American drivers’ bad safety record can be attributed to poor street and highway design rather than personal error, according to this incisive debut polemic. Civil engineer Marshall lays out how transportation engineers have “designed and built a system that incites bad behavior and invites crashes” due to their overreliance on standards (e.g., roadway widths) that have little scientific basis. Engineers should instead treat standards as guidelines subject to good engineering judgment, according to Marshall, but he further contends that transportation engineers generally consider safety less important than mobility (i.e., moving vehicles as quickly as possible). Marshall delves into esoteric transportation literature, liberally quoting from standards manuals and research articles to portray—and lampoon—how transportation engineers think. He documents the inadequacy of safety research—which is warped by government funding requirements, the contortions of legal liability, and pressure from the automobile industry—and critiques current design standards, including what he describes as the flawed premise that speed of travel matters more for mobility than access (e.g., off-ramps and cross-streets), a misconception which he says hinders both mobility and safety as it leads to logjams and dangerous maneuvers by drivers. Marshall’s breezy narrative, with section titles like “What Are We Doing Here?,” plunges surprisingly deeply into the nitty-gritty of engineering standards, giving many specialist terms a vigorous, exasperated working-over. Transit nerds and advocates for safer streets will relish the detailed conceptual battle map drawn here. (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Human-caused ecological change is enumerated in this bracing survey from the cocreators of the website Feral Atlas. The authors focus on “patches,” their term for species and ecosystems “transformed by human infrastructure” but “not under the control of human designers.” An example is the red turpentine beetle, a harmless North American species that “hitchhiked” on shipments of timber to China, where it picked up a “potent... symbiotic fungus” and became an unstoppable force of destruction, killing more than 10 million trees. Other patches include lodgepole pines that flourish in unstable sands produced by coal mines and drug-resistant bacteria that evolve in wastewater from pharmaceutical plants. The authors’ pragmatic goal is to demonstrate that the “Anthropocene” is already a lived reality for most species—that humans, who have “mov[ed] more dirt than the Ice Age glaciers,” are now the dominant force for environmental change—and thus that a “new nature” has emerged, one requiring a novel perspective to study it, in which “commodity chains” are considered as important as biomes. The book’s litany of cataclysms is shot through with a surprising hopefulness, as the authors propose a philosophy of collective well-being extending across species. It’s an unsettling but undefeated vision of a world in volatile flux. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Brooks, an assistant English professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, debuts with a rigorous analysis of how Black musicians shaped Black political and social discourse in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ranging from the ragtime of the late 19th century to the gospel music of the 1960s civil rights movement, Brooks dissects how Duke Ellington “articulated Black identity and history” during the Harlem Renaissance by exploring “themes of racial uplift” through new tonal registers; how John Coltrane and other “free jazz” pioneers used “growls, screams, hollers, and other unorthodox sounds” to reject Western rhythms during the Black Nationalist movement of the ’60s and ’70s; and how gospel singer Mahalia Jackson married blues music with Black gospel tradition for a sound that symbolized, and was used to fuel, the political activism of Black churches in the ’50s and ’60s. (Jackson’s refusal to play for racially segregated crowds also paved the way for some of the first integrated gospel concerts across the country, Brooks notes.) Lucidly anchoring his analysis in sonic studies—the study of how sound is produced and consumed—and sociohistorical context, Brooks reveals how music served to broaden boundaries of “what can be said—and to whom” and helped to spread changing ideas of Black identity, liberation, and protest. It’s a fascinating look at the complicated relationship between art, culture, and social change. (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

A contentious 2024 presidential election anchors the epic latest entry in Iles’s Penn Cage series (after Mississippi Blood). Former attorney Penn—now the mayor of Natchez, Miss.—is tending to his dying mother even as he fights his own battle with cancer. After deputies respond to a shooting at a hip-hop festival on the grounds of a former Mississippi plantation by raining bullets on the crowd, a Black liberation group takes credit for arsons at antebellum mansions across the South. Ultra-conservative radio host Robert E. Lee White capitalizes on these events as he launches his presidential campaign on a third-party ticket, promising he alone will bring order. Funded by dark money and popular on TikTok, White ignites Penn’s suspicions from the get-go. As his candidacy gains steam and he risks provoking the country into a full-blown race war, Penn enlists his daughter, Annie, to help him dig up and expose the rot beneath White’s campaign. Early on, Penn muses that “in the south, mysteries that date back 150 years retain the power to wreck families and destroy fortunes,” and that sense of haunted history permeates the novel. Certain plot strands wear out their welcome across the novel’s sprawling length, but in the end, Iles delivers an insghtiful, ambitious, and satisfying saga. This is a high water mark in a strong series. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (May)

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

In the muted second volume in a projected pentalogy (following Aubrey McKee), Pugsley depicts his 20-something protagonist’s new life in Toronto, where he’s moved from his native Halifax to begin graduate work in inorganic chemistry. Drama ensues when Gudrun Peel, a vivacious poet Aubrey met at a book party, shows up drunk at his apartment, slumps onto his couch, and unloads her fear that if she lands the book publicist job she’s just interviewed for, she’ll turn into a corporate drone. She accepts the job offer despite her reservations, and the two begin dating. As Aubrey tags along with Gudrun to book launches, he considers a literary life of his own and starts writing plays. The novel has an inventive structure, beginning with a short story set sometime in the future about Aubrey working as a writer on a sketch-comedy show and ending with a play by Aubrey about his wealthy friend Quincy, who’s described as the “hero in this period of my education” but is only briefly mentioned earlier in the narrative. Unfortunately, the substance of Aubrey’s education never quite materializes amid all the formal pyrotechnics. It’s Knausgård lite. Agent: Jennifer Hollyer, Jennifer Hollyer Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

BBC radio broadcaster Elms (The Way We Wore) delivers an effusive if haphazard ode to concerts and other live musical performances. Casting a wide net, he rhapsodizes over the pleasures of clubbing as a teenager (“You watch each other rather than a band... the music is the soundtrack to your story”); bemoans a disappointing show during which Al Green spent most of his time “handing out roses ‘to the laydees’ and praising the Lord”; and reflects on a more recent Paul Weller concert that fostered “a tangible feeling of unity, which gets so much rarer as we get older, more distanced, more alone.” Such moments vividly capture the appeal of live music, though they’re hampered by the author’s tendency to name-drop (Amy Winehouse sent him a platinum copy of Back in Black as thanks for having her on his radio show) and veer into tangents, including a series of strained comparisons between music and soccer. The result is more a hodgepodge of anecdotes than the focused study the title suggests. Readers will need patience to separate the wheat from the chaff. (Apr.)

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

This sharp-witted collection from Sarris (How a Mountain Was Made) comprises stories told by “crow sisters” about the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok homelands of northern California. Question Woman and Answer Woman, the twin granddaughters of trickster Coyote, live as crows. Their stories, loosely anchored in creation myths but also firmly grounded in place and time, are enigmatic and open-ended, and nearly always center people who have learned, to their peril, to ignore their connections to the land and each other. In the evocative “A Man Follows an Osprey,” a troubled man hopes an osprey will lead him to a legendary box of gold. The field worker heroine of the mysterious “A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake, and a Hummingbird in Santa Rosa” finds her life forever changed when she’s drawn night after night to a camp where three shape-shifters tell stories by the light of the moon. In the poignant “A Woman Invents a Lover,” a gaggle of gossips watch as good-hearted Marlene falls in love, is abandoned, and must perform a series of fairy tale–like tasks to reconnect with her family and her past. These incandescent stories will linger in the reader’s imagination. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mexican writer Tarazona’s inventive English-language debut follows an author whose consciousness splits into two separate realities. The break takes place after the unnamed protagonist, who is grieving her mother’s recent death and whose brain feels as if it’s full of stalactites, is found to have abnormal brain rhythms. One version of the woman returns to her daily routine in Mexico City, while the other runs away to a remote island, where she plans to end her life (“It doesn’t matter that you each inhabit a different body,” Tarazona writes. “Conjugations are irrelevant”). Interspersed throughout both narrative strands are dreamlike and at times apocryphal stories about the woman’s mother and grandmother, who practiced yoga together for decades with a powerful swami who might have been a “con man.” While readers may feel disoriented at the outset, the free-flowing, philosophical narrative, expertly translated by Davis and Dunn, builds to a masterful and deeply meaningful conclusion about the woman’s two selves. It’s a triumph of experimentation. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink