“The way societies support families is critical to how women experience motherhood,” journalist Leonard asserts in this by turns piercing and poignant debut. Through four profiles of mothers living in four different countries, Leonard provides a fine-grained look at the evolution of each woman’s thoughts and feelings over the course of her first year of motherhood. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations made while shadowing her subjects, she tracks how their day-to-day experiences of raising a newborn are impacted by the safety nets (or lack thereof) that encompass them on a “social, cultural, and state” level. In Finland, for example, Anna has access to multiple state services that ease the burden of motherhood—including a year of paid leave and subsidized day care—while Chelsea in Kenya, who theoretically has access to subsidized day care, struggles to find a provider. But state services are only part of the complex equation Leonard articulates. Each woman also contends with far more ephemeral forces in the cultural and interpersonal spheres—ranging from Tsukasa’s wrestling with societal pressure in Japan to become a stay-at-home mom to Sarah’s uncertainty in the U.S. about whether her polyamorous relationship will impact her child—all of which Leonard relays in lithe, captivating prose. (“Freed from the fuss of romance, she throws herself into the straightforward salve of scheduling,” Leonard writes of Anna as she initiates custody proceedings with her estranged partner.) This is an enthralling and kaleidoscopic view of modern motherhood. (May)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Fathers’ role in upholding the social order and their struggles with unruly sons are probed in this winsome and erudite study of patriarchy. CUNY historian Sedgwick (Coffeeland) offers biographical sketches of famous dads and their children, from an ancient Sumerian named Shuruppag, who wrote a querulous, plaintive advice-tablet to his son—“The instructions of an old man are precious: you should comply with them!”—to Bob Dylan, who stoked rebellion in young people yet himself became, Sedgwick notes, a doting, apolitical paterfamilias rather like his own middle-class father. Along the way Sedgwick explores Aristotle’s belief that the state rested on a foundation of fathers ruling over households, Thoreau’s longing to escape from his father’s Massachusetts pencil factory, and Charles Darwin’s rapt study of his 10 children for insights on how they inherited traits from him. Sedgwick teases out the contradictions between patriarchy as a doctrine of benevolent control and its reality as a form of constraint and domination that often breeds resistance. He plays on these ironies in elegant, evocative prose, as in his analysis of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal complex (“From a child’s perspective, Sigmund Freud’s theories made it natural, even healthy, to despise your father. From a father’s perspective, Freud made it normal, even good, to be hated”). It’s a fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma. (May)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Valenski spotlights 20 of the world’s “most dynamic queer-travel destinations” in this vibrant and visually appealing debut. Aiming to highlight cites where LGBTQ+ people can be “unapologetically themselves,” she visits “eclectic” Johannesburg, South Africa, where travelers can attend events held by queer-led and woman-focused groups, among them Same Sex Saturday and Rainbow Social; Bangkok, Thailand, where RuPaul’s Drag Queen judge Pangina Heals—a native to the city—suggests a host of queer-friendly nightlife spots (including House of Heals, her own “jungle-inspired drag club”); and Valletta, Malta, which boasts numerous queer-owned art galleries and music bars, as well as Rosa Kwir, the country’s first LGBTQ+ archive. Testimonials from frequent travelers and locals on what it means to be queer in each city lend authenticity, and the author provides useful resources to help readers understand their rights in each country. Enlivened with lush, full-color photos, this will give queer travelers a serious case of wanderlust. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Eno (A Year with Swollen Appendices) gets to the heart of art’s purpose in this playful and concise illustrated guide. Drawing on his career as a songwriter, composer, and producer, he explores art’s key functions—engendering emotions; sparking empathy; and expanding worldviews. Even art that is ostensibly purely escapist illuminates a “better” reality that provides a “richer understanding” of what this one might be missing, Eno writes. In the face of such pressing crises as climate change and intolerance, art is less an escape hatch than a means to create the blueprints for a better world. For instance, Eno points out that musicians in the 1960s helped broaden the acceptability of different forms of gender expression with music in which men “embrace[d] feelings previously regarded as ‘unmasculine’ and... women embrace[d] feelings previously regarded as ‘unfeminine.’ ” Eno also makes trenchant points about how art is a fundamentally empathetic practice that celebrates differences while offering a “reservoir of shared experiences” people can use to exchange “complex feelings and ideas with each other.” The result is an inventive and energetic defense of art as far more than the navel-gazing “pretty luxury” it’s often portrayed to be. Illus. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Musician Feldman (Klezmer) delivers an affectionate chronicle of his lifelong exploration of neglected Jewish, European, and Middle Eastern music. Raised by a father from Bessarabia (a historical part of Eastern Europe that’s now mostly in Moldova), the author grew up in the Bronx imbibing the melodies of his dad’s synagogue and playing the darabukka, a Middle Eastern drum. After discovering Greek and Armenian nightclubs in his teenage years, he began connecting with musicians who played regional instruments like the santouri and lauto. Those influences primed him to team up with musician Andy Statman in the late 1970s to revive klezmer—a Jewish instrumental folk music with Roma, Moldovan, Turkish, and Greek influences that was almost wholly out of fashion in the U.S. The pair drew from “living masters, old recordings, and a few old notations” to reimagine the music without the Americanized “Yinglish”-inflected nostalgia it had become saturated with. In so doing, they helped spark the late ’70s and ’80s revival of klezmer. Interspersing the narrative with brief profiles of such musical influences as santouri player Paul Limberis, Feldman teases out the historical roots of klezmer and elucidates the challenges of retaining Jewish tradition in America. It’s a granular, informative look at a life spent preserving a vanishing musical history. (June)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this sweeping account, Pulitzer finalist Cassidy (How Markets Fail) profiles figures who have opposed capitalism over the past two centuries. Since “the rise of factory production,” Cassidy notes, “critics from the right as well as the left” have made moral arguments against capitalism’s “dehumanizing effect” and its “upending of... social norms.” He begins with the hardscrabble Luddites—early 19th-century English weavers who attacked the mechanical looms that had eradicated their communal way of life—and traces how they were succeeded by more genteel political organizers who advocated for socialism, a system of communal work and shared responsibilities. Cassidy offers a deft, thorough reading of Marx and his “scientific” approach, which identified the mechanics by which capitalism exploited and alienated workers. But he revels most in spotlighting figures with less well-known critiques, like “arch-conservative” Thomas Carlyle—who objected to capitalism for having replaced traditional social bonds with a “cash nexus”—and Trinidadian economist Eric Williams, who in 1942 was the first to argue that colonialism and the slave trade had created the social conditions for capitalism’s economic success. Cassidy’s masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a permanent state of change not just because of its fundamental nature, but because of how it’s continuously being subjected to pushback. The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism’s history. (May)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Yuknavitch (Thrust) approaches her past “not as facts, but as fictions” in this stunning, genre-bending self-portrait. Drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, Yuknavitch eschews the conventions of traditional memoir to explore the idea that “bodies are carriers of experiences” in lyrical, short story–like chapters. The nonchronological vignettes highlight pivot points in Yuknavitch’s life, including the murder of an older cousin when she was a child, and her own sexual assault, which drove Yuknavitch to “spend my life creating literature as resistance” since “the murdered woman is everywhere in art and life.” Other anecdotes—of Yuknavitch swallowing pennies, rocks, and seeds as an adolescent, and of the staggering pain she felt when her daughter died—propel her on a journey away from numbness and toward an awareness that language offers outlets to “explore the disruptions, eruptions, many paths [and] rewordings we might invent” to lighten the burden of the past. With a fiercely feminist outlook and moody, evocative prose that never tilts into preciousness, Yuknavitch delivers a gorgeous ode to the grunt work of self-discovery. It’s a major achievement. Agent: Rayhané Sanders, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

After the mass carnage of WWI, a swiftly growing number of “palm readers, clairvoyants, hypnotists, mind readers, and jinn summoners” found receptive audiences, notes Arabic studies scholar Cormack (Midnight in Cairo) in this illuminating if stodgy account. Drawing on little-studied Arabic sources regarding those who plied their supernatural trade during the interwar period, Cormack contends that the “occult movement” was not merely a new twist on the long-standing Western “orientalist” obsession with the East but was also a worldwide “religio-philosophical movement” inspired by 20th-century advancements like electricity and magnetism (as well as horrified by the era’s mass destruction). “Occultists promised that they were the midwives of a new modern age... that would bring untold miracles,” Cormack writes, recounting the parallel stories of two little-remembered “mystics” with inverse paths. Salim Mousa al-Ashi, a Palestinian raised in Beirut who went by Dr. Dahesh, presented himself as a Western-trained scientist and traveled the Levant performing miracles that “defied nature,” like making objects appear and healing the sick; meanwhile, Tahra Bey (born Krikor Kalfayan in Armenia) fashioned himself as a Sufi “missionary” to Paris and caused a sensation with his demonstrations of mind reading and communicating with the dead. Cormack’s narrative is a bit dry, with the exception of a chapter about Harry Houdini trying to debunk the two mystics’ miracles as magic tricks. Still, patient readers will find plenty of insight. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer-winning humorist Barry (Swamp Story) looks back at his childhood hijinks, journalistic exploits, and notable columns in this revealing if bumpy memoir. Aiming to account for what led him to “fame and fortune,” he starts with his Presbyterian minister father and darkly comic mother. Amusing anecdotes about his parents (“Don’t drown, kids!” his mother shouted “in the cheerful voice of a fifties TV-commercial housewife” as her children went for a swim) give context to Barry’s natural comedic impulse and bring a levity that counterbalances otherwise harrowing recollections of his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide. Barry also offers a riotous chronicle of his rise in journalism, from chasing two-bit local stories about “an unusually large zucchini” to writing an anything-goes weekly humor column at the Miami Herald. Recalling how he gave “bat urine” as a tasting note at a Waldorf Astoria sommelier contest and paid $8,000 to rent a helicopter for the perfect shot of the 1987 Long Island garbage barge, Barry captures a fantastically uninhibited “Golden Age of Journalism Expense Accounts.” Selections from Barry’s columns sometimes serve to bolster his recollections—like his final devastating meeting with his mother—but more often bog the narrative down, particularly a punishing chapter dedicated to his coverage of every presidential election from 1984 to 2020. It makes for an uneven mix of heartfelt reflection and greatest hits compilation. (May)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Psychiatrist Kaminski debuts with an informative guide to otroversion, a personality type defined by a sense of “nonbelonging” to groups. Unlike introverts and extroverts—who are fundamentally oriented toward communities and primed to ascribe to their beliefs—otroverts “never feel part of the shared experience” despite being welcomed into groups. They also lack “apparent behavioral distinctions from well-adjusted individuals.” In short chapters bolstered by case studies, the author overviews the challenges inherent to a culture that rewards joiners and distrusts those who fail to adhere to social scripts. He goes on to detail how otroverts can capitalize on such virtues as emotional self-sufficiency (they don’t look to others to measure their value) and independent thinking (otroverts reject the opinions of the “hive mind” and excel at coming up with original ideas). Discussing how otroverts can navigate various life stages, Kaminski provides especially valuable advice for parents of otroverts. Noting that childhood is a period during which belonging is particularly emphasized, he advises parents to encourage one-on-one friendships, refrain from forcing their children into communal experiences like summer camps, and recognize that though their child’s needs “may be different from the majority’s preferences... they are not wrong; they are just different.” Those who march to the beat of their own drum will be especially gratified. (June)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink