In this inspiring debut report, Hogan, a former professional mountain biker, recaps the astonishing achievements of endurance athletes. She opens with a nail-biting account of 71-year-old Gunhild Swanson’s participation in the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run in 2015 and recreates the crowd’s uproarious reaction when Swanson crossed the finish line with five seconds to spare after running for more than 29 hours straight, becoming the oldest female finisher ever. Hogan drives home the physical toll that endurance sports take on athletes’ bodies, describing how in 1972, 15-year-old Lynne Cox had to periodically rinse her mouth with fresh water to prevent her tongue from swelling and salt water from shredding her gums while swimming the English Channel in a record-setting nine hours and 57 minutes. Elsewhere, Hogan covers how Tina Ament became the first blind woman to complete the Kona, Hawaii, Ironman World Championship course in 2014, and how John Stamstad braved windchills of as low as –85º F to snatch the bronze in the 1992 Iditarod Trail bike race through the Alaskan wilderness. The vivid recreations of grueling races capture the adrenaline of endurance competition, serving as testaments to the virtues of grit and perseverance. This will have readers cheering. Photos. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Schor (After the Gig), a sociology professor at Boston College, makes a strong case for a shorter work week in this vigorous report. Recounting the findings of her research into 245 organizations that implemented four-day work weeks without reducing pay, she notes that all 20 of the well-being metrics she tracked showed “statistically significant and often large improvements,” including better mental health and reduced stress. Schor also surveys less intuitive findings, pointing out that 20% of men reported increasing their participation in household labor and that 37% of subjects said working less improved their physical health because they could spend more time cooking and exercising. Employers benefited just as much as employees, Schor claims, and she uses case studies to explore the two most common strategies for shortening the work week. For instance, she tells how the Toronto communications company Praxis maintained productivity levels while working fewer hours by slashing meetings, and how the Italian restaurant chain M’tucci’s accepted a decrease in productivity because it was offset by cost savings from lower turnover. The robust research offers proof of concept across a range of organizations, and the case studies provide a shrewd road map of the different routes a company might take to a four-day work week. Employers looking to stand out in a tight labor market should start here. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wall Street Journal reporter Hagey (The King of Content) portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as the ultimate comeback kid in this fleet-footed biography. The future billionaire landed his first major deal as an undergraduate at Stanford University, scaling up his location-based social network Loopt with an investment from venture capital firm Y Combinator in the mid 2000s. Altman narrowly avoided getting ousted from Loopt over allegations he helped former colleagues illegally reverse-engineer a competitor’s code in 2009, and landed at Y Combinator after Loopt was “sold for parts” in 2012. Hagey’s crackerjack reporting fleshes out Altman’s ascendance to Silicon Valley royalty, detailing how he outmaneuvered Elon Musk’s attempted takeover of OpenAI in the late 2010s by persuading board members that Musk would be too difficult to work with, and how a staff mutiny convinced the board to overturn their firing of Altman in 2023. Hagey also gives due credit to Altman’s brilliance as a businessman without glossing over his contradictions, noting that he mostly equivocated in her interviews with him when confronted with how turning OpenAI into a for-profit company appeared to bring about the very AI “arms race” the organization once sought to avoid by making its software open source. The first major biography of tech’s newest titan, this sets a high bar for those to follow. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

“At the age of thirty-five, it was time to meet myself unmediated by romantic and erotic obsession,” writes memoirist Febos (Body Work) in the opening pages of this bold account. After two decades of moving from one relationship to the next, with only a “few brief periods of singleness” in between, Febos went through a particularly devastating breakup and decided to abstain from sex and dating for a year. “I liked the idea of choosing celibacy not as a last-resort treatment for depression, not as a deprivation, but as an attempt to grow my world,” she explains. She examines the history of abstinence in religious and cultural contexts through the work of writers including Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler, and explores what it meant to her, as a queer, 21st-century feminist. The results, Febos found, were freeing: she relished waking up alone, reading and writing on her own schedule, and pursuing her interests unmediated by the concerns of another. Though she’s wary of acting “as an evangelist for celibacy,” Febos convincingly makes the case for serial daters to slow down and reflect on their past relationships free from the cloud of a current entanglement. As fascinating as it is liberating, this is not to be missed. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, WME. (June)

Reviewed on 04/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hallucinations, convulsions, delusions, and other symptoms shed light on the brain’s obscure machinery, according to this luminous debut from neurologist Anand. Revisiting cases from her neurology practice as well as medical literature, novels, and even fables, she cites a woman who uttered prophecies in the voice of the Holy Spirit because of an autoimmune disorder that attacked her neurons; a mother with accelerating dementia who told Anand that her grown children were switched at birth with impostor babies; and a former doctor who fabricated stories about why she was at the hospital to paper over neural damage caused by a hemorrhage. At the heart of the book is an exploration of the intimate links between narrative and medicine—how the brain slots confusing impressions into stories to find “order in the chaos,” but also how patients create narratives to understand their symptoms; how doctors selectively cull from that information to shape diagnoses; and how cultural narratives inform the ways patients and doctors view bodies, illness, and treatment. In the process, Anand elegantly transforms the clinical minutiae of neurological disorders into evocative poetry (of a woman suffering from involuntary spasms: “her fingers moved like those of a piano player... her tongue thrusting from her mouth like that of a hummingbird searching for nectar”). It’s an engrossing exploration of the brain’s extraordinary powers and terrifying frailties. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Borden (I Totally Meant to Do That) argues that since its genesis, the U.S. has had a unique propensity for doomsday cults. She surveys this American predilection from its earliest manifestations in Christopher Columbus, who had fantasies of conquering Jerusalem after he crossed the Atlantic, and the similarly millenarian-minded Puritans to the modern-day “large group awareness training seminars” used by groups like NXIVM and multilevel marketing companies like Amway to instill a Puritan-esque work ethic in their members. Borden hypothesizes that Americans are susceptible to doomsday-ism because they are “WEIRD”—“western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic”—and are thus psychologically different from the rest of the world, where people are less individualistic and thus conformist. In America, this nonconformism breeds anxiety, which, combined with the loneliness inherent in a hyper-individualistic culture, draws people toward apocalyptic strains of thought that offer both the direction and connection they seek. It is unclear from this explanation what Borden makes of the proliferation of cults in a country like Japan, which has ample conformism but also a loneliness epidemic. Omissions like this, along with Borden’s rallying cry that “our birthright is not only to be driven by doomsday dreams but to be the apotheosis of WEIRD society”—a task ambiguously framed as realizable through “the bridging of divides”—make this unconvincing. There’s a lot of rich research here, but it doesn’t quite gel. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

A ship in international waters that offers abortions to anyone, underground pill smuggling networks, and global lists of secretive abortion providers are some of the inventive means by which activists thwart abortion restrictions in this defiant history from journalist Grant (Birth). After a brief look back at a mid-19th-century foremother to these efforts—Madame Restell, the “wickedest woman in New York,” who sold “Female Monthly Pills” before abortion’s criminalization—Grant homes in on the last 60 years of such illicit activism. She begins just before Roe, with groups like the “Army of Three,” who compiled “the first open (and illegal) abortion referral service” in the U.S., and ends with Roe’s overturning. Notwithstanding the U.S.-centric framing, the book’s scope is international, covering battles for abortion access in Ireland, Poland, Brazil, and the “abortion corridor between the U.S. and Mexico”—an illicit connection that has become more important post-Roe as “older white women,” the “least likely to attract scrutiny from customs agents,” collaborate with Mexican feminist groups to ferry abortion pills into America. Grant’s roving, keenly reported account also looks at how the internet revolutionized possibilities for remote treatment as pioneering websites like Women on Web guided people through the abortion consultation process and at how in recent years women’s deaths and imprisonment due to lack of abortion access have galvanized mass protests that successfully demanded change. With an inspiring focus on ordinary people who risk their livelihoods, freedom, and safety to help others, this rivets. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Poet and translator Hinton (Wild Mind, Wild Earth) combines natural history with classical Chinese poetry in this enchanting journal of his meditative walks in the desert of the American Southwest. Beginning with a reflection on the big bang—“the birthplace of stars is now always everywhere”—Hinton notes that “what modern science describes as space-time” is “uncannily” similar to one of “ancient China’s foundational cosmological concepts.” He points to how the classical Chinese ideogram that corresponds to “space” and “breath” also signifies “dwelling place,” and the one for “time” is also “a seed burgeoning forth,” implying a worldview of the “Cosmos as a generative self-emergent tissue,” or “our seed-time home.” As he walks, he finds parallels for this thinking in descriptions of the Southwest’s natural landscape handed down by the Hopi, for whom the “transformation of reality” is a “perpetual process” that develops “from a seed of emptiness” in the breath of all living things. Hinton ruminates on this “primal cosmology” in everything from Indo-European root words to Sung dynasty poetry. As the account builds toward an ecstatic vision of boundlessness between “self” and “landscape” that suggests a limitless capacity for creativity, a bittersweet note also emerges: “scatter is the nature of things,” Hinton reminds readers, and it’s only “forgetfulness that lasts, flowing through its ageless clarity.” This mesmerizes. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Inflation has multiple causes and just as many manifestations,” according to this measured study. Blyth (coauthor of Angrynomics) and Fraccaroli (coauthor of Austerity vs. Stimulus)—economists at Brown University and the World Bank, respectively—explain that while moderate inflation is “generally a sign of a growing economy,” “bad inflation” occurs when supply shocks compel corporations to raise prices in anticipation of further shocks, leading workers to demand higher wages that companies pay for by further boosting prices. Evaluating shortcomings of the most common explanations for inflation (corporate greed, government spending, supply shocks, and tight labor markets), the authors point out, for instance, that attempts to pin recent inflation on government stimulus during Covid are difficult to square with data showing that the amount of stimulus a given country spent bears little correlation with how much inflation it experienced. Rather, the causes of and proper remedies for inflation vary over time and place, the authors argue, noting that differences in wealth and reliance on Russian oil played decisive roles in why price controls successfully tamed inflation in Spain but not Hungary in the 2020s. Blyth and Fraccaroli excel at breaking down the complicated economics into accessible language, providing as lucid a dissection of inflation as readers are likely to find. This should be essential reading for anyone looking to understand current debates around rising prices. (May)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Every Single Album podcaster Princiotti throws it back to the early aughts in this nostalgic debut essay collection analyzing how the era’s female musicians redefined what it meant to be a pop star. The opening chapter details how Britney Spears rose from Mickey Mouse Club cast member to adolescent superstar, precipitating a “surge in resources and enthusiasm for young, female pop singers.” Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” marked the moment that indie music went mainstream, Princiotti contends, discussing how producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote the song as a popified version of “Maps” by indie rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Exploring how other stars distinguished themselves with new technologies, Princiotti discusses how a teenage Taylor Swift changed how artists interact with their fans through her MySpace page, and how Rihanna harnessed the possibilities of digital recording software to move pop in a more dance-centric direction. Princiotti’s voice is akin to gabbing with an erudite friend who doles out insight and humor with equal aplomb (she writes of Spears’s idiosyncratic phonetics in “...Baby One More Time” that “it’s as if she took a look at the lyric sheet and thought, I have better plans for these vowel sounds”). It’s a boisterous celebration of how women moved pop forward in the early 21st century. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (June)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink