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Not the book I thought it would be, but still an interesting and worthwhile read. Cohen explores several sets of friends whose bonds are close without passing over into romantic love. Her work illustrates how impoverished our language, legal structures, and social norms are when it comes to describing and honoring these types of bonds. The stories she tells demonstrate that deep friendship is possible and valuable, and just how hard people have worked to make it work. The payoff, in an enriched life that others may never fully understand, seems entirely worth it to all the people involved. The book may lead you to question some of the conventions which limit how we let others into our lives.

Miller's book is a good overview of the history of the gag rule, a story with complex parliamentary maneuvering that Miller tells with patience and good humor. He has mastered the intricacies that John Quincy Adams used to press the issue and those that Adams's opponents used to suppress the same. The book features many lengthy quotations to give a sense of the proceedings (and get a sense of Adams's acerbic wit), but the citation format will be frustrating to the serious researcher attempting to locate the materials.

Howard's history includes some good detail on individual cases and useful appendices, but interpretatively this book has been superseded by books such as Sean Kelley's American Slavers.

Late in the novel, one of the characters says that "Chosen family … sometimes grow closer in sympathy than any other" (page 227). I'm not sure if they would have said "chosen family" in the time period of the novel -- the phrase struck me as a modern one -- but there's no question that it is a major and poignant theme of the book, as the characters we meet struggle to survive during the period of the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. Phillips draws some wonderful characters, presents some incredibly harrowing but realistic scenes, and the ways in which these people coalesce into their chosen family is meaningful and consequential.