Review_NONFICTION
58 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
Review_NONFICTION
H.W. Bush, pitches his overview at gener-
alists trying to understand developments
abroad and their implications for
America. After a whirlwind montage of
world history since the 17th century, he
focuses on the post-WWII period and
looks at present-day conditions in various
regional powers and hot spots. He then
offers quick, chapter-long briefings on
geopolitical issues, including climate
change, nuclear proliferation, migration,
trade, pandemics, development strategies
for impoverished countries, war, and the
rise of China. Haass’s rehash of these topics
is cautious, evenhanded, and centrist—
he advocates for a prudent but engaged
American foreign policy that steers
between adventurism and isolationism.
(He notes his opposition to the invasion
of Iraq, for example, but castigates the
Obama administration for not punishing
the Syrian government for using chemical
weapons against insurgents.) Haas’s
broad survey may make a useful intro-
duction for neophytes, but it’s too shallow
and conventional to hold much interest
for readers who closely follow the news.
(May)Religion/Spirituality
White Too Long:
The Legacy of White Supremacy
in American Christianity
Robert P. Jones. Simon & Schuster, $28
(294p) ISBN 978-1-9821-2286-7
Sociologist Jones (The End of White
Christian America), founder and CEO of
the Public Religion Research Institute,
offers in this vociferous work a refreshing
blend of historical accounting, soul-
searching reflection, and analysis of white
supremacy within the American Christian
identity. “White Christian churches have
not just been complacent; they have not
only been complicit... as the dominant
cultural power in America, they have
been responsible for constructing and
sustaining a project to protect white
supremacy at the expense of black
equality.” He challenges white Christians
to see how white supremacy operates in
their religious lives; learn its history,
theology, and physical presence; to
understand how racism has become
“constitutive of white Christian identity”;edgeable about Nordic noir and easily
conveys her enthusiasm to readers. This
fine exploration of fiction as reality and
reality as fiction will draw many readers
to the authors she covers. (May)Who Ate the First Oyster?
The Extraordinary People Behind
the Greatest Firsts in History
Cody Cassidy. Penguin, $17 trade paper
(240p) ISBN 978-0-14-313275-2
Science writer Cassidy (And Then You’re
Dead) profiles prehistoric milestones and
the individuals responsible for them in
this illuminating and entertaining survey.
Interviewing experts across a variety of
fields, Cassidy details plausible scenarios
for the first bow and arrow, the discovery
of the Americas, the first beer, the first
case of smallpox, and the first joke, among
other turning points, and sketches the
anonymous originators’ probable back-
grounds and the causes and effects of their
contribution to human history. The
ancient hominin mother who invented
the baby sling three million years ago,
Cassidy writes, “removed the evolutionary
governor” on human intelligence by
allowing helpless infants more time to
develop synapses in their brains. The rise
of agriculture in Neolithic Europe led to
income inequality and specialization,
which in turn granted the first surgeon
(Cassidy names him “Dr. Zero”) the
authority to cut into a man’s skull to
relieve pressure from a head injury. The
Polynesian who first set foot on Hawaii
1,500 years ago sailed an 80-foot
“double-hulled catamaran” and had the
equivalent of a PhD in astronomy.
Cassidy humanizes prehistory with wit
and a firm grasp of the science behind
these anthropological case studies.
Enthralled readers will develop a new
appreciation for the ancient past. (May)The World: A Brief Introduction
Richard Haass. Penguin Press, $28 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-399-56239-6
The planet is in a state both promising
and perilous and needs America to stay
involved in international relations, argues
this superficial primer on world affairs.
Haass (A World in Disarray), president of
the Council on Foreign Relations and a
former U. S. State Department official and
Middle East policy adviser to Georgeto seize territory guaranteed in the “secret
protocol” of the German-Soviet nonag-
gression pact, Poland was doomed to be
the first domino to fall, despite the valor
of its armed forces. Moorhouse documents
the implications of France and England’s
refusal to send military aid (an estimated
200,000 Polish civilians and soldiers died
in the two-front invasion) and describes
how Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics, as well
as its extensive bombing of towns and
cities and refusal to distinguish combatants
from noncombatants, foreshadowed the
brutal nature of the war and the transfor-
mation of Poland into “a Nazi dystopia
in which populations were expropriated,
deported, or murdered on a whim.”
Moorhouse successfully fills in the gaps of
an episode that receives cursory treatment
in most WWII narratives, but armchair
historians may be overwhelmed by the
level of detail. This granular account is for
completists only. (May)★ Scandinavian Noir:
In Pursuit of a Mystery
Wendy Lesser. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27
(288p) ISBN 978-0-374-90471-5
Part literary criticism and part travel-
ogue, this exceptionally well-conceived
cultural history compares the “mental
image” of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden
that critic Lesser (Jerome Robbins: A Life in
Dance) derived from immersion in Nordic
noir thrillers, and the reality she found
when she finally visited those countries.
In the book’s first half, she relates how
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s 10 novels
featuring detective Martin Beck jump-
started her fascination with the genre.
She then exhaustively identifies themes
common in the work of Scandinavian
crime novelists, including the sadism of
their criminal characters, the alcohol
problems shared by their detectives and
criminals, and the relative lack of
emphasis on judicial proceedings.
Traveling to Copenhagen, Oslo, and
Stockholm in the book’s second part,
Lesser discovers that the murders so
rampant in the novels are comparatively
low—100–120 per year for all of Sweden,
for example—and that the violence
against children so frequently depicted
“doesn’t happen all that often in real
life,” which is “precisely why it appears
in fiction.” Lesser is remarkably knowl-