One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Tom Segev. Holt Publishing, 1999. 612 pages.

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. Tricia Romano. Public Affairs: NY. 2024. 571 pages. 

Robert Caro. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Vintage Books. 1975. 1246 pages. 

Mitri Raheb. Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, The Bible. Orbis Books. 2023. 184 pages. 

Untamed. Glennon Doyle. Dial Press 2020. 328 pages. 

Hemingway’s Brain. Andrew Farah. University of South Carolina Press. 2017. 194 pages.  

Joan Didion. The White Album. Farrar, Straus and Gireaux. New York. ©1979. Reprint 2009. 223 pages. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon and Schuster. 2013.  892 pages. 

Timothy Denevi. Freak Kingdom — Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, 2018 Hachette Book Group. 394 pages.

Dan Canon. Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class. Basic Books. 2022. 324 pages. 

Matthew F. Delmont. Half American: The Epic Story of African-Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. Viking. 2022. 374 pages. 

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Books. 2019.  320 pages.

George Orwell: Animal Farm. 1946, 1974 Harcourt Brace & Co.  This review is based on a version published by Literature Connections, Animal Farm and Related Readings, McDougal Littell, 1997. 100 pages.

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Doris Kearns. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. 1976,1991, 2019. 432 pages.

Michael Walker. Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story …

David McGowan. Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon…

How did all these wonderful musicians arrive here at the same time? OR How did people who could not really play music become famous musicians, and why did so many end up dead? 

The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. David E. Fishman. ForeEdge. 2017. 

Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked The Lives to Defy the Nazis. Jeffrey H. Jackson. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 2020. 

The Dressmakers of Auschwitz. Lucy Adlington. Harper. 2021. 

Twilight of Democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Anne Applebaum, Random House, 2020.

“Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will…”

Brave Church: Tackling Tough Topics Together. Elizabeth Hagan. Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2021. 144 pages.

A Time to Die: the Attica Prison Revolt. Tom Wicker. © Haymarket Books 2011, under license from the University of Nebraska Press (1994). 346 pages.

In the next of my “attempts to understand the U.S. of my childhood” series …

Wilmington’s Lie: The murderous coup of 1898 and the rise of white supremacy. David Zucchino. New York: Grove Press. 2020. 426 pages.