The subject of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s magisterial American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) was, as the title indicates, a singularly American figure: a child of immigrants whose curiosity, nurtured by great schools, led him to become a brilliant, worldly, and witty (if flawed) polymath. The book became the basis of the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer (2023). Bird, with his wife, Susan Goldmark, has a new book out: American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, Sept. 1). It, too, is about an unmistakably American individual—but one who was almost the mirror opposite of Oppenheimer. Cohn was distrustful, vindictive, and venal; he got ahead by being a consigliere to mob bosses, the witch-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy, and a businessman by the name of Donald Trump.
American Scoundrel is one of many excellent books coming this fall. Several concern the president. In Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era (Penguin Press, Sept. 15), Jacob Weisberg writes of the “Great Capitulation of 2025”—in which, as our critic wrote, “industry leaders, media figures, lawyers, academics, and assorted collaborators bent the knee.”
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take a more sweeping view in End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 15). “We are not saying that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netayahu, and Vladimir Putin are more evil or dangerous than Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco,” they write. “We are saying that our world is more dangerous than their world: its weapons deadlier, its technologies vastly more potent, its media more connected, its climate more unstable, its concentrated wealth more global in reach than at any point in human history.”
There’s no shortage of other serious fare this fall, too: Malcolm Gladwell is back with The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic (Little, Brown, Sept. 29). In it, he analyzes “the fundamentally dishonest way Americans talk about their gun violence” and delves into “the moral recklessness of the course the country has chosen.”
There are, of course, books that’ll lift one’s spirits—many are by or about musical artists. Anthony Tommasini’s Voice of a Century: The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson (Penguin Press, Sept. 8), says our reviewer, is “an invaluable contribution to our understanding of a great artist”—the trailblazing Black contralto who sang at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.
Grandmaster Flash, the DJ who influenced the future of rap, has written a memoir, Birth of a Culture (Amistad, Sept. 22), with Robert “Scoop” Jackson. Our critic called it “a must for anyone interested in the history of American music.”
And there are several books that weren’t yet available when we went to print. Ones I’m looking forward to include This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story by Evan Gershkovich (Crown, Sept. 9), One Helluva Ride by Michael Douglas (Grand Central, Oct. 6), Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman and Ariel Levy (Simon Six, Nov. 10), and Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, Nov. 24).
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
