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150 million acres. The contributors also
praise Roosevelt’s skill as an observer,
displayed in writings such as A Book-
Lover’s Holidays in the Open, which sought to
transmit his enthusiasm for the wilderness
to readers. Importantly, Miller and
Jenkinson’s selections also acknowledge
Roosevelt’s racial biases, which led him to
enact conservation programs to the
detriment of indigenous peoples, whom
Roosevelt believed were “backward with
no inherent right to land they had not yet
learned to use properly.” This is a fine look
at a complex man which brings attention
to both his tragic demerits and valuable
legacy. (Mar.)Weird Al: Seriously
Lily E. Hirsch. Rowman & Littlefield, $28
(216p) ISBN 978-1-5381-2499-4
Music writer Hirsch celebrates the
career of music comedian Alfred “Weird
Al” Yankovic in this thoroughly researched
debut biography. Hirsch argues that
Yankovic, though best known for his
parodies, is much more than a comedy act,
and that his songs allow listeners to “be
whoever you are,” as “he creates a mix of
tribute and mockery in his work, and he
mocks himself just as he slyly takes down
the bad behavior of others.” Hirsch charts
Yankovic’s rise to fame, beginning with
1979’s “My
Bologna” (a take
on the Knack’s
“My Sharona,”
which he
recorded in a
bathroom at
California
Polytechnic
State, where he
worked as a
student DJ),
and recounts how artists have responded to
having their work remade (Coolio was
originally outraged by Yankovic’s “Amish
Paradise” parody of his “Gangsta’s
Paradise,” but years later admitted, “I was
being cocky and stupid.... The song’s
actually funny as s___”). Hirsch details
dozens of songs, at times to the point of
overkill, as in an entire section devoted to
politics (Yankovic addresses gun violence
in several songs including his original
song “Trigger Happy” and “Canadian
Idiot,” a parody of Green Day’s “AmericanEnglish-language debut with a vivid and
disturbing account of the “suicide epi-
demic” that swept across Germany in the
final months of WWII. Drawing on war
diaries, published memoirs, letters, and
cemetery records, Huber first relates the
events of Apr. 30–May 3, 1945, in
Demmin, where advancing Soviet troops—
stalled by the German army’s destruction
of the town’s bridges—looted homes,
burned buildings, and committed mass
rapes, setting off “an unprecedented wave
of suicides” (estimates run from 500 to
more than 1,000 deaths in the town).
Huber describes mothers drowning their
children in the Peene River, a schoolteacher
shooting his entire family before firing on
the Soviets and then killing himself, and
three generations of family members who
hanged themselves. From Demmin,
Huber moves across Germany, exploring
how the “tumultuous emotions”
unleashed by Hitler’s rise, combined
with anti-Soviet propaganda, “the loss of
a sense of purpose” as defeat loomed, and
a yearslong “devaluation of human life,”
led to tens of thousands of suicides.
Though the topic is relentlessly grim,
Huber portrays his subjects with
empathy and offers key insights into the
German mindset before, during, and after
WWII. Readers will be convinced that
reckoning with the war’s legacy requires
studying this underexamined tragedy.
(Mar.)★ Theodore Roosevelt:
Naturalist in the Arena
Edited by Char Miller and Clay Jenkinson.
Univ. of Nebraska, $24.95 trade paper (258p)
ISBN 978-1-4962-1314-3
In this revealing and sometimes critical
view of the 26th president and his passion
for the natural world, scholars Miller and
Jenkinson assemble a thought-provoking
work of environmental scholarship.
Through essays by naturalists and histo-
rians and excerpted writings from Theodore
Roosevelt’s contemporaries, including John
Muir, and Roosevelt himself, the book
explores the many facets of his conserva-
tionism. These include cofounding, with
naturalist George Bird Grinnell, the Boone
and Crockett Club for conservation-minded
hunters, and, most prominently, desig-
nating the most amount of land out of any
American president as national forest—himself), and illustrates how the seeds of
modern-day issues such as Brexit were sewn
30 years ago. Even the most dedicated stu-
dents of world affairs will learn something
new from this indefatigable survey. (Mar.)
The Power Notebooks
Katie Roiphe. Free Press, $27 (256p)
ISBN 978-1-9821-2801-2
Roiphe (The Violet Hour) circles “a sub-
ject I keep coming back to: women strong
in public, weak in private,” in this bright
and dynamic collection of shorts that she
wrote “during a time of upheaval” encom-
passing pregnancy, divorce, sexual entan-
glements, and single motherhood. Using
personal experience as her template,
Roiphe layers episodes of her own “con-
fusion, self-contempt, conflict” with those
of women writers Simone de Beauvoir,
Sylvia Plath, Mary McCarthy, and Edith
Wharton. In a
pivotal scene,
Roiphe is forced
to walk home
when her abu-
sive husband,
enraged by their
crying infant,
kicks mother
and baby out of
his car. Inside
their apartment,
his shouting is heard by neighbors and
terrifies their child, yet she remains
“quiet, still, vacating,” confessing “not a
single friend... would recognize me.”
Accounts of other dysfunctional relation-
ships—the 35-year-old divorced rabbi
who seduced her at 15—are clinically con-
veyed. Throughout, she addresses the dis-
connect between her public and private
selves, admitting, “authority... the form
power takes on the page, is a fiction...
something I dreamed up because I would
like to have it.” Roiphe’s astute memoir
reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing,
and self-compassion. Agent: Suzanne Gluck,
WME. (Mar.)
“Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself”:
The Mass Suicide of Ordinary
Germans in 1945
Florian Huber, trans. by Imogen Taylor. Little,
Brown Spark, $29 (304p) ISBN 978-0-316-
53430-7
German historian Huber makes his