"Nary a Horse Left Standing"

New from The MIT Press: Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City by Lee Alan Dugatkin.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a devastating outbreak of horse flu in the 1870s ground city life to a halt—but ultimately revolutionized animal rights, medicine, and transportation.

From a veteran science writer, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and the coauthor of the acclaimed How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog).

In the 1870s, horses were the lifeblood of North American cities. New York, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto relied on tens of thousands of workhorses to power daily life. Then, in late 1872 and into 1873, a devastating outbreak of horse flu—known as The Great Epizootic—swept across the continent.

In Nary a Horse Left Standing, Lee Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay sick, or worse dying, on stable floors, fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons, and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and industrialists were poised to amass fortunes, the flu slowed progress to a crawl.

Yet the tragedy also catalyzed revolutions in medicine, animal rights, and transportation. Veterinary science in the U.S. was still emerging, but detailed medical reports from the epidemic helped validate germ theory and discredit outdated beliefs. The crisis also spotlighted early animal welfare efforts, with fledgling groups like the ASPCA advocating for sick horses forced to work. Finally, the sheer vulnerability of relying on animals for transport spurred a shift toward mechanized systems.

As illuminating as it is humbling, the book brings to life a critical account of a crisis that still speaks to the complex public health and transportation challenges we face today.

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

The Page 99 Test: Dr. Calhoun's Mousery.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hallowed Bones"

Coming October 6 from St. Martin's Griffin: Hallowed Bones: A Sons of Salem Novel by Lucy Smoke.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Four men. One woman. Five families accused of witchcraft. A dark desire they all share.

I was warned to stay away from the Sons of Salem. Not because they’re monsters―but because they’re broken enough to recognize one.

Ezra Bishop.
Cameron Goode.
Lyall Corey.
Reyes Scott.

And me―Haven Wardwell.

Legacies. Witches. Something far worse than myths.

Now that I’m here, there’s no telling what the Gods will ask for in return.

Ghosts haunt the corridors of Ipswich College, and if I’m not careful, I might just become one of them.

Visit Lucy Smoke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Outed"

Coming October 13 from the University of Chicago Press: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency by Timothy Stewart-Winter.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of the scandal in the LBJ administration that first brought queer life into the national political conversation in the 1960s.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.

Walter Jenkins’s political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins’s influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson’s career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment—the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society—and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins’s exile, regarding the Vietnam War.

Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lost Perfumes of Paris"

New from William Morrow: The Lost Perfumes of Paris: A Novel by Christine Wells.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Set against the backdrop of mid-century Parisian glamour and the timeless art of perfumery, a captivating tale of resilience, love, and the intoxicating pursuit of passion.

Élodie Limeaux's beloved mother, Aurore, was the most legendary perfumer in France before World War II, renowned for the exquisite fragrances she created for the family company, the House of Limeaux. Now in her twenties, Élodie longs to join the family business. Her father, however, has refused to let her follow in her late mother's footsteps and Élodie has had to fight to become a mere lab assistant at Limeaux.

But Élodie plans to enter the Essence of Paris contest run by the French Perfume Institute, hoping that a win will secure investment from Swiss banker Monsieur Caspari, who is looking to launch a new scent for women—and possibly to buy the House of Limeaux.

Impressed with Élodie's drive and talent, Caspari agrees to back her, provided that she collaborates with his son, Marcelo. Élodie is forced to agree, although Marcelo strikes her as a wealthy dilettante—albeit an extremely charming one.

When they join forces, though, Élodie is surprised to discover Marcelo's passion for perfume is genuine, his obsession as deep as hers. With Marcelo by her side, Élodie battles family betrayals and corporate sabotage, searching for that elusive essence of Paris that will launch her career...and possibly the love of a lifetime.

Visit Christine Wells's website.

My Book, The Movie: One Woman's War.

Q&A with Christine Wells.

The Page 69 Test: The Royal Windsor Secret.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frederick Douglass's American Founding"

New from Princeton University Press: Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation’s Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution by Dennis C. Rasmussen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The remarkable story of how Frederick Douglass went from condemning the Constitution as a proslavery pact to celebrating it as a “glorious liberty document” that promises freedom to everyone

The speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass contain some of the most probing examinations ever of the role that slavery played in America’s founding. In Frederick Douglass’s American Founding, Dennis Rasmussen traces the great abolitionist’s intellectual journey from denouncing the founders as hypocrites and the Constitution as evil to embracing them both.

Throughout the 1840s, Douglass described the founders as “little better than a band of pirates” and the Constitution as “a most cunningly-devised and wicked compact.” Beginning in 1849, however, he undertook a long period of study and reflection that produced a dramatic change of mind. From 1851 on, Douglass contended that the founders were resolutely opposed to slavery and that the Constitution was a “glorious liberty document” that mandated immediate emancipation, despite several clauses that appeared to suggest otherwise. Even after embracing the Constitution and the founders, Douglass remained second to none in castigating America for the evils of slavery. Indeed, as he argued in his greatest speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), the glory of the nation’s founding ideals only put their persistent betrayal into starker relief. Douglass also came to regard the founders as radicals in their fight against tyranny. That was why he insisted that he and his fellow abolitionists, rather than moderates like Abraham Lincoln, were the founders’ true heirs.

Whatever you think about the founding, Douglass’s arguments will challenge—and perhaps even change—your views. After seeing the Constitution through Douglass’s eyes, it is difficult to look at it in the same way again.

Visit Dennis C. Rasmussen's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Infidel and the Professor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Foreign Correspondent's Wife"

Coming October 20 from Crooked Lane Books: The Foreign Correspondent's Wife: A Novel by Jenna Helwig.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Set in post-WWII Paris, the wife of an American foreign correspondent stumbles on the body of her murdered classmate at culinary school and becomes tangled in a web that stretches from the halls of diplomacy to the city’s underworld. Paris, 1949. It’s been five years since the war ended. The City of Light is only just beginning to rediscover its joie de vivre. Americans are arriving in droves, including the fiercely independent former reporter Kat Kelly and her husband—a hotshot foreign correspondent. Forced out of journalism by the old boys’ club, the tenacious Kat has moved on to pursue her love for French cuisine. But this new chapter turns deadly when she finds the bloody body of an American classmate, Toby. After giving her statement to the police and breaking the news to Toby’s girlfriend, Kat quickly suspects that Toby’s life—and death—were more complicated than she imagined. The more Kat learns, the more certain she is that the police are only scratching the surface of the case. When another body turns up, Kat and her husband, Charlie, find themselves embroiled in the investigation. With the killer on the loose and time running out, Kat races to solve the case and save her marriage—and her life. In a glittering city desperate to forget the devastation of war, some secrets refuse to remain buried. But when agonizing truths are forced into the light, no one is safe.

Visit Jenna Helwig's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Romantic Media and Wartime Networks"

New from Stanford University Press: Romantic Media and Wartime Networks by Deven Parker.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book tells the story of how Britain revolutionized its state communication networks on an unprecedented scale during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, setting the stage for our modern infrastructure state where connectivity and surveillance go hand in hand. Deven Parker argues that Romantic literary representations of this state communications network managed to reveal—and, on occasion, to resist—its ideological functions.

In a wide-ranging study drawing upon an archive of military surveys, spy reports, trial records, and even ladies' hand fans, Parker reveals the scope and impact of the British government's investments in shutter telegraphs, mapping projects, and postal routes across two decades of war with France. The writers of the Romantic period, meanwhile, were cognizant of the political motivations undergirding the state's overhauled networks, which were designed to facilitate and speed up but also to more easily control communications. Taking up familiar writers including Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey—as well as lesser-known figures such as radical playwright John Dent, inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the proto-science fiction novelist Jane Loudon—Parker reads Romantic literature for its astute chronicling and interrogation of the material hardware of the state's media ecology.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lethal Kiss"

Coming October 20 from Tor Nightfire: Lethal Kiss by Taylor Grothe.

About the book, from the publisher:

A blood-soaked love story of rage, revenge, and belonging, Taylor Grothe's adult debut is a sapphic horror/romance that's as grotesque as it is beautiful.

Something ravenous lurks below the marble floors of Preston University…

Marcella might be a monster, but she’s careful. After getting hired at Preston University, she intends to lay low and keep her meals discreet.

Trapped in the rat race of academia, all Lacie wants is to make tenure. This will be her year, and nothing is going to stand in her way.

That is, until bodies start dropping.

Marcella swears it isn’t her doing―as if she’d be that sloppy. Whatever’s killing their coworkers is older, and far less restrained. Lacie doesn’t know who to trust, but better the monster you know…

The deeper they dig, the more they’re drawn to each other… and the more something else is drawn to them.

After all, desire has teeth of its own.

Visit Taylor Grothe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Book of Greek Life"

New from Oxford University Press: A Book of Greek Life: The Ancient World Through Epigram by Gideon Nisbet.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Book of Greek Life: The Ancient World Through Epigram brings its readers into the realities and imaginations of the ancient world through its social media - the little poems we call epigrams. Epigram captures moments from ordinary and extraordinary ancient lives, inviting us to work, play, mourn, honour the gods, and fall in love alongside the ancients. Classical translator and scholar Gideon Nisbet presents hundreds of freshly made translations, each of which sparks a short essay packed with insights about a lost world that shapes us even as we shape it. A Book of Greek Life is made for non-specialists and for browsing.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Operation Icebreaker"

Coming October 6 from Severn House: Operation Icebreaker (A Rake Ozenna Thriller, 5) by Humphrey Hawksley.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Major Rake Ozenna faces dangerous choices and deadly consequences in this rip-roaring political thriller that takes you from the icy plains of Greenland to Washinton D.C., London and back again . . . Buckle up, this is a thrilling ride!

It was meant to be a routine visit. It became a bloodbath.

Special Forces veteran Major Rake Ozenna lands at America’s remote Arctic base in Greenland. His mission is simple. Build trust between allied communities on the frontline of a changing world. Instead, violence erupts, leaving Rake with a loss he cannot forget.

The devastating attack is blamed on Inuit extremists. Rake knows it’s a lie. There were assassins in the snow. And he will make sure they’re brought to justice.

But when things take a sinister political twist, Rake finds himself on the run from his own country. Someone deep inside in the Pentagon is determined to stop him and turn the base attack into something far bigger.

As global tensions reach breaking point, Rake must expose the truth before a war is ignited at the top of the world—pitting America against its closest allies…

Operation Icebreaker is the fifth Rake Ozenna thriller and will leave readers breathless . . . and eagerly anticipating the next heart-racing adventure!

Visit Humphrey Hawksley's website.

The Page 69 Test: The History Book.

My Book, The Movie: Security Breach.

My Book, The Movie: Man on Ice.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Man on Ice.

The Page 69 Test: Man on Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue