Portside

Wideman's mixed-genre work examines the lives and legacies of the young Till, his father, Louis Till, and what they can tell us about racism and about families.

Fresh from her remarks at the Golden Globes Awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey is being touted in the mainstream media as a potential presidential candidate in 2020. Whether it's a passing fancy or the start of a serious draft effort, now is a good time to look back on celebrity journalist Kitty Kelley's 2010 biography of Oprah, which the reviewer in an essay alternately caustic and refreshing, credits Kelley with "a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favorite Oprah word, but she also gets the cost of the journey."

The well-known scientist and commentator on science has presented us with a primer on his subject that is aimed at a wide and popular audience.

The author enlivens a type of working-class society where capitalism compensates poor men with the role of tough guy, all in the writer's effort to "bring the left to life."The End of Eddy does so in a style both plainspoken and visceral, using Louis's own childhood trials--like his protagonist much abused as a gay kid in a dead-end factory town --as a window onto the pathologies of a cloistered working-class existence.

This new edition of the poetry of early 20th Century modernist poet Marianne Moore will be welcomed by all who love her formally innovative, humorous, and deeply humanist verse.

The book traces the myriad links between the far right, from Fox News, Tea Party activists, militia supporters, new media trolls, White Nationalists, resurgent Klan members and self-proclaimed Nazis to Donald Trump, where each piggybacks on the rest in honing messages and growing their influence. While the author spends little time referencing left and progressive forces opposing the right's resurgence, his work is exhaustive in researching the phenomena.

Biographer Chernow "gives us a military genius who understood the full scope of the war and pursued a winning strategy," writes reviewer Richard Moe, "and a sometimes inept president who, though unschooled in politics, made his highest priority the protection of the lives and rights of freed slaves."

A survey of the life, work and associations of the late New York Review of Books editor Elizabeth Hardwick, the transplanted Southerner who became a writer of note among the literary and political circles comprising the New York Intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period, she had a knack for illustrating what might have been called feminist themes by way of specific details of specific lives.

Little is known about the veracity of the so-called Burr Conspiracy, the alleged effort by Aaron Burr to split off the western territories to form a separate nation in the early 1800s. People, the book's author writes, clung to familiar stories; they ‘embraced different certainties’ regardless of new information and revelations. Burr was judged on what was viscerally believed in a politically divided United States, whose easy acceptance of felt truths resembles our own.

Erdrich takes up the genre of literary dystopia in a manner that is focused, writes reviewer Goodman, "on the agency of women and the centrality of procreation and pregnancy in the way they are treated by society."