J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar are today’s biggest torchbearers of conscious rap, a subgenre that explores such sociopolitical issues as racism, poverty, and mass incarceration, according to this lackluster debut. McCool, an associate professor of digital media at West Chester University, and Hopkins, a culture reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, trace both artists’ ascents against the backdrop of a rap scene caught between “intellectual” writing and commercially successful hits. Cole grew up in North Carolina and developed an “introspective, vulnerable” style that speaks to issues facing “average Black people,” while Lamar used his “raw lyricism” to both expose and transcend the challenges of his gritty Compton upbringing. The authors attribute the artists’ success to their ability to subtly channel social commentary into “radio-friendly hits, block party anthems, and club bangers,” even as conscious rap declines with the rise of “talentless” social media rappers who churn out “easily consumable records” to ready-made audiences. While Cole’s and Kendrick’s achievements are undeniable, the book fails to expand much beyond its thesis, branching instead into tangents and getting lost in clunky, repetitive prose. (A chapter on the intersections between rap and college bounces between rappers who did or did not go to college, rap that references academia, college courses on rap, and Cole and Kendrick’s respective educational experiences.) This disappoints. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Theater critic O’Malley (editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance) and lawyer Stern (The Trials of Nina McCall) assemble an enthralling history of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Margaret of Anjou, who married Henry VI at 14 and ruled during the War of Roses. More than 100 years later, Shakespeare wrote Margaret into four plays (all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III), amping up her sexuality and ambition for audiences who’d grown weary with the day’s “didactic morality tales.” The authors trace the character’s evolution in subsequent centuries, noting how some adaptations reduced Margaret’s role (she was entirely cut from Colley Cibber’s 1700 version of Richard III), though she reemerged in productions of the late 19th and 20th centuries with memorable performances from Peggy Ashcroft and Helen Mirren. Later, the 1990s and 2000s saw her “challenging, morally murky narrative” serve as a vehicle for playwrights to explore race, empire, and gender. O’Malley and Stern ingeniously probe the sweep of Shakespearean history, touching on everything from the economic realities of producing theatre in the 16th century to the varied political climates in which adaptations have been staged, ranging from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain to 1930s Germany. The result is a fascinating biography of a singular character and a revealing commentary on theater’s power to evolve with the times. (June)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Crowther (Dorothy Parker in Hollywood) delivers an intimate exploration of the personal library of actor and model Marilyn Monroe. Crowther analyzes Monroe’s 400-plus book collection—which was auctioned off several decades after her death—along with interviews and Monroe’s diaries to shed light on the significant role books played in her life. While she favored poetry, plays, psychology, Russian novels, and banned books, Monroe had a deeply curious mind that pushed her to read widely across genres and subject matters, Crowther demonstrates. She alleges that misogyny led to unfounded skepticism about Monroe’s intelligence, with people often expressing doubt about her proclivity or even ability to read. But, as Crowther shows, Monroe turned to reading to cope with the stress of Hollywood and books greatly influenced her art. For example, she read numerous works on acting, such as Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, which encouraged her to mine her life experiences to add depth to her performances. Her influence on her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, is also elucidated, including how he wrote characters and scripts based on her. By illuminating and uplifting Monroe’s love of books, Crowther helps rewrite the narrative that cast the actor as a “dumb blonde” and takes seriously the impact Monroe had on film and culture. This is an enlightening study of a misunderstood icon. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Biophysicist Osmundson (Virology) blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing. Balancing the scientific with the poetic, Osmundson documents the mating patterns of salmon, dives into age-old questions of nature vs. nurture, and quotes a range of literary sources from Carl Jung to Virginia Woolf to supplement the core narrative about his brush with parenthood. Osmundson remembers wanting children—wanting to be pregnant, in fact—since he was a young boy. As an adult in New York City, he was approached by a lesbian couple, both friends of his, who asked him to be a sperm donor and coparent to their child. The process sent Osmundson spiraling through standard contemporary parenting anxieties (the planet is dying; the cost of living is high) and nudged him toward more profound questions about passing one’s grief and anxiety onto their offspring and determining what makes a functional family when building one beyond the boundaries of a two-parent household. Though Osmundson’s story takes some heartbreaking turns, the mood is more inquisitive than melancholy: his reflections teem with the restless curiosity of someone who’s devoted their professional life to asking questions. The result is at once edifying and affecting. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian O’Malley (Final Passages) offers a spellbinding saga of one man’s long and wandering search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America. David George left behind one of the earliest known first-person testimonies of escaping slavery. It was transcribed by British officials during the Revolution, and O’Malley attempts to fill in the brief but stupendous account’s many blanks. In 1762, 19-year-old George escaped from a Virginia plantation and headed southwest toward the Creek Nation. His odyssey led him thousands of miles and found him in and out of captivity—first held by the Muscogee, and then enslaved again by a rich Irish landowner. He ended up on a South Carolina plantation, where he married and became a preacher, building a congregation that was “likely the world’s first Black Baptist church,” before the Revolution provided him and his family a path to freedom by escaping to the British lines. Postwar, he settled in Nova Scotia, before tension with white neighbors led him to join a resettlement colony in Sierra Leone. In tracing George’s repeated enslavement and escapes, O’Malley argues that the institutional nature of colonial slavery made every new person a Black colonial encountered “not just a single master oppressing them but a whole society, a system,” all blurred together as “faceless oppressors: They.” It’s an astonishing tale of endurance in a harshly reimagined early America. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

A visit to paradise turns into a multiyear quest to investigate a massive ecological collapse in this immersive travelogue. South African literary scholar Martin (A Millimetre of Dust) “knew hardly anything” about the Dodecanese islands in Greece when she arrived for a 2017 sabbatical. But during her stay, she came to see the murky history of the sponge-diving industry as a gaping mystery at the center of daily life. Journeying to the most prominent of the islands—Rhodes, Symi, Kaymnos, and Patmos—she became acquainted with loquacious elders who offered handed-down recollections of the booming turn-of-the-20th-century industry. Piecing them together, Martin relates how the steady income enjoyed by traditional sponge divers, who dove naked, exploded into an “unimagined bounty” with the 1860s introduction of the diving suit. Merchants and captains grew wealthy even as the divers referred to the new technology as “Satan’s Machine” because “it killed people or disabled them for life.” The author mixes this story with her own observations of the region’s sunkissed charms, as well as its more ominous signs of decrepitude, cruelty, and inner turmoil. These include barren orchards, animal neglect, and residents’ steadfast denial that the islands’ ecological collapse resulted from sponge overharvesting; they instead truck in conspiracy theories, blaming outlandish culprits like radiation from Chernobyl. It adds up to a rich, unsettling “object lesson” in manmade disaster. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this elegant account, former Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Robinson (Disintegration) uses his own family tree as a window onto Black history. Spanning five generations, the narrative illustrates the halting two steps forward, one step back progress toward equality that characterizes civil rights in the U.S.. Those profiled include Robinson’s great-grandfather Major Fordham, born in 1856, who “took advantage of fleeting Reconstruction-era opportunity” to become a lawyer and politician before Jim Crow hindered his ability to rise further, and his great-uncle Marion, who was drafted to serve in the legendary segregated Buffalo Soldiers infantry division in WWI and returned home to the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black people in cities across America. As Robinson situates his family members within major events in U.S. history, he notes, again and again, how white history comes to dominate and obliterate Black history. He gives as one example the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, the killing of three Black students during a civil rights protest. Few know of the slaying today, Robinson observes, compared to the Kent State shooting two years later, highlighting how “the nation’s historical memory gives primacy” to whiteness. Novelistic and at times achingly poignant, it’s a lyrical account of one family’s hard-won achievements in the face of bitter oppression. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Callegari (Dante’s Gluttons), an associate professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth, distills thousands of years of history for this delightful tour of Italian food and culture. She begins with the Aeneid, noting that Virgil describes Aeneas and his Trojan followers celebrating their arrival on the Italian peninsula with a meal, and continues through the fall of the Roman Empire, which spurred an increased focus on food as citizens sought to maintain ties to the culinary culture of antiquity. The Middle Ages saw Italian cuisine enriched by foreign spices like ginger and the cinnamonlike cassia, while the increasing influence of the Catholic church during the Renaissance reinforced the importance of wine as a core element of religious rituals. On a darker note, the author also probes links between Italian food and organized crime, noting how the mafia threatens restaurants into paying protection bribes and illegally traffics migrants to work its farms. Combining thorough history with evocative food writing (Italian anchovies, when fresh, “are more like tiny birds than fish, as they seem to float over the tongue, buoyed by seafoam, the flesh itself only barely perceptible”), Callegari delivers an informative and energetic exploration of cuisine as a cipher for both tradition and change. Italophiles will devour this. (June)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Solomon (Future Humans), a biology professor at Rice University, delivers an underwhelming exploration of the long-term consequences of humans migrating to space. While scientists and science fiction writers have long been fixated on the idea of settling on Mars, Solomon explains the many challenges humanity would have to overcome to do so, like the prevalence of toxic chemical compounds in the planet’s soil and high radiation levels on its surface. He tackles the question of whether humans can reproduce in space (the near weightlessness experienced there might prevent bones from fully forming, increasing infant mortality), explores the psychological effects that could result from leaving Earth (the harshness and isolation of being on Mars or the moon could lead to high stress levels), and outlines the evolutionary changes that could occur (living in lower gravity might reduce the need for arched feet, and living in climate-controlled habitats or space suits could lead to a reduction of sweat glands, lowering the intensity of body odor). “It is premature to push for space settlements because we are not yet ready,” he concludes. While he discusses a range of noteworthy scientific topics, from spaceflight to CRISPR gene-editing technology, he offers little new information or insights. Space aficionados will be disappointed. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this unique exploration, Spanish journalist and novelist Montero (Weight of the Heart) unpacks the relationship between creativity and madness. Combining psychological research, literary analyses, author testimonies, and her own experience with anxiety and panic attacks, Montero meditates on the nature of the brain and the forces that drive the writerly impulse. She presents several hypotheses for why writers write, including their awareness of the multifaceted nature of the self (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said, “I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes”), and points to the fact that many novelists use pseudonyms and experiment with themes of imposture, forgery, and duality. Many writers, including Joseph Conrad and Philip K. Dick, had childhood trauma, she observes, speculating this is why storytellers are obsessed with the passage of time and death. Elsewhere, she traces the prevalence of mental illness among writers, parses how socialization and neurological makeup influence creativity, and examines the addictive temperaments of artists. Montero’s theories are consistently intriguing, as is the suspenseful narrative she unfolds of her pursuit of an imposter who posed as her for many years when she was a young journalist in Madrid. This is rigorous and thrilling. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink