Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World by Victoria Johnson (Scribner). Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle. “Early in the new century, Church’s poetic evocations of nature seemed passé, but his reputation has since recovered: The 1979 sale of his ‘Iceberg’ for $2.5 million set a record for an American painting. Church once wrote to a fellow artist, ‘See for yourself this glorious country, where we reside. I cannot do it justice either with pen or pencil.’ Victoria Johnson’s sharp-eyed biography proves he was wrong on that score.”

The Other Beautiful People by Caroline Bock (Regal House Publishing). Reviewed by Sarahlyn Bruck. “Above all, the novel is a love story. Amy loves New York. She loves her job. She loves classic films. She loves her family. She should be at the height of her powers, but instead, she’s torn. She and Jack have recently fled Manhattan and relocated to a Washington, DC, rental, and she now faces a daily three-hour commute (each way) by train. Then, at the same time Jack suffers the urgent health crisis that lands him in the hospital, a competing cable network threatens to buy out the Cinema Channel. Suddenly, Amy’s work family and her real family desperately need her at the exact same moment.”

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy by Steven J. Ross (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Robert Beauregard. “Any time hate travels to the center of political life, however — entrenching itself in the institutions of American society — more than a few anti-hate groups will be needed to contain it. With this book, Ross has written an engrossing, informative, and timely history of the hate groups that energized the far right in the early postwar decades, the anti-hate organizations that infiltrated them, and the spies who gathered information from (and fomented dissent among) those who hate.”

Elegy in Blue: A Novel by Mark Helprin (Abrams Press). Reviewed by John P. Loonam. “Obviously, this endless, offbeat implausibility is purposeful. We know right away that the sky above Brooklyn was never this blue, that the course of true love never ran this smoothly, and that very few octogenarians can disarm terrorists, let alone kill them with their bare hands. In case a reader is tempted to take things too seriously — skinhead thugs certainly exist, for example — Helprin has laced his prose with jokes and clues to temper the sobriety.”

Given No Choice: A History of Abortion Rights by Cody McDevitt (independently published). Reviewed by Chris Rutledge. “The strength of Given No Choice lies in its spotlighting of those on the front lines of the fight for reproductive freedom, from activists to victims. If the stories of young women like Becky Bell — a 17-year-old Indiana girl who died after an illegal abortion — make you angry, that’s the point. It’s impossible to read the extensive history laid out here and not wonder how strangers could deign to tell women what to do with their own bodies. McDevitt does a good job stoking this anger and, perhaps, stirring the reader to action.”

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