Beach, a parent of eight, counsels mothers on the importance of prioritizing themselves, not just their children, in her down-to-earth debut handbook. Mothers often struggle to incorporate self-care into packed schedules dictated by children’s needs, Beach explains. She recommends making a list of the “motherload,” the tasks that mothers take on in their households, then determining which ones can be outsourced (for example, a mom who dislikes cooking might find it beneficial to use food delivery services). Beach says that prioritizing one’s own needs doesn’t have to be complex; self-care can be as simple as deciding not to join the PTA or instituting nightly 10-minute cleanup sessions where all household members contribute. Parenting takes a village, Beach writes, encouraging readers to create intentional community to lessen isolation and burnout. She includes space for readers to write down the names of individuals who can provide support and what that might look like, such as grandparents who babysit once a week. While Beach’s suggestions aren’t particularly groundbreaking, her compassion for fellow mothers shines through. Overworked moms will feel seen. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Financial planner Pinsker debuts with an empathetic guide to helping aging parents navigate end-of-life financial decisions. “Anyone who thinks there will always be time and that important things can be left to do another day is either delusional or has never faced an untimely death,” writes Pinsker, who recounts caring for her ailing 76-year-old mother. She begins with guidance on arranging a final resting place, encouraging readers to talk with elderly loved ones about their burial preferences. She instructs readers to make a “cheat sheet” of their loved one’s medical history (she includes a template) and check the beneficiary designations on their bank accounts. Elsewhere, she discusses the costs of care, explaining some may prefer to stay at home, requiring a hired caregiver, while those who need close attention are better suited for assisted living facilities—the fees for which can range from $6,000 to $20,000 per month. Pinsker teaches readers to calculate how long their loved one’s money will last and discusses post-death necessities, like how to settle an estate and file a deceased person’s final tax return. Acknowledging many people want to avoid morbid topics, she offers tactful scripts for initiating conversations, along with helpful checklists. This is a comprehensive blueprint for tackling a sensitive yet critical issue. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cross-Stitch author Barrera blends memoir and biography to deliver a unique portrait of Mexican author Elena Garro (1916–1988), who helped pioneer magical realism. Garro married poet Octavio Paz when she was 20, giving up her early vocation in acting and dance to support her husband’s career. Their marriage was tumultuous; Garro claimed that Paz encouraged her suicide after their divorce, stole her poetry, and passed it off as his own. Garro started writing for magazines in 1941, eventually turning to novels (Recollections of Things to Come), plays (Socrates and the Cats), screenplays (The Story of a Great Love), and poetry. She regularly employed the supernatural in her writing; according to Barrera, “magic was a device she used in her books when she couldn’t find any other way to get out of a jam.” Her work was revolutionary for denouncing violence against women, and in the 1960s she became politically active in support of a pro-democracy platform. After receiving death threats, she fled to the U.S. in 1972, before returning to Mexico in the ’90s to spend her final years surrounded by her 13 cats. Barrera supports her archival research with personal reflections, admitting, “I’ve fallen in love with [Garro],” along with an interpretation of Garro’s birth chart and a tarot reading. This subjective approach successfully captures the complicated personality of an undersung author while also demonstrating the limits of true knowability. Readers will be mesmerized. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

The urge to remake oneself—through therapy, religious conversion, or otherwise—is probed in this colorful deep dive into personal change. Journalist Denizet-Lewis (Travels with Casey) pursues many offbeat examples of self-reinvention, among them a schoolyard bully who grew up to be a Buddhist monk and learned to detach from his aggressive impulses; an obstreperous octogenarian—she threatened to stab Denizet-Lewis during an interview—who underwent hypnosis to curb her outbursts; and convicted murderers who used a mix of repentance and therapy-speak to convince the California parole board that they were new men. Denizet-Lewis also chronicles his own efforts to cure his sex addiction with the aid of questionable therapists—one urged him to attach pictures of his parents to a punching bag and pummel them—and magic mushrooms, and recalls mystical epiphanies that did or did not change his life. Denizet-Lewis attributes the rising obsession with self-transformation partly to today’s climate of “collective anxiety, ideological whiplash, and the uneasy sense that everything has simultaneously changed too fast and not nearly enough.” Beneath that, he writes, is a universal desire for change that’s as “messy and convoluted” as it is irresistible. (“Change is scary,” he writes, “not only because it scrambles instinct and routine, but also because we can’t predict where it will lead or end.”) Combining shrewd analysis and evocative reportage, this offers an entertaining and insightful take on humanity’s unappeasable drive to be different. Readers will be riveted. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

These funny and eclectic essays from Laithland (Momma Cusses) unpack what it means to learn to be “an unabashed whole person.” The author, who unexpectedly became a mom at age 23, expounds on developing a “trial and error” parenting style that teaches kids “to successfully fail, learn from our mistakes, and try not to repeat them”; being diagnosed with ADHD at age 37—which provided an answer to her lifelong questions about why “I couldn’t just brain the way I wanted to”; and dealing with imposter syndrome following an emotionally abusive relationship with a man who critiqued nearly everything about her, including her choice of sandwich. The author’s wry, self-aware tone energizes her candid insights about evolving as an adult in ways that can be uncomfortable (on teaching her kids to love their bodies: “If I wanted them to embrace their meat bags in a healthy, appreciative way, I was going to have to stop hiding my form and learn how to embrace all the work and effort it’s done, even in periods where I couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of it properly”). Moms will be entertained and reassured in equal measure by Laithland’s chatty confessions. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Travel writer Eaves-Egenes (Lonely Planet’s Best of London) delivers an enthralling exploration of humanity’s relationship with the dark. Today, blazing city lights and thousands of orbiting satellites fill the night sky, washing out stars to the point that most people can no longer see the Milky Way. To better understand what’s been lost, Eaves-Egenes traveled to dark-sky locations around the world—from New Mexico to Mount Everest to Argentina. She finds that across cultures and throughout history, humans have had an intimate connection to the night sky; the Maori people of New Zealand use stars as cues for planting and spiritual rituals, and the Ladakhi in the Himalayas incorporate the study of stars into medicinal practices. At the same time, fear of the dark remains a common phobia, perhaps dating back to prehistoric ancestors who were vulnerable to predators at night. Eaves-Egenes confronted this fear by attending a four-day darkness retreat at a monastery in Germany, which gave her “the ability to simply be, with no agenda, task, or need.” The disappearance of darkness as outdoor light levels increase impacts everyone, she explains, disrupting circadian rhythms and sleep cycles and wreaking havoc on plants and animals. Throughout, she combines captivating history and science with evocative personal reflections (“The more time I spent in darkness, the more it seemed to heal me”). Readers will be moved and enlightened. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cognitive scientist Kreuz (Linguistic Fingerprints) offers a wide-ranging investigation of plagiarism as both a psychological and cultural phenomenon. Surveying famous examples across history, he spotlights plagiarists’ reasonings, litigates whether the charge of plagiarism is really warranted in some cases, and explores whether the idea of “unconscious plagiarism” is scientifically plausible. (It is, it turns out—Kreuz ends up making a case that it’s so plausible the law should hold those who’ve committed it less culpable; among the “unconscious” plagiarizers he pinpoints as perhaps deserving a pass are Helen Keller and George Harrison). Examples cited range from Vladimir Putin, who seems to have partly plagiarized his college thesis from a textbook, to the likes of Mahler, Nabokov, and Bob Dylan, the latter of whom, when accused of plagiarism, asserted that “all my stuff comes out of the folk tradition” and “you make everything yours,” adding that “only wussies and pussies complain about that stuff.” Kreuz notes that his most surprising finding is that plagiarism is far more common a practice than he had realized and that nearly everyone engages in it at some point, many routinely. Indeed, the book presents no one as above reproach—even Jesus, Kreuz points out, was accused of plagiarizing Plato. Full of entertaining anecdotes, this is a thorough overview of current understandings of plagiarism’s motivations and its role in artistic production. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

President Truman only received partial and misleading information ahead of the atomic bombing of Japan, according to this sensational account from historian Wellerstein (Restricted Data). Truman believed that the target would be a purely military one, Wellerstein provocatively argues, pointing out that Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes on his briefings with the president never indicate that he informed Truman civilians would be killed, and that a “sample” bombing announcement given to Truman named “Nagasaki Naval Base” as the target, which he would not have realized was a city. As Wellerstein points out, Nagasaki was not actually being considered at this time—instead, Gen. Leslie Groves was pushing for Kyoto, and Stimson was defending it because he’d honeymooned there. Wellerstein highlights how strange it is that behind-the-scenes wrangling over destroying a major city was happening even as Truman was hearing about a “naval base.” Moreover, a journal entry of Truman’s from this period unequivocally states that military personnel would be targeted; he continued asserting that no civilians had been killed up until reports of the Hiroshima death toll began to break, Wellerstein notes. Most shockingly, the author posits that Truman was so uninformed that he “almost certainly had no clue that another atomic bomb was about to be dropped.” It’s a remarkable act of reading between the lines and a dark warning about how decisions unfold in the halls of power. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Steele, a social psychologist and bestselling author of Whistling Vivaldi, delivers a captivating follow-up to that volume’s groundbreaking scholarship on the psychology of stereotypes. Beginning with what he sees as the core problem of social life, the inevitable “tension... between races, ethnicities, genders, [and] social classes” that arises “as we live and work together” and can lead to vicious cycles of increasing factionalism—a phenomenon he calls “churn”—the author offers a guide to overcoming such divisions through the conscientious practice of “trust-building.” Noting that many institutions in America have taken it upon themselves to promote diversity and reduce stratification but have sometimes failed to achieve results, Steele suggests that early on there was an over-emphasis on self and “identity,” and instead posits that true diversity requires allowing “others to tell me how they’d like to be seen” and openness to learning more about one another. Drawing on his own and others’ scholarship and a host of case studies, he makes a powerful argument for “trust” as the fundamental missing element both to diversity efforts and in American society at large. The methods he recommends are built around instructive questioning and listening to others, and tend to propose offering practical, concrete assistance to others as a show of “good faith”—or, as he pithily admonishes: “Render real help.” It adds up to an elegant, concise, and moving suggestion that a little kindness would go a very long way.

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Unlike women’s rights, disability rights, and the rights of numerous other protected groups, there is no binding international treaty guaranteeing LGBTQ+ rights, notes international human rights lawyer Yoshida (How Many More Women?) in this informative, at times heart-wrenching survey of laws pertaining to LGBTQ+ people around the world. Beginning with Oscar Wilde’s 1895 indecency trial, Yoshida spotlights past and ongoing legal battles that have led to the current state of affairs, wherein 69 countries penalize private same-sex activity, including 11 that call for the death penalty. Throughout, Yoshida emphasizes how these laws, even when less drastic, serve to ostracize and exclude LGBTQ+ people from normal civic life, such as Italy’s ban on gay couples being named the parents of the same child on a birth certificate, which compels couples to travel to other countries to give birth. Yoshida ties each legal case back to their own life experiences coming out as a lesbian and later as trans and nonbinary, reflecting on how the legality or illegality of one’s identity impacts one’s deepest sense of self. (“I felt despair,” they write of their teen years in Northern Ireland. “I didn’t understand then the difference between a crime and a sin.”) It’s an enraging window on the ongoing battle to secure LGBTQ+ rights. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink