Banning Books in America: Not a How-To
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Edited by Samuel Cohen. Bloomsbury Academic, $24 (192p) ISBN 979-8-7651-3807-6
This inconsistent anthology from English literature scholar Cohen (After the End of History) invites readers to “engage with a wider range of ideas about the current moment’s frenzy of hostility to books.” Some of the essays deliver unique points of view. Emily Drabinski, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the American Library Association, describes the hateful political attacks against her and her organization during her tenure. Annie’s Foundation board member Emily Harris shares how her organization, which advocates for students’ right to read, was founded by ordinary parents pushing back against conservative group Moms for Liberty. New York City teacher Annie Abrams illustrates how Bill Gates’s philanthropic efforts to promote Common Core standards led to a “broad turn away from liberal education” and incentivized teaching short passages rather than complete literary works. But other contributions strike off notes. Novelist Lydia Millet bemoans her books never having been banned, suggesting an appearance on a banned books list is a badge of honor or a sales tactic. Georgia Tech professor Aaron Santesso takes a similar tack but with 18th-century literature, his academic specialty. Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Leonard Cassuto critiques “absolutist stances” on both sides of the political spectrum. With contributions ranging from eye-opening to exasperating, this doesn’t always rise to the occasion. (Feb.)
The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts
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Leander Schaerlaeckens. Viking, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-0-593-65387-6
“The ascent of the American men is something akin to a sporting miracle,” writes sports journalist Schaerlaeckens in this thorough debut history of the U.S. men’s national soccer team. The team formed in 1916 and finished third at the inaugural FIFA World Cup in Uruguay in 1930 (its best result to date). American soccer struggled over the next several decades, however. As Schaerlaeckens explains, the sport had a “foreignness” that pushed people away, while attempts to create a sustainable professional league were thwarted by low attendance and financial troubles. The country hosted the 1994 World Cup, which helped elevate the sport and made celebrities out of players like Alexi Lalas and Cobi Jones. The U.S. Soccer Federation later began investing in youth development with a soccer academy in Bradenton, Fla., which produced some of the program’s current stars, including Tyler Adams and Christian Pulisic, who led the team out of the group stage at the 2022 World Cup. The team is entering the 2026 World Cup as an “ascendant program, hoping to summit sometime soon,” Schaerlaeckens writes. He vividly chronicles the tumultuous journey of American men’s soccer by placing the team’s recent rise in the context of decades of institutional disorganization and on-field struggles. Fans will find this a boon. (May)
The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt: A Biography
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Hédi A. Jaouad. Three Rooms, $20 trade paper (270p) ISBN 978-1-953103-72-7
Jaouad (Browning upon Arabia), professor emeritus of French and Francophone studies at Skidmore College, delivers a captivating biography of Swiss writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. Born in Geneva in 1877, Eberhardt was the illegitimate daughter of a Russian noblewoman and, allegedly, her children’s tutor, an ex-priest affectionately known as “Vava.” Eberhardt had an unconventional upbringing, encouraged by Vava to defy gender norms by dressing as a boy and to study subjects like Arabic, literature, and history. Inspired by her studies, she became interested in Algeria and published, under a male pseudonym, short stories about North Africa based on correspondences with her brother and acquaintances who lived there. Jaouad chronicles Eberhardt’s eventual move to Algeria, where she dressed as a man and converted to Islam. Her lifestyle led French colonial authorities to suspect her of being a spy, and she was nearly killed in an assassination attempt before dying at age 27 in a flash flood in Algeria. Joauad doesn’t portray Eberhardt as merely an outcast but takes care to contextualize and demystify her life. Once dismissed as an eccentric, Eberhardt emerges here as a visionary who embodied the spirit of adventure through her nonconformist life. It’s a vivid portrait of a revolutionary. (May)
Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget
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Reyna Grande. Primero Sueño, $29 (256p) ISBN 978-1-6680-5527-4
Mexican American novelist and memoirist Grande (Across a Hundred Mountains) explores the ripple effects of her experiences as an immigrant in this stirring collection. The subject matter is broad: “Stitching My Mother Tongue” probes Grande’s feelings of shame at not being able to write in Spanish, and for raising her children in an English-speaking home; “Explaining Myself” details her decision, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, to publicly discuss being raped by a friend. Other essays are darkly humorous, as when Grande recalls attending her sister-in-law’s 2004 college graduation, where the commencement speaker, Donald Trump, told the audience that “if there is a concrete wall in front of you, go through it, go over it, go around. But get to the other side of that wall.” Grande ends the volume with an account of her daughter tending to a deformed monarch butterfly, explaining how the species “has become a symbol for undocumented immigrants” because of its 3,000-mile migration through “storms, predators, and a vanishing food supply.” Nimbly balancing hope and heartbreak, Grande’s tender dispatches add up to an affecting self-portrait. Photos. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House. (May)
A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us
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Bruce Feiler. Penguin Press, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-0-593-65643-3
A Brooklyn “grieving and weaving” circle, a forest bathing session in Chile, and a group baptism at the Vatican are just some of the gatherings attended by bestseller Feiler (The Search) in this spirited meditation on rituals. Seeking to discover “what still holds us together” in a world of increasing alienation, the author travels the globe, observing a diverse range of practices and interviewing experts. What he finds is not a “celebration recession” but rather a “ritual revival,” with many people around the world rethinking what rituals can look like. Those spotlighted range from the “millennium-old” Balinese coming-of-age custom matatah, “the ceremonial act of shaving down... an individual’s twelve front teeth,” to Taylor Swift–themed divorce parties. Most movingly, the author profiles individuals who have created new rituals to match their experiences, including Missy Holliday, who pioneered “honor walks” for organ donors after her sister’s sudden death and donation. Though Feiler sometimes waxes florid (“Rituals curate symbols into meaningful experiences that form the alphabet of intimacy and the grammar of coexistence”), he offers strong proof that rituals foster community and connection. Even the typical familial arguments over weddings and funerals, the author astutely shows, work to “force families to address... underlying conflicts.” It’s a powerful case for the continued importance of ritual at a time of disconnection and division. (May)
Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship
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Jonathan W. Jordan. Dutton, $40 (576p) ISBN 978-0-593-47313-9
The relationship between Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill changed radically along with their countries’ military-industrial heft, according to this perceptive study. Historian Jordan (The War Queens) opens the account with Eisenhower’s 1942 arrival in Europe as America’s top general. At that time, British prime minister Churchill usually prevailed in debates over strategy—he persuaded the Americans to postpone the invasion of France to attack the Axis in North Africa—though he and Eisenhower often backed each other. That changed in 1944, when America’s prodigious arms production came to dominate the war and Eisenhower began overriding Churchill on strategic issues, including sidelining the Italian campaign and commencing bombing attacks on German-occupied France. In the 1950s, the stoutly anticommunist Eisenhower rebuffed Churchill’s calls for a summit with the Soviets, and during the 1956 Suez crisis, he forced Britain to back off against Churchill’s wishes. The eloquent, cigar-chomping, and frequently soused Churchill is the more charismatic figure in Jordan’s colorful dual portrait, but Eisenhower is more transfixing, a cold and ruthless operator beneath his genial, grandfatherly mien (“When Ike stepped on a friend, he wouldn’t lift his boot until he got what he wanted”). It’s a fascinating analysis of two larger-the-life personalities who ushered in the American Century. (May)
Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature
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Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong. Norton, $28.99 (192p) ISBN 978-1-324-10548-0
In this appealing but underwhelming proposal, geoscientist Hazen (Symphony in C) and astrobiologist Wong present a new law for understanding the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the disorder of a closed system always increases over time, the authors posit that order increases as well. A new law, they contend, should be established to account for how “remarkable states of intricate organization” emerge over time, like how humans have created art and science and birds sing in patterns. They christen their discovery “the law of increasing functional information” and assert that it “describes the generation of order in a world of decay.” Hazen and Wong apply this law to language and music; advances in technology and scientific knowledge; and nonliving systems, including atoms, stars, minerals, and molecules. For example, they note how atoms, the building blocks of matter, emerged in stages after the big bang and how artificial intelligence has evolved to solve crossword puzzles, answer math questions, and hold conversations. According to the authors, their theory could help offer new strategies for tackling “unruly evolving systems” like the climate and cancer cells. Unfortunately, while they assert that any natural law should be able to explain and predict natural phenomena, they struggle to demonstrate this with their own law. It’s a provocative idea, but readers are unlikely to be convinced. (Feb.)
Chain Reaction: How Chemistry Shapes Us and Our World
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Ijeoma Uchegbu. Mariner, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-0-06-339462-9
Uchegbu (Fundamentals of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience), chemist and president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, reveals how chemistry underpins everyday life in this oversimplified account. “Without chemistry everything would simply not be,” she writes, explaining there are 118 known elements (including aluminum, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen) and everything on Earth—from a fried egg to air—is the result of bonds forging and breaking between them. She describes the chemistry behind the making of everyday substances, like mayonnaise (weak bonds between oil, water, and egg yolk allow for a smooth yellow mixture) and hair-straightening chemicals (sodium hydroxide breaks the curl-inducing bonds along the hair shaft to loosen the curl). The chemistry of clothing is also elucidated, including efforts to find more environmentally friendly ways to dye jeans blue. She underscores the prevalence of chemistry through personal anecdotes, explaining, for example, how medication soothed her blistering skin during a sun allergy flare-up by blocking a substance called histamine in the body. Elsewhere, she uses the death of her father as a jumping-off point to demonstrate how chemicals can be used to delay decomposition. While her stories are intriguing, the science is relayed with an abundance of analogies and lacks specifics. This is best suited for those new to the subject. (May)
A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake
Tamiko Nimura. Univ. of Washington, $29.95 (296p) ISBN 978-0-295-75475-8
In this gut-wrenching work of intergenerational dialogue, Nimura (We Hereby Refuse) braids passages from her late father’s unpublished memoir of growing up in California’s Tule Lake Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII with her own reflections on the text. When Nimura’s father, Taku, was 10 years old and packing for camp in 1942, his family was instructed to burn all of their photos and anything they owned with Japanese writing on it. In his memoir, Taku describes Tule Lake as an unsanitary, demoralizing place whose resourceful residents made crafts and mochi and staged talent shows. His narrative comprises simple, factual descriptions that Nimura notes are short on emotion, in contrast to the expressive man she remembers. Meanwhile, in chapters spanning from 2010 to 2022, Nimura offers her own memories of Taku, who died in 1984 when she was 10; details revisiting his manuscript as an adult; and recounts her pilgrimage from Tacoma, Wash., to Tule Lake. The back-and-forth structure works beautifully, with added poignancy coming from her acknowledgment that “the United States government has begun new waves of mass detention and mass incarceration” under President Donald Trump. It’s a memorable duet. (Apr.)
Backtalker: An American Memoir
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Simon & Schuster, $30 (400p) ISBN 978-1-9821-8100-0
UCLA law professor Crenshaw (The Race Track), who coined the concept of intersectionality, details in her outstanding debut memoir the experiences that moved her to articulate why “the racial burden of Black girlness and Black womanhood mattered—and ought to matter—to anyone concerned with fairness, justice, and the fulfillment of the promise of America.” She begins by describing how, as a six-year-old in mid-1960s Ohio, she yearned for her turn to play princess in a daily classroom activity, but was never chosen. Decades later, she recognized this as an example of the “thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls.” Additional examples followed, including urban renewal projects that failed to compensate her mother and other Black property owners for their displacement, and the pressure from Crenshaw’s Black peers to not pursue charges against a college boyfriend who abused her. Along the way, Crenshaw charts her rise as a legal scholar in the 1980s and ’90s, and discusses assisting Anita Hill’s legal team during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Throughout, she writes in an accessible, unadorned style that vibrates with authority. The result is an entertaining and invaluable account of personal triumph and political awakening. Agents: Nate Muscato and David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)
