Recently Reviewed: From Crime to Transcendence
Highlights from our Monday Book Review newsletter.
AMERICAN REICH: A MURDER IN ORANGE COUNTY, NEO-NAZIS, AND A NEW AGE OF HATE, BY ERIC LICHTBLAU
In early 2018, a gay, Jewish college student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his home to meet a former high school classmate, Sam Woodward, who had flirted with him through Tinder messages. Woodward, a neo-Nazi, murdered Bernstein. Veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses this story as a prism through which to examine hate crimes in conservative Southern California and across the country.
Days before Woodward’s sentencing for the murder, Donald Trump would be reelected, “a result that neo-Nazi groups celebrated,” culture critic Kristen Martin writes in a mixed review. “Devastatingly, the new era of hate that American Reich illuminates, and that Bernstein’s murder exemplifies, may not have reached its zenith yet.”
THEY KILL PEOPLE: BONNIE AND CLYDE, A HOLLYWOOD REVOLUTION, AND AMERICA’S OBSESSION WITH GUNS AND OUTLAWS, BY KIRK ELLIS
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker committed a string of robberies in Depression-era America and helped five inmates break out of prison in a deadly escape. Thirty-three years later, the movie Bonnie and Clyde captured the violence. In They Kill People, Kirk Ellis argues the landmark film reveals something dark about the American psyche.
“Cineastes will savor the detailed descriptions of the genesis and filming of the famous movie; historians, the backstory of America’s romance with guns and violence; and Hollywood history buffs, the ways in which Bonnie and Clyde upended production codes,” observes writer Anne Pedersen.
SWIRL & VORTEX: COLLECTED POEMS, BY LARRY LEVIS
Swirl & Vortex gathers all five of the collections that Larry Levis published during his lifetime, along with posthumously released work. Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin calls Levis a “crucial” poet whose voice is “transcendent.” Ulin discusses, in particular, the poem “God Is Always Seventeen,” in which Levis recalls his most recent meeting with his son, at a Times Square record store. “There was / Some music playing,” he concludes, “& something inconsolable // And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget / Being there with him.”
Ulin calls the book “a reclamation project in the broadest, most fundamental sense. It is a work that seeks to situate the poet within a lineage encompassing both his own career and the larger movements of 20th-century American poetry.”
CROWN CITY, BY NAOMI HIRAHARA
Naomi Hirahara’s Crown City tells the story of Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada, a Japan-born immigrant who arrives at a Pasadena boardinghouse in 1903 in the hope of reinventing himself after the death of his parents, only to face prejudice. He and his roommate are retained by an artist to solve the theft of a painting. Subsequently, Ryui becomes embroiled in a murder investigation.
Critic Paula L. Woods explains, “Hirahara’s meticulous research is obvious in the way that she contextualizes the lives of these working-class residents within Pasadena—a health-conscious escape for wealthy, winter-weary Easterners and Midwesterners that is also rife with real estate, oil speculators, and opium dens—and combines that knowledge with an origin story of an Issei immigrant who’s both witness to and victim of the city’s love-hate relationship with the Japanese.”
PARADISO 17, BY HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI
In Hannah Lillith Assadi’s stunning third novel, Paradiso 17, Sufien, a Palestinian child during the 1948 Nakba, searches all his life for a home after losing his homeland. He is displaced to Syria and Kuwait and eventually leaves his family to study engineering in Italy, before finding himself in New York and then Arizona. Sufien reflects that “losing home is the closest approximation we have for losing our bodies. To be a refugee is to be nearly apparitional.”
Critic Lauren LeBlanc advises readers to take up “Assadi’s wistful and elegiac novel, brimming with contradictions and heartache yet rife with the unquenchable desire to find oneself safely at home, all the while recognizing that ‘a paradise without people in it is no paradise at all.’ ”
PRIVACY’S DEFENDER: MY THIRTY-YEAR FIGHT AGAINST DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE, BY CINDY COHN
Cindy Cohn is a public interest litigator who has worked for decades, including 10 years as executive director, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit protecting people’s digital rights. Her memoir, Privacy’s Defender, recounts her life, from childhood injustice to litigating several groundbreaking cases, including the crucial Bernstein v. United States.
Law professor G.S. Hans explains, “[Cohn’s] goal…is a classic public interest litigator’s mission: ‘I’m trying to recruit you,’ Cohn says…‘to inspire you to dedicate some of your life to making the world a better place.…’ Only an advocate who deeply believes in the public good could speak so earnestly, with the conviction of a fighter who has both won and lost in her mission.”
