High Tech

Long before newcomers began arriving at Ellis Island, Indigenous peoples had already lived on this land for thousands of years, but the first permanent Spanish colony in the mid-1500s set in motion what would become a winding road of immigration and relocation trends in the United States. Clear explanations and naturally embedded definitions make complex terms and policies easy to follow, while the text examines why people relocated, which eras brought different groups, and how laws shaped their experiences, from enslaved Africans brought by force through Mexican workers recruited through the Bracero programs to Jewish Germans fleeing the Holocaust during World War II. Contemporary issues, including President Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, bring the history into the present. Throughout, Wegwerth emphasizes how immigration policies have disproportionately been created and enforced by white men while underscoring the fundamental truth that Indigenous people were here fir...

Worsley was the chief curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces for more than two decades and thus has a unique frame of reference on her subject. A political, social, and royal history, her book is braided with personal anecdotes. She recounts stories of the palaces’ “human inhabitants, all of them, high and low,” and she relates her own experiences, pointing out telling details in the rooms they haunted. She is an accomplished writer, her confiding, conversational style honed through speaking, her lexicon accommodating “somnolence,” or “meretricious,” as well as “control-freak.” A hefty portion of the book centers on the Tudors, especially Henry VIII, from his childhood as “an unstable compound of bravado and grief”; through his tumultuous reign; his favor-currying builder, Cardinal Wolsey; and his succession of wives. Part Two moves from Hampton Court to the Tower of London, its ravens, tragic boy princes, and other inhabitants. The Stuarts follow, from James I, a “tricksy, slipp...

The book’s opening essay, “Breakfast for Dinner,” sets the tone for the rest of the work with its blend of childhood trauma, comedic storytelling, and poignant reflections. The essay opens with the inaugural family dinner in Staples’ new home. In attendance with his wife and in-laws was the author’s mother, who (with “the calm of an air traffic controller”) told the story of how she deliberately killed her son’s childhood cat. As readers discover after piecing together details from this and a dozen other essays, Staples no longer has a relationship with his mother (“my life is a lot better without her in it,” he asserts). Though he hasn’t spoken to her in years, she plays a central role throughout the book. Born in the 1960s, she’s described as someone who carries “an air of perpetual discontent”; every event “somehow turns into proof of [her] own suffering.” Per the author, this behavior made for a childhood characterized by uncertainty and a lack of stability. Staples writes that hi...