Crime novelist Leon (the Guido Brunetti series) serves up a wide-ranging collection of poignant and amusing essays about her writing process and artistic influences. Some entries are wonderfully breezy: in “With a View of San Marco,” Leon spars with a noisy neighbor in Venice; in “Jack and Jill,” she imagines various literary analyses of the eponymous nursery rhyme (“The Marxists would no doubt point to the inevitability of historical processes that lead to the auto-destruction of crowned heads”). Elsewhere, Leon reflects on authors and episodes that have shaped her own writing. She recounts a formative trip to Iran, waxes poetic about the virtues of Ruth Rendell’s murder mysteries (“Rendell understands most things better than most other writers; the one thing she understands best is evil”), and paints pointillist portraits of an eccentric diamond dealer, whose insights informed a handful of Leon’s novels. The essays are succinct and narrowly focused, with little in the way of formal advice for aspiring writers, but Leon’s humor and narrative economy offer their own rewards. Even readers unfamiliar with Leon’s fiction will be delighted by these dispatches.(Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Filmmakers Loudenberg and Wholey debut with a thorough if salacious account of the marriage between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the vitriolic online response and lawsuits that followed their divorce. Depp and Heard met in 2008 during casting for the Depp-produced film The Rum Diary. Soon he was buying her lavish gifts, including a replica of the film’s beach bar. The couple married in 2015, and their relationship was filled with substance use, verbal abuse, and physical altercations that resulted in Heard filing for divorce and a restraining order. Though their divorce was settled quickly in 2016, two subsequent trials brought notoriety: a 2018 libel suit in England after The Sun published an article calling Depp a “wife beater,” and an American jury trial, televised live in 2022, in which both parties sued each other for defamation. Loudenberg and Wholey incorporate rigorous research, but their analysis of the wider societal implications can get overwhelmed by tawdry details, which undermines their stated objective to “complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround” the case. Readers may well wind up feeling complicit in the “celebrity industrial complex” the book is meant to impugn. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biological traits can be viewed as “whydunits,” according to this thought-provoking study from journalist Stipp (A Most Elegant Equation). He attempts to answer nine “naive/brilliant” questions about why certain life forms are the way they are, and details the impacts various scientific discoveries have had on human life. In a chapter about why skunks smell so bad, readers learn that the creatures’ stinky spray “taps into an ancient, olfactory loathing mechanism that evolved before skunks themselves appeared.” That insight leads to an investigation of “stink bombs” as a means of warfare, as in the Office of Strategic Service’s WWII-era “Who, Me?” project, which attempted to embarrass and distract Nazi soldiers with an awful smell. Elsewhere, Stipp explains how ducks sleep (often with one eye open), how octopuses dream (they have nightmares, which scientists previously thought only happened in warm-blooded creatures), and what happens when a spider on drugs spins a web (caffeine makes for seriously deformed webs). With wit and flair, Stipp proves that “familiar things we tend to ignore in our daily haste are often more interesting than they seem.” This has charm to spare. Agent: Lisa Adams, Garamond Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Spouses Cain—a journalist—and Greenlee—an attorney—debut with a chilling account of the murders of two middle school girls in the Midwest. On Valentine’s Day 2017, the naked, bloodied bodies of 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German were found in the woods outside Delphi, Ind., near the Monon High Bridge. At first, the only clue was a grainy iPhone video that appeared to capture an unidentified man approaching the girls. It took authorities five and a half years to arrest and charge Richard Allen, a middle-aged CVS manager who had severe mental health issues, with the crime. Cain and Greenlee meticulously detail the clerical errors that led authorities to overlook Allen for years, the social media fascination with the case, and Allen’s fraught 2024 trial, which drew skepticism from true crime hobbyists who doubted his guilt. By the time the narrative arrives at Allen’s conviction, Cain and Greenlee have painted a robust, emotionally exhausting portrait of a tight-knit community ravaged by tragedy and the internet’s intersection with modern murder investigations. This will get under readers’ skin. Agent: Gideon Pine, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

McDonald (Unschooled), a school reform advocate, cheerleads microschools in this upbeat survey. Intending her narrative to serve as a guidebook for school-hunting parents as well as “education entrepreneurs,” McDonald presents strategies gleaned from her profile subjects, including New Jerseyan Jill Perez, who homeschooled her four children during Covid by joining “pods” with other families. The model the parent group created—with “abundant outside time before focusing on academic content”—attracted neighborhood interest, and led to Perez starting a microschool grounded in a similar approach. McDonald dispenses advice for entrepreneurs about how to run a profitable microschool, which is no small feat given the intentionally low enrollment; the key, she says, is to franchise. For parents, she also notes that startup microschools are generally cheaper than more established “unconventional” brands like Montessori. Though the project being advocated here can come off a bit like upper-class secessionism, some of McDonald’s anecdotes offer hope even to the hoi polloi—when one Arizona public school allowed a franchised microschool to operate on its premises, it gave the public school kids a taste of a small classroom experience (just 10 students instead of the normal 30) that was so positive some reported having their entire approach to school shift for the better. This offers rich pedagogical insights, even for educators dead set against privatization. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist and native New Yorker Azzarone (Heaven on the Hudson) offers a joyful and informative tribute to the city’s waterworks. In her introduction, Azzarone, who wastes no time making her love of fountains known (“Some say God is the fountain of all being”), traces the lineage of water-conveying architecture from Rome’s aqueducts to Versailles’s gardens to New York’s myriad parks, where fountains function as “a source of serenity, quenching a thirst for quiet” amid the city’s tumult. The 70 fountains Azzarone surveys, when not strictly decorative, are largely intended to honor heroes and famous figures (or, in one case, “hardworking horses”). Among them are a Bowling Green fountain that has been replaced numerous times over the past 180 years but, remarkably, still has the same fence, and the fountain at the center of Columbus Circle, which also happens to be “the point from which official highway distances from the city are measured.” She also spotlights functional fountains like the water troughs (for the city’s aforementioned hardworking horses) that were once prevalent, a few of which still dot Central Park. Each entry is illustrated with an elegant snapshot by photographer Robert F. Rodriguez; a particularly exuberant one depicts kids dancing in the jets of Brooklyn’s Domino Park fountain, which shoot straight out of the sidewalk. The result is an enamoring and enthusiastic ode to one small slice of the Big Apple. Illus. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

“We need to talk about how we talk about mental health,” asserts psychotherapist Nucci in his penetrating if flawed debut. Tackling therapy-related myths popular on social media, he dismantles the idea that everyone needs to go to therapy—a belief that isn’t intrinsically harmful but can become so when it draws resources from those in real need of intervention; explains why expressing feelings isn’t always wise, especially for those prone to disproportionate emotional responses; and clarifies that not everyone gets depressed and anxious (pathologizing sadness and nervousness can make those normal emotions seem scarier than they are). In refuting these notions, the author sometimes stumbles into what sound like professional gripes with individual mental health influencers or fails to adequately addresses the issues involved. For example, an attempt to debunk the idea that all awkward people are neurodivergent devolves into a critique of how neurodivergence has been wrongly classified as a political and social movement. Still, many of the book’s core points—that it’s problematic when therapeutic jargon gets warped by the public, that not every therapeutic technique works for every patient, and that symptom overlap makes self-diagnosis a challenge—have merit. The result is a thought-provoking if uneven look at the challenges and complexities of a the public discourse around mental health. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Matyszak (A Walk Through Ancient Rome) provides an appealing and deft compendium of fables, legends, and tall tales that ancient Romans believed about their own civilization. Some of what Matyszak conveys is well known, though surprising in its details, like the story of Romulus and Remus. As Matyszak notes, it was Romulus’s spotting of 12 flying vultures that determined the gods favored his proposed location for a city over that of his twin brother Remus. Throughout, Matyszak aims to show how Rome’s legends not only served as metaphors or lessons but yielded real historical consequences, as when Caesar came to power based on a legend that he was descended from a Trojan hero. Later, Brutus killed Caesar because of a different legend that his own ancestor had once rescued Rome from a tyrant. “Not only can we not understand Romans without understanding their legends,” Matyszak writes, “but we cannot understand Western culture either.” Full of intrigue, romance, and human struggle, and marvelously illustrated in a two-tone black and ochre palette, this is a delight. (May)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Classroom diversity, specifically the integration of more white students into predominantly Black schools, does not lead to better outcomes for Black students, according to this disquieting debut study. Education scholar Freidus focuses on New York schools that, due to gentrification, are experiencing an influx of white students. Drawing on interviews and her own immersive ethnographic observations conducted over nearly six years, she finds that diversity and integration—especially via an increase in the proportion of white students—are treated by teachers, administrators, and parents as a de facto solution for racial inequality, and yet this is emphatically not the end result. Instead, Freidus observes that Black students’ experience of diversity entails a “hidden curriculum” that “reinforces deeply rooted [racial and class] assumptions about [them] and their families.” For instance, she notes several instances in which Black and white students with similar behavioral problems received disproportionate treatment, resulting partly from educators’ assumptions that the white student was more likely to be from a good family. At the same time, diversity does offer benefits for students—mostly in terms of enrichment, or new experiences—but as Freidus persuasively demonstrates, solving inequality is not one of them. This urgent wake-up call is a must-read for educators. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Europe likely aided Israel during its 1970s campaign of assassinations of suspected members of the Palestinian resistance, according to this meticulous account from international relations scholar Guttmann (The Origins of International Counterterrorism). Drawing her conclusions from encrypted communications she discovered in a Swiss archive, which had been circulated within a network of Western European intelligence agencies known as the Club de Berne, Guttmann shows that Mossad seems to have been reliant on these communications when selecting targets for its international assassination campaign in the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre (when Israeli athletes were killed by the Palestinian resistance group Black September). The assassinations themselves are recounted with the flair of a prime-time police procedural: one is described as “daring” and “spectacular,” while another is “taken from the plot of a James Bond film.” Guttmann also levies “charges” against each target in order to “substantiate the claim” that the assassination campaign “mainly targeted key operatives” in the Palestinian resistance, though she doesn’t always succeed, as some of the pretexts seem flimsier than others. After the 1973 Lillehammer affair, in which Mossad mistakenly assassinated the wrong man, Israel faced public backlash over the killings; however, as Guttmann notes, Club de Berne relations did not falter—in fact the network expanded, indicating acceptance of Mossad’s operation. It’s an unsettling revelation of Western intelligence agencies’ extrajudicial activities. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink