freedom of topless communal events; and Old Navy bra designers (the model who serves as the template for all the company’s bras has perfectly average breasts and a master’s degree in economics that helps her give market-oriented feedback). What emerges is an arresting look at how these subjects’ niche experiences have erased, in their own minds, any perception of breasts as merely “passive erotic playthings.” It’s an inviting and down-to-earth portrayal of women’s relationship with their bodies. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

The American progressive left has lost its mind, according to this thin debut. Bowles, staff writer for the Free Press, surveys the far left’s most criticized flash points and failures of the past four years, including violence in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, drug use in Los Angeles’s Echo Park Tent Community, and the rise and recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s anti–mass incarceration district attorney. Bowles concedes that “New Progressives” are well-meaning in their desire to battle bigotry and systemic violence, but criticizes their tactics, which she most successfully lampoons through personal recollections, like her mildly funny roast of an antiracist course she attended. Led by mostly white women instructors for mostly white women participants, the course serves as fodder for Bowles’s keen observation that critiques of “whiteness” have become just another outlet for white women’s “self-flagellation” over their bodies. Unfortunately, such perceptiveness is fleeting; by and large, the narrative has a feeling of incompleteness, as complicated subjects such as gender-affirming care for minors receive limited treatments so Bowles can quickly move on to easier, fringier targets, like nerdy Tumblr asexuals. Bowles glosses all these topics with the standard wokeness-gone-too-far veneer that originally made them go viral in right-wing media, while not adding much journalistic depth. The result is a toothless recap of anti-woke talking points. (May)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Petro debuts with an uneven exploration of shame that draws on her personal experience and interviews with women about their “self-conscious feelings and fears of inadequacy.” In 2010, Petro, who was then working as a teacher, came under fire from the New York City Department of Education for writing articles about having been a sex worker (she resigned in 2011). Using the “unrelenting humiliation” that followed as a springboard, she discusses how patriarchal society wields shame against girls and women. Among the topics covered are such conflicting messages as “be flirty, but not too flirty,” the notion that women’s bodies are “defiled” by sex work, and how the news media disempowers women with “deliberately irresponsible, undeniably wrong” coverage. As an example of the latter, she cites Amanda Knox, who was framed as a “character” in news stories about her 2007 murder trial and in movies “recreating how she might’ve committed the crime.” The second half of the book aims to teach women how to identify and overcome their shame. Unfortunately, Petro’s suggestions feel flimsy in the face of the structural issues she identifies, as when she encourages readers to “raise our own and each other’s critical awareness about the fact that” most household labor falls to women. While the interspersed bits of autobiography are vivid, the overall effect is unfocused. The result is an intriguing but undercooked analysis of a complex emotion. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

This stimulating survey from Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, details how she and other scientists search the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. Cabrol offers insight into what kinds of planets are most likely to harbor life by outlining theories for how life emerged on Earth, with some scientists claiming that the first organisms developed from alternating periods of dryness and wetness around volcanic hot springs, while others believe that reactions among RNA molecules in ice constitute a more likely genesis. Elsewhere, Cabrol notes that one study has detected phosphine, a compound “only produced by life on Earth,” in Venus’s atmosphere, and that geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus suggest the planet has a mantle composed of water. Cabrol has a talent for making technical research accessible for general readers and serves up a bounty of fascinating trivia, pointing out that “rogue planets” wander the universe after getting “ejected from their parent systems” and that the exoplanet 55 Cancri e has a 2,700ºC surface “where gases behave almost like liquids.” Amateur astronomers will be spellbound. Photos. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink

New York Times reporter Fuller debuts with a stirring account of how the football team from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside rocketed to a state championship in 2022. The start of the 2021 season looked inauspicious for the Riverside Cubs, who were out of shape from the pandemic and fresh off eight consecutive losing seasons. The Cubs surprised even themselves by winning their first game in a 68–0 blowout against a hearing school. The victory was no fluke; the Cubs went undefeated before losing the championship game 74–22 against Los Angeles’s Faith Baptist Contenders. The loss steeled the Cubs’ determination, and they racked up another undefeated run during their 2022 season, culminating in a rousing 80–26 championship victory against Faith Baptist that Fuller recounts in breathless detail. The heart of the uplifting story lies in Fuller’s moving portraits of the student athletes. For instance, he describes how a running back attended school while living out of his father’s car and how a wide receiver almost quit the game after playing on a Pop Warner team where he was berated by his coach for not following instructions he couldn’t hear. It adds up to an immensely satisfying underdog story. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/31/2024 | Details & Permalink