Book Reviews

Francis: A Life in Songs

Ann Wroe. Jonathan Cape, 2018. 191 pages. $20.04.

Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat

Robert N. Spengler III. University of California Press, 2019. 392 pages. $34.95.

Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem

Michael Schmidt. Princeton University Press, 2019. 192 pages. $24.95.

Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity

Nick Bunker. Vintage (reprint edition), 2019. 464 pages. $18.00.

Polygamy: An Early American History

Sarah M.S. Pearsall. Yale University Press, 2019. 416 pages. $38.00.

Going To College In The Sixties

John R. Thelin. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 224 pp. $34.95.

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

Nina MacLaughlin. FSG Originals, 2019. 352 pages. $16.00.

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Joanne B. Freeman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 480 pages. $28.00.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures

Nick Pyenon. Viking Press, 2018. 336 pages. $27.00.

Alive Still: Nell Blaine American Painter

Cathy Curtis. Oxford University Press, 2019. 304 pages. $34.95.

Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can

Herbert S. Terrace. Columbia University Press, 2019. 219 pages. $28.00.

American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic

Victoria Johnson. Liveright, 2018. 461 pages. $29.95.