WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 55Review_NONFICTION
he passed along top-secret information
that helped the Soviets build their own
atomic bomb faster than expected.
Exposed as a spy in the Venona code-
breaking project, Fuchs confessed in
1950 and served nine years in prison
before immigrating to East Germany.
Greenspan portrays Fuchs as a reticent
figure motivated by sincere political
beliefs and the idea that the free flow of
information might prevent a nuclear
arms race. Though the book’s prose style
is more diligent than dynamic, Greenspan
builds tension by interweaving Fuchs’s
scientific and espionage pursuits with MI5’s
efforts to unmask him. This circumspect
account blurs the lines between courage
and treachery in thought-provoking ways.
(May)
Bound by War: How the United
States and the Philippines Built
America’s First Pacific Century
Christopher Capozzola. Basic, $35 (480p)
ISBN 978-1-5416-1827-5
MIT history professor Capozzola follows
up Uncle Sam Wants You with a comprehen-
sive chronicle of the military alliance
between the U.S. and the Philippines.
After partnering with revolutionary leader
Emilio Aguinaldo in the 1898 Spanish-
American War, U.S. Navy commander
George Dewey claimed that he had never
promised the Philippines—which was
ceded to the U.S. in the Treaty of Paris—
its independence.
Aguinaldo
disagreed, and
American forces,
fighting with
the help of allied
indigenous
troops, eventu-
ally defeated
Filipino insur-
gents in 1902.
In the early 20th
century, American officials sought to
establish the Philippines as a showplace of
enlightened colonialism and a projection of
U.S. power in Asia. Plans for the archipela-
go’s defense from Japanese invasion in
WWII proved woefully inadequate, and
Filipino and American soldiers died side
by side in the Bataan Death March. The
Philippines finally gained its independence
in 1946, and U.S. armed forces and intelli-
gence agencies maintained a substantial
influence on the island nation, partnering
with local forces to battle communist rebels
during the Cold War and Muslim jihadists
after 9/11. Capozzola musters an impres-
sive array of source material to document
these mutually entwined military histories
and the impact of U.S. geopolitics and
immigration reform on the Philippines.
Readers will savor this detailed study of an
underexamined aspect of American foreign
policy. (May)Demagogue: The Life and Long
Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
Larry Tye. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $36
(608p) ISBN 978-1-328-95972-0
Biographer Tye (Bobby Kennedy) delivers
a sure-handed account of the rise and fall
of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.
Drawing from a previously unavailable
archive of McCarthy’s “unscripted writings
and correspondence,” Tye looks to correct
misconceptions large and small, including
what actually took place behind closed
doors of the 1953–1954 Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, and
how McCarthy could be “incongruously
generous to those he had just publicly
upbraided.” Analyzing the origins of
McCarthyism, Tye describes McCarthy’s
“last-minute” decision in 1950 to
substitute a talk on housing policy for a
speech alleging communist infiltration
of the U.S. state department, and
President Truman’s 1947 Loyalty Order,
which “mandated checks on nearly 5
million federal employees and applicants”
and identified 299 “subversive organiza-
tions,” including the Jewish Culture
Society. (Some historians, Tye notes,
believe that 1950s anti-Communism
should have been called “Trumanism.”)
The book’s most provocative sections,
including a posthumous diagnosis of
bipolar disorder and a roundup of “lurid”
claims that noted homophobe McCarthy
was gay, add color but lack definitive
proof. Though Tye occasionally veers
into minutiae (as with the recipe for
McCarthy’s venison meatballs), he main-
tains a brisk pace throughout. The result
is a searing and informative portrait of the
man and his specific brand of self-aggran-
dizing demagoguery. Agent: Jill Kneerim,
Kneerim & Williams. (May)★ Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as
a Chef in Training, Father, and
Sleuth Looking for the Secret
of French Cooking
Bill Buford. Knopf, $28.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-
307-27101-3
Buford (Heat) returns with a vivid and
often laugh-out-loud account of the tribu-
lations, humblings, and triumphs he and
his family endured in the five years they
lived in France. In the mid-aughts, Buford
determines to move to France to learn
about French cooking, and after much
effort he, his wife, and their twin toddler
boys arrive in Lyon, a city notable for “its
gritty darkness, the sewage smells,” where
it’s initially impossible for Buford to find a
kitchen to work in. It isn’t until he does a
stint at a cooking school that he finagles a
spot in a Michelin-starred restaurant,
where the work is relentless and the culture
unreformed (an Indonesian cook, for
instance, is given the name Jackie Chan).
Meanwhile, Buford’s twin boys become
fully French, and Buford puts on his culi-
nary deerstalker cap to investigate the
influence of Italian cooking on French
cuisine, and vice versa. Buford’s a delightful
narrator, and his stories of attending a pig
slaughter, befriending the owner of a local
bakery, and becoming gradually accepted
by the locals are by turns funny, intimate,
insightful, and occasionally heartbreaking.
It’s a remarkable book, and even readers
who don’t know a sabayon from a Sabatier
will find it endlessly rewarding. (May)Entangled Life: How Fungi Make
Our Worlds, Change Our Minds,
& Shape Our Futures
Merlin Sheldrake. Random House, $28
(368p) ISBN 978-0-525-51031-4
Scientist Sheldrake debuts with a
revelatory look at fungi that proves their
relevance to humans goes far beyond their
uses in cooking. While fungi lack brains,
they can process and share complicated
information about food and the habit-
ability of environments quickly and over
great distances, influencing the “speed
and direction of growth,” in ways not yet
understood, prompting Sheldrake to ask,
“Can we think of their behavior as intel-
ligent?” By discussing how fungi come
together with algae to form lichens,
Sheldrake touches on another question,
that of “where one organism stops and