Morton Jack (Psychedelia), cofounder of the reissue label Sunbeam Records, delivers the definitive biography of English folk singer-songwriter Nick Drake (1948–1974), who died from an overdose on antidepressants at 26 following a protracted struggle with mental illness. Mining interviews with friends and family, Morton Jack paints a tender portrait of a musician known for his “husky, resonant” voice, “intricate” guitar playing, and a deep introversion that belied his “ambitious streak” and desire for commercial success. His albums—the lovingly orchestrated Five Leaves Left (1969), pop-influenced Bryter Layter (1971), and spare Pink Moon (1972)—initially failed to gain traction, however, and by the time Drake began to garner international recognition in 1973, he’d started to spiral into probable psychosis, according to Morton Jack. His work was later repackaged and released in several album compilations from the 1980s to the 2000s and has “never lost momentum since.” Drake’s longtime producer, Joe Boyd, attributes the music’s continued relevance to “the fact that... it’s not identified with a particular time and place, which allows each generation to create its own connection.” While Morton Jack sometimes makes too much of certain aspects of the artist’s life (including Drake’s apparent lack of academic motivation in secondary school), he sets out an engrossing and ultimately heartwrenching account. (The sections on Drake’s steady descent into depression are especially affecting.) The result is a worthy tribute to a talented artist gone too soon. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

Kaplan (Human Rights in Thick and Thin Societies), a professor of international studies at John Hopkins University, strays outside his area of expertise—“fragile states”—in this unconvincing analysis of “social poverty” in America. Defining “fragile neighborhoods” as places of “stress, mistrust, frustration, and a sense of insecurity,” where people are anxious, depressed, and alienated from one another, Kaplan claims such conditions are the result of social poverty—a dearth of supportive social relations and local institutions—rather than economic poverty. He argues that fragile neighborhoods can be rich or poor, and that governmental support, good jobs, living wages, and wealth-creation opportunities are necessary but insufficient for eradicating social poverty. Kaplan highlights five initiatives he contends are adequately addressing the problem, including Partners for Education’s strengthening of learning environments in eastern Kentucky and East Lake Foundation’s multipronged efforts to develop mixed-income housing in Atlanta. These “social repairers,” as he labels them, utilize bottom-up, collaborative, comprehensive, privately funded, and volunteer-based approaches. Kaplan’s tone is hopeful, but would be more persuasive if his recommendations were not cast in such general terms, his examples considered more critically, and his argument more attentive to economic justice. This holds the most appeal for nonprofit leaders in search of motivational advice. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

Editor Rosenberg (Sorrows, Scribbles, and Russet Leather Boots) assembles in this elegant anthology some of 19th-century novelist Alcott’s most notable nonfiction. In “Hospital Sketches,” Alcott lyrically recounts working as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, writing of a soldier she tended who died of his injuries: “He vanished, like a drop in that red sea upon whose shores so many women stand lamenting.” Her humor and vivaciousness are on display in “How I Went Out to Service,” in which she describes her brief stint as a domestic servant for a Boston family of declining fortunes when she was 15 and offers a nauseatingly vivid sketch of the priggish scion who insisted on inviting Alcott to his “charming room” so he could read Hegel to her. The standout “Transcendental Wild Oats” provides a droll account of Fruitlands, the short-lived utopian community founded by Alcott’s father in the 1840s. She wryly notes that the idealistic residents walked back their ban on animal labor after a few days of “blistered hands and aching backs suggested the expediency of permitting the use of cattle” to plow fields. Filled with scintillating prose and amusing stories, this persuasively makes the case that Alcott’s essays have been unjustly overlooked. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

A sleepy Nebraska backwater serves as the unlikely ground zero for the eruption of a dimension’s worth of otherworldly nightmares in this high-octane supernatural thriller from Markert (The Nightmare Man). Since the mid-19th century, Harrod’s Reach has been plagued by a legacy of disappearances and deaths related to its unused local train tunnel. One of the tunnel’s last victims, before the town bricked it up, was Sully Dupree, who, now age eight, has been comatose for years following an ill-fated experience inside it. But Sully’s condition, lamented in the waking world as tragic, gives him strength in Lalaland, a realm of dreams where he and other “Seers” like him serve as gatekeepers holding at bay an incursion of nightmares into the waking world. Leading this dastardly charge is Mister Lullaby, a malignant entity who, through serial killer Teddy Lomax and his gang of malevolent “mare” infiltrators, hastens to Harrod’s Reach for a climactic showdown with Sully’s brother, Gideon, and the town’s united citizens. Markert evokes the style and substance of works from horror’s golden years with his depiction of a small town under siege by infernal forces and a large cast of well-developed characters. Not all of the elements add up, but horror fans will enjoy the rapid-fire pacing and pyrotechnic finale. Agent: Alice Speilburg, Speilburg Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

This vibrant and resonant story of love and sickness from Mavor (1927–2013) was shortlisted for the Booker when it was first published in 1973. Hero Kinoull, a bookseller and admirer of cultural artifacts (“I have the Great Sickness... that love affair, sexual almost, with the lost past”) is content to be the mistress of Hugh Shafto, an upper-crust art historian of the rococo. Then, after Mavor implies Hero has caught typhoid during an outbreak in their English village of Beaudesert, Hero is in a car accident with Belle, Hugh’s activist wife. During their convalescence, Hero becomes smitten with Belle, and is later drawn into Belle’s campaign to save a community tree. As drama ratchets up around the typhoid lockdown, Hero takes refuge in a garden paradise created by Hugh’s formidable and worldly mother, Kate. “It’s really so very, very neurotic attaching yourself to one person after another. It isn’t adult of you, you know,” Belle says to Hero, after she falls under Kate’s spell. The plague sections of this unconventional story feel au courant, as does the timeless exploration of the many different ways to approach love. Mavor’s passionate story endures. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

Andersson (Silent History) profiles in this diligent study 16th-century court jester William Somer, Henry VIII’s favored “fool.” Prone to “sleepiness” and possessing a penchant for unexpected quips, Somer eventually became a “mascot” of the court. Analyzing court records, letters, and other contemporaneous sources, Andersson suggests that Somer’s “physical” comedy filled a niche in “the baiting environment of the court at its most frivolous and rowdy.” Unable to fend for himself in verbal sparring matches, Somer would make a show of “giving in to pointless hitting or shaking tantrums.” In a thorough discussion of whether Somer was, in the parlance of the time, a “natural” fool (with a cognitive disability) or an “artificial” fool, Andersson contends that the truth lies somewhere in between, writing that Somer’s “distinguishing characteristic is an inclination to make gaffes, to speak too quickly, the tongue that runs away while the wit comes halting after.” Andersson uncovers details that reveal how intimate and elevated Somer’s position was at court, including his appearance in multiple Tudor family portraits and the surprisingly large button orders listed in his wardrobe accounts (paid for by the crown), which may indicate he often lost them, collected them, or pulled them off his garments in his fits of rage. The result is an illuminating look into Somer’s role as a source of broad humor and stress relief in a tumultuous court ruled by a mercurial king. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

Part memoir, part polemic, this trenchant debut from computer scientist Buolamwini chronicles her career studying encoded bias in artificial intelligence. She explains that her interest in the failures of AI started when, as a master’s student at MIT in 2015, she struggled to get a facial recognition program to track her face. Putting on a white theater mask did the trick, revealing that the program only worked for light-skinned faces and alerting Buolamwini to how human prejudices get baked into tech. Exploring the ethical quandaries posed by AI, she shares research that found facial recognition software’s spotty record detecting dark-skinned individuals’ faces stemmed from training the software with image datasets mostly comprising light-skinned people. Attempts to fix this bias have led to further injury, according to Buolamwini, who describes a China-based startup’s initiative to collect photos of Zimbabwean individuals’ faces for AI datasets as a form of “data colonialism” that exploits Zimbabwean people “to build the wealth of foreign companies.” Buolamwini proves that she’s among the sharpest critics of AI, and her list of principles for achieving “algorithmic justice,” which includes the stipulation that “people have a voice” in shaping the algorithms that influence their lives, charts a path forward. Urgent and incisive, this is a vital examination of AI’s pitfalls. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

The lives of three couples in small-town Henry Adams, Kans., intertwine over the holidays in Jenkins’s easy and optimistic 12th Blessings contemporary (after On the Corner of Hope and Main). Bernadine Brown and her love Malachi July are preparing to walk down the aisle. They both hope to maintain their private homes after marriage and neither is aware that the feeling is mutual, leading to some friction. Meanwhile, high school senior Leah Clark, who suffers from self-esteem issues thanks to her abusive mother, breaks up with her boyfriend, Preston Mays, believing that once they go to separate colleges, he’ll find someone better. Heartbroken Preston turns to Reverend Paula for guidance. The reverend is embarking on her own relationship with new resident chef Thornton Webb, a man six years her junior who’s “never been very spiritual but understands the concept.” Jenkins eschews drama for slice-of-life storytelling that highlights the love and interconnectedness of Henry Adams’s tightly knit community. The Christmas backdrop and simple plot make this gentle wish fulfillment. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

Abdullah (Next of Kin) steeps this excellent standalone in the racial tensions of suburban England. Bangladeshis Salma and Bilal Khatun have moved to the suburbs from London with their teenage son, Zain, hoping for a new start after the failure of Bilal’s restaurant and Zain’s expulsion from school. The appeal of “neat streets and perfectly nice neighbors” has overpowered concerns that the family’s business setbacks might make the purchase of a new home financially risky, but Salma remains trepidatious. Her misgivings are only magnified when their white neighbors, the Huttons, reveal themselves as bigots: Salma witnesses Tom Hutton deliberately knock down a Black Lives Matter banner Zain displayed on the Khatun’s house, and suspects that Tom painted over one of her windows after she hung the banner there. Tom denies the vandalism, Zain films a confrontation between him and Salma, and tensions between the two families escalate, leading to violence and attempted murder charges. Abdullah dots the narrative with a few surprises, but plot twists are secondary to her unsparing depiction of racial prejudice, which sets this apart from standard trouble-in-the-suburbs thrillers. Readers will have a tough time letting go of this one. Agent: Jessica Faust, BookEnds Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink

New York City’s Chinatown in the late 19th century provides a fascinating backdrop for Simpson’s outstanding eighth Gilded Age Mystery (after 2022’s Death at the Falls). Attorney Prudence McKenzie and former Pinkerton detective Geoffrey Hunter join Manhattan’s elite at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the February 1891 unveiling of an exhibition of Chinese artifacts to accompany the arrival in America of Chinese cultural attaché Lord Peng Tha Mah and his family. While the museum guests watch in shock, a man steps out of the crowd, stabs Lord Peng to death, and flees. McKenzie and Hunter are swiftly hired to investigate. Meanwhile, the Chinese government tries to force the Peng family to return home by revoking their diplomatic standing, though official communications make it clear that violence would await them back in China. McKenzie and Hunter help the Pengs escape into the anonymity of Chinatown—but the family is soon wrapped up in the neighborhood’s criminal affairs while Tha Mah’s killer remains at large. Simpson’s historical research pays off in spades, resulting in a captivating depiction of the ethnic enclave that never distracts from the plot’s high tension. By eschewing the expected focus on the Gilded Age’s Robber Barons, this mystery takes readers on a fresh and exciting ride. Agent: Jessica Faust, BookEnds Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/06/2023 | Details & Permalink