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Business leaders must make diversity a foundation of their company culture in order to successfully be inclusive, advises Short, CEO of a diversity consulting company, in this diffuse work. Short’s plan is meant to create a “We & Us” culture in which employees are “noticed and heard and respected,” as opposed to a “They & Them” arrangement in which some are “left out of conversations and decision-making.” The model is based on four pillars: diversity, inclusion, equity, and “authentic company culture.” Short encourages companies to view diversity and inclusion as more than just a trend and recommends, for example, seeking “board members who have a diversity of thought” and “promoting a team approach rather than an individual approach to work.” Short’s ideas for how to implement the four pillars often lack specificity, as when, for instance, she notes that “computer programs introduce all kinds of bias into the hiring process” but doesn’t offer any suggestions of what to do about it. Some of her explanations similarly fall short, as when she describes unconscious bias as “thinking that you just don’t like something but you’re not sure why.” The result comes across more as an introduction to what constitutes workplace bias than a guide for countering it. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/04/2020 | Details & Permalink

PEN Award–winning playwright Marks’s eerie period fantasy, her comics debut with artist Jones (the Deadman series), plunges readers into a gaslamp-era New York City haunted by shadows of death. After teenage Daphne’s father dies under suspicious circumstances, her mother becomes entranced by spiritualism in hopes of communing with the afterlife. Daphne suspects her mother’s new favorite medium has ulterior motives. Meanwhile, Daphne, cursed with genuine spiritual sensitivity, gets haunted by visions of the dead and of a ghostly “brother” who encourages her budding necromantic powers, promising that “the only way to feel safe is to be a monster.” The tale’s packed with horror set pieces: séances, Satanic rituals, mouldering cemeteries, and a spiritual underworld of ghosts and demonic entities. But the plot’s hard to follow, especially Daphne’s hairpin character turn from wary-eyed psychic sensitive to ruthless killer. Jones delivers on his horror cred with creepy mobs of monstrous creatures, but his human portraits are surprisingly uneven, with facial features that sometimes seem to be sliding off skulls. The collaboration feels right on the verge of coalescing into a powerful horror plot before collapsing into mere scares. There’s enough moody gothic atmosphere here to satisfy voracious horror fans, but it’s not top of the genre. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 12/04/2020 | Details & Permalink

Journalist White debuts with a moving look at “legendary Stanford University scientist” Davis and his fight to cure his son’s chronic fatigue syndrome. After having “gained a reputation as the go-to writer for tragic stories,” White was assigned a piece on Davis and his son Whitney Dafoe, a 31-year-old former artist who was so ill that he couldn’t eat or speak. White explains how misunderstood chronic fatigue is: in the mid-1980s, several hundred cases were reported near Lake Tahoe, which brought “the nation’s attention to what would become known as ME/CFS,” but with few answers, the disease came to be known by many as “yuppie flu.” While there is still no known cause or treatments, White writes, Davis has dedicated himself to researching the illness; using prize money from an award, he set up an ME/CFS lab and in 2015 released a report that led to a “shift within the mainstream scientific community” toward understanding chronic fatigue as a real, biological disease. The author’s keen commitment to capturing Dafoe’s illness and Davis’s work makes for a story of heartbreak balanced with unexpected beauty. White succeeds in casting chronic fatigue syndrome in a new light in this inspirational account. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/11/2020 | Details & Permalink

Diviney, a former Navy SEAL, debuts with a straightforward program for understanding and teaching others how to perform well under myriad circumstances. Diviney writes that he observed many highly qualified applicants drop out of SEAL training, and, after studying the qualities of the men who finished the course, realized it wasn’t skills that made some applicants successful, but rather attributes: “Are you highly adaptable with a strong sense of humility but low accountability? You’ll perform differently than someone who’s cunning and disciplined and fears rejection.” Diviney divides his key attributes into five areas—grit, mental acuity, drive, leadership, and teamability. For instance, grit requires courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience. For each attribute, he provides case studies and research into how to get the most out of oneself and others. To explain the attributes of mental acuity—situational awareness, compartmentalization, and learnability—he presents the hypothetical scenario of losing a child on a subway and the steps of reducing fear and creating a plan under pressure. Business leaders looking to improve their organizations will want to take a look at Diviney’s guide to identifying and making the most of others’ attributes. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/11/2020 | Details & Permalink

Trump Jr. debuts with a vitriolic screed against "liberal losers" and "Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn," combining a full-throated defense of his father's presidency with autobiographical snapshots likely to fuel speculation that he has political ambitions of his own. Sarcastically stating that he's "not mad" about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump Jr. derides the inquiry for "taking nearly two years" when "anyone with half a brain could have done [it] in five minutes." He snipes at many of the right wing's favorite targets, including the Green New Deal ("freaking stupid"), undocumented immigrants ("comparing today's illegal immigrants to the ones who built this country is ridiculous"), and safe spaces on college campuses ("don't get me started"). Trump Jr.'s memories of visiting his maternal grandparents in Czechoslovakia, learning to hunt and fish, and working manual labor jobs during summer breaks are meant to burnish his common-man bona fides, despite the fact that he grew up rich. Aiming exclusively at "Trump-supporting Americans," Trump Jr. delivers the snarky yet polished self-portrait he's been honing at his father's rallies and on Twitter for years. Loyalists will nod their heads in agreement; skeptics need not apply. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this acerbic survey of American culture, historian Fenster (Jefferson’s America) examines how and why people cheat, and whether or not cheating is part of the national character. Fenster relates stories of fraud, deception, and rule breaking in sports (caddies in 1920s Chicago who demanded payment in order to keep golfers’ true scores secret), entertainment (the quiz show scandals of the 1950s), and law (a New Jersey man who went to the district attorney when the fake law license he bought for $1,000 never showed up). She investigates whether or not it’s true that everybody cheats (it’s not); examines various responses to being cheated, including seeking revenge and staying silent (“all are apt to fail”); and provides a quiz to determine the likelihood that a partner who’s had an affair will do so again. According to Fenster, American society has stopped believing that “nothing is more important than integrity”; as a result, she writes, “never has cheating been so blithely accepted by the non-cheater and never has it been granted as a privilege of leadership, as it is today.” Fenster’s sarcasm gives the book a somewhat peevish tone, but her moral outrage is genuine. Readers who’ve noticed a downward trend in American virtue since the 1960s will relate. Agent: Julia Lord, Julia Lord Literary Management (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink

In this eye-opening debut, University of Cambridge historian Lokhova documents the Soviet Union’s covert campaign to acquire America’s scientific and technological secrets in the decade before WWII. Beginning with the 1931 arrival of 75 Russian students (several of whom were trained spies) at U.S. universities including Cornell, Harvard, and MIT, the espionage mission, Lokhova contends, made it possible for the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany and close the “technological gap” with America. She focuses on the career of MIT graduate and spy Stanislav Shumovsky, who spent 15 years gathering intelligence on the U.S. aeronautics industry and established a network of American engineers and scientists willing to share top-secret technologies with the U.S.S.R. It’s thanks to Shumovsky, Lokhova writes, that Russia was able to mass-produce bombers capable of reaching U.S. targets and build its own atomic bomb. In addition to the scope of Shumovsky’s espionage, Lokhova also uncovers the roles of two Russian-American women, Raisa Bennett and Gertrude Klivans, in helping to train the Soviet spies for their U.S. missions. Though it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of the various code names and military hardware, Lokhova delivers a comprehensive account of a crucial yet overlooked chapter in the history of Soviet espionage. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink

This slender volume from novelist Hrabal (1914–1997), originally published in 1983, is an affecting meditation on the joys and occasional griefs of sharing his life with a large group of cats. While working in Prague during the week, Hrabal constantly worries about the animals that inhabit—and which he’s allowed to completely overrun—his country cottage, and only upon returning there for the weekend can he feel relieved. Should anything happen to him or his wife, he frets, “Who would feed the cats?” So when a new litter brings the cottage’s feline population over capacity, and Hrabal rashly decides to kill several kittens, readers will be shocked. That he can keep them on his side afterward—by persuasively showing himself as appalled at what he’s done—is a testament to his storytelling skills. These include an ability to balance brutal moments with tender ones, as when relating how even his feline-averse wife “always looked forward to mornings, when we’d wake up and I’d open the door and five grown cats would come charging into the kitchen and lap up two full bowls of milk.” Hrabal’s involving and moving story will prod his audience to look more closely at their own relationships with other creatures. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink

Rare books dealer Schaberg (The Nietzsche Canon) provides an admirably exhaustive, albeit intimidatingly lengthy, look at the writing of Alcoholic Anonymous’s foundational 1939 text—known colloquially as “The Big Book,” and in full as Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. Through years of archival research, Schaberg uncovered a “tremendous amount” of first-hand documentation related to the book’s composition. He demonstrates a detective’s skill in using this evidence to examine accounts by major A.A. figures and identify contradictions, often traceable to what he calls the “mythmaking” tendencies of A.A.’s charismatic and garrulous founder Bill Wilson, the Big Book’s primary author. Among other things, Schaberg shows that the creation of A.A.’s most famous tenet, the 12 Steps, was likely not the “sudden, inspired event [Wilson] so frequently reported,” but a “much more... deliberate affair.” Elsewhere, Schaberg demonstrates equal skill as a literary archeologist in excavating past drafts of the book, finding traces of a planned but unwritten chapter about the “potential alcoholic” still evident in the finished text, and showing how a much-debated internal A.A. decision—to use the word “God,” but not more creed-specific language—shaped the Steps. The main caveat for general readers will be this book’s monumental scale; nonetheless, Schaberg’s work is a landmark study. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink

The ISIS caliphate has been dismantled, but the conditions that led to its rise, and the appeal it held for extremists, remain, according to this searing debut from Atlantic writer Giglio. In dispatches from Egypt, Germany, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in the years between 2011 and 2017, Giglio reports on Syria’s descent into multisided civil war, the origins of ISIS in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the smuggling of foreign jihadists across the Turkish-Syrian border, and the alliance of American and Iraqi special forces soldiers, Syrian rebels, and Kurdish militias that dislodged ISIS from the territory it held in Iraq and Syria. Giglio vividly describes the experience of coming under machine gun fire in a Humvee (“The feeling this gave me was always the same, both riled and afraid, like a trapped animal taunted by someone rattling its cage”), and his insights into the “strange ecosystem” of journalists, hustlers, and fixers that operate on the edges of war zones will be of interest even to readers who’ve had their fill of battle stories. His warning, meanwhile, that many jihadists and their families escaped ISIS territory before coalition forces moved in takes on frightening new relevance as U.S. troops withdraw from the region. Giglio’s probing, prescient narrative illuminates the global repercussions of a murky conflict. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/08/2019 | Details & Permalink