Featuring 244 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 20 | 15 OCTOBER 2020 REVIEWS Tana French The bestselling crime writer had an unexpected inspiration for her new stand-alone novel p. 14 Also in the issue: Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Kwame Mbalia, and Tamara Payne from the editor’s desk: Don’t Know Much About History Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas # Last month, at a White House history conference, President Donald Trump Chief Executive Officer attacked the 1619 Project, a series of essays published in the New York Times MEG LABORDE KUEHN Magazine. The project—conceived by staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, with
[email protected] Editor-in-Chief contributions by Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and others—explores TOM BEER the centrality of slavery to the story of America. Trump claimed that the 1619
[email protected] Vice President of Marketing Project has been “discredited”—in fact, Hannah-Jones’ own essay won a Pulitzer SARAH KALINA Prize for Commentary—and groused that the “left has warped, distorted, and
[email protected] defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.” He called for Managing/Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU the establishment of a “1776 commission” to promote “patriotic education.”
[email protected] Leaving aside the matter of nationally mandated “patriotic education”— Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK which sounds like something out of Stalin’s Soviet Union—the president clearly
[email protected] Tom Beer misunderstands the nature of historiography, which involves not simply a fixed Young Readers’ Editor VICKY SMITH set of facts, but an ongoing dialogue with historians past and present.