Good evening, everyone. A little late posting this evening. This afternoon we had to say goodbye to out sweet kitty Charlie Brown. He was a wonderful companion, and we will miss him.
There have been dozens of musicians who have pushed back and even sued Trump for using their songs without permission in his rallies. This week, it was nice to see a publisher push back as well: ‘Franklin the Turtle’ publisher slams Hegseth post joking about boat strike
The publisher of “Franklin the Turtle,” a Canadian book franchise aimed at preschoolers, has expressed criticism after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to make light of deadly boat strikes in Latin America by posting a doctored image that showed the well-known turtle character attacking the crew of a narcotics vessel….
In a statement late Monday, the cartoon’s publisher, Kids Can Press, issued a statement that did not name Hegseth but said: “Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity. We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.”
About Kids Can Press:
Kids Can Press, a leading Canadian-owned children’s book publisher, and a Corus Entertainment company, is the home of beloved, best-selling global brands such as Franklin the Turtle, Scaredy Squirrel and CitizenKid. From its early years as a small collective dedicated to publishing fun, enchanting, and socially responsible children’s books, Kids Can Press has evolved into a globally recognized content company, with a library of more than 600 titles. Our young adult imprint, KCP Loft, was launched with a focus on properties with crossover potential. Kids Can Press also has a thriving custom publishing business in partnership with a number of blue-chip brands.
There were a surprising number of interesting books published this week. So much for the December publishing doldrums. The first book on tonight's list has stirred some love/hate controversy as journalist Olivia Nuzzi takes us on a trip through her rise and downfall, covering the Trump campaign while having a relationship <shudder> with RFK, Jr. Honestly, I never really followed the ins and outs of her controversy. This review from the Washington Post (free link, I think) is a good jumping off point, and didn’t give me any desire to read it.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- American Canto, by Olivia Nuzzi. Olivia Nuzzi spent a third of her life observing those in power. She became a reporter in 2014, when the political landscape began to reconfigure itself around a singular personality whom she was uniquely primed to understand. Over the next ten years, she used her access and eye for detail to chronicle his campaigns, trials, and government in blockbuster feature stories that drove the national conversation and propelled her to the heights of her profession.
Then, in 2024, her personal life collided with the public interest in a scandal that cost Nuzzi her job and reputation. Amid a full-blown tabloid frenzy, Nuzzi went quiet, drove west, and spent the next year in self-imposed exile at the edge of the country, where she wrote this searing and astonishingly clear-eyed account of what she—and we—have experienced over the last decade.
- Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age, by Patrick Markee. Millions of people are affected by homelessness, but media pundits and politicians see homelessness as a social work problem, or a matter of personal pathology, or some peculiar subspecies of urban poverty.
Informed by the author’s own front-line experiences from more than two decades working as an advocate for homeless people in New York City and his work with housing activists across the country. Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age presents an alternative and innovative, wide-angle view of homelessness and displacement in New York and elsewhere.
This is a tour of the geography of homelessness in New York City, where some 100,000 people a night sleep in the city’s shelter system, Markee visits multiple city landmarks where homeless New Yorkers struggle to survive. "At a moment when the National Guard is being mobilized to 'clean up' cities, Placeless offers a nuanced, compassionate, and meticulously researched counterpoint for a relentlessly demonized population. Advocates like Patrick Markee have lived and breathed the suffering of others and understand policy from the perspective of the streets, tunnels, jails and darkness of the displaced. Using New York City and his work with displaced persons as a microcosm for the nation, Markee gives a fascinating history lesson and offers concrete hope while also eloquently eulogizing those gone too soon." —Jonathan Mulligan Sepulveda, author of No Human Is Illegal
- Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, by Samuel Miller McDonald. Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.
But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’-- existence on a planet in crisis. “There is an idealism to this book that refreshes readers jaded by the claims of 'techno-futurism' and the aspirations of oligarchs. You read this book and want to love the earth rather than reach for stars.” —Kirkus Reviews
"This is a wise book, and hopefully its wisdom will rub off. We need somehow to take the human traits that fixated on 'more' and turn them towards 'better,' with a rich definition of that blessed state!" -- Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
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Chasing Chi: The FBI's Groundbreaking Pursuit of China's Most Prolific Spy Family, by James E. Gaylord. Chasing Chi is a compelling read and first-person account of the trailblazing investigation and prosecution of Chi Mak and his family and friends. For decades, they stole sensitive US military and commercial technologies for the Peoples’ Republic of China. FBI Special Agent James Gaylord, who directed the investigation, recounts this mesmerizing tale by drawing upon his eyewitness experiences and notes, case evidence, investigative files, and court records to weave a fascinating spy thriller detailing Chi Mak’s betrayal. This incredible true-life story highlights behind-the-curtain intrigues, obstacles, betrayals, and hard-won victories, while pointing out the heroes and villains along the way.
Barbieland: The Unauthorized History, by Tarpley Hitt.For nearly seven decades, Mattel billed Barbie as the first adult doll—a revolutionary alternative to the baby dolls before her, which had treated little girls as future mothers rather than future women. But Barbie was no original. She was a knockoff: a nearly identical copy of a German doll now erased from the narrative in favor of Mattel’s preferred version of history. It was Barbie’s first secret but far from her last.
In Barbieland, journalist and The Drift editor Tarpley Hitt exposes the long-hidden backstory of the world’s most famous doll. After snuffing out her predecessor, Barbie climbed to the throne of global girlhood and stayed there, fending off rivals with a mix of strategic marketing, government influence, ruthless litigation, and covert tactics worthy of a classic spy novel.
