Bestseller Glaude (Begin Again) offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries. Glaude begins by asserting that it is “dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious” as America, particularly as it is founded on an inherent contradiction. America is both a “nation of laws” dedicated to the “equal standing of each individual” but also “a white Republic,” he notes, and it is at moments when the tension between the two “becomes unbearably felt” that “white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it.” (He cites both the Civil War and “Donald Trump’s ascendance” as examples.) But “history isn’t fate,” Glaude argues; it’s rather a “repository” that allows us “to act today with more than luck.” It is in this spirit that Glaude aims to excavate “the usefulness of the past, however ugly.” He begins in 1776 with the story of captured fugitive Moses Gordon, who “chose to drown himself rather than submit again to slavery,” and, from there, visits several other anniversaries, including the centennial celebration in 1876, which was conducted “as violence choked the life out of Reconstruction,” and the 150th celebration in 1926, which arrived during the resurgence of the KKK. The upshot isn’t just a searing revisionist history but a stirring view of America as a place “worth fighting for.” (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wyman (The Verge) upends myths about the rise of civilization in this profound and enchanting study. He begins by noting that “in the last several decades, our grasp of humanity’s distant past has been utterly transformed” thanks to a technological revolution in the archaeological sciences. Lidar scanning, ground-penetrating radar, and DNA analysis “have generated so much data” that most people “have yet to fully grasp just how much our basic story of humanity’s past has changed.” The traditional story, he suggests, is that of “an orderly sequence... from foraging to farming... to city-dwelling.” Recent research, however, shows that major developments like farming, permanent villages, and state structures were invented independently, again and again, around the globe. This revelation “points toward a new... more variable understanding of the human past” as one of kinetic, continuous social experimentation. “For every success story,” Wyman notes, there were “just as many who came, thrived, and then died out,” like the people who built Stonehenge, who “effectively disappeared from the genetic... record.” Thus, the distant past presents a series of case studies, and, as “our species faces immense challenges in the future,” he argues, humanity must attend to these examples more carefully, since “we cannot afford to waste the very insights that might help us survive once more.” In a narrative at once demystifying and awe-inspiring, Wyman vividly conjures the distant past while at the same time making it seem like a window into the future. It’s a remarkable achievement. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this phenomenal meditation on food’s role in Black history and culture, anthropologist Reese (Black Food Matters) shares guiding principles gleaned from Black social gatherings that can help combat hunger and food insecurity. Asserting that “the values we practice and the rituals we build in our everyday lives hold keys to how to transform our food system,” she draws on interviews, oral histories, and her own experiences to make a series of tangible, elegant connections between Black tradition, community values, and on-the-ground activism. An interview with a pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore about his efforts to plant a community garden expands into a history of Black agrarian traditions and overview of solutions for the food deserts that disproportionately impact Black neighborhoods. The role of food at funerals merges into reflections on grief, care, and how “reciprocity” is a fundamental community value that “requires an openness to give and receive.” The author’s own experience organizing food distribution and housing in Texas after Winter Storm Uri caused a massive power outage in 2021 leads to a probing discussion of the differences between mutual aid and charity. Ultimately, Reese hopes to inspire readers to rekindle their sense of connection with others and “submit to being transformed in the process.” It’s a delicacy for the heart, mind, and soul. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Finance journalist O’Connell (The Broke and Beautiful Life) delivers a rigorous, incisive examination of how the corporate world simultaneously demands and punishes women’s ambition. The gender pay gap and leadership deficit, she argues, aren’t products of women’s insufficient confidence or negotiating skills but of structural forces that levy a compounding cost—financial, personal, and professional—on women, which she calls “the ambition penalty.” Drawing on survey data and behavioral economics, she debunks the notion that women can close systemic gaps through personal comportment and documents how gender biases reassert inequality even as women accumulate credentials. In addition to presenting policy solutions such as affordable childcare and universal paid family leave, she offers scripts for changing workplace culture from within. For example, she encourages readers to reframe stereotypes like “women are just less confident and more risk averse” to “women face more consequences for the risks they take.” With punchy and accessible prose, O’Connell moves fluidly between academic citations and vivid real-world examples, though she occasionally leaves the methodology behind key studies underexamined. Still, this is a persuasive accounting of the costs women face for daring to want more. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Critic and essayist LaBarge debuts with a singular mix of memoir and criticism exploring the futility of language and narrative in the aftermath of trauma. In 2009, 25-year-old LaBarge, her parents, and sister were vacationing on an island in the Caribbean when six men entered their rental home with guns and knives, ransacked the house, and held them hostage for eight hours. They survived, but the random attack fractured LaBarge’s sense of time and self. She quickly learned people don’t want to hear the details but merely “the good story,” the abbreviated version that doesn’t make anyone too uneasy. Adequately describing such an event is impossible anyway, she writes: “As you speak the story becomes something else and the reality falls away to a place more horrible, less utterable.” She turns to books and films to understand her experience, learning from Joan Didion’s memoirs on grief that magical thinking—the act of finding signals and signs in everyday life—is a form of survival. In It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, she finds characters attempting to “reintegrate into normal society after a brush with fate.” Poignant textual interpretations combine with rigorous analyses of psychology and philosophy to reveal the unrelenting pull of the past. It’s an evocative quest to find meaning in the inexplicable. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Ferrer (Cuba: An American History) traces the impact of her family’s migration in this wrenching account. In 1963, less than a year after Ferrer’s birth in Cuba, her mother fled to Mexico City on the first leg of a journey to join Ferrer’s father in New York. She left behind Ferrer’s older half brother, Poly, because of a dispute with the boy’s father. Though their contact was limited, Ferrer grew devoted to Poly, naming a doll after him and occasionally calling him on the phone. They were on different tracks, however: Ferrer enrolled at Vassar, while Poly struggled to finish grade school. After arriving in the U.S. in 1980, Poly came to live with Ferrer and her parents in New Jersey, but proved an angry presence who “got into fights, stabbed people, beat me” and “threatened to kill the whole family, his girlfriend, and then himself.” Ferrer muses on the divergent paths their lives took—Poly died of hypertension in 2020 after being diagnosed with schizophrenia—without judgment or excessive psychologizing. Instead, she braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement. Agent: Gail Ross, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Celebrity stylist Walsh debuts with an empowering if overstuffed guide to developing a personal style that reflects one’s truest self. She urges readers to tap into how they want to feel and dress to achieve that by, for example, picking clothes based on the vibes one would like to channel (those who want to feel bold should make audacious choices at “the edge of your fashion comfort zone”), and conducting a closet overhaul to eliminate garments that “no longer serve your highest self or current intentions.” Readers can then focus on expanding their wardrobe by organizing a clothing swap with friends and putting together fresh combinations of items already in their closet. Walsh’s advice is most valuable when it’s concrete, but can go off track in sections that have little to do with clothing (like creating a morning aromatherapy routine) or feel more esoteric, as when she offers guidance on dressing to activate one’s energy centers (readers can connect to their “root chakra,” which reinforces feelings of stability, by wearing “chunky boots—think lug soles or sturdy block heels”—that connect you to the ground”). Still, those willing to wade through the excess will find some solid pieces of fashion advice. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this riveting real-life thriller, journalist Ireland (Churchill & Son) traces how a group of Russian spies managed to infiltrate Leon Trotsky’s inner circle. Ireland begins with Trotsky’s banishment to Siberia in 1928, which was the first of a series of exiles that would each see a physically ailing but politically fiery Trotsky pushed farther and farther away from Russia, eventually landing him in Mexico. Against the narrative of Trotsky’s banishments, Ireland presents the parallel stories of the Russian spies who hounded, undermined, and surveilled him, including one who grew so close as to become the publisher of Trotsky’s newsletter. Ireland dissects the techniques used by Soviet intelligence to recruit and groom spies to join Trotsky’s circle, while also noting how, in a topsy-turvy twist, “looking after Trotsky” carried its own dangers—just opening his mail was risky, as the packages could contain bombs. Ultimately, the narrative begins to swirl around Soviet recruit Ramon Mercador, a young Spanish aristocrat who grew close enough to Trotsky to know where the switch for his alarm system was in his study, meaning he was able to block it with his body when, on orders from Moscow, he infamously struck Trotsky in the head with an ice pick on August 21, 1940. Cinematic and suspenseful, this vividly depicts the yearslong tightening of the noose around a brilliant and hunted man. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Essayist Nolan’s fervid follow-up to Don’t Let It Get You Down channels the author’s fury at the idea of letting her daughter become trapped by the same stultifying strictures of womanhood that have ensnared Nolan herself. Asserting that a lifetime of attempts at being a “good woman” haven’t led to any of womanhood’s promised payoffs, Nolan refutes the idea that there can be any sort of healthy, fulfilling acquiescence to stereotypically womanly aspirations within the patriarchal system. “All my life I have tried to be a good woman.... I’ve tried, in other words, to capitulate.... I wish I had refused, because compliance... did not work, which is to say, compliance did not make me happy, or accepted, or whole.” Becoming a mother, in particular, Nolan represents as being “sold a bill of goods,” as she found that men, and male-dominated society at large, relegate mothers to the status of helpmeets and nonpersons, while simultaneously denying the genuinely sacred nature of motherhood. Nolan finds similar issues attendant to sexuality, due to an inescapable, overarching system of violence against women. And all these inequities, she notes, are compounded by race (“To be a... woman who is self-possessed and self-actualized... is to be a villain. Double that for... women of color”). It adds up to a blistering assertion that there can be no true equality for women under patriarchy. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this smart guide to creating equitable workplaces, McCollum (In Her Own Voice), CEO of Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on women’s advancement in the workforce, explores how businesses flounder when they adhere to rigid gender stereotypes. The solution is to engage men in efforts to make workplace cultures fair and inclusive, she argues: “Instead of calling them out, we need to invite them in as partners to embrace new, more flexible norms across gender.” According to the author, both men and women chafe at being confined to gendered norms in the workplace, including the expectation that men be competitive and aggressive while women remain warm and vulnerable. One antidote suggested by McCollum is to buddy up with a partner to cross-promote each other’s work; doing so can help women avoid the appearance of self-promotion, which can render them dislikable, and makes men look generous. Gender-neutral parental leave allows both men and women to take time off to care for a newborn, preventing either from being stigmatized for stepping away from the job. Expanding the number of people on a leadership team to increase diversity (instead of making people fight for inclusion in an exclusive group) can lead to more innovative decision-making. Shrewd advice and enlightening anecdotes make this an actionable manual for workplace inclusivity. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink