October 1, 2022
In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 19, 2022
“Imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts,” according to this pointed and wide-ranging survey of how Britain’s imperialist past informs its present. Contending that most Britons remain ignorant of the many ways in which “the experience of having colonized” continues to affect British life and culture, journalist and novelist Sanghera (Marriage Material), calls for Empire Day 2.0, a reimagined version of an annual half-day school holiday from the first half of the 20th century. Among other lessons, students would learn that the expression “I don’t give a damn” originated in British India, where a dam was a low-value copper coin, and that the oil and gas company Shell started as an importer of “oriental seashells from the Far East.” Elsewhere, Sanghera turns to darker episodes in the history of British empire, including the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre that killed an estimated 600 to 1,000 Indian men, women, and children in 1919 and helped bring the British Raj to an end, and the looting of artifacts in Tibet. Ranging across the temporal length and geographical breadth of the empire, Sanghera amasses a devastating catalog of tragedies and injustices, and makes an irrefutable case that “imperial amnesia” hurts all Britons. It’s a cogent and captivating wake-up call.
March 10, 2023
Was the British Empire a force for good or evil? Journalist and novelist Sanghera (Marriage Material, 2016) argues that this is the wrong question. Offering no simple answers, Empireland advocates for an honest reckoning with the facts of imperial history and its many legacies in the contemporary United Kingdom and across the world. Empire has left traces on British life at every level, from museum holdings to immigration patterns to travel habits to the presence in public and private buildings of monuments and statues that commemorate imperial figures like Clive of India. Sanghera writes as a perpetual student, not a historian; his approach invites the reader to share in his curiosity and discoveries, but he does not soft-pedal the horrors inflicted by the British on colonial subjects who dared to question imperial authority. Empireland does not seek to topple existing narratives about English history, but rather, to complicate them by including the stories and histories of the colonized as well as the colonizers. A lucid, measured call to grapple with the fraught history of empire.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from December 1, 2022
A British Sikh journalist and documentarian probes the lasting effects of "one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity." Sanghera opens this U.S. edition (the book was published in the U.K. in 2021) with a note to American readers: "The contention that the War of Independence marked a total rejection of the British Empire is the historical equivalent of a teenager leaving home and declaring that his parents had nothing to do with shaping him." Indeed, American readers will find much that's familiar in the account that follows, in which the author probes Britain's imperial history to find its present-day influences--which are everywhere: in Britain's monuments and museums, education system, multiculturalism, racism, even its trash TV. Drawing from sources as varied as Jan Morris, Edward Said, and Twitter, Sanghera moves elegantly through one legacy to the next, frequently opposing imperial apologists against detractors. Observing that much British conversation about empire has been binary--"a veritable industrial oven of hot potatoes"--he pleads for a nuanced view of Britain's "difficult history." Acknowledging that his "quintessentially British" education "encouraged me to view my Indian heritage through patronizing Western eyes," he nevertheless loves the nation, even though immigrants are endlessly instructed to integrate." It is, as he points out passionately, his home. The author frequently strings lists of names or facts into single, long sentences, accreting evidence for his argument that, say, Britain has been multicultural for centuries in a way that is hard to deny--and when he uses the same rhetorical device in his unexpectedly optimistic conclusion, it's equally effective. Readers whose familiarity with British history and culture is not acute may find themselves reaching for external context at times, but Sanghera's exploration of the topic is consistently lively and just as often laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply painful. Marlon James provides the foreword. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but this piercing examination of its legacies is thoroughly timely.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.