This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong (The Box) uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans’ relationship with nature. In the title essay, Wong turns the life of a sea snail into a bildungsroman, chronicling its journey from a tiny larva to its eventual formation of a protective shell, which prompts questions about the snail’s mode of being (“She undulates at the threshold between what we call living and inanimate”). In “The One and the Many,” Wong juxtaposes her experience providing a home to a small snail she found attached to a stack of mail with the story of an endangered Bermudian land snail that became part of a captive breeding program. When the snail doesn’t leave the open takeaway container she uses to house it, she begins to wonder if her love for the creature is oppressive (“What if it didn’t feel like love but like surveillance?”). Love comes into focus again in “How to Love a Jellyfish,” in which the author questions what it would look like to marvel at another creature without capturing and using it for one’s own needs. Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This stimulating memoir from French philosopher Badiou (The Immanence of Truths) recounts the personal milestones and intellectual influences that shaped him from his birth in 1937 to the middle of his career in 1985. Writing in a conversational mode, Badiou revisits his childhood in Vichy France, early encounters with literature and mathematics, and entrance into postwar intellectual life, situating each episode within the wider turmoil of the 20th century. His accounts of shifting ideological currents, including anti-colonial struggles, the rise and fall of left-wing movements, and the enduring temptations of fascism, are brisk yet sharp. Most involving are Badiou’s insights on his philosophical formation, including the “four truth procedures”—science, art, politics, and love—that came to anchor his worldview. As Badiou blends personal reflections and theoretical explorations, he occasionally slips into abstraction, but for the most part he writes with an inviting clarity, lingering as long on his considerable achievements as he does on his failures and regrets. Students of political thought and French intellectual history will find much to savor in this rewarding and approachable volume. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This gut-wrenching account from sociologist Mauldin (Made to Hear) spotlights the hardships endured by couples in the U.S. when one partner becomes disabled or ill and the other must serve as full-time caregiver. Drawing on her harrowing experiences caring for her late partner J., who suffered from leukemia, as well as the stories of four other couples, the author explores the financial, physical, and mental toll of caregiving. The able-bodied partner, she shows, becomes a “bottomless resource”—or, as she bittersweetly calls it, “The One”—who must act as “physical therapist, appointment scheduler, medication manager, and all-around assistant.” Throughout, the author pinpoints how these challenges stem from America’s “minimal social safety nets,” as in the case of Tina, a woman with multiple sclerosis who struggles with red tape while trying to access home-care services through Medicaid, meaning that her husband must miss work to help her; or Angel, an independent contractor who can’t afford health insurance and is thus disastrously uninsured when he suffers a stroke. Mauldin’s account stands out for its courageous coverage of taboo topics, including the physical effort of “toileting,” caregivers who suffer from PTSD, and how infidelity can become imperative for a caregiver’s mental health. (It’s “the one thing that can bring you back to life,” one subject says.) The result is both an unflinching look at private worlds of pain and a forceful denunciation of America’s for-profit healthcare system. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Jäger (The Populist Moment) offers an incisive analysis of the contemporary political moment, in which “popular involvement in American politics has seen a relative resurgence” and yet “institutional involvement” with organized political groups is at an all time low. Instead of the organized mass-movement politics that characterized the 20th century, Jäger asserts, today’s era is one of “hyperpolitics,” wherein “the primary forms of political engagement” happen on social media and are “as fleeting as a market transaction.” Such interactions are “intense” and “polarizing” yet “require little to no long-term obligation.” Jäger offers a brief survey of how society got here, from the post–Cold War “nihilistic societies of the 1990s and 2000s” to the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis and the ascendancy of Trumpism. Along the way, he highlights the public’s decreasing engagement with traditional social institutions like labor unions, civic groups, and churches, and points to how both major political parties have become increasingly “fused with their media or donor classes,” whose economic interests lie, the author suggests, in promoting exactly such monetizable, market transaction–style political engagement. Indeed, he cannily argues, the erosion of social institutions appears to be “an imperative of capital itself,” as if “collective life had to be thinned out to clear new inroads for the market.” It’s an urgent and clarifying call to log off and show up. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

James, a personal trainer and literacy activist, shares his unique path to learning how to read in this inspiring debut. Raised by a single mother in the poorest neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pa., in the 1990s, James struggled as a child to get the attention he needed. His OCD and ADHD made school a challenge, meaning he merely memorized some words as symbols, never functionally learning to read. At 19, he was arrested for trafficking guns—which he did not realize, due to his illiteracy, was illegal—and served time in prison. He continued to struggle with illiteracy after his release, eventually becoming “so sick and tired of hiding” it that, at 32, he shared his story on TikTok. He received responses from thousands of strangers, who pointed him toward videos and other resources to help him get started. Here, he recounts following the advice of his digital community and shares the titles that made an impression on him, including The Diary of Anne Frank and The Giving Tree, from the 100 he read in 2023. Straightforward, moving, and bursting with gratitude, this is a testament to the power of perseverance. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wachter (The Digital Doctor), chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, offers an evenhanded and insightful exploration of the ways artificial intelligence could impact the medical profession. Recognizing that “nearly one million Americans are severely harmed or killed by medical mistakes every year” and that the current healthcare system is wildly expensive and often inaccessible, Wachter argues that “AI doesn’t have to be perfect to be better.” He examines possible physician uses of AI, explaining how its ability to analyze vast datasets could enable more personalized patient care, and explores how patients might benefit, noting, for example, that AI scribes can document patient-doctor conversations, thus freeing up the physician for more present and genuine connections. Wachter doesn’t see AI replacing doctors anytime soon because its biggest shortcoming is “a lack of expansive thinking and real-world experience,” but he does believe that it can automate administrative tasks, decreasing the amount of time spent on paperwork and the frustrations associated with filing pre-authorization forms with insurance companies. Throughout, Wachter clearly and concisely explains the complex technology and its possible medical uses and makes a convincing case that AI will usher in “something of a golden age in healthcare.” The result is a clear-eyed road map of AI’s potential in medicine. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Richards (Black Atlantic) offers an eye-opening look at the fates of captives freed by maritime patrols after the U.S. and U.K. abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The trade continued clandestinely, so in the 1830s the British began issuing prize money for captured slave ships. This created a new system of exploitation, the author reveals, citing the case of the slave ship Progreso, wherein the “prize crew” who took over the ship forced the supposedly liberated captives—most of them children—back into the hold and flogged them for stealing water. By the time the Progreso docked in Cape Town, 177 of the liberated Africans—39.6% of the total—were dead. Once dropped in a random harbor town, getting emancipation papers required freed captives to find a court that would accept jurisdiction and declare the ship’s capture legal—no easy feat, given the onerous burden of proof. Moreover, freed captives were often required to be indentured for up to 14 years, resulting in further exploitation, including indentured freedwomen being forced to marry men at their contract owner’s behest. Throughout, the author draws canny links to the era’s macroeconomic shift from the slave trade to colonization—indeed, he notes, Britian used protecting Africans from slavery as an explicit justification for colonizing West Africa. The result is a savvy juxtaposition of individual lives and larger historical trends. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this somewhat sluggish saga of friendship and survival, Dondi draws on a stash of hundreds of letters to bring to light the story of her father, Bob Cress, who survived a doomed WWII bombing mission over the Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania. Bob and his friend John B. White, who was also the brother of Bob’s girlfriend Polley back home in Illinois, were both assigned to fly missions over Ploesti. John’s plane went down first, on August 1, 1943, during the disastrous operation Tidal Wave, the costliest U.S. air raid of the war, when 53 aircraft were lost. (Dondi writes that the oil fields were “a colossal land battleship, armored and gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.”) John was marked missed in action, and Bob and Polley exchanged letters about his fate—before Bob himself was also shot down over Ploesti several weeks later. Settling stoically into life as a POW, Bob made it his mission to find John, an ultimately fruitless task. While the book is full of unique insights—the letters, as well as two memoirs later written by Bob, reveal much about the situation on the ground in Romania in the final days of WWII—the author’s overreliance on firsthand sources (with every primary quote in italics) can be a slog. It’s a letdown. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet’s evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country’s increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Liu contextualizes these events, linking them to China’s larger historical cycles of “opening and tightening,” but her account focuses on the up-close perspectives of five Chinese “netizens” impacted by the rise and fall of the open internet. They include Ma Baoli, a formerly closeted police officer who started a website as a “sanctuary for gay men” that evolved into a popular gay hookup app, and Lü Pin, founder of “the nation’s most influential feminist publication.” Liu conveys how these individuals’ emotional and interior lives were shaped by events in the digital world, from their excitement at discovering a community online to the pain and isolation caused by growing restrictions and even the outright deletion of their platforms (Lü describes the latter as “like having a part of myself die before my eyes”). Through other interviews, including with a Weibo editor pressured to silence posts about a high-speed train crash, the author spotlights the state’s chillingly singular promotion of content with “positive energy,” as well as netizens’ coy means of evading censorship, such as #MeToo activists’ usage of the phrase rice bunny, pronounced “mi tu.” It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

“The story of Nintendo... is the story of video games as a whole,” asserts journalist MacDonald (You Died) in this entertaining history of the Japanese gaming company. Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi started Nintendo in the 1890s to sell illustrated handmade playing cards known as hanafuda. Decades later, the company brought on engineer Gunpei Yokoi, who created one of Nintendo’s first successful toys, an extendable plastic gripper known as the Ultra Hand. Nintendo’s first gaming console, the Color TV-Game 6, entered the market in 1977 and hit games, like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon, launched the company into global prominence. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata saw games not just as a form of entertainment, MacDonald explains, but as a way of improving quality of life. She chronicles how the company helped popularize handheld gaming with the creation of the Game Boy in 1989 and innovated touch-screen controls, as seen on the Nintendo DS, before smartphones were commonplace. MacDonald writes with a gamer’s keen eye for the intricacies of play and a thoughtful appreciation for Nintendo’s commitment to innovate and have fun. This is a must-read for gamers. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink