ARC Review – Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz

Andy Borowitz, “one of the funniest people in America” (CBS Sunday Morning), brilliantly examines the intellectual deterioration of American politics, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, to its apotheosis in Donald J. Trump.The winner of the first-ever National Press Club award for humor, Andy Borowitz has been called a...

Audiobook Review: Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor

Inglorious Empire tells the real story of the British in India — from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj — and reveals how Britain’s rise was built upon its plunder of India.In the eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s. By 1947, after...

Audiobook Review: The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand

When Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, ordered Brigadier General Reginald Dyer to Amritsar, he wanted Dyer to bring the troublesome city to heel. Sir Michael had become increasingly alarmed at the effect Gandhi was having on his province, as well as recent demonstrations, strikes, and shows of Hindu-Muslim unity. All these things,...

Audiobook Review: How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.It is the story of the...

ARC Review: Four Hundred Souls – A Community History of African America 1619-2019 Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

Curated by Ibram X. Kendi, author of the number one bestseller How To Be an Antiracist, and fellow historian Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls begins with the arrival of twenty enslaved Ndongo people on the shores of the British colony in mainland America in 1619, the year before the arrival of the Mayflower.In eighty chronological chapters, the book...

Graphic Novel Review: March – Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans...

Book Review: Bag Man by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz

Is it possible for an American vice president to direct a vast criminal enterprise within the halls of the White House? To have one of the most brazen corruption scandals in American history play out while nobody's paying attention? And for that scandal to be all but forgotten decades later? The year was 1973, and...

Audiobook Review: They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s...