WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 57Review_NONFICTION
were initially at the forefront of calls for
strong measures against crack until they
saw that the result was the imprisonment
of record numbers of young black men,
but the political popularity of the war on
drugs stymied their efforts to challenge
the punitive policies. This thoughtful,
well-researched history highlights the
futility of viewing drugs as strictly a
matter for law enforcement while ignoring
their socioeconomic context. (Oct.)
The First: How to Think About
Hate Speech, Campus Speech,
Religious Speech, Fake News,
Post-truth, and Donald Trump
Stanley Fish. One Signal, $26 (212p)
ISBN 978-1-9821-1524-1
A bestselling author and humanities
professor, Fish (How to Write a Sentence)
zeroes in on the First Amendment in this
well-constructed analysis, offering his
nonpartisan take on what it does and
doesn’t protect and what kind of speech it
should and shouldn’t regulate. He argues
that the amendment’s language, and the
jurisprudence that back it up, make it
impossible for the U.S. to ban hate speech
as many European countries have done,
and that, despite the fact that the amend-
ment contains a
religious clause,
faith and free
speech will
always be at
odds with one
another. Fish
declares that
universities
“don’t have free-
speech obliga-
tions because
freedom of speech is not an academic value”;
in his view, schools are not required to
host visiting right-wing provocateurs and
“safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” are
inherently antithetical to the learning
process. And he explores Donald Trump’s
bombastic “post-truth” discourse as an
extension of cultural relativism, in which
there is considered to be no such thing as
an “objective truth.” The title’s “think
about” is accurate: Fish’s well-articulated
and substantiated argument offers no ideas
about what to do about hate speech, fake
news, or political polarization. More than
anything else, this is a thought exercise
for armchair philosophers and perhaps
university administrators. (Oct.)Good Things Out of Nazareth:
The Uncollected Letters of
Flannery O’Connor and Friends
Edited by Benjamin B. Alexander. Convergent,
$26 (400p) ISBN 978-0-525-57506-1
Alexander, a Franciscan University of
Steubenville English and humanities
professor, presents a fascinating set of
Flannery O’Connor’s correspondence.
Beyond recreating the flavor of the
Southern Catholic intellectual subcul-
ture which O’Connor inhabited, the
compilation is highlighted by gems from
O’Connor’s writing mentor, Caroline
Gordon. Recognizing O’Connor’s talent
early on, Gordon sets about pushing
O’Connor to sharpen her prose, study James
Joyce, and develop an “elevated” tone to
complement her regional dialect. O’Connor
fans will especially prize Gordon’s detailed
critiques of such celebrated works as the
novel Wise Blood and short story “Good
Country People.” While O’Connor’s milieu
can seem intimidatingly insular, the
volume allows readers to feel closer to the
writer, by glimpsing O’Connor’s struggles
with lupus, which sometimes leaves her
bedridden or walking on crutches, and
by hearing her famously strong Georgian
accent in the colloquialisms she sprinkles
throughout the letters—congratulating
author Thomas F. Gossett on receiving a
positive Time review, she comments
“better to have those people for you than
agin [against].” Alexander makes a few odd
editing choices, such as including a sur-
prising amount of material about
O’Connor’s fellow Southern Catholic author,
and Caroline Gordon mentee, Walker Percy.
On the whole, however, this is an important
addition to the knowledge of O’Connor, her
world, and her writing. (Oct.)The Iconist: The Art and
Science of Standing Out
Jamie Mustard. BenBella, $22 (264p)
ISBN 978-1-94883-641-8
In this thin guide, media consultant
Mustard delivers a magazine article gussied
up into book form. Mustard proposes to
use “lessons from history, psychology, the
arts, and pop culture” to illustrate
“unchanging primal laws” called Blocks—
the “simple mechanism underlying whatmakes anything iconic.” These blocks
constitute little more than simple and
loudly stated content, but are framed as a
critical “primordial rule” of why people
pay attention. Mustard runs through the
problem of getting people to pay attention
to any one thing in a world crowded with
competing claims on attention, the solution
(Blocks), and how to use Blocks to attain
success. He pushes simplicity; most people
overcomplicate their message, he writes,
but simply “marqueeing” everything like
a billboard will get one far on the “infor-
mation superhighway.” The work is heavily
illustrated with infographics and demon-
strated through a wide array of stories,
which encompass both the MMA fighter
Chael Sonnen and Martin Luther King’s “I
Have a Dream” speech. While the need to
break through the data deluge is real,
Mustard’s tactic—identify an audience’s
primary emotional need, address it
loudly and simply, and repeat, repeat,
repeat—is not new enough to warrant
the space applied to it. (Oct.)The Kosher Capones: A History
of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters
Joe Kraus. Cornell Univ., $26.95 (296p)
ISBN 978-1-5017-4731-1
In this underwhelming history, English
professor Kraus (An Accidental Anarchist)
tells some tales from a century of Jewish
organized crime in Chicagoland. Drawing
mostly on secondary sources, along with
some interviews that provide color, he starts
with a section about “Zukie’s Bad Day,”
when “the boss of the last independent
predominantly Jewish gang in Chicago,”
Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman,
was gunned down in 1944, leading to his
gang members coming under tighter
control from the syndicate known for its
association with Al Capone. Kraus then
moves backwards and forwards in time and
geographically between the Maxwell Street
and Lawndale neighborhoods, looking at
power struggles (ranging from execution-
style murder to “peace conferences” among
rival gangs that yielded press conferences),
business structures, and personal relation-
ships. When the story moves forward in
time, Kraus focuses on Lenny Patrick, “the
central figure in Chicago Jewish organized
crime,” who eventually became a cooper-
ating witness whose testimony took down
the syndicate; surprisingly, after prison he