Novelist Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore) mines his own life for this chilling true crime narrative about two disappearances separated by 23 years. In 2001, Hale’s six-year-old cousin Haley Zega went missing on Arkansas’s Cave Mountain, sparking a three-day manhunt in the Buffalo National River Wilderness. When Haley was finally found on the riverbank, she claimed an “imaginary friend” led her out of the woods and toward the water. A member of the search party then recalled another incident in which a child was murdered nearby in 1978. Hale eventually learned that the victim was three-year-old Bethany Clark, who was killed by members of a doomsday cult and buried at the spot where Haley was found. As Hale tracks down witnesses and former cult members, he pieces together a hair-raising story about a killing supposedly carried out in the name of God. Brainwashing, apocalyptic fervor, and a teenage prophet enter the frame before Hale suggests that Bethany’s ghost led Haley out of the woods. Regardless of whether readers are prepared to take that leap, this is an engrossing and rigorous account of a haunting crime. Agent: Brian DeFiore, DeFiore and Co. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

The late activist and Pentagon Paper leaker Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine), who died in 2023, muses in this roving collection on what motivates bureaucrats to comply with or resist corrupt directives. The book opens with essays on his fraught relationship with his mother, Adele (“We were lovers,” he writes, but “not physically”), who insisted that he train as a pianist. After she died in a car accident when his father, Harry, fell asleep at the wheel, the 15-year-old Ellsberg felt relieved at not having to practice anymore, leading to guilt and neurosis. In later passages drawn from his notebooks, he reflects on his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers, which contradicted official optimism about the Vietnam War, as well as the apparent lack of conscience of the national-security functionaries who hid the truth about the conflict at the president’s behest. Here, Ellsberg draws connections between Vietnam and his boyhood trauma, likening Adele, who demanded that the sleep-deprived Harry keep driving, to a domineering president, and Harry to a passive RAND flunky who follows dangerous directives. Other selections cover Ellsberg’s later activism, including on climate change. Ellsberg’s ruminations map an emotional, at times almost spiritual journey from Cold War liberalism to New Left progressivism and today’s lefty politics. It makes for a fascinating window into the inner life of a whistleblower and the psychological turmoil behind a sweeping societal shift. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Díaz (Manufacturing Celebrity) and Rivera-Rideau (Remixing Reggaeton), creators of the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an initiative that explores how Bad Bunny has drawn attention to Puerto Rican history and resistance, team up for a smart, meticulous analysis of how the rapper has used his platform to advocate for the island. Since breaking out in 2016 via Soundcloud, Bad Bunny has used his music to protest government corruption and economic crises, as well as draw attention to the devastation of Hurricane Maria and broader issues like the territory’s history of colonial rule. The authors analyze overt critiques in songs like “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” which condemns the “ongoing effects of US imperialism” by invoking Hawaii as a cautionary tale, more subtle references (including to Vuelve Candy B, “the most famous Puerto Rican [race] horse,” on his 2023 album Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana), and celebrations of Latin music genres like salsa and reggaeton. Though the authors draw ample context from interviews with the rapper’s collaborators and contemporaries, they take care to situate his contributions within a long tradition of Puerto Rican resistance that uses “everyday” art and music to both celebrate identity and critique society. The result is an insightful consideration of the rapper’s significance and the many ways art can serve as protest. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Bailey (Uncredited) uses a feminist lens to explore the cultural evolution of the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West in this uneven critical analysis. In L. Frank Baum’s original story, the witch was a one-eyed, nameless old woman who sought “power and control” (and was possibly inspired by his mother-in-law, suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage). The 1939 film adaptation gave the character, played by Margaret Hamilton, green skin and a mix of “femininity [and] villainy,” pushing back, Bailey suggests, on a false dichotomy between power and womanhood. The Wiz, a 1978 remake starring Diana Ross, renamed the witch Evillene, and the character’s “bold” portrayal by Mabel King was informed by rising tides of 1970s feminism. More recently, Wicked—both the novel and musical—transformed the character into Elphaba, a complex figure more overtly positioned as a rebel. Bailey is mostly successful in tracing the character’s evolution, but she sometimes stretches her thesis too far, as when she links Elphaba’s search “for justice in a world that sought to silence and marginalize her” to the #MeToo movement and the fight for reproductive rights. Readers will find this an intriguing if scattershot deep dive into the legendary character. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

