Mar 10 2025
with Lisa Dickey. Subtitled Lessons for Anyone Who Wants to Make a Difference. Despite being fairly politically informed, I wasn’t super familiar with Governor Gretchen Whitmer until the news of her attempted kidnapping and murder made national headlines. Even then, her policies didn’t (and still don’t, as most if not all of my Midwestern friends …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/10/true-gretch-young-adult-edition-by-gretchen-whitmer/
Mar 02 2025
Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/02/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
Feb 12 2025
featuring the art of Tracy Chahwan, Ganzeer, Ghadi Ghosn, Omar Khouri, Sirene Moukheiber, Hicham Rahma and Enas Satir. Hoo boy, readers, what a book. If you’re as unfamiliar with current events in the Middle East and North Africa as I am, then this book is likely to be a jarring experience for you, as Yazan …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/12/lebanon-is-burning-and-other-dispatches-by-yazan-al-saadi-et-al/
Nov 17 2024
Any book about current events eventually becomes a book about history, and a bit of a historical object itself. If it’s a good one, its insights will transcend the immediate period of its writing, illuminating its subject over a longer period, showing readers how the long term looked at a particular time. Michael Thumann’s Das …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/17/das-lied-von-der-russischen-erde-by-michael-thumann/
Oct 17 2024
translated from the original Italian by Willard Wood. This review is going to require a lot of background on me as a reviewer so buckle up, or feel free to scroll down till you get to the parts that are primarily about this book, around six paragraphs down. When I was a girl growing up …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/17/gaza-faces-history-by-enzo-traverso/
Jul 08 2024
Every so often, the publicist Alex Kelleher-Nagorski (hi, Alex!) sends me a book and starts firmly (but gently) persuading me to read it. This is one of those books. I was genuinely afraid that I wouldn’t have time to get into it but Alex assured me that it would be totally worth my time. After …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/08/unbecoming-by-seema-yasmin/
Apr 29 2024
subtitled The Cold War, Joe McCarthy, and the Red Scare. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the word “communism” has been used as a bogeyman for the average American, and is often the default label for any behavior that threatens a selfish sense of privilege. Why explain why you don’t like something …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/04/29/witch-hunt-by-andrea-balis-elizabeth-levy-illustrated-by-tim-foley/
Feb 13 2024
So I know that that order of attribution seems weird, as Fahmida Azim is the artist, Anthony Del Col the reporter and Josh Adams the art director of this Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novella. Like, who even puts the art director’s name on the cover of a book? But once you look at the contents, you’ll …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/13/i-escaped-a-chinese-internment-camp-by-fahmida-azim-anthony-del-col-josh-adams/
Jan 10 2024
Hunh, this had better not be the last book in the Counterfeit Lady series, as seemed to be hinted at in the afterword. I understand how this seventh volume would be a thematically appropriate story to finish on, but it absolutely lacked the larger part of why so many readers, myself included, have adored these …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/10/city-of-betrayal-by-victoria-thompson/
Dec 30 2023
Samantha Power was a writer before she went into public service. And even though she’s been America’s ambassador to the United Nations, and is now serving as the chief of the US Agency for International Development, it’s possible — maybe even probable — that she’s a better writer than anything else. Which means that even after …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/30/the-education-of-an-idealist-by-samantha-power/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire