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\u201cProof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty Book<\/a>,\u201d Adam Kucharski (2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n My summer reading was a little unusual this year, because I\u2019m in the middle of writing a book, which is orienting my reading choices (alongside my nagging insecurities, etc.) The book I\u2019m writing is about how our discourses around uncertainty (\u201cthese uncertain times\u201d and so on) can risk distracting from some of the more pernicious certainties grounding this grim conjuncture \u2014 so I\u2019ve been\u00a0trying to keep vaguely abreast of the \u201cuncertainty\u201d literature circulating.<\/p>\n Most of it is the very sort of thing I\u2019m arguing against \u2014 overtures to unending doubt, which fail to look at what gets held certain, which world-ordering structures get to resist doubt (e.g. borders<\/a>, property relations, gender binaries<\/a>), by whom, how, and to what ends. But a very nice, general reader book by mathematician and epidemiologist Adam Kucharski, \u201cProof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty,\u201d was a breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n In it, he looks at the historically, materially situated activities and assumptions involved, in fields from law, economics, medicine, statecraft, and more, in establishing proof and certainty. He uses great anecdotes and examples \u2014 like the time Kurt G\u00f6del (founder of modern mathematics) in his 1947 U.S. citizenship interview declared that he had discovered the ways a formal fascist regime could be established in the U.S., not by a leader eschewing the Constitution, but relying on its inner contradictions.<\/p>\n I\u2019m particularly thinking it\u2019s a great gift for the vulgar positivists and bewildered liberals in your life, who would never read radical theory on truth production but might listen to a bestselling mathematician and epidemiologist. \u2013 Natasha Lennard<\/p>\n \u201cThe Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking<\/a>,\u201d Olivia Laing (2014) The book meanders in and out of the lives of six extraordinary writers \u2014 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver \u2014 who were also extraordinary drinkers.\u00a0It lists this way and that, wandering into Laing\u2019s life too.\u00a0Not every author is up to the task of writing about great writers, but Laing more than holds her own. Try not to salivate when you read this passage: \u201cClick in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.\u201d\u00a0Try to convince your brain not to paint a picture after imbibing this line: \u201cFor years, I\u2019d steered well clear of the period in which alcohol seeped its way into my childhood, beneath the doors and around the seams of windows, a slow contaminating flood.\u201d<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need to be a writer or a drinker to enjoy Laing\u2019s book.\u00a0But if you do happen to be one, either, or both, it\u2019s an especially lovely book to sip and savor. \u201cI\u2019m taking a little short trip to Echo Spring,\u201d says Brick, a character in Tennessee Williams\u2019 Pulitzer-winning play\u00a0\u201cCat on a Hot Tin Roof,\u201d referencing his brand of bourbon. The book goes down just as warm and smooth \u2014 the literary equivalent of 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle. But the finish is not without bite. All six men were also laid low by drink-induced decline, dementia, and disease.<\/p>\n \u201cI was beginning to think,\u201d Laing writes, \u201cthat drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world.\u201d It\u2019s easy to disappear into the pages of \u201cThe Trip to Echo Spring,\u201d and it\u2019s uniquely satisfying as well.\u00a0It\u2019s almost as enjoyable as spending a weekday afternoon sipping an expertly crafted Old Fashioned at the St. Regis New York\u2019s King Cole Bar, or at your favorite local bar, or at any old tavern, or on your front stoop.<\/p>\n Almost. \u2013 Nick Turse<\/p>\n \u201cHiroshima<\/a>,\u201d John Hersey (1946)<\/strong> That\u2019s why it is so important that everyone reads John Hersey\u2019s book \u201cHiroshima.\u201d It first appeared as an article<\/a> in The New Yorker \u2014 taking up the entire August 31, 1946, issue. Hersey\u2019s account following six people who survived the A-bomb exposed the American public to the reality of what their government had done.<\/p>\n I first read it as an undergraduate student in a \u201cGreat Books of Journalism\u201d class, and Hersey\u2019s vivid descriptions of the aftermath have stuck with me since. This book is graphic, be prepared for that. But with\u00a035 percent of Americans<\/a>\u00a0in June 2025 still saying the bombings were justified, compared to 31 percent who say it was unjustified (the rest \u201caren\u2019t sure\u201d), we owe it to the hundreds of thousands of people who died or suffered in the aftermath to be uncomfortable. No one should have to suffer like that ever again. \u2013 Chelsey B. Coombs<\/p>\n \u201cLakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power<\/a>,\u201d Pekka H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen<\/strong> \u201cThe Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth<\/a>,\u201d Andreas Malm (2025)<\/strong> \u201cOn the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer<\/a>,\u201d Rick Steves (2025)<\/strong> \u201c<\/strong>Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d Leah Litman (2025)<\/strong> \u00a0<\/p>\n Fiction \u201cThe Buried Giant<\/a>,\u201d Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)<\/strong> \u201cAnam<\/a>,\u201d Andr\u00e9 Dao (2023)<\/strong> Dao confronts that inherently egotistical fixation \u2014 a legacy \u2014 by having his narrator admit how exploring his family\u2019s past has blocked his ability to prioritize a different extension of the self: his offspring. \u201cHow terrible has my pursuit of the past been,\u201d he wonders, \u201cif it has led to the total occlusion of the future?\u201d His wife, the primary caretaker of his child, serves also as chief caller of bullshit: Challenging his patriarchal focus, she questions why the family story revolves around his grandfather rather than his grandmother. All storytelling is revealed as inherently reductive, the choosing of any main character as reliant upon the sidelining of others. Picturing his grandfather chained to the wall in a prison cell, the narrator admits: \u201cI think that the image really is too reductive, victimising, gratuitous \u2014 basically that it\u2019s tacky.\u201d But it really happened, he thinks, despite any aesthetic objection, and despite the fact that both the family history and the narrator\u2019s essentially self-centered fixation on it are inconvenient for his politics. \u201cAnd if that really happened,\u201d he allows himself, \u201cthen how can it not be at the heart of things?\u201d \u2013 Maia Hibbett<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sisters<\/a>,\u201d Jonas Hassen Khemiri<\/strong> (2025)<\/strong> \u201cCirce<\/a>,\u201d Madeline Miller<\/strong> (2018)<\/strong> \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Boy and the Dog<\/a>,\u201d Seish\u016b Hase (2020)<\/strong> Known by many names, the dog is steadfast in his search, yet along the way he brings unexpected solace to the people he meets, whose own lives are full of chaos, drama, and the ordinary ups and downs life also brings. As Miwa, one of the book\u2019s distinctive characters observes, \u201cIt\u2019s your dog magic, I suppose. Dogs don\u2019t just make people smile. They give us love and courage, too, just from being at our side.\u201d \u2013 Laura Flynn<\/p>\n \u201cOperation Shylock<\/a>,\u201d Philip Roth (1993) \u201cThe Oligarch\u2019s Daughter<\/a>,\u201d Joseph Finder (2025) \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Poetry & Art \u201c<\/strong>The Essential June Jordan<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d by June Jordan<\/strong> (2021)<\/strong> In her 1985 poem \u201cMoving towards Home<\/a>,\u201d Jordan intimately embodies this solidarity: \u201cI was born a Black woman \/ and now \/ I am become a Palestinian.\u201d And she asks us to undergo a similar reckoning, by first turning toward the comfort of our \u201cliving room \u2026 where my children will grow without horror,\u201d turning toward ourselves.<\/p>\n Following the U.S. bombing campaign of Iraq, she wrote in her 1997 poem \u201cThe Bombing of Baghdad<\/a>,\u201d which I read as a prescient indictment on neoconservatism that continues to color U.S. foreign policy<\/a>: \u201cAnd all who believed that holocaust means something \/ that only happens to white people \/ And all who believed that Desert Storm \/ signified anything besides the delivery of an American \/ holocaust against the peoples of the Middle East \/ All who believed these things \/ they were already dead \/ They no longer stood among the possibly humane.\u201d<\/p>\n When my writing, whether journalism or poetry, feels stuck or stale, reading June Jordan\u2019s poems offers me a path back to myself and toward the urgency of liberation \u2014 that is, toward something ultimately affirming of life. In \u201cThe Bombing of Baghdad,\u201d she ends her poem with these lines: \u201cAnd here is my song of the living \/ who must sing against the dying \/ sing to join the living \/ with the dead.\u201d \u2013 Jonah Valdez\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/getimage.600x0.jpg\")
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<\/strong>I\u2019ve re-read this book several times since it was published, and it never disappoints.\u00a0\u201cThe Trip to Echo Spring\u201d is beautifully written and profoundly idiosyncratic. It is deft literary criticism. But also an amalgam of biographies.\u00a0And it\u2019s a travelogue.\u00a0And it\u2019s also a memoir.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/604CD2EA4B28CBBD82ADA549E6F00E417A4AF25C.jpg\")
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August 5 and 9 marked 80 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it\u2019s clear that our collective memory of the horror the U.S. government subjected the civilians<\/a> of those cities to has greatly diminished. As tensions worldwide increase and the Trump administration waffles on its long-standing security commitments to allies, politicians of countries without nuclear weapons programs<\/a>, including\u00a0those of Japan<\/a>, are reconsidering that stance.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/61yVblYfTRL._UF10001000_QL80_.jpg\")
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A gripping, if scholarly, take on the Lakotas that treats them as central characters rather than bit players. Recommended reading for a road trip through the Upper Midwest and Great Plains. \u2013 Matt Sledge<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/getimage_82ed626b-a754-43cd-b238-c5de68f26655.webp.jpeg\")
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\u201cWhat, exactly, is it that ties the state of Israel and the rest of the West so closely together? What explains the willingness of countries like the U.S. and the U.K. to collaborate in genocide? Why does the American empire share Israel\u2019s goal of destroying Palestine?\u201d Malm addresses these questions by drawing a line connecting the destruction of Palestine to the U.S. and the West\u2019s control and the extraction of fossil capital from the region, making the genocide of Palestinians a strategic part of U.S. foreign policy and also a point by which we began and continue to destroy the planet through fossil capital. \u2013 Jeehan Mikdadi<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/81EBb3LhhtL._UF10001000_QL80_-1.jpg\")
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Anyone who travels knows of Rick Steves, but \u201cOn the Hippie Trail\u201d shows a totally different side of him. I loved seeing Rick not as the confident guide we know, but as a young, sometimes awkward backpacker trying to find his place among more seasoned adventurers. As a traveler, I loved this book because it captures that raw, unfiltered feeling of being young, curious, and totally open to the world. It\u2019s part coming-of-age story, part snapshot of a very specific moment in travel history \u2014 a time where you could journey over land through Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan; a time when Western backpackers could freely travel through cities like Kabul, mingling with locals and other travelers over hashish and tea. It reminded me of why I love traveling: meeting new people, navigating the unexpected, and letting travel shift the way I see things. It\u2019s not polished or overly romanticized, and that\u2019s exactly what made it feel so real. \u2013 Lauren Schilli<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/81Ks1ldHV4L._UF10001000_QL80_.jpg\")
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The summer has become a gloomy period among lawyers, as we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to close out its session and release its final flurry of rulings. How did we get to the point where we refresh our feeds to see what\u2019s left<\/a> of bedrock constitutional precedent? Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and co-host of the \u201cStrict Scrutiny<\/a>\u201d podcast, unpacks the conservative turn on the SCOTUS bench in recent decades, blending legal history with her signature snark<\/a>. \u2013 Shawn Musgrave<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s a weird read.\u00a0While it has a dragon and Sir Gawain, it is not a fantasy as much as an allegory framed like the Arthurian grail stories. I think the book is about deceit and betrayal on a macro and micro scale: entire nations and the people we love.\u00a0It\u2019s a sad, reflective book, like most of his works. \u2013 David Bralow<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/123025358.jpg\")
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Ideology is too blunt an instrument for Andr\u00e9 Dao\u2019s \u201cAnam.\u201d This is one of those meta-novels that uses the process of its own writing to propel the plot, slipping the reader between phases of empire via the narrator\u2019s family research mission to Hanoi, interviews with his refugee grandparents in Paris, and distracted afternoons at Cambridge University, where he\u2019s pursuing a degree for which he\u2019s forced his tiny daughter and unhappy wife to move. At its heart is the narrator\u2019s dead grandfather, a Vietnamese anti-communist who spent a decade imprisoned by the same regime over which the U.S. torched and poisoned the country and still failed to defeat, whose memory forces the narrator to grapple with his own left politics and his dissatisfaction with his family legacy. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/9780374618896.jpg\")
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This family saga follows the lives of the three charismatic Swedish-Tunisian Mikkola sisters and a shy Swedish-Tunisian boy who grows up alongside them. Across decades and continents, the sisters are haunted by a family curse, while the boy \u2014 named Jonas Khemiri, like the author \u2014 attempts to reclaim the singular connection he felt to the Mikkola sisters as a child. The novel is told in six sections ranging from a year to a single minute. Through this structure, the author plays with the notion of time and expectations, reveals the identities we adopt and shed, and upends the sanctity of family legacies. It\u2019s an elegant and compelling read, and you won\u2019t even notice it\u2019s over 600 pages.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Celine Piser<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/9780316556330.webp\")
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I\u2019ve read \u201cCirce\u201d multiple times, including this summer. It\u2019s by the same author as \u201cThe Song of Achilles,\u201d which I also loved. The real world can be a little dark, and this book is perfect Greek Mythology escapism. \u2013 Jessica Washington<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/81zvhvbNK4L._UF10001000_QL80_.jpg\")
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Friends recommended \u201cThe Boy and the Dog\u201d after I told them I wanted to make a fictional short film about the adventures my pup would get into: traversing through California landscapes trying to find his way home, making friends both human and furry along the way. Hase\u2019s novel traces the journey of another extraordinary dog, separated from his person after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/MartyrOperation.png\")
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\u201cMartyr!<\/a>\u201d Kaveh Akbar (2024)<\/strong>
I would like to witness these two writers (or their doppelg\u00e4ngers) hashing it out in a talk-show format \u2014 Legacy! Identity! Generational trauma! Unreliable narrators! And of course, martyrdom! \u2014 much like the conversations imagined by the \u201cMartyr!\u201d protagonist in his attempts to fall asleep. \u2013 Fei Liu<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/The-Oligarchs-Daughter-Finder_UK-661x1024-1.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
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<\/strong>I tore through this. It\u2019s a modern-day spy thriller set in New York that puts a twist on Cold War intrigue. \u2013 Akela Lacy<\/p>\n
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When reading the poetry of June Jordan, I may be crying of heartbreak, laughing, teeming with rage, and abandoning my desk for the streets to join a protest all at once and in no particular order. Jordan wrote prolifically (28 poetry collections) about themes of love, home, politics, motherhood, and loss. But perhaps what sets her most apart in literary and American history is how truthfully she reckoned with our position in the imperial core. She recognized the United States as a nation built on genocide and slavery, but also as an actor of genocidal horrors on the other Black and brown peoples of the world \u2014 from U.S. ties to apartheid South Africa<\/a> to its unconditional support<\/a> of Israel\u2019s occupation<\/a> of Palestine \u2014 a politics steeped in unflinching global solidarity. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/tooneg11_1.jpg\")
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