The question of what it means to live in the moment is at the heart of this sprawling examination from science journalist Marchant (The Human Cosmos). Combining quantum mechanics, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, Marchant discusses the possibilities that time is an illusion; that there’s no difference between the past, present, and future; and that humans believe their world into existence. She relays studies on how humans perceive information, explaining that the brain can take several hundred milliseconds to process signals, meaning that “later events can influence our perception of earlier ones, because the second stimulus comes in while the first is still being processed.” Elsewhere, she explains why humans’ perception of time is critical for their sense of self, highlighting how people with schizophrenia may lose the ability to make connections between the past, present, and future, leading them to “feel as though their thoughts and actions are being steered by external forces: God, aliens, TV.” These insights and others make for an arduous but gratifying journey through the nature of time. Adventurous readers will find this stimulating and enlightening. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Filmmaker Friedrich recalls traveling across post-colonial West Africa in 1976, when she was 21, in this intriguing if somewhat overwhelming account. Less a linear narrative than a scrapbook of journal entries and photos, the book traces Friedrich’s travels alongside her political musings. She’s sharply attentive to gendered power dynamics, particularly in her encounters with Nigerian women, registering both solidarity and the vast distance between their lives. Her commentary on patriarchy, race, and class often feels strikingly contemporary, though it’s rooted in the social tensions of the 1970s. She can be biting (“If the country is ‘being brought into the modern world,’ it usually means that the wife of the President has a microwave oven & that the facilities for tourists are improving”), but moments of political rupture, including the assassination of Nigerian president Murtala Ramat Muhammed, prompt sober reflections on U.S. influence abroad. The sheer volume of material, coupled with frequent changes of location and a lack of recurring figures, can be disorienting. Still, Friedrich’s striking black-and-white photographs—of people, townscapes, and art—help paper over some of the confusion. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, this succeeds as a self-aware meditation on the difficulty of telling complex truths. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Activist Kurshan (Out of Control) recounts her involvement in social and political movements from the 1960s to the present in this fascinating memoir. A cofounder of the Youth International Party, or “Yippies,” Kurshan was a key organizer of anti-war demonstrators in the 1967 march on the Pentagon and at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Her advocacy continued when she visited North Vietnam as part of an all-women’s delegation in 1970, then joined various women’s rights groups in the U.S. and rallied for causes including Black liberation and Puerto Rican independence. As Kurshan highlights the often unglamorous daily work of activism, she wades into the tensions that emerged in her circles, stressing how her desire to leave her comfort zone and lack of defensiveness about “my monogamous heterosexual relationship” were keys to her longevity in activism. Kurshan writes in a conspiratorial, friendly register, roping readers in while buttressing her account with photos, photocopied documents, and sections written by her friends and associates, which offer greater perspective on her accomplishments and philosophies. The result is equal parts revealing memoir, valuable historical document, and galvanizing guide to following one’s beliefs. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

This illuminating account from University of Kentucky American studies professor Doolen (Territories of Empire) resurfaces a little-remembered figure in U.S. history: John Dunn Hunter, a 19th-century advocate for Native American rights. Hunter’s rise, Doolen asserts, signaled the possibility of cultural integration between Native and white peoples, and his public downfall put paid to that harmonious possibility and portended the coming of Indian removal. Born in 1796 into a white family before being abducted by Kickapoos as a child, Hunter later found stability living with the Kansa and Osage. As a young man, he published a memoir that advocated for the mixing of the “noblest” virtues of Native and white America. It shot him to stardom, putting him at odds with both tribal authorities, who didn’t appreciate his involvement, and War Department officials, who felt he was a threat. The War Department accused Hunter of being a fraud—a likely unfounded accusation, the author maintains—which paved the way for his 1827 assassination in the midst of Texas’s Fredonian rebellion, where Hunter, who had been trying to negotiate between the rebels and the Cherokee, was betrayed by both sides. Throughout, Doolen highlights how prescient Dunn’s views were regarding the potential for a multicultural America. It’s a revelatory up-close look at moment when the U.S. could have taken a different path and the man who could have led it there. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Kraus (Whalefall) offers an entertaining deep dive into George A. Romero’s classic horror film. The author’s first encounter with Night of the Living Dead on TV at five years old inspired a lifelong passion for horror, low-budget filmmaking, and Romero’s movies (the author collaborated posthumously with Romero on a novel, The Living Dead). The book is structured around a frame-by-frame reexamination of the film, with copious detours exploring related angles, including the film’s ragtag production, the infamous copyright snafu that gave the production company “no power to stop Joe Schmoe from screening it,” and Fred Rogers’s humble request that Romero refrain from casting Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’s Betty Aberlin “in his movie about flesh-eaters.” Kraus’s close critical analysis of the film, however, is where the book really pops, as he makes a convincing argument for understanding the film as representative of the U.S. in the late 1960s—suffused with the mangled carnage of the Vietnam War and the violent backlash against the civil rights movement. (Regarding the first zombie that appears in the film, Kraus writes: “This sounds histrionic, but he’s Vietnam. He comes out of nowhere. He’s doesn’t fight how we think fights are fought. He looks unthreatening until abruptly he’s killing us. He’s a terrorist you can’t blame for his terrorism.”) Romero devotees will be enamored. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cook (It’s Me They Follow) delivers an inspiring account of opening an independent bookstore in Philadelphia just weeks before the 2020 Covid-19 shutdowns. Growing up with a terminally ill father and a blind librarian mother, Cook found solace in reading and nurtured a lifelong dream of running a bookstore of her own: “I realize now that part of building the bookshop is me seeking to build a home for those who need one again and again,” she writes. After quitting her three jobs to realize that dream in February 2020, Covid hit. Suddenly, Cook faced a litany of financial and practical obstacles to keeping Harriet’s Bookshop—half-ironically named after Harriet Tubman, who couldn’t read—alive. Blending memoir and manifesto, she organizes the account around letters to historical figures including Tubman and Josephine Baker, personal essays about the ups and downs of owning a bookstore, and potent reflections on 2020’s racial justice protests, which underscored Cook’s desire to carve out a safe haven for her community. The survival of the bookstore, and its recognition with a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures award, provides the memoir with a satisfying conclusion. This triumphant tale will inspire book lovers of all stripes. Agent: Marie Brown, Marie Brown Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink