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2 weeks ago | 
startribune.com | Kevin Canfield
The subject of Ron de Beaulieu's new book is a notorious bootlegger with a talent for misdirection. After one of Isadore Blumenfeld's arrests, authorities said he used seven aliases. The author's research unearths a few more.
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2 weeks ago | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | Kevin Canfield
Amid hourly news flashes on tariffs and rising food prices, Paul Rice’s new book is as timely as the catch of the day. “I had no idea that we would be in the pickle we’re in,” said Rice, CEO of Fair Trade USA, the Oakland-based nonprofit focused on ethically sourced products.
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1 month ago | 
crimereads.com | Kevin Canfield
In 1857, British scholars held a contest to decipher the inscriptions on a 3,000-year-old clay artwork. Today, this would be considered a rarefied pursuit, but in Victorian London, the event enjoyed a keen audience. Mid-19th century Britons were besotted with the distant past, their fervor stimulated by remarkable objects from since-vanished civilizations, which were being pried from the earth in the Middle East. Archaeologists became some of the country’s most famous people.
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1 month ago | 
crimereads.com | Kevin Canfield
In Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh—a 2017 dystopian novel that won a major award in her country—“mass hysteria” ensues when a deadly virus seems to leap from animals to humans. In its broad strokes, the story presaged the spread of Covid in 2020. Her latest, a character-driven horror novel, envisions a different sort of catastrophe, one brought about by capitalism’s excesses.
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1 month ago | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | Samina Ali |Kevin Canfield
If you ask Samina Ali about the work that went into her new memoir, she might liken herself to a peckish ocean predator. “You know how they say a shark circles its prey? That’s what it was like,” she told the Chronicle. Ali, a San Francisco writer, nearly died giving birth to her son Ishmael in September 1999. She tried to write about the mental and physical toll in a novel but wasn’t satisfied with the results. Switching to nonfiction, she wrote several drafts, each stronger than the last.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
crimereads.com | Kevin Canfield
Gabriel Dax, the main character of William Boyd’s terrific new novel, is a talented journalist and the author of several acclaimed travel books—”a clever bugger,” as an admirer puts it, but heretofore not a figure of intrigue. In “Gabriel’s Moon,” he becomes one. The action starts in the early 1960s, when Gabriel, a Brit who suspects his brother has ties to the country’s intelligence services, is recruited to travel to Spain, pick up an artwork and deliver it to a person he’s never met.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | Nathan Kalman-Lamb |Derek Silva |Kevin Canfield
“The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game” by Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva. Photo: The University of North Carolina PressThis month, millions of Americans will gather around TVs and in packed stadiums, cheering as young men representing their universities flatten one another. College football, gearing up for its 12-team championship tournament, would be unrecognizable without scary collisions and their inevitable consequence — serious injuries.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | Cary Groner |Kevin Canfield
“The Way” by Cary Groner. Photo: Spiegel & GrauWestward bound, Will Collins is doing 4 miles per hour — not bad given that his pickup truck is being pulled by mules. His destination: The Sovereign Republic of California. Will is the hero of Cary Groner’s “The Way,” a novel set in the 2040s. America has collapsed. If you need something, you barter. Meat and guns are valuable. Nobody has gasoline, hence the mules. Paper money? Use it to keep the campfire going.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | James Buckley |Kevin Canfield
Historian and author James Michael Buckley is out with a new book, “City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry” on Nov. 19. Photo: James Michael Buckley/University of Texas PressAround 1850, men with axes began cutting down California’s redwoods, the first step in a process that turned the giant trees into houses, railroad ties, cigar boxes and other products.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
rep-am.com | Kevin Canfield
Eliza Griswold’s “Circle of Hope” is about four pastors at a Philadelphia church riven by its response to racial discrimination after a Minneapolis police office murdered George Floyd in 2020. Hahrie Han’s “Undivided” focuses on four parishioners of a Cincinnati church having similar conversations after several police shootings of Black men. That isn’t all the books have in common. Both show that up-close, long-term reporting can yield stories as gripping as any novel.
