The Blazing World

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 5, 2022
The English Civil War that beheaded King Charles I in 1649 and the Glorious Revolution that kicked his son James II out of England in 1688 were epochal events that birthed religious freedom and democratic accountability, according to this sweeping study. Oxford historian Healey (The First Century of Welfare) traces these upheavals to the struggle between kings demanding absolute power and a Parliament determined to assert its supremacy in the name of the people; the culture war pitting the ceremonies and festivals of Anglicanism against the austerity of Puritan revolutionaries, who dourly canceled Christmas; the rising influence of middle-class landowners and businessmen; the eruption of radical movements like the Levellers, who advanced the shocking idea of universal suffrage; and the explosive growth of a partisan press that politicized the increasingly literate masses. Healey’s elegant narrative provides a sure guide through the century’s labyrinthine political intrigues while analyzing deeper social dynamics that he crystallizes in dramatic scenes of hierarchies being suddenly upended. (“First they invaded the Lords, then the Commons, where they threw street ordure in the faces of MPs,” he notes of a London mob’s incursion into Parliament.) The result is a bracing history of a time and place that created the modern world.

Starred review from January 1, 2023
A wide-ranging study of the social and political makeup of 17th-century Britain. Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, offers an ambitious narrative stuffed with engaging detail about the social and political developments that led to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, restoration, and shift to a constitutional monarchy following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With the explosion of the press and proliferation of free schools came "the rise of the literate middling sort"--i.e., those below the gentry class--who grew more politically active and opinionated and who were directly involved in challenging the authoritarian strictures of James I and his son, Charles I. The author is particularly insightful on the advancement of this "middling sort." As challenges to the monarchy mounted, Parliament began to gain real power and became "the institutional voice of the new political classes." Healey ably chronicles the suspenseful buildup to the shocking regicide of 1649 via two primary threads: republicanism, tinged with fervid anti-Catholicism; and royal absolutism. The author gives a fair assessment of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, whose "unattractive Puritanism, apparently vaunting ambition, and of course brutal conquest of Ireland helped taint republicanism for centuries and still does, to a point." As Healey convincingly shows, "one of the great tragedies" of the time was that Cromwell "prevented the Republic being so much more." In addition to his keen attention to the lives of ordinary citizens, the author includes portraits of many of the important thinkers and visionaries of the time, including Isaac Newton, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Samuel Pepys, and Margaret Cavendish, whose early science-fiction novel provides the title for Healey's book. "The political world we live in today, with regular parliaments and elections, ideologically defined parties [and] a vibrant press...was born in the seventeenth century," writes Healey. "For this...the story told here remains fascinating and vital to this day." Most readers will agree. An educative history and fresh civics lesson for a new generation.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.