July’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

Susannah Gibson’s The Bluestockings, Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., and Margalit Fox’s The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum all feature among the best reviewed nonfiction titles of the month.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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1. The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson
(W. W. Norton & Company)

4 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Deftly interwoven … Gibson’s own balancing act, skilfully managed, is to highlight the extraordinary place these women carved out for themselves against the odds in 18th-century society, without glossing over aspects less congenial to 21st-century readers. It is often tempting to uncritically champion pioneering women in history with a sort of proto-girlboss feminism. Bluestockings is much more sophisticated stuff than this, and all the richer for it.”

–Hannah Rose Woods (The New Statesman)

2. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox
(Random House)

3 Rave • 6 Positive

“Ms. Fox has produced a vivid portrait of Mandelbaum in this rich recounting of her life and times. Best-known as an obituary writer for the New York Times, Ms. Fox knows how to synthesize facts and shape a story … Sometimes, the extraneous information threatens to swamp the Mandelbaum story, especially as there are also copious footnotes on nearly every page. But Ms. Fox is too skilled a writer to slow the momentum for long.”

–Charlotte Gray (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum
(Doubleday)

2 Rave • 6 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Applebaum rightly places kleptocratic institutionalized thievery at the center of her analysis … A valuable book for many reasons, but the focus on illicit wealth creation and on those in democracies who enable it is especially timely. So is Applebaum’s recommendation that we wage war on autocratic behaviors wherever they occur.”

–Ruth Ben-Ghiat (The Washington Post)

4. Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great by Rachel Kousser
(Mariner)

2 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“A breath of fresh air … Kousser’s biography extends beyond Alexander’s military movements and into his emotional life … Her account is exhaustively researched—many chapters extend past 100 footnotes—but remains approachable.”

–Valorie Castellanos Clark (The Los Angeles Times)

5. The Rent Collectors: he Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA by Jesse Katz
(Astra House)

5 Rave

“Katz has constructed an ethnography of the crime, locating it within the intricate lacework of history, geography, policing and politics that the crime was knotted to … Katz…brings his formidable skills to mapping the territory of Macedo’s crime … Katz has constructed a riveting and masterful urban narrative … Sets out to understand an evil act and asks whether atonement and redemption are possible for the person who did it. It finds a web of meaning in which all of us are suspended, implying that many other crimes could be understood in such a holistic way if we took the time. As much as is possible after such a senseless tragedy, Katz makes some sense out of that September day.”

–Lorraine Berry (The Los Angeles Times)