Social psychologist Carter’s encouraging debut how-to helps readers understand “the ways you have been socialized to see (or not to see) racial bias, how to unlearn those impulses, and how to bring others along on that journey.” Drawing on her experiences as a corporate DEI consultant, Carter presents actionable steps for talking to colleagues, friends, family, and children about racial bias, with a particular emphasis on how to broach the subject with white people, who typically learn about racism later in life, detect it less often, and feel ill-equipped to discuss it. Carter suggests some of this reticence can be countered by fostering a more general “growth mindset” that includes “shedding an ego-protecting façade and embracing... vulnerability.” She also provides helpful tools for identifying and calling out microaggressions and decentering whiteness in everyday interactions. While Carter’s tone is sometimes reminiscent of corporate HR training, she makes several antiestablishment points, including debunking the notion that each generation is naturally becoming less racist (she cites studies showing that, without education on the topic, white children are more likely to learn racism socially) and arguing against the “business case” for diversity—i.e., that a diverse workplace is better for the bottom line. Instead, Carter refreshingly declares that “even if ‘doing diversity’ was bad for business, I would advocate for it anyway.” Readers will feel galvanized. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Financial institutions—often at the behest of government officials—are freezing bank accounts, cancelling credit cards, and denying payment processing to penalize people for controversial speech and politics, according to this hard-hitting debut exposé. Reitman, cofounder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recaps recent examples, starting with PayPal’s blocking of donations to FPF’s campaign to free imprisoned military whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Other examples include the “banking blockade” of Wikileaks by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, at the instigation of Sen. Joe Lieberman, which reduced Wikileak’s revenue by 95%; PayPal’s cutoff of Consortium News for its skeptical coverage of the war in Ukraine; and PayPal and Venmo’s cessation of payment processing to online Persian poetry courses run by a Detroit-based Instagrammer on the vague possibility that they might run afoul of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Reitman explores the Kafkaesque character of debanking measures: customers usually get no notice or appeal and often are put on blacklists that trash their credit ratings. Her cogent recommendations include requiring transparency about accounts that are being closed and legislation to ban financial penalties for legal speech and political actions. Some of Reitman’s judgments are open to debate—how “chilling” is it really that Visa dropped Pornhub for fear of lawsuits from child pornography victims? Still, it’s an incisive call for action against the collusions of big money and big government. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

With this quirky and informative account, screenwriter Brooke-Hitching (The Most Interesting Book in the World) veers off the beaten path to explore the strangest corners of music history. He covers some of the world’s most bizarre instruments, including the largest: the Great Stalacpipe Organ, which comprises a series of caves whose stalactites can be struck by mallets to produce different notes; and the pyrophone, a 19th-century “internal combustion organ” that used blasts of flame in glass tubes to make sounds. The weird concerts described—many of which still take place—include the Ice Musical Festival Norway, where visitors from around the world watch musicians play ice harps, fiddles, and drums, and performances by the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, whose members create impromptu instruments from raw vegetables and later blend them into a soup for the audience. Elsewhere, Brooke-Hitchings unearths such historical oddities as 15th-century French composer Baude Cordier’s sheet music, which twisted lines of notes to match “the theme of the composition,” and hoaxes like a series of Haydn sonatas “rediscovered” in the 1990s. Enriched by a colorful array of reproduced sheet music, photos, and illustrations, and spanning continents and centuries, this is a witty, fun, and often jaw-dropping tour of the many outlandish ways humans have made music. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Therapist and former Love on the Spectrum star Partlow blends clinical expertise with her lived experience for this clear-eyed debut guide to understanding autism. She disputes framings of the condition as either a “superpower” or a character flaw, explaining how the developmental condition spans a broad spectrum and demands highly personalized forms of support and management. She unpacks the challenges those on the spectrum face with communication, sensory over- or under-stimulation, and changes to routine, outlining possible fixes like augmentative communication devices, environmental modifications, and goal recalibration, each of which is meant to reduce distress, increase autonomy, and improve quality of life (rather than hew to neurotypical developmental benchmarks). Partlow does especially valuable work in drawing attention to challenges faced by autistic populations often marginalized in public discourse, including nonspeaking autistic people who require significant, lifelong support and who are often obscured in favor of highly verbal autistic people overrepresented on social media. The result is a compassionate, pragmatic resource for parents, educators, and caregivers looking to better understand the condition. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this fresh reconsideration, Stanford history professor Riskin (The Restless Clock) reevaluates the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 18th-century French naturalist who was castigated for his claim that organisms’ acquired characteristics can be passed down to their offspring. Rejecting his family’s wish that he become a priest, Lamarck joined the French army during the Seven Years’ War. While stationed in Provence, he discovered his love of plants and began studying botany. Riskin takes readers through Lamarck’s discoveries, particularly “the idea that living things continually create and recreate themselves, one another, and the world around them.” Seen as dismissive of God and divine creation, his ideas were largely rejected until nearly two centuries later with the emergence of epigenetics, the study of how behaviors and environments can cause heritable changes in how genes are expressed. Riskin also highlights Lamarck’s many other contributions to science, including his coining of the term biology and development of a classification system for cloud formations. Effectively explaining how her subject’s thoughts on evolution were twisted by his detractors into a caricature of what he originally intended, Riskin concludes that, in many ways, “Lamarck was right.” Historians and scientists will find much to savor. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

As her 20s come to an end, actor and screenwriter David (No One Asked for This) reflects on the absurdities of contemporary adulthood in this hilarious essay collection. Feeling the pressure to have life figured out by 30, she spends her 29th year trying (and failing) to end a decade-long situationship, find a hobby that gets her off her phone, cure her neuroses through self-care rituals, make friends who are emotionally mature, and finally decide if she wants kids. Throughout, she pokes fun at herself for being a nepo baby (her dad is comedian Larry David) and shows how the internet has exacerbated her anxiety and depression. Frustrated by the obligation to find “the right partner,” she skewers the “romantic-advice-industrial complex” of influencers who dole out unhelpful, conflicting relationship guidance. When someone tweets she looks like “Nathan Fielder with a wig on,” she spirals and obsessively researches nose types online. She attempts to get out of the house and escape the internet’s grip, only to find herself at an “influencer gym” surrounded by people driven by their social media following. Sardonic and self-deprecating (“My body is not a temple. It is more like a loan shark, constantly holding my mind by the ankles, over a balcony”), David reveals how modern society has made growing up a harrowing, all-consuming worry. This is relatable company for anyone afraid they wasted their 20s. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Late civil rights leader Lawson, who died in 2024, offers an engrossing behind-the-scenes look at his work organizing nonviolent resistance in this posthumous memoir coauthored with journalist Yellin (Our Mothers’ War). Born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1928 and descended from a line of Methodist ministers, Lawson recalls being outraged by racism and called by God to “challenge... hate” as early as age four. The chronological account gathers steam during Lawson’s yearlong stint in federal prison for refusing to register for the Korean War draft in 1951 and his subsequent studies of nonviolent protest during three years in India and Africa as a missionary. After returning to the U.S. in 1958, Lawson led nonviolent workshops for groups including the Little Rock Nine, the Birmingham Freedom Riders, and participants in the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. While the memoir primarily serves as a humble, meticulous record of Lawson’s leadership in the 1960s and ’70s, the final act offers a fascinating glimpse of his more recent work with Los Angeles’s labor and immigrant rights movements. It adds up to a soul-stirring testament to the transformative power of “leading with love.” Photos. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Aevitas Creative Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

This robust reference guide from Kabatchnik (Murder in the West End), a retired theater professor, spotlights the crime dramas that appeared on Broadway and international stages from 1900 to 1930. The so-called “bloody Broadway era” was set in motion by director William Gillette, whose four-act adaptation of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle premiered in 1899 and ushered in a wave of melodramatic plays filled with “convoluted plots, wild happenings, humorous interludes, one-dimensional characters, flamboyant villains, and sensational cliffhangers.” Among them were heart-pounders such as 1902’s Old Sleuth, about a Manhattan gumshoe who saves a lady in distress from a wrongful accuser, and 1914’s On Trial, which was set in a courtroom during a two-day murder trial and helped popularize cinematic effects like flashbacks. By 1925, conventional dramas waned as playwrights began to dissect the psychological underpinnings of crime, with Eugene O’ Neill’s Desire Under the Elms investigating themes of “avarice, incest, and infanticide.” Kabatchnik’s selection of plays is comprehensive and packed with detailed analysis, trivia, and insights into how the featured productions reflected the times (“If a particularly horrible murder excited the public,” playwright Owen Davis once quipped, “we had it dramatized and on the stage usually before anyone knew who had been guilty of the crime”). Dedicated theater fans will want this on their bookshelves. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Johns Hopkins musicology professor Celenza (Jazz Italian Style) offers an engrossing history of how music has intersected with American politics, policy, and culture. She covers how the law has shaped the musical landscape, citing the 1991 U.S. district court ruling that unauthorized sampling constituted copyright infringement—undercutting “the communicative power of rap,” a genre reliant on layering different sounds—and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which led to the deregulation of radio station ownership, privileging “nationally syndicated content” over “local voices and music styles.” On the flip side, music also furthered broader political efforts by both the government—one 1950s State Department project sent “jazz ambassadors” like Dizzy Gillespie abroad to win over “the hearts and minds” of countries believed vulnerable to communist doctrine—and the American people, with songs by Nina Simone and Bob Dylan, among others, spreading the message of the civil rights movement. Celenza also unpacks the complicated roots of classic American music and plays, noting how Martha Graham and Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, which was originally set during the Civil War and featured an escaped slave, had become by the time it premiered in 1944 a “mythical narrative of the nation’s founding and pioneering spirit.” Using such examples, Celenza explains with nuance and care how the history of American music reveals as much about the foundational stories ”we choose to protect” as those “we’re willing to forget.” This hits all the right notes. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Stuttard (Nemesis) reframes ancient Greece’s “golden age” as a turbulent period of culture wars centered around the construction of the Parthenon. The temple complex, Stuttard argues, was a masterwork of political theater, “honed... to project Athenian power” and “justify imperialism.” It was part of a public works program celebrating the city’s repelling of Persian invasion and its “new experimental democratic constitution.” Accompanying this period of civic revitalization was a flowering of “bold” questions aimed at established truths, including the existence of the gods. Among those embracing these new ideas was Pericles, Athens’ leading statesman, beloved by the working class for his populism, but despised by landowners and religious conservatives. Pericles, whose family had been temple builders for over a century, helmed the Parthenon’s construction, resulting in its anomalous designation as a civic, rather than religious, temple, with “no altar and no priestess.” A year after its completion, however, Pericles’s imperialist policies plunged Athens into war, and a plague killed a third of the city’s population, including Pericles himself. This “proof” that the “gods.... were angered” by Pericles’ impiety led to decades of reactionary backlash, including the execution of Socrates. Stuttard brings ancient Athens to vivid life as a world riven by intense moral and religious debate rather than a dry realm of ponderous metaphysics. It’s an elegant corrective to the soft-focus nostalgia with which Classical Greece is often viewed. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink