Recently Reviewed: From Activists to Insiders
Highlights from our Monday Book Review newsletter.
A BOMB PLACED CLOSE TO THE HEART, BY NISHANT BATSHA
Nishant Batsha’s sophomore novel begins shortly before the United States enters World War I in 1917. Loosely inspired by a true story, it centers on Indra Mukherjee, an Indian freedom fighter, who has come to California to await arms from Germans sympathetic to the independence struggle. Indra’s romance with a socialist graduate student, Cora, leads to their marriage and eventual flight across the country when Indra becomes a wanted man.
Books editor Anita Felicelli writes, “In A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart, systemic forces bear down on two individuals who seem to have fallen in love in part because of absences in their lives—whether you believe their love can win out over the constraints that society may place on it produces the novel’s suspensefulness. It’s a timeless conflict, beautifully grappled with here.”
REHAB: AN AMERICAN SCANDAL, BY SHOSHANA WALTER
Journalist Robert Ito interviewed Shoshana Walter, author of Rehab: An American Scandal, about her book, which grew out of articles for which she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, on “the shameful state of the country’s rehab centers.” Walter’s book focuses on four individuals betrayed by the drug-treatment system; one of them is a mother who fought the system, in particular a rehab center called Above It All that eventually was forced to shutter.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned about our treatment system, it’s that it is essentially run by these twin principles of punishment and profit,” Walter tells Ito. “People are punished for having addictions, and then these rehab programs proliferated with the intent of making a ton of profit off of them. And that’s how a lot of our systems in this country operate.”
THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (AND HIS MOTHER), BY RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Reviewing Rabih Alameddine’s novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), critic David L. Ulin writes, “Imagine a 21st-century Scheherazade—in the form of a 63-year-old gay Beiruti teacher named Raja—spinning stories to keep himself and his 85-year-old mother alive in a dangerous and disruptive world.”
“The book functions as a set of nesting dolls, offering stories embedded in stories, a series of overlapping detours and evasions that ultimately coalesce as a vivid and coherent whole,” Ulin observes. “In that sense, the novel is as much about the storyteller, or the process of storytelling, as it is about the substance of its narrative.… The shape of this new work of fiction highlights both the insufficiency of memory, of story, and their utter necessity.”
MODERATION, BY ELAINE CASTILLO
The protagonist of Elaine Castillo’s second novel is the pseudonymous Girlie Delmundo, a Filipina American content moderator for Playground, a burgeoning virtual reality platform recently purchased by a social media company. She and her boss develop a mutual attraction.
Journalist Jessica Blough explains, “It would be easy to write a hackneyed book about how new technology is scary, how tech billionaires are bad, how profit motive will overtake the greater good, and how we are societally unprepared for the pace of advancement that is being laid out before us.… Instead, Castillo writes a love story, neither trite nor pandering, over this terrain; it is simultaneously an interrogation of capitalism and tech ecosystems.”
POSITIVE OBSESSION: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, BY SUSANA M. MORRIS
Journalist Lynell George comments that “MacArthur Fellow and science fiction trailblazer Octavia E. Butler’s life path” was determined by “a focused tenacity to carve a passageway where there once was none.” Butler called her own drive a “positive obsession.” Susana M. Morris uses this term as the title of her new biography of Butler.
In her interview with Morris, George explains that the writer “trains a broad, bright light on Butler’s extraordinary evolution from a deeply curious but painfully shy Black child with working-class Southern California roots to an internationally renowned, barrier-breaking intellectual who was shaped by the roiling Cold War/civil rights/global warming culture through which she traveled. She saw…the trouble lurking just out of frame.”
MCNAMARA AT WAR: A NEW HISTORY, BY PHILIP TAUBMAN AND WILLIAM TAUBMAN
“War, of course, is central to the [Robert] McNamara story,” writes historian Robert Rakove in his review of McNamara at War. In Philip Taubman and William Taubman’s telling, he notes, McNamara is not “a numb practitioner of industrial warfare” but rather is skeptical about introducing U.S. ground forces into South Vietnam to rescue the government in Saigon. The biography also covers McNamara’s childhood and college years in the Bay Area, as well as his career subsequent to the war, working for the World Bank.
Of the authors’ approach, Rakove writes, “McNamara, they explain, felt an inexhaustible need to ‘excel and succeed’ and hoped to retain his office. [President Lyndon B. Johnson], meanwhile, emerges as a volatile, even unstable presence. Mistaken Cold War notions play their role—the domino theory and McNamara’s dismissal of North Vietnamese agency among them—but the emphasis [here] is psychological, not doctrinal.”
The Forest Remembers
13 New February Books
California Bestsellers List (January 29, 2026)
Split Self, Split Sisters
