The world of the Britpop mega-group seethes with offstage mayhem, electrifying music, and intense sibling rivalry in this rollicking oral history. Bandmembers and brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher are joined by bandmates, associates, and relatives in recapping the group’s rise from Manchester obscurity to superstardom in the 1990s and 2000s thanks to their Beatles-meet-Sex Pistols sound. The account traces a classic rock ’n’ roll arc from mildly delinquent, working-class adolescence through obsessive rehearsals, grungy early gigs, breakout albums (Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory), frenzied tours, and nearly incessant ingestion of drugs. At the heart of the saga is the perpetual feuding between songwriter Noel’s sober devotion to the music and frontman Liam’s unruly appreciation for excess. The two regularly came to blows—sometimes over Liam’s habit of “walking off stage halfway through countless fucking gigs because he’d been on a bender,” in Noel’s exasperated telling—though it was their unique chemistry that made the band more than the sum of its parts (“When it all came together, in a venue or in a field.... We made people feel something... indefinable,” Noel recalls). Unvarnished, high-spirited, and full of pungent Mancunian eloquence (“It was biblical, man, it felt fucking biblical. All the rest of it is a load of bollocks really”), this captivates. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Opera singer McQuistin debuts with a perceptive and self-aware guide to recovering from alcoholism. The daughter of tenant farmers, McQuistin grew up in a depressed area of Scotland and began drinking at age 13 to escape childhood trauma and persistent self-loathing. Following a suicide attempt at age 19, an abusive relationship, and visits to the psychiatric ward, she was warned by a doctor that if she kept drinking she risked dying in her 20s (“I thought sobriety was for people who needed to get their life back on track, and I’d never actually been on it,” she remembers thinking). With those experiences as a springboard, she leads readers through the recovery process, from hitting rock bottom—which can be triggered by disaster or a more mundane moment “that finally gets your attention” but should be acted upon quickly—to grappling in early sobriety with the emotions that drinking had anesthetized and creating daily routines to build stability. McQuistin’s guidance is light on specifics and most useful in viscerally rendering the internal experience of addiction recovery (“Sometimes you can feel like there’s a stranger in you body, and it’s you. You maybe once believed you processed your trauma by obliterating it with alcohol... but that just leaves it frozen in time”). The author’s appealingly diaristic tone and nonjudgmental advice will help those hoping to break their addictions feel seen. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Barkan (The Prince) provides a searing chronicle of the political contortions that culminated in Donald Trump’s reelection. Barkan opens with the June 2024 New York congressional primary race between democratic-socialist incumbent Jamaal Bowman and moderate challenger George Latimer. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee—an organization “funded by right-wing Republican donors”—“unleashed nearly $15 million” to “obliterate” Bowman for describing events in Gaza as a genocide. For Barkan, the fate of Bowman is emblematic of its political moment, which he describes as a revanchist reaction to the progressive wave that was itself a reaction to the first Trump presidency. Barkan posits that the “social justice politics” of the left were effectively co-opted into a nastier form of “grievance politics” by the right, noting that Republicans had become “identity and language obsessed... whining about... female sports” and Israel’s “oppressed” status. Of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Barkan lays fault with the media for failing to report the truth. Indeed it’s the media that is subject to his harshest critique; he knocks the poll-driven “weathervane” politics that he says fueled the centrist backlash to progressivism, and skewers “the many ponderous New Yorker writers” and others whom he sees as legitimizing the overly polished style epitomized by Kamala Harris. More than the anti-progressive backlash, Barkan argues, it was Americans’ disgust with such disingenuous slickness that led to the “raw, crude, hilarious” Donald Trump’s reelection. Narrated with verve, wit, and spine, this is an essential view of the present moment. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The financial forces behind factory farming have grown powerful enough to silence industry whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and even federal inspectors, according to this troubling account. Journalist Potter (Green Is the New Red) provides a wealth of examples, among them a U.S. Department of Agriculture consumer safety inspector who reported to her supervisors that electric shocks were not actually rendering pigs unconscious before slaughter, and that the animals were illegally bleeding to death; she was “relieved of her duties, placed on close supervision, and assigned to another job.” Potter also analyzes the emergence of “ag-gag” laws, enacted in nearly half of U.S. states, which restrict reporting on factory farms—“even the sharing of undercover videos on social media”—and have led to journalists being tried as domestic terrorists. His reporting spotlights how these developments are endangering not just animal but also human and environmental welfare, including exacerbating global warming. Late in the book, he writes that he had nearly finished his account of “bearing witness” when the January 6 insurrection and the FBI’s limited response—which the agency blamed on being understaffed—“broke my brain,” as he had seen the Bureau’s vigorous, over-the-top prosecution of animal welfare advocates. From there, the book morphs into a fascinating, swirling meditation on law enforcement, rising authoritarianism, misinformation, climate change, and the global spread of ag-gag laws. Readers’ brains will also be broken. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The computer maker that once dominated China’s development into an industrial powerhouse is now dominated by China’s government, according to this insightful debut account. Financial Times reporter McGee recaps Apple’s 30-year process of shuttering its original American factories and outsourcing production to Chinese contract manufacturers. It’s partly a saga of greed as Apple took advantage of Asia’s lax regulations and its own bargaining power—Apple forced one firm to sign a production contract without reading it—to ruthlessly cut costs. But Apple also invested hundreds of billions of dollars in its Chinese suppliers, taught them state-of-the-art techniques, and brought them its own engineers and high-tech machinery. Apple eventually located most of its production in China, which, McGee contends, made it hostage to Beijing’s whims. The company appreciated the government’s policy of crushing labor unions and muting bad press but had to bow to demands to compromise customers’ data privacy and accommodate censorship. McGee’s perceptive account presents a cogent rethink of Apple’s role in the global economy, painting the company as the de facto proprietor and active manager of China’s advanced electronics sector. He also makes the potentially dry subject of global supply chains riveting, with epic narratives of bleeding-edge product design and colorful portraits of larger-than-life leaders. The result is a fascinating analysis of how global capitalism conquered China—and vice versa. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Condé Nast magazines “defin[ed] our modern notions of class... and taste,” according to this exhaustive debut history from New York Times reporter Grynbaum. The company’s namesake, Condé Montrose Nast, worked his way up through the magazine world and began amassing his empire in 1909 when he took control of Vogue, which was then a niche publication with an old-money readership. “Nast recognized,” Grynbaum writes, “that social aspiration” could be “lucratively exploited.” He targeted Vogue toward not just the wealthy but also to those who wanted to be, and in just a few years the magazine became a “global tastemaker.” Samuel I. Newhouse bought the business in 1959, and Newhouse’s son, S.I. Newhouse Jr., took over in 1975. Grynbaum describes the ensuing shake-up of the magazine industry as he revived Vanity Fair and acquired rival publications including the New Yorker. Throughout, Grynbaum digs into the inner workings of Condé Nast in exquisite detail, tracing the career of editor Tina Brown, who helmed both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and shedding light on the “accusations of racial insensitivity” at Bon Appétit in 2020. Grynbaum makes clear that at its height, the culture of Condé Nast was one of exclusionary wealth, where “budgets were for the unimaginative.” It’s a definitive account of a media titan. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lit Hub columnist Kreizman (Slaughterhouse 90210) bucks the stereotypical trend of growing more conservative with age in this fierce and witty collection. Across the essays, Kreizman finds that “in a country plagued by problems in which individual grit is not nearly enough to prevail over rotten systems, working hard begins to feel more like a Sisyphean task than a practical solution.” In “She’s Lost Control Again,” the author describes her increasing disillusionment with America’s healthcare system as she got older and her efforts to finance strangers’ insulin bills on GoFundMe. In “I Wanna Be Rich,” she outlines the decline of the New York City department store Barneys (founded by her great-great-uncle), where employee welfare “began to seem like an afterthought” before the store went bankrupt and was “sold off for parts” in 2019. “Copaganda and Me” finds Kreizman considering how TV shows and films from the 1980s and ’90s “unceasingly told us that the police would bravely save the day no matter what was wrong, and they would also look cool doing it.” Kreizman tempers her anger with wryness and lots of Xennial nostalgia, and while her viewpoint is firmly on the left, many of her frustrations at the failures of the neoliberal status quo will resonate across the political spectrum. These sharp and entertaining essays deliver the goods. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Working Mother contributor Gaddis (Feng Shui Mommy) helps parents identify their child-rearing values in this instructive manual. A well-tailored approach to parenting should address discipline, schedule-making, and communication style in a way that directly reflects one’s principles, Gaddis contends. For instance, a household committed to environmentalism might create rules around recycling and composting, and families who prioritize compassion could institute a no name-calling policy. Elsewhere, Gaddis encourages parents to lean on intuition as a guide when receiving unsolicited advice; for example, one might tune into physical signals such as stomach pain when considering counsel that goes against their best judgment. These skills, she notes, can be shared with children to help them do the same. Though Gaddis advises readers to do what works best for their families, she also draws on studies to help steer parents away from outdated and potentially harmful practices such as corporal punishment, citing possible connections between spanking and negative outcomes including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Writing prompts and links to guided meditation exercises are included in each chapter and will help readers bring Gaddis’s tips off the page. Parents will find no shortage of worthwhile guidance here. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this sparkling joint memoir, ex-wives Russo and Youngs cover miscarriage, divorce, eviction, and their enduring love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which they recapped together on their popular podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer. With conversational prose and cheeky chapter titles like “If the Apocalypse Comes, Start a Podcast,” the duo parallels Buffy Summers’s seven-season arc with their own, discussing how her perseverance informed their determination to stay in each other’s lives after they broke up, and how developing an episode around the Buffy musical “Once More with Feeling” took their creative partnership to new heights. With hand-drawn graphics and sometimes-goofy, sometimes-moving Buffy-themed song lyrics written by Youngs, the book has the feel of a shared diary. Surprisingly candid accounts of the authors’ relationship trials and triumphs sit alongside shop-talk nuggets for the podcast’s fans. The result is a tender ode to the pleasures of TV fandom that doubles as a moving account of what happens after a romance ends. Illus. Agent: Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Lucas debuts with a bracing work of true crime. CashApp developer Bob Lee (1979–2023) was known to his friends and colleagues as “Crazy Bob,” an indefatigable worker and partier who also managed to be a devoted husband and father. That reputation had waned somewhat by April 2023, when a divorced Lee was stabbed to death underneath the Bay Bridge in the early morning hours. Local news and social media exploded with speculation that spun the tragedy as an indicator of San Francisco’s supposed descent into anarchy, but evidence soon emerged that the culprit was a man named Nima Momeni—a fellow techie who knew Lee personally. In addition to unpacking Momeni’s motives, which involved a relationship between Lee and his sister, Lucas paints a wry portrait of the Golden City (“You can walk past the Zodiac killer and not even know it—they never caught him”) and dives deep into the struggles with drugs like cocaine and ketamine that Bob and his ilk had. The resulting narrative is rigorously reported, well written, and difficult to put down. It’s a memorable depiction of the seamy side of Silicon Valley. Agent: Mark Tauber, Watermark. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink