Svetlana's Reads and Views

  Title of the book: We the people; a history of the U.S Constitution  Author: Jill Lepore Publisher: Liveright  Publishing Date: 2025 ISBN: 978-1-63149-608-0 Summary: Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Readers' Favorite History & Biography (2025) The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world--and one of the most difficult to amend. At what cost? In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. Challenging both originalism and the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation, Lepore argues that the framers never intended for the Constitution to be kept, like a butterfly, under glass, but instead expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, improving the machinery of government. In an account as radical as Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the U...

  Title of the book: Stealing America; The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History  Author: Linford D Fisher Publisher: Liveright Publishing Date: 2026 ISBN: 978-1-324-09495-1 Summary: Indigenous enslavement was a colossal phenomenon of almost unimaginable consequences that ensnared nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America. In a saga that predates 1619, this double-stealing of Indigenous people and their lands upends virtually every known narrative of American history. Captured Natives, often deliberately misidentified as Black slaves, were used not only on southern plantations, but on small northern farms, and were routinely shipped overseas. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that decimated tribes and plundered Indigenous lands. Even after Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labore...

 Name of Book: Goodbye Chinatown Author: Kit Fan ISBN: 978-1-64286-165-5 Publisher: World Editions  Type of book: Hong Kong, England, China, protests, 2001-January 2020, relationships, mother/son relationship, parents/daughter relationship, cooking, ambitions, fame vs motherhood  Year it was published: 2026 Summary: As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown. Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London. That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy? Set in the aftermath of Hon...

  Title of the book: Returning; A Search For Home Across Three Centuries Author: Nicholas Lemann Publisher: Liveright  Publishing Date: 2026 ISBN: 978-1-63149-841-1 Summary: Nicholas Lemann grew up thinking he wanted to be Jack Burden, the ever–curious reporter–historian in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men who gets drawn into a web of southern intrigue. Like his fictional mentor, Lemann pulls us mesmerizingly into a three–century family drama, in which he traces the Lemanns from their humble beginnings in Germany to the nineteenth–century American South, where they became Jewish plantation owners and aspirants to New Orleans society. Yet Lemann began chafing against the South’s strict racial hierarchy and his relatives’ eagerness to be accepted in an anti–Semitic environment, including a deliberate blindness to the plight of desperate European Jews. Returning follows the narrator as he rejects this assimilated world and embraces the rites of Judaism. Through its nuanced...

  Name of Book: No Way Home Author: T.C. Boyle ISBN: 978-1-324-09752-5 Publisher: Liveright  Type of book: Boulder City Nevada, desert, helplessness, hopelessness, friendship, relationships, being a resident, doctor money, limits, post 2020s, causing pain  Year it was published: 2026 Summary: David Lynch meets Fight Club in T. C. Boyle’s most compulsive, obsessive, and psychologically haunting novel in many years. No Way Home tells the haunting story of Terrence Tully, an LA medical resident who is abruptly informed that his mother has died. Arriving at her home in a forlorn Nevada desert town, the naive doctor finds himself “like a swimmer caught in a riptide,” drawn into a love triangle involving the manipulative, margarita–swilling receptionist Bethany and her ex–boyfriend Jesse, a vengeful middle–school teacher cocksure about his sexual prowess. There is indeed no way home for Tully, who cannot extricate himself from this aimless, post–twenty–something world where mot...

  Name of Book: I'll Make a Spectacle of You Author: Beatrice Winifred Iker ISBN: 9780316575249 Publisher: Run For It Type of book: Appalachia, Afrolachia, 1823 to 2027, Tennessee, USA, horror, beast, protection, LGBtQ relationships and characters, friendships, family  Year it was published: 2025  Summary: This heart-pounding horror debut from Beatrice Winifred Iker, takes readers to Bricksbury University, the oldest and most storied HBCUs in the nation. But as one student is about to find out, a long history comes with a legacy of secrets.   Zora Robinson is an ambitious grad student at her dream program, the Appalachian Studies at Bricksbury university. When her thesis advisor suggests she research the local folklore about a beast roaming the woods surrounding campus, Zora finds a local population uneager to talk to an outsider.   As she delves into the history of the beast, she uncovers a rumored secret society called the Keepers that has tenuous ties to the ...