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

Five years of interviews with a convicted serial murderer form the backbone of criminologist Brand’s chilling debut. As part of a study on serial killers, Brand reached out to Lawrence Bittaker in 2014, when he was on death row at San Quentin prison. The pair discussed Bittaker’s 1979 abduction, rape, and murder of five teenage girls across Southern California with his accomplice Roy Norris—a killing spree that earned them the nickname “the toolbox killers,” because they tortured their victims with household tools. Brand explains how Bittaker and Norris met in prison in the late ’70s and, after their release, transformed a van into a mobile torture chamber. She details the pair’s crimes, but her account of the rapport she and Bittaker cultivated is just as unsettling: he named her his next of kin and, after refusing to cooperate with police for decades, gave her a map to the graves of his last two victims before dying of natural causes in 2019. Brand interweaves her and Bittaker’s conversations with compassionate portraits of his victims and snapshots of her own grief over her cousin’s murder of her best friend in 2015. Along the way, she steadily probes the inner workings of remorseless killers without losing sight of the human cost of their crimes. For true crime devotees, this is a must. (June)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Actor and martial artist Li chronicles his search for spiritual meaning in his inspiring debut. Already a martial arts champion in China by the time he was a teenager, Li landed his first major film role in 1982’s The Shaolin Temple, when he was 19. He went on to star in more than 20 international martial arts movies throughout the ’90s. As his fame increased, so did his desire for deeper meaning, pushing him toward philanthropy and a rigorous study of Buddhism and Taoism. Li’s narrative unspools at a leisurely pace, intertwining explanations of spiritual concepts with accounts of the death of Li’s mother in the late ’90s and his harrowing experience surviving the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. His reflections on aging (“Taoism teaches me to age like a tree—shedding leaves naturally. Buddhism reminds me not to mourn them”) and nonviolence (“If you love everyone, there is no offense or defense”) are especially potent. Readers willing to tune into the book’s meditative wavelength will be rewarded with a touching account of one man’s quest for inner peace. This is a balm. Agent: Marc Gerald, Europa Content. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of political reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, enrolled at Stanford in 2022 planning to study computer science. He joined the student newspaper as a hobby, but it became something more when a friend alerted Baker to a years-old blog post suggesting that one of Tessier-Lavigne’s published neurobiology papers included a falsified image. Pulling on that thread, Baker reported a series of stories alleging that Tessier-Lavigne was complicit in publishing deceptive and misleading scientific research on multiple occasions. The university assembled a committee to investigate Baker’s claims, and in 2023, Tessier-Lavigne resigned from his post—shortly after Baker became the youngest recipient of a Polk Award. Far from braggadocious, Baker is frank about the toll his reporting took on his social life and his faith in higher education; the book is at its most fascinating when detailing his disillusionment with the “rot” at the heart of academia that prizes the appearance of success over the truth. It’s a confident testament to the power of independent journalism from an author with a bright future. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this dynamic biography, historian Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, uses the ideas of poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) as a window onto the “intellectual and spiritual schizophrenia” that permeated the Victorian era. Holmes zeroes in on Tennyson’s early career, when his “thought and poetry were fired... by the new science and the new skepticism” and he grappled with “the struggle... between intellectual hope and spiritual despair.” Throughout, Holmes returns to an early poem, “The Kraken (1830),” in which Tennyson writes of a “deep division” threatening to overtake the world as scientific revelations seemed to paint two vastly different pictures: while astronomy gave an “optimistic” view of an ever-expanding universe full of new worlds, geology offered a “claustrophobic” glimpse of a “cruel, meaningless” world full of “monsters, dust, and extinctions.” Holmes depicts Tennyson, haunted by failed love affairs and the death of his friend, the poet Arthur Hallam, as drawn to an early kind of speculative science fiction, or “speculative natural history,” that “put forth a radical vision of humanity... evolving, both physically and morally, to rise to a new peak.” Tennyson himself, sounding surprisingly modern, once wrote that “it is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.” It’s a fascinating and delightfully questing deep dive into the turbulent spirituality of the modern age. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Political scientist Neep (Occupying Syria Under the French Mandate) offers a nuanced history of Syria since the 1800s. Then as now, the region comprised a diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups; the rise of a modern Arab identity helped inhabitants rally together against Ottoman, English, and French imperial rule beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Post-independence, the idea of pan-Arab reunification with neighboring countries became a major source of political contention within the fledgling nation, inflamed at various moments by Israeli expansionism and Western interventionism, and complicated by rising disillusionment with the country’s elites, all of which contributed to the ascendancy of the populist Ba’ath party in the 1950s. After a brief unification with the authoritarian Egyptian government, the increasingly militant Ba’ath party propelled Hafez al-Assad to power in 1970; his decades-long rule of Syria through wily political machinations and brute force led to a pressure cooker of tensions that, exacerbated by the unfulfilled promises of his son, Bashar al-Assad, resulted in the Syrian Civil War. Neep’s eye for detail helps him mount challenges against some long-standing truisms, such as the Ottoman Empire’s characterization as the “Sick Man of Europe,” and offers insight into pressing contemporary questions, including the connections between Syria’s current leadership and the Islamic State. While occasionally dense, it’s an illuminating, comprehensive study of the region. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Musicologist Kapusta debuts with a comprehensive survey of artists, musicians, and performers who, in the years after WWII, practiced self-realization, or using art to express one’s “freely flowing creative energies” and become one’s “true self.” He traces the idea’s roots to the turn of the 20th century, when figures like Paramahansa Yogananda and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze framed yoga and music as vehicles for transcending the ego, tapping into one’s soul, and building a more harmonious world. The movement took off amid the post-WWII “age of anxiety,” with such artists as composer John Cage adopting a creative process of “doing without attempting to control what you are doing” and jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins debuting a “brand new” form of jazz that he called “playing me” and which possessed “an almost occult power to open others’ minds.” Other artists continued the tradition through subsequent decades, though the 1970s brought a wave of detractors that viewed self-realization as an “inward facing creed” that threatened “long-standing American values like duty, self-sacrifice, and family.” Kapusta valiantly argues for the nobility of the enterprise, though he concedes it ultimately failed to change the country as its proponents hoped it would. The result is an impressively researched history of a promising if limited artistic movement. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink