Tom Rider's Reviews

The Forest Unseen; A Year’s Watch in Nature. By David Gaskell. Penguin, 2012. Gaskell’s writing are infused with the insights of contemporary biology and the imagination of a nineteenth-century naturalist.

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Devil in the Grove; Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. By Gilbert King. Harper, 2012. One of the most famous lawyers of the twentieth century, Marshall’s career was almost derailed by an alleged rape in a Florida orange grove.

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The Patriarch; The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. By David Nasaw. Penguin, 2012. The father of two martyred sons, the elder Kennedy had had controversial life, some of which wasn’t all that noble.

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The Barbarous Years; The Peopling of British North America; The Conflict of Civilization, 1600 to 1675. By Bernard Bailyn. Knopf, 2012. An account of the first great migration of Europeans and Africans to British North America and their struggles with the indigenous population of the eastern coast.

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Embers of War; The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam. By Fredrick Logevall. Random, 2012. The conflict lasted three decades and involved France and then the U.S., and both were defeated by Vietnamese revolutionary forces.

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Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. By Touré and Michael Dyson. Atria Books, paper. An exploration of the notion of post-blackness, of being rooted in but not restricted by one’s race.

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Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. By Rob Nixon. Harvard University Press, paper. Climate change, toxic dumping, deforestation, oil spills and the aftermath of warfare are the different forms of “slow” violence against the poor in virtually every country.

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Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. By Adilifu Nama. University of Texas Press, paper. Ways to explore racial identity through the extraordinary adventures of black superheroes.

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Whorled. By Ed Bok Lee. Coffee House Press, paper. How does one decide on an identity in an increasingly homeless world? How does that state of affairs impact one’s meditations on such this as war and culture?

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Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. By Annia Ciezadlo. Free Press, paper. Like any travel writer, she fills her book with carefully drawn portraits of the places, people, and food that she comes across.

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