Journalist Hattem debuts with a deeply reported look at the new patterns of migration resulting from climate change. Hattem notes that humans “are an innately migratory species” and that environmental changes have always spurred migration but asserts that what is novel about the current moment is the pace of change. He takes readers to Bangladesh—“one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world”—where, due to displacement caused by river erosion, nearly 10 million people are considered “climate migrants.” In northwest Bangladesh, the average household has been displaced a whopping 4.6 times. He also presents the case of Guatemala, where increasing droughts will have nearly two million climate migrants on the move northward through Mexico by 2050, according to the World Bank. Excoriating anti-migrant narratives in the West as racist, Hattem notes the irony that if Western leaders really wanted to reduce migration, they would focus on combatting climate change and “make it easier for people to stay in place.” He observes that many people would indeed prefer to remain in place, and makes plain that mass migration can amount to a devastating cultural erasure, as with the case of Bangladesh’s Munda people, a rural, forest-worshipping Indigenous sect, whose way of life has been threatened by “climate induced scattering.” The result is an informative and troubling snapshot of the current state of the climate crisis. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Brand strategist and longtime yoga practitioner Norton draws inspiration from his years on the mat for his wry debut collection of life advice. Each chapter is anchored by an aphoristic piece of wisdom the author has overheard in yoga class. Some of the advice is familiar; “If you feel overwhelmed, just do the next right thing,” he writes, is a reminder that there’s rarely a “correct” next decision. (The best choice is to pick an option that’s feasible and enjoyable, because “at the very least, it’s better than no move at all.”) Elsewhere, he uses the instruction “Close your eyes so you’re not comparing yourself to others in the room” to emphasize how growth and fulfillment come from within. Norton entertains with his self-aware humor and fun pop culture references (ranging from Amélie to Jessica Lange), though he can go off-track, as with a rambling meditation on Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid (“The reason we can’t stop talking about Hillary is because her loss shattered our individual and collective worlds”). The result is an approachable and low-pressure, if uneven, guide to self-reflection and personal change. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this scrupulous study, anthropologist Roberts (God’s Laboratory) mines her fieldwork in Mexico City to upend judgmental Western notions of addiction. Drawing from a local philosophy that sees compulsion in the context of its circumstances, she distinguishes between addictions, which happen in community and can be connective, and vices that draw people apart. (The same substance, like alcohol, can be an addiction when used at parties, or a vice when someone isolates themselves while drinking.) Tracing the history of the term addiction, she explains how its 16th-century meaning as “devotion, loyalty, attachment... especially pertaining to the worship of God” was slowly pathologized in the West as post–Protestant Reformation individualism took hold. The focus on personal morality and self-control, she writes, transformed addiction “from being viewed as a regular part of the human condition to a disease” and thus a source of shame, while discounting its structural roots, including economic inequality. As an alternative, she suggests embracing a definition of addiction that centers “devoted and connected pleasure,” reduces shame, and embraces community. While she sometimes leans into extremes (“What if abject junkies could revere heroin for all to see, instead of isolating themselves, ashamed in vice?”), Roberts does a masterful job of excavating the social and cultural roots and ramifications of addiction, exploring along the way AA’s questionable methods (some argue that it replaces one kind of addiction with another), her own disordered eating history, and more. It’s a worthy take on a challenging topic. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Research-based insight meets practical guidance in this straightforward debut guide to the first six years of a child’s development from psychologist Schwarzlmüller. Rather than getting bogged down by complex child-rearing strategies, she encourages parents to simply interact with their children, alternately leading and following them. Following infants might look like learning to read their facial expressions and cues, and for toddlers, letting them make messes while learning to feed themselves. Leading might look like setting limits and boundaries (for instance, creating a “yes space” at home that’s safe for toddlers to explore while still firmly redirecting them from stoves and stairs), finding appropriate tasks that small children can assist with, and helping kids interpret their playmates’ behavior (“Those friends would like to use the sand pail too”). Both leading and following build trust and mutual respect in the parent-child relationship, according to Schwarzlmüller. Throughout, she walks readers through scenarios with a fictional child, “Alex,” that are meant to illustrate development across ages; it’s an effective device, giving readers a glimpse into what behaviors are typical and what might need extra attention. This is a valuable resource for parents of young children. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this affecting and wide-ranging essay collection, novelist Neugeboren (Whatever Happened to Frankie King) reflects on his career and literary friendships, his time caring for his brother who had a mental illness, and his Jewish identity. The title essay draws parallels between Neugeboren’s youth in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s and the work of Charles Dickens (his parents’ prized possession was a 20-volume set of the author’s complete works), noting his early life, like the lives of Dickens’s characters, was “determined by difficult economic circumstances, inhabited by eccentric larger-than-life characters, rooted in family feuds about inheritance and money, and steeped in scenes of intense, high drama.” In another piece, Neugeboren reflects on connecting with a distant cousin named Manya, whose stories of surviving Nazi concentration camps remind him “that a person who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.” Neugeboren’s personal struggles also get addressed, including the helplessness he felt trying to ease the suffering of his brother, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Elsewhere, he details his friendships with the late writers Martha Foley and Oliver Sacks, his efforts to balance a writing career with single fatherhood, and his political activism in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Neugeboren’s poignant and contemplative prose results in a rich portrait of a writer’s life. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and mathematician Suri (The Big Bang of Numbers) delivers a tender autobiography that unfolds primarily in the one-room Bombay flat where the author’s parents raised him. The first section concerns Suri’s childhood in the 1960s and ’70s, recounting the tensions between his Hindu family and Muslim neighbors and his humorous attempts to find privacy as he entered adolescence in cramped quarters. The next follows Suri to the U.S., where he pursued a degree and then a career in mathematics, came out as gay, and grappled with telling his family about his sexuality. In the melancholy final third, Suri returns to Bombay and chronicles his mother, Prem’s, agonizing decline from Alzheimer’s, detailing how flashes of her signature wit would cut through long days of terror and confusion. Suri expertly parallels the apartment’s combination of claustrophobia and coziness with his conflicted feelings about his aging parents (“This room that has been my crucible, controlled and tormented and driven me—how much has it shaped my history, my current self?”). His portrait of Prem is clear-eyed and prismatic, highlighting both her sweetness and her intensity. The result is a moving consideration of the ties that bind. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Campbell debuts with a revelatory biography of sex researcher Shere Hite (1942–2020), best known for her 1976 publication, The Hite Report. “The thirtieth bestselling book of all time,” the Report surveyed thousands of women about their sexual experiences and came to the paradigm-shifting conclusion that “70 percent of women could not orgasm from penetrative sex alone.” Campbell shows how Hite’s early life influenced her later interest in sexual dynamics, from her Christian fundamentalist upbringing to her work in porn, but the book captivates most when documenting Hite’s relentless pursuit of her research, including her finagling the National Organization for Women into sending out the anonymous questionnaires covered “with love hearts [and] cupid bows.” Tracing the extraordinary public response to the book’s publication, Campbell unearths a trove of effusive letters to Hite from women expressing that “a cloud of guilt... was completely lifted” and men questioning whether they had been “complete... sexual partner[s].” Campbell also tackles Hite’s blind spots and personal flaws, including a propensity to “fly off the handle,” which played a role in the 1980s backlash against Hite after an incident in which she struck a limo driver. Campbell, however, notes the excessive misogyny in the press’s treatment of Hite (“How many Shere Hites does it take to change a light bulb?” asked the Chicago Tribune). Readers will find this an essential account of an oft-overlooked feminist pioneer. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former Glamour editor Gavenas (Color Stories) offers a brilliant biography of Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics and “the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange.” Born to “hardworking people” in rural Texas in 1918, Ash married and became a mother at 16, and began working in direct sales not long after. Her ambition increased after she witnessed a top seller win an alligator handbag at a conference. When she founded Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963, her own yearning for such prizes, as well as her experience selling tchotchkes door-to-door, influenced her approach, which standardized and expanded the direct sales industry’s tiered rewards structure (including the famous pink Cadillacs for the company’s top sellers). Gavenas also explores Ash’s personal life, including her multiple marriages (more than have previously been reported) and her “campy” persona, with her “big, white blond wigs,” ever-present poodle companion, and dramatic entrances (she once arrived at a seminar in “a horse-drawn carriage as thousands belted... ‘I’ve Got That Mary Kay Enthusiasm’ ”). Yet the author also takes seriously the groundbreaking nature of Ash’s endeavor. Frustrated by the lack of upward mobility for women, Ash continually added “echelon after echelon, so that there was always some higher step,” and in the process turned “shift workers and stay-at-home moms into millionaires.” Her uniquely encouraging leadership style treated women “as though they were burning with ambition,” Gavenas writes. “Many found that they were.” It’s a remarkable depiction of a transformational businesswoman. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Travel writer Wheeler (Glowing Still) offers a granular biography of Jan Morris, a journalist, travel writer, Welsh nationalist, and trans woman. Morris, who was born in 1926, joined the British army during WWII and served in Egypt and Palestine, where the collapse of British imperial ambitions inspired her to become what she described as “vocationally engaged in the decline of my country.” (She went on to publish Pax Britannica, a three-part history of the British Empire from 1836 to 1965). After returning to England and completing a degree at Oxford, Morris embarked on a journalism career that took her and her wife, Elizabeth, across the world, including to the first summiting of Mt. Everest in 1953 and to Cuba to interview Che Guevara in 1960. Wheeler closely analyzes Morris’s literary output, including her newspaper columns and travelogues. She also digs into Morris’s life as a trans woman, including the medical care challenges she encountered in the U.K. during her long transition process and her gender reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972, which she documented in her memoir Conundrum. Morris died in 2020, at age 94. Wheeler provides especially illuminating details about Morris’s experience as a trans woman at a time “when ‘sex change’ was unexplored territory,” though those moments are sometimes buried under dry specifics about job changes and financial struggles. It’s a thorough and competent biography, best suited for those already familiar with Morris and her work. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bold new claims about Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer and why he painted are at the core of this exemplary biography from art historian Graham-Dixon (Caravaggio). Drawing from a wealth of historical documents, the author argues that Vermeer (1632–1675) did most of his work for two patrons: husband and wife Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, members of the Collegiants, a dissenting Christian movement that developed in response to the Eighty Years’ War. The sect prized egalitarian values, eschewed traditional preaching, and gave women equal rights to speak. Meetings were often held in members’ homes; those that occurred in the van Ruijven household likely used Vermeer’s paintings as “devotional pictures” to aid members in their worship. Domestic scenes in Vermeer’s paintings are actually loaded with religious symbolism, Graham-Dixon contends. For example, nails protruding from walls in the backgrounds of The Milkmaid and Woman with a Balance symbolize Jesus’s crucifixion, and Girl with a Pearl Earring was likely a baptismal portrait of Vermeer’s patrons’ daughter, Magdalena. Drawing from auction and inheritance records, the author convincingly repositions Vermeer, about whom relatively little is known and whose motivations were presumed to be mostly secular, as a painter with egalitarian religious views. Along the way, Graham-Dixon makes informed, well-researched guesses about whom Vermeer might have apprenticed with, among other mysteries. Serious Vermeer fan won’t want to miss this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink