In this illuminating account, historian Brady (Three Ordinary Girls) recaps the lead-up to the October 1943 rescue of the Jewish population of Denmark, when boatmen across the country covertly transported them to neutral Sweden by sea. The Nazi occupation of Denmark, which began in April 1940, was initially milder than that of Eastern European countries, Brady notes. Due to Nazi views on racial hierarchies, German soldiers were instructed that “the Dane is freedom-loving and self-aware. He rejects every Coercion and every Subordination.... Unnecessary sharpness... must be avoided.” However, few Danes were fooled by this kid-glove approach, Brady writes, as they were well aware of German atrocities in the rest of Europe. The Danish resistance carried out increasingly daring sabotage efforts, culminating in the August 1943 bombing of a German barrack, which finally triggered a Nazi crackdown that began with the rounding up of Jews. The resistance immediately changed tack: utilizing daily synagogue services, they got the word out about the planned October evacuation, a complex affair that included clever subterfuges like hospitals admitting Jews under false names in order to move them along a smuggling route that ended with them being ferried out on small fishing boats. Throughout, Brady describes the action in nail-biting detail. The result is an inspiring and suspenseful history that showcases grassroots efforts to stand up to tyranny. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

As the global population growth rate begins to decline, governments should make concerted efforts to keep population replacement levels steady, according to this stimulating study. Economists and demographers Spears (Where India Goes) and Geruso propose that the world’s population will spike at “10 billion within a few decades” and then will decline precipitously. Depopulation would be disastrous at such a scale—not only for society (since a population that trends more elderly triggers myriad challenges) but also, the authors intriguingly assert, for the environment. Global depopulation, rather than reduce environmental degradation, would, with a shrinking working-age population, slow down technological progress, raise the fixed costs of doing business, and decrease funding for the very governments and programs that defend the environment. Thus, the authors advocate for a government-led effort to “stabilize” the global population at 10 billion, through gentle social-welfare methods like cash allotments to couples who choose to have children. The authors make a strong argument that such a decline really is on the horizon, noting that “nobody fully understands low birth rates,” since many former commonsense explanations like women’s increased rights have begun to be dismissed by researchers. Though somewhat dry, this offers important food for thought for those concerned about climate change. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

YouTuber Schoenmaker debuts with a touching chronicle of self-discovery. After a dramatic breakup with her cheating husband in 2018, a 31-year-old Schoenmaker fled the Netherlands for Asia. In India, she bought a motorcycle for $2,400, dubbed it Basanti, and set out on an initially aimless trip that amounted to 22,370 miles and 25 countries over the course of nine months. Enjoying the kindness of strangers from Malaysia to Iran and beyond, Schoenmaker gradually learned to trust again as locals took her into their homes for meals and helped her pull Basanti from mud flats. “Nobody would have thought we’d come this far, including me,” she writes after returning to the Netherlands with Basanti. Along the way, Schoenmaker’s grounded optimism adds poignancy to her sometimes-fraught experiences—including being catcalled in Iran—and her conversational prose mimics the feeling of receiving regular travel updates from a close friend. It adds up to an inspiring and often-thrilling ode to healing on one’s own terms. Agents: Abigail Koons and Ben Kaslow-Zieve, Park & Fine Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wiencek follows up Master of the Mountain with an intimate account of the professional and personal relationship between architect Stanford White (1853-1906) and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). The two met in 1875 New York, forming a creative partnership in which White solicited commissions for Saint-Gaudens—who was seemingly always on the verge of financial ruin—and designed the bases for many of Saint-Gaudens’s sculptures. Drawing on archival sources, Wiencek highlights how the pair embraced Gilded Age New York’s “theatrical potential as a place of visual and social drama” in their projects, rejecting Gothic styles for designs with drama and “emotional power,” such as their opulent Madison Square Garden, which included a statue of the Goddess Diana, and Saint-Gaudens’s relief sculpture commemorating the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-Black unit that fought in the Civil War. Situating his subjects’ story against the hedonism of the Gilded Age, Wiencek devotes ample space to their numerous affairs with women, men, and one another; the scandals that consumed White’s life; and the complex dynamic between the pair——White was charismatic and confident, Saint-Gaudens was wracked by self-doubt—occasionally at the expense of more in-depth aesthetic and historical analysis. Still, this offers a colorful, captivating window into a fascinating historical era. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this candid collection, late British aid worker Boas muses on life and death in the wake of his terminal throat cancer diagnosis. Expanding on three articles he wrote for the Jersey Post following his diagnosis at age 46, the author discusses meditation, gratitude, religion, and—in an especially valuable section—how to interact with those who are dying (readers should take care to listen well; acknowledge the elephant in the room without harping on it; and refrain from forcing a “final farewell”—which often occurs for the catharsis of the visitor, not the dying person). Most of the account meditates on what it means to live fully in the light of death, and Boas’s solid if somewhat predictable advice to seize the day is enriched by his wry humor and moments of genuine insight, as when he discusses being comforted by the interconnectedness of humanity and the idea of the world going on without him: “Children will want ice creams and people will fall head-over-heels in love and musicians will delight us.... I find the contemplation of other selves to be... enormously moving.” This poignant volume inspires. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Medical historian Shillace (Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher) offers an evocative study of Weimar Germany’s Institute for Sexual Sciences, the first scientific institution to treat homosexuality and transgender identity as innate, and famously the first institution targeted by the Nazis for book burning. Aiming to “understand why the Institute became such a target for hatred”—since such insight will “tell us everything about the present moment”—Shillace traces the Institute’s origins back to the turn of the 20th century, when, even as innovative sexologists like the Institute’s later founder Magnus Hirschfeld were pioneering a scientifically inquisitive attitude toward sexuality and gender, a still relatively newly formed Germany, motivated by fervent nationalism, began to scapegoat gay men in government for the nascent state’s hardships. Hirschfeld himself testified at the 1907 trial of one such official; public “panic” about sexology exploded following the affair, swirling together with antisemitism as Jewish sexologists like Hirschfeld were accused of undermining the nation’s “masculinity.” Shillace traces this twisty political thread to the notorious 1933 book burning at the Institute, with a focus on the era’s disastrous, repeated ceding of ground to Nazi “masculinism”—including efforts by gay men to distance themselves from trans people. The author also relays what she uncovered about Dora Richter, the first person to receive gender-affirming surgery at the Institute, whose story, while moving, can distract with its more sentimental tone (“She went about both day and night as a sweet young maid”). Still, this is an incisive, timely study of Weimar politics. (May)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this triumphant follow-up to Legacy of Ashes, National Book Award winner Weiner continues his history of the CIA. He begins at the turn of the 21st century, when some believed the agency, sunk into post–Cold War listlessness, “was at the point of failure” and might only be resurrected “after some appalling catastrophe.” That catastrophe arrived on Sept 11, 2001, in the form of a terrorist attack all but predicted by then CIA director David Tenet, who had failed to convince the Bush administration to take Al Qaeda seriously. By November, American bombs were killing Taliban foot soldiers, but, beyond that, “no strategy was in place.” Bush’s preoccupation with Iraq and failure to order a military dragnet for Osama bin Laden created a strategic vacuum into which the CIA fatefully stepped. Looking to extract intelligence on bin Laden from detainees, the agency implemented a set of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” codifying torture as a “government institution.” After Barack Obama’s 2008 election, “to the muted astonishment” of the CIA’s leaders, “little would change,” Weiner writes, noting that Obama “closed the secret prisons,” but in exchange “chose to incinerate America’s enemies, rather than incarcerate them,” expanding the agency’s drone strike program. Weiner chillingly concludes by asserting that the CIA’s repeated legal line crossing has turned the American president, who gives the agency its “marching orders,” into “a king above the law”; he quotes “CIA veterans” who speculate that the president could even “deploy a paramilitary group” without repercussion. It’s a crucial document of the present times. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dwell magazine editor Reynolds debuts with a rocky defense of the much maligned filler word like. Driven by her self-consciousness over her habitual usage (“What does it say about me as a person... if I say ‘like,’ like all the time”), Reynolds surveys the cultural representations and linguistic finger-wagging surrounding the word, including its “negative associations with empty-headed teenage girls” and its presumed lack of professionalism. She counters “the pervasive myth that it is a meaningless word” by showing like’s handiness, from making conversations flow more naturally (less like “a friendly chat with AI”) to “doing a tiny bit of caretaking” by softening painful blows. Along the way, she proffers personal anecdotes and cultural criticisms at varying levels of relevancy. Some, like her evaluations of Ice Spice’s 2023 E.P. Like...? and of the classic Valley Girl film Clueless—which “introduced the idea that just because a woman talks like a total ditz doesn’t mean she’s unintelligent”—are incisive. Others seem to drift from the like thesis entirely, including an extended interlude about My Cousin Vinny and a dive into Kamala Harris’s short-lived Brat era. Even with these diversions, Reynolds effectively mounts her larger argument: that people should embrace language’s changes rather than becoming cranky grammatical nitpickers exuding “hall monitor energy.” It’s a passionate, if occasionally wearying, love letter to linguistic evolution. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Sweeney debuts with an engrossing chronicle of how Roxie Laybourne (1910–2003) pioneered the field of forensic ornithology. Laybourne was an avian taxidermist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History when the newly created Federal Aviation Administration approached her in 1960 for assistance identifying the shredded feathers found amid the wreckage of a fatal airline crash in Boston Harbor. The agency soon came to rely on her insights to make airfields unappealing homes for the species that most frequently collided with aircraft. Her expertise also put her in demand at other federal agencies. For instance, Sweeney details how Laybourne shored up the FBI’s 1971 case against white supremacists who tarred and feathered a Detroit civil rights activist by finding that the feathers matched those from the suspects’ homes, and how she assisted the Fish and Wildlife Agency in sorting through the remains of over 100 hawks, vultures, and owls uncovered in the late ’80s at the estate of media tycoon John Kluge, whose gamekeeper was found guilty of poaching and fined $10,000. The riveting accounts of Laybourne’s biggest cases read like an avian riff on CSI, and Sweeney’s finely observed portrait of Laybourne presents her as a no-nonsense ornithologist who navigated the politics of the lab and the courtroom with equal aplomb. This entrances. Agent: Susan Canavan, Waxman Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and graphic designer Mendelsund (Weepers) blends memoir and visual art in this striking account. Toward the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mendelsund and his family visited an isolated New Hampshire farmhouse, where Mendelsund tried painting for the first time as his despair about the state of the world spiraled into suicidal depression. In short, percussive micro-chapters (“Unpacked. Searched the property. Sat on the porch steps”), he captures both the drudgery of his condition and the ways art helped alleviate it. Along the way, he reflects on his artist father’s life and death, his younger years as a classical musician, and the wisdom he’s gleaned from writers including James Joyce and Roland Barthes. Particularly memorable are passages in which Mendelsund details the inspiration for his paintings, including one inspired by his late grandfather’s fur coat (“It is facile to say that whenever I see a certain shade of brown, I think of him. Even if it is true”). The paintings themselves, which mostly appear in full-page photographs, range from claustrophobic and harrowing to playfully naive. Witty, inspiring, and endearingly unpolished, this chronicle of a creative mind learning to heal itself will enchant artists of all stripes. Photos. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (June)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink