{"id":273701,"date":"2026-06-25T05:09:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=273701"},"modified":"2026-06-24T21:39:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T01:39:53","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-6-25-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-6-25-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Ginny Hogan on JD Vance\u2019s\u00a0Communion<\/em>, Fintan O\u2019Toole on Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s\u00a0Regime Change<\/em>, Kathryn Hughes on James Lasdun\u2019s\u00a0The Family Man<\/em>, Lily Meyer on Simon Par\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s\u00a0Trash!<\/em>, and Dwight Garner on Amy Edelman and Chris Begley\u2019s\u00a0The Emergency Playbook<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Communion:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI got a colonoscopy on Friday. If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading\u00a0Communion<\/em>, J.D. Vance\u2019s new book.\u00a0Communion<\/em>\u00a0is ostensibly the story of the vice-president finding his way back to Christianity\u2014specifically Catholicism, though he only briefly touches on the distinction. The book starts off autobiographical, but by the end it devolves into heavy-handed defenses of policies and his Trump conversion. Apparently he only\u00a0pretended<\/em>\u00a0to hate Trump so he could fit in with the big, mean, judgmental liberal elites. And in one hilarious chapter, he explains\u00a0why economic data is all fake<\/a>. Very convenient, sir. I see what you did there.<\/p>\n

To an extent,\u00a0Communion<\/em>\u00a0is nothing new. Vance has always invoked religion for political gain. He once famously lambasted Trump with the words \u2018God wants better of us.\u2019 Still, I\u2019m still not sure why he wrote this book. Most VPs wait until they leave office to publish their memoirs, but considering the near-fate of Mike Pence, maybe Vance doesn\u2019t think he has that kind of time.\u00a0Communion\u00a0<\/em>does him no favors, though, mostly in its sheer banality. It\u2019s not even incendiary\u2014tonally, the book is more akin to\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy\u00a0<\/em>than to his public appearances, though he can\u2019t help but hide his contempt for liberals (one woman is smeared for the mortal sin of wearing a beret).<\/p>\n

Communion\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>\u00a0are the same story: A lousy man gets saved. In\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, J.D.\u2019s grandmother saved him. And, sort of, his wife. In\u00a0Communion<\/em>, Christianity saved him. And also\u00a0his wife, who is arguably the book\u2019s main character. Like all women who identify even loosely with the term\u00a0feminist<\/em>, I compulsively mutter \u2018giiiiirl\u2019 upon learning any new fact about Usha Vance. And I muttered \u2018giiiiirl\u2019 a\u00a0lot<\/em>\u00a0while reading\u00a0Communion<\/em>. Mostly, I marveled at how much he could say about Usha without saying anything at all.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nothing fresh about a story of a guy learning a lesson and somehow reemerging on the other side supposedly fixed. But the tale of the shitty guy who uses his \u2018saved\u2019 status to avoid scrutiny of his current choices? The guy who willingly turns out one pocket so you don\u2019t inspect what\u2019s in the other? Even worse. In\u00a0Communion<\/em>, Vance puts on a show of fake humility in describing the circumstances that led him to his faith, but at no point does he take responsibility for all that is still wrong with him. Everyone he continues to hurt, everyone harmed by his administration, everyone whose life has been upended in the last 18 months\u2014we are all just more collateral damage on the path to the enlightenment of the great J.D. Vance. Vance\u2019s hypocrisy alone makes\u00a0Communion<\/em>\u00a0nearly unreadable. You don\u2019t need me to tell you this, but he is not a good Catholic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Ginny Hogan on JD Vance\u2019s\u00a0Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Cut<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Regime<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn January 2026, The New York Times asked Donald Trump why, having told his family not to make\u00a0new business deals in foreign countries\u00a0during his first term as president, he was permitting them to do so now.\u00a0He answered: \u2018Because I found out that nobody cared. I\u2019m allowed to.\u2019 In\u00a0Regime Change<\/em>, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s riveting and richly textured narrative of the first 14 months of Trump\u2019s second term, the authors include this reply as part of a coldly devastating account of how the Trumps have added more than $1 billion\u00a0to the family fortune.<\/p>\n

By \u2018nobody,\u2019 as Haberman and Swan make clear, Trump meant those who enable his impunity: the sycophantic courtiers with whom he has surrounded himself; the Republican majority in Congress that abandoned its duty to check executive power; the tech moguls who rushed to pay homage to him; the MAGA base that venerates him. So long as none of them publicly objects to his actions, he has permission to do whatever he wants.<\/p>\n

All this presents a profound challenge to journalism. The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus\u2019 (or Richard Nixon\u2019s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With\u00a0a few<\/a>\u00a0notable exceptions<\/a>, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?<\/p>\n

Haberman and Swan have spent more than a decade covering Trump\u2019s political career and the events they portray are in themselves well known: the excesses of Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0Department of Government Efficiency<\/a>, the chaos of\u00a0Trump\u2019s tariffs<\/a>, the vampiric return of\u00a0Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>, the\u00a0militarization<\/a>\u00a0of American cities, the unleashing of ICE on\u00a0migrant communities<\/a>, the abuse of the justice system to go after Trump\u2019s\u00a0perceived enemies<\/a>, the assault on the independence of\u00a0the Federal Reserve<\/a>, the headlong stumble into\u00a0war on Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan\u2019s counternarrative so vital.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Fintan O\u2019Toole on Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s\u00a0Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen James Lasdun, a British novelist who lives in the US, began his research, he was not certain that Murdaugh had done it. Big Red might be a braggart, a bully and rotten to the core, but Lasdun invokes Thomas De Quincey\u2019s neat point about how a man\u2019s capacity to rob says nothing about his propensity to murder. In addition, there is something about the crime that Lasdun, who is himself married with children, cannot countenance. How could a man with no history of domestic violence or even bad temper bring himself to shoot loved ones merely to delay his own imminent financial exposure?<\/p>\n

This kind of ethical audit calls to mind Janet Malcolm\u2019s distinctive approach to writing about well-known criminal cases. Indeed, Lasdun tells us that he \u2018reveres\u2019 Malcolm who, like him, typically tried out her ideas in long-form pieces for the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0before expanding them into books. Yet here the similarities end. Malcolm\u2019s approach to writing about celebrated murders was to avoid getting into the narrative weeds in order to retain space for her own psychological and ethical explorations. Lasdun, by contrast, insists on delivering a meticulous retelling of the Murdaugh case, complete with byzantine subplots involving the suspicious death of the family\u2019s housekeeper and the murder of another local teenager.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cYet while it does not reveal anything substantively new about the case, Lasdun\u2019s prose is pure pleasure. His resistance to going full southern gothic is particularly admirable, although the hovering stink of rotting jelly fish caused by one of Murdaugh\u2019s failed side hustles is too good to leave out. Likewise, Lasdun\u2019s refusal to come to an iron-clad conclusion about Big Red\u2019s guilt turns out to be remarkably prescient. On 13 May 2026, by which time his book had gone to press, the South Carolina supreme court sensationally overturned the murder conviction, citing \u2018shocking jury interference\u2019 by the clerk to the court. It turned out that Becky Hill\u2014\u2019Miss Becky\u2019\u2014had been nudging the jurors to find Murdaugh guilty. One witness testified that she was writing a book about the trial, and needed narrative closure for the project to really pop. In the process she has, ironically, blown everything wide open again. Murdaugh\u2019s retrial is likely to begin sometime next year and, chances are, Lasdun will be there to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Kathryn Hughes on James Lasdun\u2019s\u00a0The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Guardian<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"Trash!\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cPar\u00e9-Poupart takes Francophone literature to particular task for leaving his colleagues out of the cohort of \u2018\u201dworking-class heroes\u201d celebrated in popular culture, from Quebec\u2019s novels of rural life to \u00c9mile Zola\u2019s miners. Nobody writes novels about garbagemen.\u2019 He seems to be writing for those who need to imagine, not remember, what it\u2019s like to take an accidental \u201cshower in compost bin juice\u201d or have the man whose garbage cans you\u2019re wrangling sneer at you, \u2018I went to school so I wouldn\u2019t have to do a job like that.\u2019<\/p>\n

Trash!\u00a0<\/i>is an intriguing attempt to broaden the parameters of this kind of book. Par\u00e9-Poupart has a distinctly 21st-century knack for swirling together theoretical and visceral language: Ren\u00e9 Descartes on one page, and grubs \u2018wriggling and swarming in every garbage bag\u2019 on the next. His grab-bag writing is reminiscent of the internet at its rare, educational best. Par\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s style gives his book a rambunctious spirit, a sense of a hungry, catholic mind at work. All sorts of dilemmas come together in\u00a0Trash!<\/i>, which reveals them to be expressions of the same core issue. Par\u00e9-Poupart shows readers a society whose members, with too few exceptions, seem to treat both their belongings and the workers who ultimately handle them as disposable.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cPar\u00e9-Poupart describes this man, and others like him, with grace and admiration, though he can veer into idealization. Of a 52-year-old nicknamed \u2018Beaujeunehomme\u2019 who generally arrives at work \u2018in a state of inebriation that would make even the hardest drinkers stagger,\u2019 Par\u00e9-Poupart writes, \u2018Everyone in the garbage business accepts him just the way he is, unconditionally, few questions asked.\u2019 And then he adds, \u2018Beaujeunehomme is a castoff who feels right at home surrounded by garbage.\u2019\u00a0Trash!\u00a0<\/i>regularly expresses this vision of garbagemen as rebels united by their work, which can be unsettling when Par\u00e9-Poupart is writing about men with much less social mobility than he has. He doesn\u2019t convince me that Beaujeunehomme\u00a0is\u00a0<\/i>accepted, not trapped.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0Trash!<\/i>\u00a0were exclusively stories of Montreal\u2019s Beaujeunehommes alongside that of Par\u00e9-Poupart himself, it might seem unsavory. Its author\u2019s education\u2014and, more important, his power as the lone narrator of his world\u2014already risks creating too much of a divide, on the page if not necessarily in person, between him and the men he writes about. Its intellectual components are the reason it works. Even though I\u2019m skeptical of\u00a0Trash!<\/i>\u2019s account of Beaujeunehomme, I can appreciate its analysis of\u2014and anger at\u2014the conditions garbagemen deal with on the job, which Par\u00e9-Poupart often puts in cerebral as well as anecdotal terms. It\u2019s when he combines these two modes that his argument grows most convincing.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cPar\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s constant need to connect and contextualize can be a little exhausting, as I imagine his dumpster-diving lifestyle might be. Still, the book is exhilarating (also like dumpster diving?) on every page. Par\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s hyperactive, genre-mixing writing suggests that writing about contemporary labor and its place in consumer societies may benefit from being associative and capacious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Lily Meyer on Simon Par\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s\u00a0Trash!: A Garbageman\u2019s Story<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBegley is the author of a (very good) previous survival book titled\u00a0The Next Apocalypse<\/em>\u00a0(2021). It argues that \u2018lone hero\u2019 fantasies in the wake of catastrophe are moronic. Community rather than gonzo individualism will likely be the key to survival. (Although a community of gonzo individuals might do pretty well for a time.)\u00a0The Next Apocalypse<\/em>\u00a0is philosophical. It draws from historical examples, notably the collapses of the Roman and Mayan empires, and contains a good deal of nuts-and-bolts prepper information.<\/p>\n

This new book is basically a condensation and a dumbing down of those ideas. It tries so hard to be upbeat and reader-friendly that the audiobook could be narrated by Peppa Pig. It\u2019s ridiculous at times. (We\u2019ll get to that.) Yet it\u2019s a handier book than Begley\u2019s original one. It has umpteen to-do lists and sidebars. It\u2019ll get you started.<\/p>\n

What most interests me about\u00a0The Emergency Playbook<\/em>\u00a0is how, beneath the sunny tone, there\u2019s a calm but insistent moral outrage on display. The usual scenarios are covered: blackouts, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, floods, pandemics, bioterrorism. But this book leans heavily into the notion that, as American democracy dissolves into kakistocracy and worse, we may be already up to our knees in societal ruin.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t an original notion. But the authors rake the details into a towering pile and, in the context of contingency planning, set them on fire. When the worst happens, we\u2019ll realize what it means that the budgets of NOAA and FEMA and the C.D.C. are being gutted. That we have a government that mistrusts science and suggests outlandish untruths, like the joy of injecting disinfectant into one\u2019s veins.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that I\u2019ve built this book up, I\u2019m afraid I must tear it back down a bit.\u00a0The Emergency Playbook<\/em>\u00a0is repetitive. It\u2019s like one of those grilling cookbooks in which every recipe starts with the same three paragraphs about starting a fire. The essential information (this is true of nearly every self-help book) could probably be condensed onto two index cards in nine-point type.<\/p>\n

Corny jokes, frequent lists, hoary quotations and an uncanny evenness of tone make the writers sound a bit like A.I., or like someone riding A.I. as if it were an A.T.V. This is a comment, not an accusation. We\u2019re all paranoid now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Dwight Garner on Amy Edelman and Chris Begley\u2019s\u00a0The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New York Times<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Ginny Hogan on JD Vance\u2019s\u00a0Communion, Fintan O\u2019Toole on Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan\u2019s\u00a0Regime Change, Kathryn Hughes on James Lasdun\u2019s\u00a0The Family Man, Lily Meyer on Simon Par\u00e9-Poupart\u2019s\u00a0Trash!, and Dwight Garner on Amy Edelman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":273703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[36298,15654,13821],"class_list":["post-273701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Communion.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19cx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}