Dave's Reviews

Like a baroque palace where all the fire alarms are going off but the docents are pointing out the fire extinguishers rather than the exits, in Life on the Rocks Juli Berwald, author of Spineless, brings to the surface many reasons to hope—and work for—the survival of corals. From retired Special Forces divers to cloud brightening and coral cryogenics, Berwald finds a reef of possibilities for saving them long enough for us to get climate change under control. —Dave

You’ll want to be reading excerpts to your friends, but don’t do it. They’ll want to take a look at it “for a minute.” A quarter of an hour later, you’ll be able to get back to the crazy story of the Tangier International Zone, or the Free State of Bottleneck (both real things). Each former “country” gets a cause of death, from “too louche” to “probably not existing in the first place.” Treat yourself to this one.  —Dave

If you’ve been a fan of Nikki McClure’s poster art and calendars, this is your chance to collect them in book form. I’ve enjoyed her always inspiring and often perplexing papercut works for many mystified years. This time we get some enlightening commentary to go along with each, though you might want to just stretch your perplexed muscles instead.  —Dave

Do you dream of the easy, literary life of a bookseller? Want to own your own shop where you can loll around at the register, dispensing wisdom and raking in the cash? Prepare to be disabused of your conceptions. Nadia Wassef gives us a taste of the hectic, inspiring, and sometimes heartbreaking life of a Cairo bookseller. She contends with the usual bookseller challenges and also with a deeply misogynist society, bureaucrats, censors, corruption, and large-scale larceny. Not to mention corrupt larcenous censorial misogynistic bureaucrats. —Dave

Full disclosure: I used to be a bookseller with Maryse. When she moved on my life got a little less weird. If you, too, are missing a little weird in your life, or feel like you haven't recently read enough books that feature ossophilia and radical environmental activism, then check out this wonderfully strange book. It brought my weird quotient up by seven points! - Dave

A combination of It Can’t Happen Here horror story of American dystopia and an epic struggle from Italy to Germany—including many Medal of Honor–minting battles and heroism—Facing the Mountain would make a movie to rival D-Day spectaculars. Japanese Americans’ lives were upended by Roosevelt’s order that they be sent to concentration camps in the desert. Brown’s book is a tour through the lives of Japanese Americans in this time: ROTC high school kids; those who resisted internment and the draft; those who went to war to defend American ideals and their familial values; those who never came back from the war; and those who did who had still another battle to fight. — Dave

Nathan Raab finds amazing—and sometimes terrible—things. A British officer’s report from St. Helena announcing the death of Napoléon. Andrew Jackson’s letter to the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, inviting them to what would become the Trail of Tears. A love letter from MLK in the Albany City Jail. A forged land survey, not by George Washington. The missing tapes from Air Force One after the JFK assassination. And a letter from Susan B. Anthony explaining that no, she did not want to buy photographs of famous men of the 1800s. If you understand why half a piece of moldy paper with the signature torn off could be worth the world, then this book is for you. — Dave

After finishing Unworthy Republic, you’ll be wondering how the US got off so lightly in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Two hundred years of violent, though piecemeal, efforts to displace the original inhabitants of the Eastern US did not result in the purging of all Native peoples. Claudio Saunt explains how the first systematized, censused, self-capitalized, internationally brokered, and democratically determined program to remove an entire people, or kill them if more convenient, led to the Trail of Tears, the expansion of slavery, and Disney World. — Dave

While reading The Compton Cowboys, what struck me most—and most often—were the relentless challenges, hurdles, roadblocks, and grief that the riders, the students, and the founder of the Compton Jr. Posse, Mayisha Akbar, had to overcome every day to keep on going. Olympic-caliber high jumpers, women rodeo champions, recovering gang members, and kids dodging trouble after school, The Compton Cowboys are part of a centuries-old tradition of Black riders in America. — Dave

Brina weaves her own life—from a desperate attempt to camouflage herself with a variety of punk hair colors, doomed attempts at relationships, and her first ever conversation with her mother in Japanese as an adult—together with that of her mother, a survivor of the Battle of Okinawa and a war bride living unhappily in America. The deep scars of the battle, and the ongoing US military occupation of Okinawa, show in the trauma and healing between them. — Dave