Books

Broken Arrow isn’t just the title of a mediocre 1996 film, but the term for a serious accident involving a nuclear weapon. Over the last seventy years, the United States has officially experienced thirty-two Broken Arrows, where a nuclear weapon has been in a crash or fire, accidentally been dropped — or just disappeared. Incredibly, six have been lost and never recovered. Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Mustafa Suleyman tells one such story in his new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. In 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two live hydrogen bombs broke up in the skies above Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb disintegrated when it plunged into a muddy field.

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named “Mad Mike” Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. “I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or NASA, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,” he had once explained in an interview. “I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.” In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: “Do your own research!

Do you ever wish that your young children would stop asking you questions, constantly touching your body and being needy for your love and attention? That’s called being “touched out,” a new-age expression for the Extremely Online mother who can’t seem to reconcile with the idea that her life is going to be different after she has children. It’s also the title of Amanda Montei’s memoir-cum-cultural criticism on how modern motherhood in America is indistinguishable from the pervasive rape culture that permeates every aspect of a woman’s life in the country, including marriage, the workplace and yes, parenthood. Montei’s revelations about motherhood came to her after #MeToo took off.

Christine Blasey Ford is back and ready for more — disbelief, tears? Perhaps all of it. The professor of sociology who testified in 2018 that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault against her in high school is set to release a memoir this March detailing the trial.   Cockburn suspects your opinion on whether the book will be fiction or nonfiction depends on how you vote, though One Way Back promises to be “the compelling true story behind the testimony that awed the nation.”   According to St. Martin’s Press, the memoir recounts the months leading up to the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing as Ford attempted to get information “into the right hands” without bringing backlash on her friends and family.

When a new book by an author often characterized as a conservative polemicist earns a rave review in the staid Economist, independent thinkers take notice. Christopher Rufo’s articles on recent US radicalism for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal have long attracted wide attention, and now America’s Cultural Revolution has been praised as “meticulous” and “cerebral” as well as “persuasive and well-written.” All true, for Rufo’s book is impressively erudite, reflecting a breadth and depth of familiarity with influential leftist writings that will shame any number of “woke” academics.

Like his creator J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter says unspeakable things. He teases his cousin Dudley, the prince of his aunt’s suburban kingdom. He calls the Dark Lord Voldemort by his name. He even speaks to snakes. In other words, if Potter were a real person, he’d likely write a Substack, present a podcast and empathize with his creator’s recent public controversies. You are probably familiar with Rowling’s protests against trans activists’ demands to use women’s restrooms.

In Elsewhere, a coruscating memoir published in 2012, Richard Russo described his formative years as “an American childhood, as lived in the late Fifties, by a lower-middle class that barely seems to exist any more.” The setting for this slice of lost Eisenhower-era Americana was Gloversville in upstate New York, an East Coast leather town where the money had long since moved out and taken the locale’s animating spirit with it, to the point where the eighteen-year-old high-school graduate reckoned that “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.” The “Main Street” reference carries its own freight of associative cargo.