Review_NONFICTION
74 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JULY 29, 2019
was precisely the intention.... Refusing to
marry was recalcitrant behavior that
would not be enabled by a comfortable
private room with en suite bathroom.” In
concise, visceral vignettes, Moaveni
immerses her readers in a milieu saturated
with the romantic appeal of violence. The
result is a journalistic tour de force that
lays bare the inner lives, motivations, and
aspirations of her subjects. (Sept.)A Guest of the Reich: The Story
of American Heiress Gertrude
Legendre’s Dramatic Captivity
and Escape from Nazi Germany
Peter Finn. Pantheon, $28.95 (256p)
ISBN 978-1-5247-4733-6
Finn (coauthor, The Zhivago Affair),
national security editor at the Washington
Post, keenly draws a portrait of the war-
time derring-do of Gertrude “Gertie”
Legendre (1902–2000), socialite, heiress,
and teenage big-game hunter who inspired
the Broadway play Holiday. After the attack
on Pearl Harbor, while her husband
Sidney was stationed in Hawaii and their
daughters were being cared for by nannies,
Legendre insinuated herself into the Office
of Strategic Services, the intelligence
agency that preceded the CIA. In
September 1944, on leave outside recently
liberated Paris and “against all common
sense and training,” she accidentally crossed
enemy lines. The Nazis arrested her, and
she was interrogated often, but she
remained undaunted and, after six months,
escaped into Switzerland. Finn wisely
depends on Legendre’s diaries, which
exhibit not only her wit and pluck but her
racism, anti-Semitism, entitlement, and
ego (of stealing hot water rations intended
for fellow prisoners’ baths, she writes, “I
felt classed with the other wily women of
the ages, but unashamed—I was keeping
cleaner than the others”), and ably fills in
historical context. Legendre was an
extraordinary woman, whose “journey
through Hitler’s collapsing Reich” will
appeal to anyone equally enamored of
glamour and wartime adventure. (Sept.)Litigation Nation: A Cultural
History of Lawsuits in America
Peter Charles Hoffer. Rowman & Littlefield,
$35 (224p) ISBN 978-1-5381-1657-9
In this engaging and comprehensive
survey of American history via thevehicles; and “smart” electrical grids will
render fossil-fueled energy too expensive
to compete, leading to its “inevitable”
failure in the marketplace. He embeds
this forecast within a primer on “the
Third Industrial Revolution” that he pre-
dicts will bring households and businesses
trading home-brewed solar and wind
power online, a vision of energy populism
that he touts in ringing but nebulous
verbiage. (“The distributed and laterally
scaled infrastructure of the Third
Industrial Revolution is... fluid and
open, allowing literally billions of players
around the world to assemble and reas-
semble, and disaggregate and reaggregate,
their own component parts of it... in
continuously evolving blockchained
platforms.”) In the fine print, Rifkin
grants that this collapse isn’t quite inevi-
table: he allows that market forces will
need help from trillions in government
subsidies for renewables to displace carbon
and says little about the difficulty of knit-
ting wind and solar into a reliable energy
supply. Readers will find more jargon
and hype than serious analysis. (Sept.)★ Guest House for Young
Widows: The Women of ISIS
Asadeh Moaveni. Random House, $28 (330p)
ISBN 978-0-399-17975-4
In this searing investigation, Moaveni,
an Iranian-American journalist
(Honeymoon in Tehran), explores the phe-
nomenon of Muslim women—many of
them educated, successful, and outwardly
Westernized—choosing to travel to Syria
in support of jihad. She follows 13 women
and girls who were radicalized by news,
by recruiters on social media, or within
their social circles. Many of them naively
dreamed of handsome warrior husbands,
“camels trudging through a glowing ver-
milion sandstorm and Moorish palaces set
against the moonlight.” In Syria, many
found that “the militants [were] no better
than the tyrants they claimed to oppose”
and their new husbands, assigned imme-
diately upon arrival by ISIS, were often
alarming (some described as “swiping
through phone apps for sex slaves”). The
guest house of the title, which most
women come to know well, since the men
die so quickly, “was a place of such delib-
erate uninhabitability that few women
could stay long without going mad. ThisGive a F**k: A Brief Inventory of
Ways in Which You Can
Felicity Morse. Ixia, $16.95 trade paper
(320p) ISBN 978-0-486-83593-8
Former journalist and life coach Morse
combats what she sees as a prevailing
narrative that “the existential question we
face is whether or not to give an actual
f**k” in her spirited, welcoming debut.
Asking readers to engage more deeply
with others, Morse breaks her instructions
into three main parts: caring about oneself,
caring about one’s relationships, and
caring about “infinity and beyond.” In
the opening section, she offers breathing,
self-care, and meditation exercises to
facilitate getting in touch with one’s body
and staying in the moment, sprinkling
references to psychological research
throughout: “Our minds can attend to
126 pieces of information a second—
there’s always more that we can pay atten-
tion to in the right now.” The strongest
section is the one on relationships, in
which Morse tackles setting healthy
boundaries, establishing meaningful
communities and connections, and
learning to accept compliments. In her
conclusion, she addresses outside sources
that affect one’s general well-being—such
as the news, financial concerns, and one’s
fundamental worldview—providing
useful routines for recognizing privilege
and gratefulness. Suggested mantras and
short moments of reflection appear
throughout and provide moments for
refocusing. Morse’s encouraging work
will aid any reader looking to improve
self-care in order to more effectively help
others. (Sept.)The Green New Deal:
Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization
Will Collapse by 2028, and
the Bold New Economic Plan
to Save Life on Earth
Jeremy Rifkin. St. Martin’s, $27.99 (288p)
ISBN 978-1-250-25320-0
America’s transition to clean energy is
unstoppable—well, almost—according
to this boosterish treatise that, contrary to
the name, isn’t about the stimulus policy
promoted by left-leaning Democrats.
Sustainability consultant Rifkin (The
Third Industrial Revolution) contends that
plummeting prices for wind power, solar
power, and batteries; a shift to electric