number of environmental calamities over the past 300 years, the author offers a cautionary map of the route we took to arrive at this vital geologic moment. The path forward should entail "both disaster policy and disaster culture," Muir-Wood argues: a governing body and a motivated global community that will collaboratively and inventively undertake the management of inevitable catastrophes. Agent: Alex Christofi, Conville & Walsh. (Sept.)
★ Adnan's Story: The Search for
Truth and Justice After 'Serial'
Rabia Chaudry. St. Martin's, $26.99 (416p)
Launched into the collective conscious-
ness by the podcast Serial, the investigation
into Adnan Syed's involvement in the
1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend continues
to fascinate in this gripping account from
attorney Chaudry, a friend of Syed's
family, who first brought the case to the
attention of the podcast creators. Chaudry
uses her unique perspective to craft a grip-
ping and meticulously detailed account of
including let-
ters, court tran-
scripts, and
evidence that
fill in the
show's gaps and
provide the
Readers new to
the story will
have no trouble following—the narrative
is outlined extensively from the begin-
ning—and podcast listeners will find
plenty of previously undisclosed material.
Chaudry explains what Serial missed, including a lack of legal perspective, and she argues that host Sarah Koenig failed to convey the enormity of Syed's (later disbarred) attorney's incompetence. She strongly makes the case for cultural and religious bias in the investigation and conviction and presents damaging evidence of police misconduct, including tampering with evidence and a witness.
She also examines other suspects and their
possible motives and alibis. Syed provides
running commentary that creates a depic-
tion of the damage inflicted on a person
when the system fails. Chaudry's version
presentation of George Washington's
understanding that "victory hinged on
who could endure a long, hard, bitter
struggle." Taylor analyzes "the cycles of
invasion, exposure, and suppression" that
convinced most Americans that "a Patriot
victory offered the best prospect for
restoring peace and stability." He also
highlights the "broad and anarchic bor-
derland" where "Patriots fought... to
suppress the independence of native
peoples" in the name of creating an
"empire of liberty." Provocative and per-
suasive, Taylor's fine work demonstrates
that on a continent "riven with competing
allegiances and multiple possibilities,"
the newly independent U.S. by no means
faced a secure future. (Sept.)
The Cure for Catastrophe:
How We Can Stop Manufacturing
Robert Muir-Wood. Basic, $28.99 (368p)
Muir-Wood, chief research officer at
Risk Management Solutions, exhaustively
chronicles modern history's natural disas-
ters and humankind's evolving—if
erratic—responses to them. Catastrophes
such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake were
once interpreted as "acts of fate," but cen-
turies of meteorological, engineering, and
economic research have ushered in "the
modern social understanding of disasters
and the practical scientific approach to
disaster risk reduction." Recent decades
have seen significant post-disaster
advancements in the fields of architecture,
insurance, forecasting, and probabilistic
"catastrophe modeling." But Muir-Wood
contends that
there remain
impediments to
managing nat-
ural disasters:
namely, the rise
in these events
as a result of
the increasingly
devastating
consequences in a world where "the
number of people and buildings in harm's
way keeps rising," and the prevalence of
human denial and bureaucratic negli-
gence. In his meticulous reportage on a
shows that there is much left to say about
F.D.R. even though there is little left to
learn of the main elements of his biog-
raphy. Lelyveld's approach is to focus on
the last months of F.D.R.'s life and the
influence of his declining health, always
kept under wraps, on his decisions. The
result is a gripping look into Roosevelt's
efforts to keep from both himself and the
American people his severe hypertension
and congestive heart failure during his
successful fourth run for the presidency, as
well as during the critical closing months
of WWII. Lelyveld shows how others—
national figures, family members, and the
women who surrounded him—conspired
to keep F.D.R.'s poor health a secret, and
demonstrates that his doctors lacked
either competence or candor. Yet those
who saw him close up knew that his life
was in danger. It didn't help, as Lelyveld
emphasizes, that F. D.R. was characteristi-
cally teasing and unrevealing about his
thinking and intentions as well as his
ailments. Though the consequences of the
president's illness might have been graver
for the nation had he died even a few
months prior, the U.S. survived while
F.D.R. remained, as always, a sphinx, as
he does to Lelyveld. This is a solid work of
narrative history. (Sept.)
American Revolutions:
A Continental History, 1750–1804
Alan Taylor. Norton, $37.50 (736p) ISBN 978-
Taylor, professor of history at the University of Virginia and Pulitzer Prize– winner for The Internal Enemy, further cements his reputation with this comprehensive analysis of an American Revolution that was anything but the relatively decorous event of popular myth. The revolutionary era was a time of divisions and uncertainties. "Turmoil persisted after the formal peace treaty," Taylor writes. But that upheaval inspired political and cultural creativity that enabled a nation to emerge from "much cruelty, violence, and destruction." Stressing the importance of the trans-Appalachian west, Taylor suggests that the conflict between land-hungry settlers and restrictive British polices was just as important to sparking revolution as the resistance to taxation that inflamed the Atlantic coast. This expanded perspective frames Taylor's