The Republican senator from Alaska offers a candid reflection on her toughest decisions and biggest electoral battles in her debut memoir. Murkowski charts her unique senatorial career, from her hesitant entry in 2002, appointed by her governor father (“people don’t believe me when I say I didn’t want an appointment”), through her historic 2010 write-in victory. Though her independent-mindedness had already been well-established as a member of the Alaska legislature (she was a pro-choice Republican), Murkowski traces her developing position in the Senate—“so often in the middle, standing up to the extremes”— through some of her most contentious votes, including against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and in opposition to calling witnesses during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. However, the memoir is most illuminating when Murkowski reflects on her commitment to addressing the distinctive needs of Alaskans, particularly destitute rural Native communities, and on the “cultural chasm” between Alaska and Washington, including the latter’s shockingly overt misogyny and “bubble of affluence” in which elites are insulated from “the poverty of the city’s majority people of color.” Murkowski pegs the widening division between left and right as only offering “rhetoric” and “failure,” an argument strengthened by her own mea culpa over her embrace of divisiveness as a young senator, when she “call[ed] every environmentalist an extremist.” As a warning against the hazards of partisanship, this feels notably sincere. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chaos is strewn by foolhardy leaders acting on bad information in this riveting history of the Iranian revolution from journalist Anderson (The Quiet Americans). The book centers on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who presented himself as the grand successor of conquering Persian emperors of the past. In fact, he was a stiff political naïf (Anderson describes him in his youth as a “tense, taut little boy”) and Eurocentric dilettante who squandered Iran’s “gold rush” of oil revenues on wasteful military hardware and corruption-riddled public projects, and who was eager to prove himself to the U.S., which had used the CIA to overthrow his nationalist rival Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. By the late 1970s, economic malaise had compounded the simmering resentments of both leftist intellectuals and Islamic extremists led by exiled Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, all of whom saw the Shah as a cat’s paw for America. Anderson’s story builds a rushing momentum as one miscalculation after another hurtles the country toward the 1979 “revolution few saw coming and no one knew how to stop.” The result is an illuminating, operatic depiction of the revolution as a farcical cavalcade of arrogant mistakes with dire consequences. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Art is a central part of the human experience, but snobbery and jargon-filled critical language have wrongly convinced most people it’s not for them, according to this approachable guide to viewing, collecting, and creating art. Beginning with the basics, Soho House art director Bryan (Bright Stars) breaks down how to find art (in national and local galleries and museums) and how to talk about it (consider materials, technique, style, and how the work makes one feel). Later sections expound on the benefits—even for novices—of making art (it helps with being in the present and stimulating creative thinking); offer tips for buying artworks on a budget; and advise those pursuing art as a profession on “finding your style,” tracking sales, selling online, and drawing up an artist’s statement. Bryan’s blend of practical advice, intimate knowledge of the art scene, and down-to-earth personal disclosures (“I remain what I consider to be a terrible artist in the context of my day job, but it doesn’t stop my entire body from relaxing... when I wield my daughter’s felt-tip pens with reckless abandon”) will go a long way in welcoming even readers who’ve never picked up a paintbrush. The result is a worthwhile introduction to an often intimidating world. Illus. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Flanagan, a Quaker and environmental activist, weighs in on the underlying causes of the climate crisis and offers nonviolent strategies to combat it in her strong debut guide. She argues that only by addressing social and economic divides can activists effectively unite against the fossil-fuel industry and disarm the “pillars of power” that support it, including proindustry politicians, judges, and banks. Flanagan reports on some successful direct actions, including those undertaken by Margie Richard, a woman from the oil refining corridor in Louisiana dubbed “Cancer Alley.” Richard began organizing picket lines and community meetings in the 1980s and eventually persuaded Shell to meet the community’s demand that they buy out homeowners in her town close to the refinery in 2002. Flanagan admits that small-group sing-outs or camp-ins are not enough to disarm industry Goliaths and that victories are often modest in comparison to corporations’ power. To that end, she calls for an activism built on love and touts the importance of “many, many groups pushing on the pillars that support the status quo, while inviting those with more power into our vision of a just and sustainable alternative.” Well researched and impassioned, this successfully mixes big ideas with frank advice. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chef and cookbook author Hercules (Home Food) blends personal history with political urgency in this poignant account of her family’s roots in Ukraine. What begins as a visceral tale of survival and cultural preservation—Hercules recounts the emotional turmoil of persuading her parents, uncle, and aunt to flee Kakhovka in southeastern Ukraine and reunite in northern Italy after Russia invaded in 2022—soon becomes a meditation on the century that Hercules’s ancestors have spent in the region. Along the way, she uses food as a through line, recalling her anxious search for beetroot to prepare “borsch” while she awaited her family’s arrival in Italy, and taking note of how she sublimated her grief about the invasion by imagining the former lushness of her parents’ garden, now no doubt ravaged by Russian forces. Throughout, Hercules’s prose is sensual and evocative, highlighting the herbal-scented ceremonial scarves called khatas and hand-embroidered linens that decorate Ukrainian life. Her reflections on grief and resilience, meanwhile, are wonderfully complex: “Any hint of pleasure felt like a betrayal,” she writes, while admitting that she took great pleasure in the control that cooking for her family brought her. At once elegant, affecting, and mouthwatering, this is not to be missed. Agent: Ariella Feiner, UTA. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Ansfield debuts with a riveting and meticulous chronicle of the wave of arsons-for-profit that burned through America’s cities in the 1970s. The book focuses on the Bronx, which notoriously lost around 20% of its housing stock, though Ansfield argues that the borough is “exemplary” of a lesser-known arson epidemic that devastated neighborhoods of color across the country. Dispelling the racist myth that residents set the fires themselves, the author traces the confluence of financial factors that motivated absentee landlords to burn their neglected, deteriorating properties. These factors included high-cost, low-coverage state-sponsored insurance policies that debuted following the racial uprisings of the 1960s (when insurance companies abandoned “riot-affected areas”); insurance companies’ newfound practice of investing customer premiums for profit, which further inflated premiums to astronomical heights; and city budget cuts that decimated the FDNY. Ansfield shows how “the spoils of arson were manifest”—one arsonist landlord cruised the South Bronx in a pink Cadillac—and movingly conveys the “immense psychic toll” living among the fires took on tenants who, as they tracked the conflagrations’ block-by-block progress, fearfully went to bed with their shoes on; some were even burned out of more than one apartment. The book also unearths the tenant-organized activism, in collaboration with local officials and even some of the insurance companies themselves, that finally ended the fires. The result is an outstanding exposé of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the “Bronx is burning” saga. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Leavitt tracks the experiences of seven Ukrainian families in her harrowing debut account of the war’s first year. They include Maria, a 20-something mother whose soldier husband Leonid was taken prisoner by the Russians; Tania and Viktor, pig farmers whose village was occupied by Russian troops who looted houses and menaced Ukrainian loyalists; and Yulia and her husband Oleg, who fled the Donbas region for Kramatorsk, where Yulia lost a leg to a Russian missile attack on a train station. (Interspersed throughout are episodes from the Gogol-esque narrative of documentary filmmaker Volodymyr and his effort in 1989 to exhume and repatriate the body of Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus from a Russian gulag.) These are intimate, human-scale stories of anguished survival: people live in cellars for weeks while bombs shake the earth; scrabble for water, firewood, and cell-phone reception after the grid collapses; seethe with anger at neighbors now collaborating with Russian occupiers; tensely calculate whether the danger is serious enough to abandon their homes; and weep for dead loved ones. Leavitt’s evocative prose conveys these heartbreaking scenes in unsparing detail. (“Then came a powerful explosion, like the sound of a whip multiplied by a hundred thousand.... Yulia pushed herself to a sitting position.... On the ground next to her were her broken bones.”) It’s a searing rendition of Ukrainians’ suffering. (May)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bassett (William Faulkner), former president of Clark University, delivers a dry biography of queer playwright Rachel Crothers. Born in Bloomington, Ill., in 1870, Crothers moved to New York City in 1896 with hopes of becoming an actor. Though those dreams were dashed, they gave way to a fruitful writing and directing career. Crothers, who died in 1958, staged 24 plays on Broadway between 1906 and 1938, developing a style that employed “realistic everyday dialogue—or, more precisely, what is made to appear that to an audience,” complex female characters, and feminist themes. (The 1910 play A Man’s World, which stars a feminist writer who rejects a suitor’s proposal, critiques double standards that excuse male immorality, according to Bassett, though she notes that Crothers’s later plays highlight ways in which women must accommodate to patriarchal society.) Studies of Crothers have been confined to dissertations and scholarly publications, so this exploration of her life is welcome, but Bassett’s perfunctory prose and reliance on summaries of the plays (with few examples of Crothers’s actual writing) make the account feel like an extended encyclopedia entry. It adds up to a well-meaning but less-than-satisfying portrait of an overlooked pioneer of American theater. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Starry-eyed visions of glamorous people enjoying miraculous technology misrepresent a future reality that might be glitchier and grungier, according to this intriguing if flawed debut manifesto. Foster, a designer who works with tech companies including Google and Sony, outlines four schools of futurist prognosticating that inform government and corporate planners: “Could Futurists” are boosters for things to come, which are often showcased in “vision videos” of families beaming at their gee-whiz gadgets; “Should Futurists” lay out unduly confident road maps to an improved future based in sketchy quantitative models that are little more than “numeric fictions”; “Might Futurists” evaluate the probabilities of different and potentially clashing future scenarios; and pessimistic “Don’t Futurists” look for the complex ways in which the future will go wrong. Foster offers biting and persuasive takedowns of stale futurist tropes as a mix of sci-fi schlock and consumerist porn but stumbles in his pointed refusal to paint a clear portrait of what the future might actually look like (he suggests it will be more of “a quotidian, lived-in evolution of the present” but leans heavily on vague theoreticals: “What happens when we imagine this VR headset in Derek’s backpack rather than in the hands of a scientist in a pristine white laboratory?”). This abstract exercise may be of interest to professional designers but will disappoint lay readers. Photos. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Therapist Cook-Shonkoff’s insightful debut aims to help parents keep their families grounded during the current “polycrisis.” Climate change, mass shootings, and social media usage loom large over childhood, Cook-Shonkoff suggests, and while such issues can bring up emotions that cause one to turn cynical or tune out, she cautions that parents can’t afford to stay stuck in despair. She encourages adults to have age-appropriate discussions with children about tough topics and posits that giving kids knowledge to face realities about climate change is just as crucial as imparting wisdom on such widely acknowledged threats as stranger danger and sexual abuse. The author also provides mind-body exercises that parents can do with children to help them identify how emotions might show up in their bodies, such as “anger in fists” or “sadness in chest.” Cook-Shonkoff offers no shortage of inspiration and practical guidance, as when she urges families to practice what they preach, including by volunteering at food banks or animal shelters. This smart, straightforward guide is a must for parents hoping to raise kids who will be part of the solution. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink