Robert Boyers, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies. New York: Scribner, 2019. $27.00. 170 pp.

Boyer’s cri de coeur delivers a bracing recounting of the wars being waged in the academy over such matters as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism. He takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. His is a book of lamentations whose anecdotal evidence resonates throughout a once liberal order.

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019. $28.00. 280 pp.

Murray examines the twenty-first century’s most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology, and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in workplaces, universities, schools, and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality. He contends we are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media.

Andrew Scull, Psychiatry and Its Discontents. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019. $29.95. 376 pp.

Scull provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness, tracing the rise of the field, its midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm’s decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book’s historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of “community care”.

Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. $29.95. 328 pp.

Marcus challenges everything that has been thought about the obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories told about celebrities and fans. The result: A high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.

Michael J. Kral, The Return of the Sun: Suicide and Reclamation Among Inuit of Arctic Canada. New York: Oxford University Press. $45.00. 192 pp.

Inuit have among the highest suicide rates in the world - ten times the national average. Based on two decades of participatory action and ethnographic research, the book is a historical and anthropological examination of suicide among Inuit youth. Kral sees suicide among Inuit as a response to colonial disruption of family and interpersonal relationships and describes how the community has responded to the issue, He draws on research from multiple disciplines to understand and address this population.