Booknotes+

For his book, "Five Bullets," attorney Elliot Williams wrote 95,720 words. On the back of the cover of the book, writer Garrett Graff sums up the story this way: "Never has a book about the 1980s felt more like current events than Elliot Williams's journey back to one of America's most notorious shootings, when Bernie Goetz opened fire in a crowded New York City subway…'Five Bullets' is a haunting examination of our nation's complicated fascination with vigilantes and the politics of crime…" A lot of the people who were instrumental to this story are deceased. However, the man at the center, Bernie Goetz, is still alive at 78 and still lives in New York City.
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Russian Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, marched toward Moscow starting on June 23, 2023. His forces were advancing north on M4 Highway after seizing Rostov-on-Don. The rebellion against his longtime colleague Vladimir Putin was halted the next day. Literally two months later, at a little past 6pm, Prigozhin and nine others boarded his Embraer 600 jet in Moscow. Several minutes later, at 6:20pm, over Tver, Russia, 100-miles north of Moscow, the plane exploded. All 10 passengers perished, including two pilots and the flight attendant. Writer and intelligence expert, Candace Rondeaux , gives us the rest of the story in her book, "Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos."
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In the December 1, 2025, print edition of the Wall Street Journal, there was this headline on page R25: "These 10 books changed the way Americans thought about work." Carol Hymowitz, the author, wrote: "It began with Benjamin Franklin, who couldn't stop working or writing about work throughout his 84-year long life." Carol Hymowitz has been associated with the Wall Street Journal since she got her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University. Other books she featured in this article about work include Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Dale Carnegie, and C. Wright Mills, plus others. We wanted to know how she chose these 10 books about work, so we had a chat.
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Jonathan Horn's latest book is titled "The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines." The publisher Scribner explains the premise of Horn's book: "For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received the country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic Douglas MacArthur whose orders forced him to leave his troops and go to Australia. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing."

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Anne Marshall is associate professor of history and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University. Her book is "Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform." Clay lived to be 92, had two wives and 11 children. Kentucky was his home state. As an antislavery reformer, Cassius Marcellus Clay is often remembered as a knife-wielding rabble rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries. Abraham Lincoln made him minister to Russia. And yes, the boxer Muhammad Ali was originally named after him, but decided he wanted his own original name. Ann Marshall will discuss all this with us.
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