Kirkus Reviews • Best Historical Fiction of 2019 The Millions • "Most Anticipated" Books of 2019 Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. Ray Takahashi’s return from the battlefields of World War II should have been triumphant, but the fragrant, budding orchards of his rural Northern California home hide a secret that has destroyed everything he holds dear. With his hair now trimmed short and his newly broadened shoulders filling in his uniform, nineteen-year-old Ray approaches the small house in which he grew up, tucked behind rows of plum trees he planted with his father, only to find it occupied by a family he has does not know, a white family. Two decades later, John Frazier adjusts to his own homecoming. Detoxing from a dope addiction acquired in the barracks of Vietnam, yet still aching to write the next great American novel, he struggles to silence the phantoms that have trailed him from the muddy jungles. Frazier’s ambitions are put on hold when he finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. From the halcyon days of pre–World War II Newcastle, when fruit trees glowed like jewels, through the dusty, cramped nights of Tule Lake, and the wayward years of the post-Vietnam era, Phantoms weaves the splintered stories of two families as they seek an impossible closure. A jarring examination of the personal cost of American exceptionalism and imperialism, and the ghosts that haunt us today, this saga affirms Christian Kiefer’s expanding place in contemporary literature.

Reproduction of the original: The Phantom World by Augustin Calmet

Many people today are entranced by the idea of speaking with the dead or else immersing themselves in vampire tales and wonder. What most people don't realize is how old and revered these stories really are. Within this work Calmet attempts to show where the idea of spirits and apparitions comes from and then within the second part of the main work where the idea and history of the vampire itself comes from. This work simply is not just a history text of ancient religious beliefs but also explains the thinking and beliefs that surrounded the spirits and vampires in the day and age when Calmet wrote this work.

In March 1933, in one of his first acts as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a bank holiday throughout the United States. Considered by many to be a bold step to curb the mounting bank crisis, the decree closed banks in all 48 states and overseas territories, putting money out of reach of citizens, businesses and all levels of government. This narrative history recounts and explains the economic, financial and political backgrounds of the banking panic, arguing that the holiday was not only unnecessary but actually damaging to the economy. The holiday did, however, provide Roosevelt with the momentum to push through a series of historic reforms that remade the federal government. This revisionist work not only reveals the circumstances around the panic but debunks numerous myths that have clung to it ever since.