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Lane In Her Lane At Her Best. This book is Lane returning to the straight historical after a multi-year adventure in combining her romance and historical sides with the Lost Daughters series, and while that series showed just how great an author she is via doing something I've *very* rarely - if ever - seen anyone else pull off (the fusion of both contemporary and historical romance), this book is more about Lane reasserting that yes, she will draw *exactly* the emotions out of you that she wants even in a pure historic...

Required Reading For Every American Who Thinks These Are Unprecedented Times. Yes, I mean exactly what I said in the title of this review. No matter your particular bent of what you think is so bad - election/ voting fraud, political violence, "fake news", whatever - Jackson does a tremendous job here of taking mostly examples even *I*, as studious of American History as I've been all my life, had either never or barely heard of and uses them to show, as Alex Wright's Empire Of Ink (releasing on the same day and covering the "wild and wooly" early history of newspapers in America, which has some bearing on some aspects of this tale as well) also does quite well, how "history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme" (a quote misattributed to Mark Twain).

As James Morone's 2021 book Republic Of Wrath showed, political violence in the US is actually at a rather historical *low* point in this current era (thankfully), yes, even with the repeated attempted ...

Solid History Rhymes With Present Themes. This is a solid history showing the rise of "organic" newspapers of the 19th century in particular, from their earliest days in the 18th century and earlier to their corporatization as the 20th century began.

You're going to learn a lot here, from the pre-teen girl going "viral" *well* before that was a thing for creating her own newspaper in an era when few adult m...

Bigoted Polemic. Just 105 days ago, I wrote of Chosen Land by Matthew Avery Sutton that "his assessment told only half the story" - and this tale tells even less in most ways, while at the same time genuinely showing more in some. Covering 500 or so years in a span of just under 700 pages (including roughly 15% bibliography, meeting at least that standard, though really there should have been even more, given some of the claims herein), there really is virtually no way to really cover "religion in America" in even a very shallow depth and do it evenly over that time period in that few pages. Yes, that few. At nearly 700 pages. So any attempt at all is to be commended at least for the undertaking.

Unfortunately that is about the only commendable thing here, as Wilensky-Lanford shows balance only in showing many different religions over that history period, rather than Sutton's focus on Christianity in a more condensed period. (And to be clear, his text was almost exactly the same page count as Wilensky-Lanford's, with about 2/3 the bibliography.) Devoting roughly half...

Solid Suspense Tale On Both Levels. This is one of those book-within-a-book tales where we actually get to read the book that exists within the tale, and that part of this tale actually does work quite well to further the larger story. Set in a beach town, this is quite literally a beach thriller - even though my own standard of a "beach read" is quite literally "any book you read on a beach", which could be truly *any* book.

Don't believe the Negative Ninnies about this book - as a suspense thriller, where...

Confino Expands In Unexpected Direction. One thing that I absolutely love about Confino's books is that both she and her characters are unabashedly Jewish - yet they also don't preach it. They *live* it and do not apologize for it at all... yet also do not make a spectacle of it. (A lot of Christians - and Christian authors - could learn from this model, truly.)

Here, Confino takes her story into very nearly thriller territory, which was quite awesome to see her push her normal boundaries just a touch and see w...

C.S. Lewis Warned Us About This. C.S. Lewis wrote in 1949 that "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." Here, we have an entire book of exactly that kind of elitist, disdainful tyranny.

Larson openly admits to being a thief in several instances within this text. Her own actions as documented within this text show her to be a hypocrite. She actively denies objective reality in claiming that FDR's support of unionism was a good thing, when it actually and objectively extended the Great Depression nearly twice as long as it would have gone without FDR's price-fixing policies, including his support of unions.

And yet she is *absolutely sure* she knows *exactly* what would help the very people she had to lower herself to be around because she had no other choice and had to find any possible work available to her. Truly, this is the worst part of this entire narrative, is Larson's elitist disdain for everything and everyone around her that is positively *dripping* from these pages. She alone knows what will save these people, and she alone will force them to accept her help whether they want her involvement or not.

I've worked in a supermarket myself - apparently longer than Larson did, as I worked there for 2? 3? yrs at the border of HS and college, though I do admit that this was 20 yrs before Larson di...

Utterly Disgusting LGBT Stephen King x Jeremy Robinson Cross. If you're familiar with the works of King (specifically Carrie and/ or his more.. *ahem* out there *ahem*... takes) or Jeremy Robinson (TORMENT specifically), those alone will give you a fairly solid idea what to expect as an overall story here. Throw in heavy and explicit LGBT elements (including *technically* closed door, yet still well-heard "spice") of a variety of sexualities, and now you've got an even better idea what to expect here.

This is horror more of the revolting/ disgusting fo...

Fun Scifi Adventure Chasing Pirate Treasure. This is a fun scifi adventure that takes its cues more from the Dane Maddock universe of David Wood than from a more classic Indiana Jones type - and is actually quite stronger for it. One where Chesler's real-world diving experience is on full display in its vivid descriptions of diving, and yet one where his inventiveness in crea...

Utterly Fascinating Parallels Between History Of Cold Food Tech And AI. This is the book I was reading on my walks in May 2026, and it was truly utterly fascinating to see the parallels between the history of cold food storage and transportation technology - a history of basically the past 150 yrs in particular, though Twilley does indeed also cover how food was cooled and stored before that period as well - and that of the current history-in-the-making of AI technology. One thing that stood out in particular was just how much more power is used for cold food storage and transportation than AI uses - a fact that actually checks out upon an independent deep dive. Another was the rapidity of societal change from "this new tech is harmful" to "this new tech is essential" - Twilley speaking directly of refrigeration of food, yet seemingly *a...