Smugglers who help Central Americans traverse Mexico and cross into the U.S. are not the “slick haired... kingpins” portrayed in popular media but are usually themselves poor migrants who got waylaid and caught up in the trade, according to this outstanding, luminously written account. Drawing on seven years spent embedded with people smugglers in Mexico, anthropologist De León (The Land of Open Graves) depicts a hardscrabble world of almost mythically impossible proportions: terrorized by corrupt Mexican cops, fearful of being returned back to the brutal conditions of their home countries, and constantly at risk of violence from gangs, the smugglers serve as guides to desperate souls who’d “rather die on the train tracks in Mexico than be murdered on a street corner” back home. De León’s elegant prose brings pulsing life to this benighted underworld, observing it with a sharp eye and a noirish sensibility (“It is impossible to avoid him. It is unhealthy to run from him,” he quips about a gang leaderwho perches as “the guardian at the gate... the troll under the bridge” at a waypoint along the notorious La Bestia train route). His fluid storytelling builds to a gut-wrenching finish as De León reflects on the heartless reception his ethnographic work with smugglers receives from academic audiences, contrasting it with his own emotional fallout after the death of Roberto, a carefree, lively young smuggler he’d befriended. It’s a knockout. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Women should embrace their “natural cyclicality” to tap into their innate “resilience, empowerment, joy and purpose,” contends hypnotherapist Redgrave in her empathetic debut. Focusing on four cycles that organize women’s lives—seasons, moon phases, menstrual cycles, and life stages—Redgrave explains how readers can honor each stage by maximizing its “unique strengths and opportunities” (for example, spring, a season of energy and new beginnings, is ideal for setting new goals). Elsewhere, she details how each cycle can guide reflection (during the full moon, readers can use the provided journal prompts to meditate on the past month) and physical self-care (readers should take advantage of the higher duration of REM sleep during the follicular stage of the menstrual cycle by getting enough shut-eye). While the author’s new agey tone won’t be for everyone—women are encouraged to embrace their “feminine power” as they embark on their “menstrual voyages”—there’s much to be said for her wide-ranging approach, which wrangles together spiritual, emotional, and physical rituals and practices, along with useful background information (including a valuable section on menstrual conditions). This will appeal to women seeking natural means of finding greater balance and peace. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this chilling debut, The Clearing podcast host Balascio recounts her growing realization that her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, was a murderer. Balascio was born in 1969, and her childhood was marked by frequent relocations across the East Coast and Midwest. It was also marked by chronic abuse: Edwards, a convicted bank robber at the time he married Balascio’s mother, frequently beat his wife and children. After Balascio started a family of her own and lost touch with her parents, she remained haunted by her childhood. Vague memories that her family’s stints in various cities coincided with reports of people going missing in those places led her, in 2009, to look up Watertown, Wis. She found reports about the 1980 double murder of teenagers who were last seen alive at a hotel where Edwards worked. Balascio called the cold case hotline, setting in motion an investigation that led to the 76-year-old Edwards’s arrest that same year, and a dogged quest by law enforcement and amateur sleuths to establish what other killings he might be responsible for. Balascio’s blunt, conversational prose allows the horrors of her situation to register without melodrama or overstatement. Readers will be riveted by this frank and frightening account. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Aevitas Creative Management. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mystery writer Patton (Death and the Devil’s Revenge) makes his nonfiction debut with an unflinching examination of his tumultuous childhood. In anecdotes both hopeful and dire, Patton recounts growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father, and his own attempts to escape the cycle of abuse as an adult. “There is no yardstick for measuring the depth of the scars when your beatings begin as a baby,” he begins, setting the stage for an unvarnished, hyperdetailed account of his early years in West Virginia as the youngest of four children. He renders his first experience crashing a bicycle and the first time he saw his father hit his mother with equal intensity. Though the bulk of the narrative covers Patton’s coming-of-age, the most powerful chapters concern his adulthood, during which Patton grappled with the traumas his father suffered before Patton was born. Ultimately, he manages to extend hard-won empathy to his tormentor long after he’d died of a heart attack. Though occasionally long-winded, Patton is a forceful writer, bestowing his harrowing narrative with page-turning momentum. Readers looking to heal their own family trauma will find comfort here. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this piercing study, Dunbar (Black Regions of the Imagination), an English professor at Vassar College, explores how the Jim Crow–era fiction of Black women authors envisioned what it would look like to feel fulfilled “outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.” Examining Ann Petry’s sympathetic representation of sex work in her 1946 novel The Street, Dunbar argues that brothel madame Mrs. Hedges’s refusal to conform with “socially condoned forms of labor” serves to refute the cultural norms of whiteness. According to Dunbar, Dorothy West’s 1948 novel The Living Is Easy imagines the female-led household as an empowering alternative to heterosexual marriage by following protagonist Cleo Judson’s quest to convince her sisters to move in with her without their husbands. Elsewhere, Dunbar suggests that Alice Childress’s 1956 short story collection Like One of the Family “illustrates how American power structures saw the presumption of dignity among Black domestic workers as a threat,” and explores how Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1953 novel Maud Martha pushes back against the racist conflation of Black people and animals. The sharp analysis illuminates how mid-century Black writers challenged white conceptions of the good life, and Dunbar concludes with a moving tribute to Breonna Taylor that doubles as a reminder that “Black women cannot wait for utopic conditions to find their satisfaction.” Edifying and incisive, this impresses. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Poet Kisuule (A Recipe for Sorcery) delivers a candid reflection on struggling to reconcile her love for Michael Jackson with the sexual abuse allegations against him. Discussing the outsize role Jackson’s music played in her childhood, Kisuule recounts practicing the moonwalk while listening to her aunt’s Jackson records and feeling disbelief after learning of his death in 2009. She offers a frank account of coming to grips with Jackson’s misdeeds, describing how she made excuses for him for years (“He was troubled, childlike, ambushed”) before watching a 2019 documentary on the allegations. Afterward, she was relieved that she no longer felt compelled to defend him. Kisuule’s full ambitions come into focus in the provocative final chapter, which draws parallels between her uncle and Jackson, noting that both were beaten as kids and went on to abuse others as adults. She finds in her aunt’s compassion for her abusive ex-husband a promising model for dealing with problematic men, arguing that in addition to holding abusers accountable, society should strive to rehabilitate them and mitigate the “factors that make abuse more likely.” Though the power of her aunt’s story is somewhat dampened by the disclosure that “some of the events described in this book didn’t happen” (which ones aren’t specified), Kisuule brings a novel perspective to the discourse on loving problematic artists. This is a worthy complement to Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Readers can rebalance their brain chemistry by maximizing the production of chemicals that today’s sedentary and tech-based lifestyles have suppressed, according to this sensible debut guide. Neuroscientist Power explains that for most of human history, people have spent 85% of their lives outside, hunting and gathering in small, tight-knit communities—a lifestyle that promoted the production of oxytocin (which aids social connection), serotonin (which bolsters mood), dopamine (which controls motivation), and endorphins (which reduce stress). In order to help readers improve their mental well-being, Powers explains how to diagnose chemical deficiencies (feelings of isolation and loneliness can indicate low oxytocin levels) and offers concrete strategies for relief (giving more hugs and strengthening friendships can boost oxytocin levels; going on three headphone-free walks per week can raise serotonin levels). While the author’s reliance on rating scales, bullet points, and checklists sometimes lends the book the feel of a PowerPoint presentation, the commonsense tips and refreshingly middle-of-the-road approach to technology—he recommends small tweaks to prevent tech overuse rather than major life overhauls—are smart and manageable. For those seeking an action-oriented guide to boosting their mental health, this delivers. Illus. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian and PW reviewer Leepson (Huntland) offers an immersive biography of Doug Hegdahl, “the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam,” who famously recited the names of 254 prisoners of the Hanoi Hilton after his release and alerted the world to the POW camp’s inhumane conditions and torture of prisoners. Drawing on interviews with Hegdahl’s fellow POWs, Leepson presents a complete picture of the extraordinary story, including its unlikely beginnings: Hegdahl, an enlisted seaman, was blown overboard by the concussive force of one of his own ship’s gun blasts and picked up by Vietnamese boaters in 1967. He ended up in the Hilton, which was mostly filled with high-ranking pilots. Under questioning, Hegdahl, already feeling foolish at having gone overboard, fell into a country bumpkin–like affect. The guards quickly dismissed him as “The Incredibly Stupid One” and gave him free rein of the camp. He connected with the interred officers, who, impressed with Hegdahl’s apparently superhuman memorization skills (which he proved by reciting the Gettysburg Address backwards, a feat Leepson reveals was also a bit of chicanery—Hegdahl was reading it off), ordered him to memorize their names and accept the early release that they themselves refused. Leepson paints a striking picture of a canny survivor nonetheless committed to his compatriots. Vietnam War buffs will be riveted. (Dec.)

