Review by New York Times Review
FACTFULNESS By Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund. (Flatiron, $27.99.) Rosling, who died last year, was an expert on international health who lamented the information bubbles that he feared surrounded too many of us. Burst them, he argues in this book, and our general pessimism about the state of the world will also ease - things are much better than they seem. Neapolitan chronicles By Anna Maria Ortese. (New Vessel, paper, $16.95.) This collection of writing and reportage about Naples was a major inspiration for Elena Ferrante. Ortese's portrait of the Italian city just after World War II is of a place of poverty and desperation, lear By Harold Bloom. (Scribner, $24.) Bloom's understanding of Lear as a character has shifted with age, allowing him to appreciate aspects of the old king he couldn't see at 17 or 40. This focused study showcases the erudition of one of our most eminent Shakespeare scholars, the kremlin ball By Curzio Malaparte. (New York Review, paper, $15.95.) This is a glimpse of 1920s Moscow, among the Soviet high society It's the aftertaste of the revolution. Published posthumously, Malaparte's court chronicle captures Stalin as the surveyor of every intrigue and scandal from his nightly opera box. the view from flyover country By Sarah Kendzior. (Flatiron, paper, $12.99.) A St. Louis-based journalist, Kendzior has been called "a Cassandra in Trumpland," analyzing in these short essays the social trends and discontent in Middle America that built the president's base. "When I drove to Spring Green, Wis., for a reporting trip recently, I expected to see Frank Lloyd Wright's influence sprinkled throughout the bucolic valley that he considered his home, a place I hadn't visited since I was a child. I hadn't realized that Wright's inspiration seemed to touch nearly everything there: the design of houses tucked into grassy slopes, a former bank's drive-through lanes, the prairie-style sconces in the hallways of a tiny elementary school. So when I returned home, I (perhaps a little belatedly) turned to frank lloyd wright, a 2004 biography by Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. Hers is one of many biographies on Wright, whose cinematic, brilliant life makes for incredibly rich reading. Huxtable skillfully weaves together the tales of Wright as a seductive, obsessive young architect in booming late-19th-century Chicago, where he rubbed shoulders with Jane Addams and Daniel Burnham; his scandalous personal behavior and indifference to his small children (he apparently loathed the sound of the word 'papa'); and the debts, broken relationships, tragedy and lasting acclaim that followed." - JULIE BOSMAN, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
In 2015, Al-Jazeera contributor Kendzior published this collection of essays on political repression, education and income inequality, the changing role of the media, and authoritarianism as an e-book, to great critical acclaim. Much has changed in the interim, and Kendzior is now not only offering those essays in print but also provides updates to reflect how the world looks and works under the Trump administration. Kendzior's views deserve the wider audience print publication will bring, for hers is a crystalline voice of reason and appraisal in a world that shifts further into unrecognizable territory minute-by-minute. She speaks with true and heartbreaking eloquence in In the Trial of Trayvon, the U.S. Is Guilty and with fiery outrage about economic injustice in such pieces as Surviving the Post-Employment Economy. There are many voices now raising the clarion call to pay attention to the signs of authoritarianism that the Trump administration has unleashed; Kendzior's is one of the most forthright and unabashed in the chorus.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland, originally published between 2012 and 2014.Now an op-ed columnist with the Globe and Mail in Toronto, Kendzior, who lives in St. Louis, addresses a number of issues in these essays: the failure of coastal (and other) elites to understand the Midwest; the daunting expenses of undergraduate and graduate education programs, expenses that serve to deny opportunities for the less privileged; the endangered freedoms of speech and the press; the spread of unpaid internships, another way that only the well-to-do gain access to jobs and opportunities; the good and bad aspects of expanding social media; the daunting difficulties many face due to race and gender; the widespread practice among universities of employing large numbers of low-paid adjunct professors; and the profound lack of empathy of the haves for the have-nots. The author explores these and other instances of economic and social inequality and indifference, noting how "the Midwest, in decline for decades, still suffers disproportionately." Throughout the book, Kendzior adorns her paragraphs with apothegms, most of which are pithy and effective ("The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had"), though some seem a bit forced or lifted from a motivational poster ("Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go"). Nonetheless, the author's overwhelming message shines through: We are all human, and we must address the fact that there is a declining amount of equality and social justice. In a final essay, from September 2017, she worries about Donald Trump and his "autocratic policies" and what she sees as the dangers to democracy his presence has already elevated in America.Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
