Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Breakup, by Kurt Andersen (Random House). This comic novel is set in a hysterical vision of the year 2045, in which what was once the United States has been split apart by a civil war between liberals and a MAGA-like rebel group. The country is now divided into the so-called Free American Republic and what remains of the U.S. In this tense, uneasy landscape, a separated couple, Natalie and Asher, reunite to take their child, Logan, on a trip to tour colleges in both territories. Asher and Natalie’s disunion serves as almost a microcosm of the country: he a rabidly engaged liberal and she a head-in-the-sand moderate. The book is enlivened by Andersen’s gift for satire, which plays up the comic potential of ideological extremes.

All Them Dogs, by Djamel White (Riverhead). “I was Wardy. Tony bleeding Ward. Lethal weapon forged in 1997,” the protagonist of this bold début novel proclaims. The statement is mainly a reminder to himself, as he returns home to Dublin after five long years on the run. Tony had to flee after killing a member of a rival gang; now he has joined the ranks of another outfit, notionally in search of money and protection, but ultimately out of a longing to have “someone else do the thinking.” As Tony strains to navigate brewing street wars, the most intimidating battles he faces are still internal—between expectation and desire, between who he is and who he might want to be.

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Sex and Dissent, by Meaghan Beatley (Penguin). This vividly reported book centers on recent feminist movements in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain. Beatley, a journalist, profiles women protesting abortion restrictions, sexual assault, and femicide—an act that, she writes, lies “atop layers of normalized and socially sanctioned abuse.” While documenting acts of resistance, she examines the way that these feminists’ cultural contexts inflect their organizing. As she points out, many were influenced by struggles against military dictatorships of the twentieth century; some are the children of disappeared dissidents. “What sets Latin America apart is not violence itself but the clarity with which women understand its roots,” she writes.

We Want to Believe, by Adam Kirsch (Columbia Global Reports). In recent decades, technological advances have vastly expanded our knowledge of the universe and led to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. This has coincided with a widespread belief that humans will inevitably confirm that extraterrestrials exist. But, Kirsch argues in this concise treatise, the fact that our search has so far yielded nothing decreases the probability that we’ll ever find intelligent life beyond Earth. Why, then, has public opinion moved in the opposite direction from the science? Kirsch contends that the rise of serious discussion about extraterrestrials has paralleled the decline of the “traditional religious vocabularies” that once helped people grapple with the deepest questions of existence. In the end, he writes, “all our thinking about aliens and how to find them is best understood as humanity’s evolving self-portrait.”

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