Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest for Black Citizenship - REVIEW

by Peter Eisenstadt

Jackie Robinson is one of the most enduring icons of the great American pastime―the man who broke baseball’s color line in the twentieth century, opening the door for his fellow professionals and allowing rising generations to dream of fame and glory on the diamond. But for number 42, playing for the Dodgers was just a beginning. As Peter Eisenstadt demonstrates in this compelling new biography, Robinson’s trailblazing journey was more than a role that fate thrust on him―it was politically informed and consciously connected in Robinson’s mind to a vision of integration and full Black citizenship.

When he ventured out of the Negro Leagues and into the majors, as the league’s sole Black player, his triumph could have stopped at mere tokenism. Eisenstadt reveals a more ambitious goal on Robinson’s part, as well as a side to the great sports hero we have never fully appreciated. This book explores the political and spiritual roots of Jackie Robinson’s quest for Black citizenship from his boyhood in Pasadena to his service days―during which he was court-martialed for refusing to change seats on a segregated bus―to a transcendent athletic career that included an MVP award, a World Series victory, and eventually a place in the Hall of Fame. In his life after baseball, Robinson went on to serve as a civil rights leader, columnist, and political advocate.

The determination that spurred his great achievements was always accompanied by an understanding of just how far society still needed to go: despite his success, at the end of his life he was convinced that he “never had it made.” In telling the story of Robinson’s remarkable life, this book sheds invaluable light on the complex meanings of integration.

Peter Eisenstadt is Affiliate Professor of History at Clemson University and the author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman.

University of Virginia Press
ISBN-13: 978-0813955001

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy - REVIEW

by Steven J. Ross

Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.

Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Southern California.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578003

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru - REVIEW

by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is one of those rare historical novels that feels both intimate and haunting. Set within the Russian émigré community of 1920s Paris, the story blends mystery, spirituality, and family secrets into something far more thoughtful than a conventional gothic thriller.

What stayed with me most was the emotional atmosphere. Olesya Salnikova Gilmore creates a Paris filled with displaced people carrying memories of another life, another country, and unresolved grief. The séances, tea rituals, and fortune-telling rooms on Rue Daru are richly imagined, but the real “ghosts” in this novel are loss, exile, and inherited silence.

At the center are Zina and Baba Valya, two women whose relationship gives the novel its heart. They are complex, protective, flawed, and deeply human. The story thoughtfully explores how women survive upheaval and how family secrets can shape generations long after the original wounds were created.

I also appreciated the restraint of the supernatural elements. The novel never slips into cheap horror. Instead, the mystical aspects feel tied to memory and emotional truth, which makes the story more unsettling and believable.

Our book club selected this novel for discussion, and it generated thoughtful conversations about family history, displacement, resilience, and the emotional weight of secrets passed between generations. For purposes of full disclosure and transparency, Random House kindly provided me with a complimentary review copy of this book.

The pacing occasionally slows in the middle, but the prose remains elegant and immersive throughout. Even during quieter sections, the novel maintains a dreamlike tension that keeps you invested.

For readers who enjoy atmospheric historical fiction, layered female characters, and mysteries rooted in emotion rather than shock, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is deeply rewarding. It is melancholy, intelligent, and quietly unforgettable.

Olesya Salnikova Gilmore is the author of The Witch and the Tsar and The Haunting of Moscow House. Originally from Moscow, she was raised in the US and graduated from Pepperdine University with a BA in English/political science, and from Northwestern School of Law with a JD. She practiced litigation at a large law firm in Chicago for several years before pursuing her dream of becoming an author. She writes speculative gothic suspense and other dark fiction. She also loves exploring Eastern European history and folklore. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Tor.com, CrimeReads, Writer’s Digest, and Washington Independent Review of Books, among others. She lives in a wooded, lakeside suburb of Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Berkley
ISBN-13: 978-0593952689

Ghalen: A Romance in Black - REVIEW

by Walter Mosley

The spellbinding novel introduces readers to Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man shaped by his parents' extraordinary love story. Mosley masterfully weaves a narrative marked by highs and lows, exploring themes of ambition, connection, and personal discovery, all while celebrating the beauty and complexity of Black identity.

Set for release Spring 2026, this remarkable work by master storyteller Mosley cements his legacy as one of the foremost authors of our time. Mosley's new novel promises to captivate readers with a unique, moving, and unflinchingly honest narrative that centers Black characters in a story of family, love, and growth unlike anything seen before.

Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegan restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education. His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.

"Ghalen is a story about love in Black America. This capacity for love is a central moment in the lives of all human beings. And so, for me it is a great pleasure to be able to talk about that passion inside the community that spawned me. I am thrilled to publish this novel with Amistad," says Mosley. Best known for his iconic Easy Rawlins and King Oliver mystery series, Mosley has written more than 60 books across genres, from mystery, to prolific literary fiction. Recently, his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey which tackles themes of aging, memory, and family, was adapted into an Apple TV+ limited series starring Samuel L. Jackson. Last fall, another of Mosley's novels, The Man in Basement, staring Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins, was released on streaming platforms by Disney/Hulu.

With Ghalen, Mosley brings forth that same literary, brilliance, offering a deeply cinematic and emotional exploration of characters often underrepresented in literature, such as the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and immigrants grappling with their past.

Walter Mosley is one of America's most celebrated writers He was given the 2020 National Book Award's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, numerous Edgars and several NAACP Image Awards. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and the young adult novel .17. His work has been translated into twenty five languages. He has published fiction and nonfiction. The New Yorker, Playboy and The Nation. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey, for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX's Snowfall.

Amistad
ISBN: 9780063451551

Black Evidence: A History and a Warning - REVIEW

by Candis Watts Smith

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Candis Watts Smith is professor of political science at Duke University. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and books, including Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in Americans Politics. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Smith is a cohost of the Democracy Works podcast, and her TEDx talk on myths about racism has been viewed over two million times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-1324036272

Jefferson on Race - A Reader

by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Annette Gordon-Reed

Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson’s most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.

These selections come from Jefferson’s public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson’s ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.

Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times–bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and (with Peter S. Onuf) Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691122069

Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History - REVIEW

by Linford D. Fisher

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.

From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States―not just initially but throughout all of American history.”

In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.

Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core. 90 illustrations; 19 maps.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Liveright
ISBN-13: 978-1324094951

The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution - REVIEW

by Jesse Wegman

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.

Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.

Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

Jesse Wegman is a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he writes about Supreme Court reform and constitutional amendments. From 2013 to 2025, he was a member of the New York Times editorial board, covering law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and electoral reforms. His first book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, was published in 2020.

Celadon Books
ISBN-13: 978-1250851079

Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation - REVIEW

by Elliot Williams

On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.

Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.

In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.

A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two children.

Penguin Press
ISBN-13: 978-0593833704