Veterinary medicine has come a long way since its 18th-century beginnings, according to this standout history from veterinarian Schott (The Accidental Veterinarian). Each chapter features a veterinarian who has made his or her mark on the profession. There’s William Moorcroft, founder of the first equine hospital in London, who traveled the world searching for breeding horses for the British East India Company’s cavalry; French veterinarian Pierre Victor Galtier, who pioneered the rabies vaccine with sheep in 1881 before Louis Pasteur put it to the test on humans; Canadian vet Harry Colebourn, who, en route to the Western Front in 1914, adopted Winnie, a bear cub who became the inspiration for the character Winnie-the-Pooh; and Louis Camuti, the New York vet who became the first to specialize in cats in 1933. Not all the credit goes to humans in Schott’s clever survey—an unsung hero of veterinary history is the 18th-century racehorse Eclipse, who was so beloved that the British public went into mourning upon his death in 1789, sparking demand for formal veterinary education. Schott’s animated account moves at a fast clip, is full of colorful anecdotes, and will delight animal lovers of all stripes. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former FBI sniper Whitcomb (Cold Zero) recounts life after the Bureau in this scattered memoir. Whitcomb resigned from the FBI in 2001 after publishing an account of his experiences at the agency. His final day on the job was September 12, and his desire to continue counterterrorism work after 9/11 led him to approach the CIA with an offer to use press credentials he had from his days as a journalist to gain access to tribal areas in Pakistan and share what he learned with the Pentagon. From there, Whitcomb delivers a discursive, often boastful account of life in the spotlight and out of it. He writes of becoming a public face of the “war on terror,” including as the co-host of a CNBC show, and of his increasing obsession with anonymity, which drove him to start a private security firm in war-torn Timor and nearly drown off the coast of Bali. His wife helped straighten him out during Covid, insisting that “people who live unusual lives have an obligation to record them.” Unfortunately, the narrative is marred by hazy through lines and abrasive prose (he writes that it’s easy to hide in Asia and Africa because they’re “giant expanses of nobody-gives-a-fuck”). In the author’s note, Whitcomb concedes that his life is “quite difficult to explain.” This rambling account won’t leave many readers feeling he’s succeeded. Agent: David Vigliano, Vigliano Assoc. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this striking, elegant account, novelist and Anglican priest Helwig (Girls Fall Down) recalls how in spring 2022 her small churchyard in Toronto became the site of a homeless encampment. Finding shelter is a grueling and often senseless process for Toronto’s unhoused, according to Helwig, who calls it “a Lewis Carroll fantasia,” replete with mysterious calls from city staff that are later contradicted, permits that don’t exist, and a stance of “encouraging people to come indoors when there was no indoors... to come into.” The encampment at Helwig’s church quickly became a lightning rod for controversy, with the city sending an ominous vehicle called “the Claw” to remove tents and a nearby Montessori school emerging as a particularly sinister nemesis. Throughout, Helwig gracefully illuminates the encampment’s embattled residents; one particularly awful anecdote describes how a beloved dog is stolen from a resident by a Cruella de Vil–esque figure. Helwig recounts guarding tents, serving coffee, and standing by deathbeds as “the holder of sacred things,” whose job it was to redistribute the meager worldly possessions of the deceased to those who loved them and, as Helwig emphasizes, did indeed notice when they were gone. In crystalline prose, this sheds light on not only the struggles of the unhoused but the heartlessness of a society that would rather not see them at all. (May)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

This entertaining and stimulating brain teaser from Jeopardy! host Jennings (100 Places to See After You Die) is based on his popular online game series of the same name. “Kennections” began in 2012 when Jennings—then a record-setting game show contestant—was approached by Parade magazine about authoring a weekly puzzle in which the player would answer five trivia questions and then detect the commonality between the answers. (Parade initially suggested something far more complicated but unprintable in its allotted space; Jennings, ever the master puzzler, solved this problem by streamlining it into its current form.) A hit in print became a hit online when Jennings moved the puzzle series from Parade to the website Mental Floss. The thousand puzzles collected here are not organized by theme, preventing the player from cherry picking categories in their comfort zone, and trying to beat them quickly becomes addictive. “Being a trivia person breaks your brain,” Jennings writes, but if his brain is broken, it does not show. Viewers of Jeopardy! won’t be surprised by the humor here: the introduction is titled “Kenfessions,” the instructions are “Kenstructions,” and the people he thanks in the acknowledgements are “Kentributors.” Jennings is having a lot of fun with this, and it’s infectious. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

“When workers are sailing on the ship that they’ve built and charting its course, great things can happen to the economy, our democracy, and the quality of people’s lives,” asserts Abrams (Companies We Keep) in this standout guide to a more democratic workplace. He encourages businesses to become a “CommonWealth company,” one that focuses on the common good. Becoming one requires five transitions: from proprietary ownership to “widely shared”; from “original” leadership to “next generation”; from an “unprotected” to a “permanent” mission; from top-down control to democratic; and into a certified B Corp. He offers plenty of guidance for each—the concrete steps he outlines for becoming employee-owned include creating a value proposal and a steering committee, for example. Though he’s a strong advocate for co-ops, Abrams also presents a fair share of alternatives, including employee stock ownership plans and employee ownership trusts. Along the way, he draws on his experience with the architecture and energy firm he cofounded in 1973 and transformed into a worker co-op in 1987. Zealous without being preachy, Abrams makes a solid case that small businesses can “spread wealth more equitably.” The result is a must-read for business owners looking to put more power in the hands of employees. (June)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The striped “layers of sand, silt, and clay” comprising Earth’s geologic record offer “wisdom that we may carry into our own lives, so long as we know how to read them,” according to journalist Poppick’s solid debut. She covers four periods: around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen began to appear on Earth; the ice ages scientists believe spanned between 717 million and 635 million years ago; when newly evolved plants transformed the land by creating mud approximately 458 million years ago; and the rise of the dinosaurs as the planet warmed significantly around 252 million years ago. Making a convincing argument that understanding strata can help scientists better respond to climate change, Poppick movingly describes these layers of rock and sediment as “love letters left behind by an aging Earth” that is rapidly changing: “Even as the planet ages and grows sick, its stories persist as constant reminders that return us home.” Throughout, she memorably recounts assisting in geological research in the Arctic and the Australian outback, and provides an impressive look at how scientific ideas take shape and evolve as new data enters the picture, explaining that “stratigraphy offers drafts of stories that must remain open to revisions.” Poetic and passionate, this is science writing with flair. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cultural critic Johnson debuts with an astute and deeply felt essay collection on how Black Americans “leverage what might typically be seen as disadvantages—our marginalized, ‘low’ placement in society; our Blackness; our communities—and flip them into a series of superpowers.” In “Streemal: Navigating America’s Education,” Johnson traces his uncle Alan’s life from his youth in “Black Trenton” to college at UPenn in 1977 when the school only had 350 Black students. “The Fifth Dimension, Celebration in America’s Face” is a memorable account of Philadelphia’s “picturesque” Odunde festival, a yearly street fair in June replete with “Black cowboys strutting down South Philly blocks, a soundstage with throw-back R&B acts, the long bins of food, Black people fanning themselves,” and more. Johnson deftly balances the celebratory, as in his account of the BlackStar Film Festival, which “transforms Philly’s cultural spaces into an ephemeral Chocolate City,” with harsh cultural realities, including the racial profiling that drives what he calls “Black Paranoia™,” or “the historical and cultural state of having been relentlessly surveilled.” Each essay is finely crafted as a standalone piece, and the thematic threads that run through the collection make it all the stronger when taken as a whole. It’s an auspicious first outing from an unflinching voice. Agent: Sabrina Taitz, WME. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

A once famous but now little remembered turn-of-the-20th-century executive had a secret Gatsby-esque trajectory, hiding his Native American and Jewish roots in order to “pass” as white, according to this captivating debut investigation from journalist Berman. Born in 1870 in Marquette, Mich., to a Métis mother and a Jewish father, Louis Graveraet Kaufman (1870–1942), or LG, as he was commonly known, grew up poor, until his older brother Nathan found success in iron ore mining. With Nathan’s support, LG married into old money and was given a job at Nathan’s Marquette County Savings Bank. “From the start LG seemed to know exactly what he was doing—grasping financial and managerial concepts and utilizing them with energy, charm, and finesse,” Berman writes. In 1910, he was chosen to head one of the largest banks in New York, the Chatham Phenix National Bank and Trust. Wildly successful, LG went on to finance numerous constructions, among them the Empire State Building—then the world’s tallest building—and “the world’s largest log structure,” an Adirondack-style lodge near Marquette that became a boozy Prohibition-era hot spot for America’s rich and famous. However, he lost everything in the 1932 market crash and retreated back to Michigan, dying in obscurity. Combining dogged archival sleuthing with vibrant storytelling, this makes for a unique and riveting American saga. (June)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Rowe (The Spider and the Fly) rips the Band-Aid off the ugly wound that is the American foster care system in this searing j’accuse. Drawing on frank interviews with current and former foster youth, Rowe exposes the cruelty of a system that leaves the young feeling worthless and ignored and plausibly links it to other societal problems, writing that foster care is “an unacknowledged factor driving mass homelessness, drug addiction, and property crimes,” and “one of the gears powering America’s incarceration complex.” Rowe’s profile subjects include Maryanne, who is among the many foster children who were unadopted—“dumped... back into the pool of unwanted kids like a Christmas puppy grown too big.” Maryanne later fatally shot a friend and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison; Rowe notes that her fate was not atypical, reporting that former foster kids comprise at least 20% of America’s prison population. Others she profiles include Art Longworth, who wrote award-winning memoirs about his experiences in foster care and prison, and Sixto Cancel, who survived horrific abuse. Rowe is blunt about what is needed to change the system—reducing how many children end up in it by providing families with stable housing, food, and medical care. It’s a powerful indictment of a child welfare system seemingly designed to “pump out” adults “ill-equipped” to flourish. (May)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Zito (The Great Revolt) offers a vivid firsthand account of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his Butler, Pa., rally and uses the experience to delve into the political importance of western Pennsylvania. Zito describes the shooting from her perspective “a mere few feet away” from Trump: the anticipatory atmosphere—the “happy” crowd with “newly purchased Trump flags, hats, [and] sipping cups”—shifts dramatically as she’s “shoved to the ground” after hearing gunshots. In addition to relaying her multiple phone calls with Trump the next day, when the two discussed “divine intervention... and Trump’s purpose,” Zito follows the election to its conclusion, occasionally offering some local insights such as how Harris’s campaign blundered by holding “tightly controlled” invite-only rallies in Pennsylvania. However, her focus on Butler residents becomes more tenuous as she moves on to national events, and when she veers into detailed accounts of her schmoozy, admiration-filled interactions with Trump, who calls her “my beautiful Salena.” Zito, who has multigenerational ties to western Pennsylvania, argues that reporters from New York and Washington, D.C., suffer from a “lack of rootedness” that weakens their coverage of places like Butler, yet her analysis of what caused these communities’ rightward shift (globalization, opioids, inflation) doesn’t go beyond what others have written. While well observed and knowledgeable, this pointed plea for a return to local reporting lacks fresh political insights. (July)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink