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Book Reviews

Dee Wilson reveals what he considers to be the best reading he encountered in 2023, both fiction and non-fiction

BOOK REVIEWS (listed largely in the order read and reviewed by Dee Wilson)

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall

Why Do Foster Care Placements Disrupt? An Investigation of Reasons for Placement Change in Foster Care by Sigrid James

Trauma and Recovery By Judith Herman


Take Me Home: Protecting America’s Vulnerable Children and Families by Jill Duerr Berrick

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel, Alan Lane

Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War (Part 1) by John Leonard

Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War (Part 2)

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph

iGen: Why Today's Super-connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood by Jean Twenge

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where We Go From Here by Hope Jahren

The Story of More (Part 2)


The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner By Daniel Ellsberg

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of The Cold War by Fred Kaplan

Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs by Michael Osterholm and Mark Olshaker


Deaths of Despair By Anne Case and Angus Denton

The Sleeping Beauties And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

What's Eating the Universe?; and Other Cosmic Questions by Paul Davies


The Upswing by Robert Putnam

White Too Long; The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones

Let Them Eat Tweets: How The Right Rules In An Age of Extreme Inequality by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson


Land of Inopportunity by Save the Children Foundation

Four books reviewed

JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke

The Uninhabitable Earth by Davis Wallace-Wells


Last Witnesses: An Oral History of World War II Svetlana Alexievich

Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney

Fuzz by Mary Roach

The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix, by Howard Markel


Nightbitch by Rachael Yoder

The Ice at the End of The World by Jon Gertner

Out of our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noe
 

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

 

The Growing Influence of State Governments on Population Health in the United States by Steven Woolf

The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter and The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette to the Cuban Missile Crisis by Martin Sherwin

A list of the top novels/short stories over two decades by Dee Wilson

Things are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela by William Neuman

The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams by Sidarta Riberio

The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz

The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz (new material) 

Notable reviews by Helen Epstein

Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita

The Candy House by Jennifer Egen

Citizen Security in Latin America: Facts and Figures by Robert Muggah and Katherine Aguirre Tobon

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas by Sam Haynes

 

Special Series: "Imaginative Worlds"

When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David Pena-Guzman

 

The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists by Gregory Curtis 

Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative by Herbert Mason

Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins by Jacob Wright

 

More Reviews:

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape our World by Gala Vince

Eight Books: A Deep Dive into the Big Bang

What We Owe Our Fellow Animals by Martha Nussbaum

Fan letter to J. Robert Lennon by Dee Wilson

SanFransicko by Michael Shellenberger

Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern

Vows (vo. 1) by Sigrid Undset

The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio

The Angel or Rome and Other Stories by Jess Walter

Ideas regarding ritual sacrifice among early humans, Dee Wilson's thoughts on four authors and their works

Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Senses by Jackie Higgins

Every Day is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel

On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche

 

The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Citizen Security in Latin America: Facts and Figures by Robert Muggah and Katherine Aguirre Tobon

How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World by Christopher Clark

An Homage to Joyce Carol Oates from The New Yorker

Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes who Shaped History by Kenneth Harl

Investigating Families by Kelley Fong

Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House," by  Dorothy and Thomas Hobbler

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell

Dee Wilson recommends three good reads

Things that go Bump in the Universe by C. Renee James

What A Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees by Stephen Buchmann

Inside CIA Foreign Interference by Daniel Immerwahr (The New Yorker)

Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Montefiore

A Secret Life of the Universe by Nathalie Cabrol

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life by Ferris Jabr

Irresistible Iris, A reviewer unpacks differing views of Iris Murdoch

 

 

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