56 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Review_NONFICTION Review_NONFICTIONof an old house.” (Jan.)★ The Depositions:
New and Selected Essays
on Being and Ceasing to Be
Thomas Lynch. Norton, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-
1-324-00397-7
This meditative, often emotionally
affecting collection from funeral director,
poet, and essayist Lynch (Whence and
Whither) explores, with personal honesty
and philosophical curiosity, the intersec-
tion of faith, death, family, and vocation.
It features selections from Lynch’s four
previous collections, along with five new
pieces. It begins with “The Undertaking,”
an introduction to his trade that is moving
and humorous in turns—the latter, partic-
ularly, as Lynch considers people’s frequent
discomfort with his profession, noting, “I
am no more attracted to the dead than the
dentist is to your bad gums.” Despite this
flippant remark, Lynch explores his work
as a spiritual one. In “How We Come to Be
the Ones We Are,” he recalls how learning
Catholicism’s language and rituals in
childhood informed his work. In “Y2Kat,”
one of the standout pieces, Lynch views his
first marriage’s collapse through the meta-
phor of the ancient, seemingly immortal
family cat that hates him, again expertly
straddling the line between comedy and
tragedy. In the new essays, Lynch contem-
plates the potential collapse of his second
marriage and the challenge of main-
taining sobriety during dark days, among
other topics. Providing an excellent entry
point for newcomers to Lynch’s work, this
assemblage is an erudite but unpretentious
discussion of life and mortality by a
master craftsman of language. (Dec.)Agent Jack: The True Story of
MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter
Robert Hutton. St. Martin’s, $29.99 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-250-22176-6
In this meticulous WWII espionage
history, Bloomberg UK correspondent
Hutton (Romps, Tots and Boffins) relates
the story of British spy Eric Roberts and
the Fifth Column, a secret MI5 operation
to identify Nazi sympathizers in the U.K.
Posing as Gestapo agent Jack King,
Roberts recruited more than 500 British
fascists to help prepare for the German
invasion of England. In reality, the would-
be saboteurs were under close watch byMI5’s countersabotage division. Drawing
on documents declassified in 2014, Hutton
describes Roberts’s recruitment efforts
and the balancing act he managed between
cultivating his network and not allowing
its members to commit any serious mis-
chief. In one case, he arranged for local
police to stake out a warehouse in Leeds
that had been targeted for firebombing.
The police failed to respond to the agreed
upon signal, however, and only the
incompetence of the arsonists prevented
the warehouse’s destruction. Hutton
argues that MI5 kept Roberts’s reports,
which exposed ordinary citizens as well as
the daughter of a popular composer,
classified for 70 years because they
undermined “the story Britain told itself
about the war.” This entertaining, detailed
narrative presents a chilling portrait of
England under siege. (Nov.)America for Americans: A History
of Xenophobia in the United States
Erika Lee. Basic, $32 (432p) ISBN 978-1-5416-
7260-4
As University of Minnesota historian Lee
(The Making of Asian America) demonstrates
in this fascinating but disturbing study,
xenophobia is not “an exception to
America’s immigration tradition” but is as
American as apple pie. Moreover, hostility
to migrants, she argues, has derived far
more from racist ideologies than it has from
anxieties about
foreign policy or
economic con-
cerns. Lee takes
a chronological
approach to this
topic, starting
with Benjamin
Franklin’s fears
regarding newly
arrived Germans
in pre-Revolu-
tionary Pennsylvania and moving on to the
mid-19th-century Know Nothing party’s
hatred for Irish Catholics, the federal gov-
ernment’s exclusion of Chinese migrants at
the end of the 19th century, the Bostonian
intellectual elite’s early-20th-century
dismissal of Jews and Eastern Europeans
as “beaten men from beaten races,” and
the demonization of Japanese immigrants
for decades prior to Pearl Harbor. While
readers might be tempted to see theseevents as dark but foregone moments in
the nation’s history, Lee’s later sections
make it clear that similar anxieties con-
tinue to legitimize fear and hatred of
Mexicans and Muslims, and even of
“model minority” groups of Asian
Americans. She persuasively expresses that
current hostilities over national borders are
no exception to the nation’s history. This
clearly organized and lucidly written book
should be read by a wide audience. (Nov.)Beyond the Known: How
Exploration Created the Modern
World and Will Take Us to the Stars
Andrew Rader. Scribner, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-
1-9821-2353-6
A children’s author and SpaceX engineer,
Rader (Mars Rover Rescue) offers an expan-
sive, overly ambitious look at human
exploration. Packed with information, the
work testifies to Rader’s extensive research
into, and avid enthusiasm for, the subject.
He addresses common myths, such as that
Europeans, during their first expeditions to
the Americas, believed the Earth to be flat.
To that end, he observes that, by the Middle
Ages, the Earth’s spherical shape “would
have been second nature to sailors who...
observed the horizon’s curvature on a daily
basis.” While Rader notes exploration’s
negative repercussions, he doesn’t suffi-
ciently address them. For instance, he
glosses over Columbus’s atrocities with
such statements as the navigator noting
“the gentle indigenous people would make
ideal servants, so he kidnapped a few.”
Similarly, when addressing the mid-20th-
century space race, Rader fails to compre-
hensively explore the complex legacy of
German-born NASA rocket engineer
Wernher von Braun—in particular, his
earlier service on behalf of the Third Reich.
Rader falls short of his goal—transmitting
to the reader his excitement for the future
of exploration, particularly of the solar
system—by failing to fully to do justice to
its past. Agent: Bonnie Solow, Solow Literary.
(Nov.)★ Chasing the Bright Side:
Embrace Optimism, Activate Your
Purpose, and Write Your Own Story
Jess Ekstrom. Thomas Nelson, $26.99 (230p)
ISBN 978-0-7852-2932-2
In this spectacular debut, Ekstrom,
founder of Headbands of Hope, which