Review_NONFICTIONReview_NONFICTION
52 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
Rescuers survey flooded Houston streets in a photo from Eric Jay
Dolin’s hurricane history, A Furious Sky (reviewed on this page).Do What You Want:
The Story of Bad Religion
Bad Religion and Jim Ruland. Hachette, $28
(336p) ISBN 978-0-306-92222-0
Ruland (My Damage) serves up a heady,
revelatory collaboration with the enduring
punk band Bad Religion, set to be pub-
lished on the 40th anniversary of the
group’s formation. Ruland begins with
the band’s humble origins as a group of
teens in California’s uncool San Fernando
Valley and captures how their intelligent
lyrics were intended to “encourage the
audience to not just think, but think
critically” and helped them stand out in
the punk scene. Ruland anchors the group
portrait with interviews with three of the
founding members: Greg Graffin, vocalist,
known as the “punk professor” for his
parallel career as an evolutionary biologist;
Brett Gurewitz, guitarist and founder of
Epitaph Records, which released the
band’s records; and Jay Bentley, bassist,
responsible for writing each show’s set list.
(Unlike most successful touring bands,
Ruland explains, Bad Religion would
rather challenge themselves and surprise
their fans by playing a different set every
night.) Readers will appreciate Ruland’s
thorough reporting and insight on the
various lineup changes over the years,
along with his convincing analysis of punk
history in which, counter to the consensus
of popular rock critics, he argues that bands
such as Green Day and Rancid were influ-
enced by the Southern California punk
scene, not by Nirvana and Seattle’s grunge
music. This testament to the value of hard
work and independent thinking offers a
thrilling alternative to the conventional
rise-and-fall rock narrative. (Aug.)A Fish Growing Lungs: Essays
Alysia Li-Ying Sawchyn. Burrow, $16 trade
paper (170p) ISBN 978-1-941681-66-4
Rumpus editor Sawchyn probes how
personal struggles shape identity in her
insightful debut. In linked essays, she
untangles her diagnosis with bipolar I at
age 18—a diagnosis she discovered seven
years later was false. This misdiagnosis
drives the book’s narrative, with Sawchyn
trying to figure out how to recover from a
disorder that never was, while balancingvery real tribulations, including addiction
and deeply dysfunctional relationships. It’s
when Sawchyn plays with form that her
narrative voice is strongest; an index of
mental illness–related terms seesaws in
tone between playful and weighty, while,
in a series of fragments, Sawchyn recounts
drug use in language verging on, but never
succumbing to, addiction clichés. In
explaining that she considered fabricating
outlandish stories to explain away scars
from cutting, she writes that “what these
stories have in common, of course, is that
I am not the subject in the story who is
responsible for the damage. I am the object,
the body that is acted upon.” At this and
other points, Sawchyn considers the act of
telling stories about oneself and how this
process can be misleading. The result is a
refreshingly open-ended collection that
provides a model of how essay writing can
be used for self-exploration. (June)A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-
Year History of America’s Hurricanes
Eric Jay Dolin. Liveright. $29.95 (416p)
ISBN 978-1-631-49527-4
Historian Dolin (Black Flags, Blue Waters)
delivers a fast-paced and informative historyof American hurricanes from
the 16th century through the
2017 season, when a record-
setting three storms made
landfall. Though Dolin’s
question of “how we can learn
to survive and adapt” to hur-
ricanes in the era of climate
change doesn’t receive deep
analysis, the book successfully
documents the impact of
storms such as the 1900
Galveston Hurricane (in which
an estimated 8,000–10,000
people died) and the 1935
Labor Day Hurricane, which
killed hundreds of WWI
veterans building the Overseas
Highway in the Florida Keys.
Milestones in the scientific
understanding of hurricanes
include Father Benito Viñes’s
observational studies in 19th-
century Cuba and the U.S.
military’s “Hurricane Hunter”
flights, which began in WWII
and employed new radar
technology to capture real-time data from
inside storms; the information was even-
tually used to create computer models to
predict hurricane behavior. Dolin also
explains hurricane naming conventions
and credits Dan Rather’s 1961 Hurricane
Carla broadcasts, which showed radar
images of the storm, with changing how
they’re reported. Packed with intriguing
miscellanea, this accessible chronicle serves
as a worthy introduction to the subject.
Readers will be awed by the power of
these storms and the wherewithal of people
to recover from them. Agent: Russell Galen,
The Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (June)Inclusify: The Power of
Uniqueness and Belonging
to Build Innovative Teams
Stefanie K. Johnson. HarperBusiness, $29.99
(288p) ISBN 978-0-06-294727-7
Most companies that think they’re
encouraging diverse and inclusive practices
are actually not, according to this disap-
pointing treatise from Johnson, an associate
management professor at the Leeds School
of Business. She sees business leaders as still
largely in thrall to the meritocracy myth,
and as failing to take diverse backgrounds,
experiences, and skills into account whenNonfiction