In this humorous and affecting debut memoir, Canadian comedian Hanley discusses how he built a career in spite of his debilitating dyslexia. Hanley grew up in Oshawa, a medium-sized city near Toronto (“Like Detroit minus the European flair”), and struggled academically from an early age. In elementary school, he frustrated his teachers with his inability to keep up with his classmates; in middle school, he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. With college off the table, Hanley started booking work as a model on a friend’s suggestion. Then an acquaintance in the film industry asked him to punch up jokes in a movie about a chimpanzee detective, and he became a freelance script doctor. That boosted Hanley’s confidence, and he started honing a stand-up act that drew from his early classroom experiences, which eventually led to bookings across Canada and the U.S. “When I look at my life, it’s impossible to think of dyslexia as a curse,” Hanley concludes. “I look at the things I cherish most... and I can connect them all to my disability.” Throughout, Hanley matches that optimism with plenty of laugh-out-loud observations (“I thought adults collecting toys might be a UK thing, like getting blasted during the day and calling it Sunday roast”). This inspires. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

The discrepancy between the Boy Scouts of America’s wholesome image and its decades-long reality of rampant sexual abuse is uncovered in this harrowing, posthumously published debut account from Pulitzer-winning journalist Christensen. Beginning with the organization's founding in 1910, Christensen tracks how, as the Boy Scouts became increasingly tied to “American boyhood and masculinity,” there was a parallel development within the institution: the emergence and maintenance of the “Ineligible Volunteer files,” a “closely held blacklist intended to keep suspected sexual predators out of the ranks.” Through analysis of the files and interviews with abuse survivors, Christensen proves this list was a failure as a safeguard: “time and again... men who were booted from Scouting for molesting boys found ways to get back in.” Gaming the files was as easy as changing a name—as in the case of Thomas E. Hacker, the Boy Scouts’ “most prolific known abuser” who molested more than 100 boys from the 1960s to the ’80s. Christensen also reveals how the organization would refuse to alert authorities about predators, instead helping them resign with such "bogus explanations” as “chronic brain dysfunction” and “duties at a Shakespeare festival.” The book’s most distressing revelations are drawn from letters written by survivors that were filed in the organization’s recent bankruptcy proceedings (Christensen calls the trove “a compilation of heartbreak and human wreckage strewn across generations and all fifty states”). It's an unflinching and stomach-churning exposé. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

From the first days of rock ’n’ roll to the last days of disco, pop culture was markedly influenced by gay themes and undertones in movies, music, and art, according to this exuberant history. Journalist Savage (England’s Dreaming) surveys American and British showbiz figures, from rocker Little Richard, who deleted the explicit anal sex lyrics from his 1955 hit “Tutti Frutti,” but got plenty of "fruity" subtext across anyway, to the late 1970s disco group Village People, whose overt hymns to gay bliss became standards at straight weddings. Among the other cultural phenomena that he revisits are Andy Warhol’s elevation of camp into high art, David Bowie’s androgynous style and his 1972 confession that he was gay, and the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever, which brought disco, a musical style incubated in gay dance clubs, to its peak popularity. (The movie and its star John Travolta fairly oozed a homoerotic vibe, Savage contends, while deflecting it with a few homophobic scenes.) Savage offers a rich analysis of the symbiosis of gay subculture and the dominant postwar youth culture, both yearning for more sexual freedom, and backgrounds his narrative with the story of the evolving gay rights movement (he depicts the 1979 “Disco Sucks” destruction of thousands of disco records in Chicago's Comiskey Park as partly fueled by antigay backlash). Perceptive and elegantly written, this captivates. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

The American education system for centuries developed on two parallel tracks, according to this brilliant history from sociologist and poet Ewing (Ghosts in the Schoolyard). One track, Ewing writes, was for white and European immigrant children, and on it great strides in education theory were made that emphasized how cooperation through play made for engaged citizens. These developments, as Ewing cannily notes, also functioned to erase cultural boundaries between white children from disparate backgrounds, solidifying a sense of cross-cultural whiteness. Meanwhile, the other track, for Indigenous and Black children, aimed to “annihilate” their cultural identity and train them as “subservient laborers,” according to Ewing. She brings to light plenty of harrowing evidence to this effect, not just as a broad strokes theory but in the minutiae of teacher-training manuals and educators’ writings. Her citations span from Reconstruction era textbooks written by Northern white educators who stated that their aim was to stop Black people’s “relapse into barbarism” and turn them into “useful citizens,” to her own recollections of her Chicago middle school class being taken to the Cook County Jail in an effort to have the students “scared straight.” This ideological undertaking was often framed as a common sense, dollars-and-cents solution, Ewing notes; for instance, she reports that the idea that “the country could save money by schooling Indians rather than endeavoring to kill them” was a recurring theme in her research. It’s a troubling and eye-opening examination of the foundational role educators played in developing America’s racial hierarchy. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this pseudoscientific treatise, Braden (Human by Design) contends that humanity is being slowly poisoned by advanced technology. According to the author, the 20th century saw the rise of “transhumanists” who sought to harness “the logic, speed, and efficiency” of technology—for example, by developing mRNA vaccines that “reprogram” the immune system—to perfect the human body with the goal of achieving immortality. Such actions interfere with natural design and stamp out the “imagination, intuition, innovation, and creativity” that makes humans special, Braden contends. In one of many instances of convoluted logic, he uses a kabbalistic system of assigning Hebrew letters to elements that comprise DNA to “prove” that God has “encoded” into humans a message that “our bodies are... biological temples” that technology threatens to spoil. Just as troublesome is the lack of any concrete evidence of the transhumanists’ supposed plot to merge “humans and machines into a unified digital landscape called the singularity.” This paranoid cri de coeur fails to persuade. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist O’Brien (Glow) brings together a muddled array of meditations on motivating young people to adopt a “more gentle, humanistic and integrated way of living.” In the book’s opening and closing essays, she laments how social media has decimated teens’ self-esteem and left them feeling lonely, but her vague recommendation for parents to model healthy behavior avoids the crucial question of what example parents should set. A grab bag of activists, artists, businesspeople, medical professionals, and teachers contribute the rest of the entries, but many feel only tangentially related to the volume’s ostensible focus on supporting young people. For instance, Ryan Dusick describes how he became a therapist after suffering from depression and addiction during his stint as the founding drummer of Maroon 5, but the essay has little to do with the difficulties most young people face besides a tacked-on suggestion to “stay open to change.” There are a few highlights, such as Native American scholar Mindahi Bastida’s moving letter to his daughter calling on her to rediscover the importance of community and living in harmony with nature. More typical, however, is “commercial foreign policy” entrepreneur Ed Olver’s cliché-ridden plea for readers to “listen to your heart” and “express your authentic Self.” This comes up short. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this informative debut, Amies draws on more than 20 years of experience as a private nanny to offer guidance on caring for young children. She touts the benefits of what she calls “logical parenting,” which encourages helping kids work through challenges without doing the heavy lifting for them. Anecdotes from Amies’s career illustrate how to follow this parenting style, usually by showing the ill effects of deviating from it. For instance, she urges readers to hold boundaries in the face of tantrums and recounts how one parent reinforced their toddler’s outbreaks by capitulating to the child’s resistance to sitting in a car seat and asking Amies to bring the toddler to day care in a stroller instead. Techniques for helping children calm down when they’re overwhelmed include a breathing exercise in which a toddler traces their hand with their pointer finger, inhaling when moving up a digit and exhaling on the down slope. Amies brings humor to the proceedings (“I once cared for two siblings... who fought so much that I decided then and there that if I were to ever have my own children, I only wanted one!”), and her “top tip” sidebars distill the guidance into easy-to-follow directives, as when she suggests playing musical statues to help toddlers practice impulse control. Parents will value Amies’s hard-won wisdom. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Clapp debuts with a rollicking deep dive into the absurdities and intricacies of the global trash trade. In the 1970s, Western countries began exporting their toxic waste to developing nations; Clapp chronicles how, despite these nations having since banded together to end the toxic waste trade, it has continued to flourish under the guise of recycling. In Ghana, Clapp visits Agbogbloshie, a town where discarded electronics “donated” by Westerners are stripped for parts in hazardous and backbreaking work (which is actually for the Westerners’ benefit—it prevents scammers from accessing their information). In Turkey, Clapp meets with the family of a young man who perished in the shipbreaking trade, which strips old cruise ships for parts (the steel contributes to Turkey's construction trade, a key source of power for President Erdoğan’s rule). In Indonesia, Clapp discusses how the country’s robust paper recycling program was forced by a complex series of machinations to take on U.S. plastic waste, and profiles farmers who’ve turned to trading plastic, which is burned as fuel. Clapp can veer into a provocatively melodramatic tone (“I had flown to Indonesia to witness the lunatic phenomenon of ‘trash towns’ ”), but he also plainly states the cruel ironies facing his interviewees (one Agbogbloshie worker engaged in the dangerous trade of burning e-waste tells Clapp, “I pray to God every day to stop the burning. But for now I need it”). It’s a stirring and dogged investigation. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jones, a senior writer at New York magazine, debuts with a disquieting examination of the systemic flaws laid bare by Covid. “What the pandemic did... is strip the world back until its workings are visible to all,” she contends. Drawing on personal accounts from Covid victims and their families, Jones profiles people with disabilities who died alone in overfilled care facilities, frontline workers who couldn’t afford to quit, a prisoner who worked on a hazmat team with no protective gear, and a Haitian immigrant with a precarious housing situation that made care more difficult to access—after she died of Covid, her son remarked that her doctors had been “ready to rush her into the grave.” His statement is only half hyperbole—Jones’s vision of America isn’t one where the poor stumbled into Covid-era tragedy by happenstance but one in which it was intentionally engineered, and she interweaves her account with a mind-boggling assortment of anecdotes and insights that showcase systemic harm and humiliation. They range from an observation that medical programs that forcibly sterilized the poor under the auspices of eugenics in the early 20th century now aggressively collect unpaid medical bills as a similar deterrent to accessing care, to a story about workers at an Oakland McDonald’s who finally walked off the job when they were given dog diapers to use as masks during the Covid lockdown. It’s a ghastly panorama of the American way of life. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

An epidemic of overdiagnosis is causing patients to pathologize normal differences and overtaxing the medical system, according to this thought-provoking treatise. Neurologist O’Sullivan (The Sleeping Beauties) explains how new screening techniques and expanded disease parameters have spiked rates of such conditions as autism, Huntington’s disease, and ADHD—risking, for mild cases, needless health anxiety, an overreliance on medication, and the “nocebo effect,” where labeling the disease can actually produce symptoms. Meanwhile, time and money is wasted in treating people for cases “that would never have progressed” or “would have resolved spontaneously if left alone.” At the root of the endless search for diagnoses—and medical institutions’ willingness to provide them—O’Sullivan finds a nebulous mix of “physical suffering and personal struggles” that, given modern society’s “general lack of caring institutions,” end up driving patients to the medical system for answers. She intriguingly illustrates this phenomenon through a discussion of the self-diagnosis of long Covid, which has become so hazily defined that scientists struggle to study it. While O’Sullivan’s argument has some paternalistic implications—well-intentioned efforts to withhold complex medical information can reduce patient choice, especially if new or alternative therapies become available—she makes salient points about the challenges of treating patients in a world where, despite scientific advances, "definite answers" about one's health are often elusive. This is sure to spark debate. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink