I Went to Prison So You Wouldn’t Have To: A Love and Lawfare Story in Trumpland, by Peter Navarro and Bonnie Brenner (War Room Books, 384 pp., $32.99). Earlier this year, Trump’s senior trade advisor Peter Navarro ruffled feathers across the Atlantic by referring to Great Britain as a “compliant servant of communist China” in danger of having its “blood sucked dry” by Beijing. If that’s what Navarro thinks of our nation’s oldest ally, you can imagine what he says about our adversaries.

Nor is he exactly shy when it comes to asserting himself in print. Previous titles, such as Death by China: Confronting the Dragon and Taking Back Trump’s America, give a representative flavor of the whole. He’s also given us three weighty volumes of The Navarro Report, which seek to shed light on potentially illegal activity that may have influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Navarro’s latest book recounts his experience at the hands of the judicial authorities as a consequence of his defying a congressional subpoena to appear before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, disturbances at the U.S. Capitol. It’s an alarming story of official overreach. Publicly arrested at Reagan National Airport, Navarro was sentenced to four months in federal prison for criminal contempt and fined $9,500. “You are not a victim,” the presiding judge said. “You are not the object of a political prosecution. You have received every process you are due.”

Not surprisingly, Navarro begs to differ. A significant portion of the book expresses his indignation at the “Nazi-like” treatment he received from the FBI, as well as the lunacy of a federal prison system where “common sense is ignored, taxpayer dollars are wasted by the billions, and families are often needlessly torn apart.”

Some parts of this are told in Navarro’s ringing prose, while others unfold in the form of an epistolary exchange with his fiancée, Bonnie Brenner. Taken as a whole, the tone is by turns petulant, vindictive, provocative, astute, sentimental, and shrill—not least when it comes to his ordeal at the hands of the Biden-era Justice Department. It’s also compulsively readable, and, particularly given the horrific fate that befell Charlie Kirk in Utah, a poignantly timed account of what can happen when an outspoken public figure dares to defy the political orthodoxy of his day.

(Christopher Sandford)

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Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico (New York Review Books; 136 pp., $15.95). The razor-sharp novella Perfection barely feels like fiction. It reads as one long description; there is not one word of dialogue, not even an exclamation. Yet it is an utterly compelling depiction of the empty lives so many millennials lead.

The secular young couple Tom and Anna are late-twentysomething web designers who reside in a plant-filled apartment in hip but sterile Berlin, their lives built around their careers and the digital world. They are smugly and determinedly deracinated; pan-European metropolitans of an indeterminate Mediterranean origin adrift from family connections, they commit themselves to life online. Unlike growing numbers of their friends, they are childless; it is their solipsistic choice. Very little is permitted to interfere with their routine: work punctuated by regular hedonistic partying and social drug use. 

Inevitably, their lack of religion, family, and rootedness in a place (the potted plants adorning their apartment symbolize their contained existence) leads to dissatisfaction and isolation. As friends grow up and move on, Tom and Anna develop an uneasy sense of not belonging.

Politically, “they and all their friends belonged to an imprecise left,” their intellectual horizons delineated by The Guardian and The New York Times. Relying on those sources, they attempt to find meaning in the refugee crisis that hit Berlin in 2015. With a million migrants from Syria and elsewhere pouring into Germany, they are moved to get involved and help out. They are, however, hopeless incompetents and their volunteer work at a soup kitchen is more hindrance than help. 

Latronico brilliantly captures their dawning realization that their involvement is motivated by virtue-signaling and an attempt to fill their spiritually empty lives. “They had glimpsed—within themselves and those around them—a flakiness and vanity they could not now unsee.” A move from Berlin to fashionable Lisbon fails to revitalize their earlier love of trendy urban living; ultimately, their ancestral place of origin beckons them. 

Latronico’s great skill is rendering this matter-of-fact, this-is-how-it-is descriptive chronology of Tom and Anna’s lives into something succinctly meaningful and telling. He is a detached observer, unsparingly exposing the couple without any partisanship whatsoever. He neither vindicates nor condemns them, but instead brilliantly lets their actions expose the shallowness of their directionless lives. Don’t let the fact that this book was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize put you off. It is an astonishingly perceptive and mature portrait of the way many Gen Zers now live their lives: as citizens of nowhere.

(Sean McGlynn)