This lively, authoritative ride through the underbelly of American business pulls back the curtain on the corporate titans, cultural influencers, and toyland rivals who shaped this icon’s world—from flawed founder Ruth Handler to convicted Wall Street fraudster (and improbable Barbie savior) Michael Milken. Along the way, Hitt delves into the stories of the eccentrics and autocrats who brought Barbie to life through sheer force of will: a pair of ex-Nazi toymakers, a toy mogul friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s, a swinging missile designer turned Barbie executive married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Mattel’s mid-century Freudian marketeer, who saw the doll as a psychosexual skeleton key to controlling the American mind. "More than the story of a toy, Barbieland is the story of the twentieth century. As fun as it is informative—you'll never look at a doll the same way."—Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
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Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America, by Trent Preszler. Every December, millions of people around the globe adorn their homes, offices, and town squares with lavishly decorated Christmas trees to celebrate the holiday season. Yet few pause to wonder: Where did this tradition come from? And in an age of climate upheaval and artificial replicas, will these beloved trees still be here for future generations?
In Evergreen, Cornell University professor Trent Preszler weaves together a captivating story of humanity’s deeply rooted relationship with evergreens, revealing how the trees shaped economies, launched cultural movements, and propelled America’s rise to global prominence. With stunning historical range and lyrical insight, Preszler guides readers from the awe-inspiring evergreen cathedrals of the West to Christmas tree farms in the Midwest, sawmills in the South, the iconic Rockefeller Center spruce in the East, and beyond.
Blending cinematic detail with compelling ecological and cultural history, Evergreen explores the hidden tensions between nature, commerce, and spirituality that have confounded humanity for millennia.
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Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books, by Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan. Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure?
How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.
Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encouraging book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Lifelong and new readers will take inspiration from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within.
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Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day, by Tamar Adler. From the award-winning author of An Everlasting Meal comes a record of daily delights from inside the kitchen and just outside it; designed to help you find joy every day. “Delight in food, in eating, in cooking, in serving, in recognizing our luck when we feel full is available to all of us,” says writer Tamar Adler. Adler found relief and ease in spending a year recording instances of such delight. Her hope is that her observations might do the same for you.
Each captivating entry is a celebration of simple pleasures. From the pleasure of picking sun-warmed cherries to the comfort of a perfectly cooked meal, Adler’s reflections range from short, lyrical musings—a series of phrases, a list of words, a quick poem—to longer, thought-provoking meditations. All in all, they represent the kitchen (and adjacent) happinesses of one year.
Step into a world where cooking becomes a meditative, soothing retreat. Adler brings her signature warmth and poetic charm to this daily devotional of sorts.
- Googoosh: A Sinful Voice, by Googoosh, with Tara Dehlavi. Before there was Madonna or Beyoncé, there was Googoosh. For the first time, one of the biggest pop stars of the 20th century tells her remarkable story: her rise to fame in pre-revolution Iran, her arrest and imprisonment, her twenty-year exile, and finally, her triumphant return to the global stage.
“My story is not only my story. It’s about our past, my country, how it was, what it became, what happened to the people, to artists.”
What would happen to a country’s biggest pop star if religious extremists took control? In the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, singer Googoosh found out. She was ordered by her government to never sing again, and for twenty years, she didn’t...until she did. "Googoosh's story broke my heart but also gave me hope: hope for voices that defy silence, for women who risk their lives in order to preserve their dignity and their true identity, for a singer retrieving her voice from those who silenced it, and for Iranian women and men, defying the sound of the Islamic regime’s bullets with singing in the streets...This memoir is about the triumph of the hopeful voice, the sinful voice. To those who tried to break Googoosh with their hate, she responded by focusing on love. She survived by remaining faithful to her first and last love, music. Music is a part of her, like blood running through her veins. So for Googoosh, resistance against the Islamic Republic is not a political act, it is existential. Because just being Googoosh is illegal and subversive." -Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
- Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of "Winnie-the-Pooh", by Gyles Brandreth. For the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Winnie-the-Pooh," Gyles Brandreth chronicles the writing of this beloved classic and the life of its creator, A. A. Milne.
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear tells the remarkable story of A A Milne, a playwright, a bestselling crime writer, poet, polemicist, humorist, and the man who created Winnie-the-Pooh.
Gyles Brandreth explores "Winnie-the-Pooh," a bear beloved by millions: his genesis, his life across a hundred years, his special philosophy, and the reasons for his worldwide popularity. Brandreth’s book is also the intimate biography of three generations of the fascinating and troubled Milne family, which knew fame and fortune, despising both for a time, but a family that ultimately found a profound reason to be grateful for the riches Pooh brought them.
With an extraordinary cast list that includes Elizabeth II and Walt Disney, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear moves from idyllic childhood games in the English countryside to New York in the 1930s and the love affairs, litigation, and heartrending family rifts that touched the life of one of Britain's most brilliant writers and his most famous creation.
- The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation, by Michael DC Drout.
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth—a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien’s genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien’s poetry and innovative scholarship.
Drout, who has spent decades reading, studying, and teaching Tolkien, allows us to understand the author’s methods and to embrace his works as never before. With great erudition and sparkling prose, Drout shows us how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from northern Europe, using the subtle qualities of those famous works as inspiration for his own. We also see the process by which he created the complex form of sorrow that is the primary emotional effect of his mature works, a sadness “blessed without bitterness,” carefully woven through a tapestry of themes that has resonated with generations of readers.
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