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that Doug Hegdahl recited the names of every prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton. There were around 400 POWs held there at the time of his release; he recited the names of 254 of them.

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this soulful meditation, philosopher Han (The Crisis of Narration) draws from the writings of Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Franz Kafka, and other thinkers to reflect on staying hopeful during fraught times. Pushing back against Camus’s contention that hope spurs resignation, Han argues that it instead motivates people to act by enabling them to imagine possible futures worth fighting for. In this capacity, hope becomes, as poet Ingeborg Bachmann contended, a “condition of the possibility of living.” “The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope,” Han posits, noting that Czech human rights activist Václav Havel viewed hope as a commitment to an idea’s righteousness rather than any expectation of a positive outcome. Suggesting that hope can also foster community, Han describes how in Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China,” the endless task of building the eponymous wall unites those involved in its construction around the “hopeless hope” that it will one day be completed. Though some of Han’s finer points are lost in the occasionally vague prose (“It is the authority of the other as a transcendence that raises me up in the face of absolute despair”), he still makes a rousing case for holding onto hope even, and perhaps especially, in times of hardship. This is sure to lift readers’ spirits. Illus. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink

This sweeping cultural history from journalist Lynskey (The Ministry of Truth) chronicles how films, novels, and other media have imagined the apocalypse from ancient times through the present. He explains that cultures across the world held a cyclical understanding of time until ancient Persian Zoroastrians developed a linear view that influenced Judaism and Christianity, as reflected in the Book of Revelation’s “bloodthirsty, psychedelic visions” of fiery end times. Contending that artists have used apocalyptic stories to make sense of global and personal tragedies, Lynskey discusses how Lord Byron composed the poem “Darkness” to reckon with the blackened skies and failed harvests caused by the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, and how Mary Shelley wrote her dystopian 1826 novel The Last Man, about a plague that nearly eliminates humanity, to work through her grief over the deaths of her husband and children. “Writers of fictional doomsdays all reveal what they love or hate about the world... and what they fear,” Lynskey argues, exploring how such films as Godzilla dramatized anxieties over nuclear weapons, and how Don’t Look Up took a scathing view of indifference to climate change. Lynskey’s astute analysis excels at teasing out the existential concerns that have animated artists over the course of millennia. Readers won’t want this to end. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Calligraph. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/25/2024 | Details & Permalink