BY MICHAEL POLLAN PENGUIN PRESS, 2018 480 PP., $28.00 I tried pot late at age twenty-five. Though I’d been an English major who hung out with wannabe Beats and around plenty of pot and acid,... Read More

BY BILL SIZEMORE BRANDYLANE PUBLISHERS, 2018 158 PP.; $18.95 Bill Sizemore has written a little gem of a book. In Uncle George & Me: Two Southern Families Confront a Shared Legacy of 
Slavery he explores... Read More

In their new book, The Shadow President: The Truth about Mike Pence, journalists Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner do a very thorough job characterizing the vice president’s carefully crafted blandness—someone who’s thoughtful, concise, and pious,... Read More

WRITTEN BY MICHAEL J. UHLMAN, BRIAN WASIAK & JON C. SCHEIDE ILLUSTRATED BY ROBERT RATH SHINEBOX PRESS, 2018 The release of Altered Boys Vol. 1: The Book of Billy coincides with the recent Pennsylvania grand... Read More

BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT W. NORTAON & COMPANY, 2018 224 PP.; $21.95 Stephen Greenblatt’s latest, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, is about the tyrannical characters in William Shakespeare’s plays. If you think it’s a coincidence Greenblatt wrote... Read More

Those looking for hope (or even energizing desperation) about our prospects for dealing with global warming will want to avoid William T. Vollmann’s new two-part Carbon Ideologies series: No Immediate Danger: Volume One (624 pages;... Read More

BY WALTER ISAACSON SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2017 624 PP.; $35.00 “Leonardo was a genius,” Walter Isaacson says near the end of Leonardo da Vinci. “Yet it is also true that he was a mere mortal.”... Read More