Vulture podcast columnist Malin helps readers navigate the vast landscape of English-language podcasts in this insightful debut guide. He deems the current moment “the Golden Age of Podcasting,” explaining that 31% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly and ad revenue has exploded in recent years to a projected $4 billion in 2025. The 101 shows Malin highlights span all the major categories, including history, pop culture, true crime, comedy, science fiction, and self-help. In each entry, Malin describes the show’s merits and history and recommends a favorite episode. For Limetown, a science fiction podcast, Malin details, without spoilers, the plot—the unsolved disappearance of 300 people from their fictional Tennessee community—and outlines how the pilot episode rapidly found an audience, reaching “the top spot on the download charts without any famous cast members to promote it.” Each section is equal parts informative and evocative; Malin conveys what makes comedy podcasts, such as Jonathan Katz’s Hey, We’re Back, funny to so many listeners, and why certain investigative series are successful, like The Last Days of August, which he says avoided cheap thrills and brought compassion and humanity to the story of a pornographic actress who died by suicide. This is an essential overview of a wildly popular medium. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this powerful history, biographer Pearson (Crusade to Heal America) spotlights three women who spearheaded the breast cancer awareness movement: actor and diplomat Shirley Temple Black, journalist Rose Kushner, and businesswoman and philanthropist Evelyn Lauder. Though the three never met, Pearson explains, each worked tirelessly to advocate for early detection programs and increased research into treatments between the 1970s and ’90s. In addition to facing their own breast cancer diagnoses, the three battled public opinion (even the mention of breasts was taboo) and a paternalistic medical establishment. Pearson describes how their awareness campaigns, like the 1972 press conference Black held in her hospital room days after receiving a mastectomy, normalized conversations about breast cancer, and how their philanthropic efforts, including Lauder’s founding of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, brought hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research. Pearson details several moving moments, as when the Washington Post in 1974 decided to run Kushner’s groundbreaking article on a woman’s right to choose her breast cancer treatment. At times, the chronology is hard to follow as Pearson weaves the women’s stories together across decades. Still, it’s an inspiring account of the women who changed how breast cancer is understood and treated. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this gently heartbreaking account, Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Use of Photography) reflects on the death of her older sister, Ginette, in 1938, two years before the author was born. Months before the diphtheria vaccine was made compulsory in France, six-year-old Ginette died of the disease. Taking inspiration from Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father, Ernaux addresses her late sibling directly, compiling all she knows of Ginette’s life, death, and legacy into a diaristic dossier. Though Ernaux’s parents never spoke of Ginette, the author tracks down and interviews the few living people who remember the girl’s death, seeking to map the devastation it wrought on her family before Ernaux was born. Elsewhere, she recalls hearing adults call Ginette a “nice” girl and Ernaux a “demon,” which saddled her with lifelong feelings of inadequacy, and makes a number of poignant literary allusions, comparing her late sister to Peter Pan and Jane Eyre’s tuberculosis-stricken Helen Burns. Poetic and raw but never maudlin, this beautiful meditation on a very particular kind of grief will resonate with anyone trying to process a major loss of their own. Photos. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Religious historian Ryrie (Unbelievers) makes a provocative yet incompletely persuasive argument about the negative impact of Adolf Hitler’s centrality in modern discourse. Ryrie posits that the story told of WWII as a grand unifying crusade against the ultimate evil, symbolized by Hitler and his genocidal Nazi ideology, was used in the postwar West as a substitute for a fading Christianity. “The Second World War is our Trojan War. It is our Paradise Lost,” he writes, describing how Nazis and Nazi allegories came to be used in pop culture as an all-purpose symbol for badness, whether for dramatic (Harry Potter) or comedic (Seinfeld) purposes. Ryrie goes on to make a persuasive case that the “negative” value system of the “anti-Nazi era” (i.e., being anti-genocidal) created an ethical vacuum in the postwar world—“It is becoming plainer that the anti-Nazi story cannot do all the work we are asking of it,” he writes, pointing to developments ranging from a reemerging far right to cancel culture—and that a positive morality is needed to bolster society. However, the narrative feels on thinner ground when Ryrie tries to imagine that positive morality, delivering an upbeat yet muzzy message about an “ethical synthesis” between old and new values. Presented in a light yet not unserious tone, this well-paced investigation of what underpins modern morality is worth grappling with. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

The changing fortunes of newspaper publishing provide the backdrop for this spirited second-chance romance from Fuller (The Marriage Pact). Accountant Jade Smith and columnist Sebastian Hudson first bond while working at the Democrat Gazette in 1994 Little Rock, Ark. Just as sparks start to fly, Jade’s offered a high-paying job at a media conglomerate in Atlanta, which would give her the resources to adopt the troubled foster brother, Logan, she’s told no one about, including Seb. Ten years later, Jade’s still working in Atlanta and trying to keep Logan out of trouble, while Seb runs a struggling local paper in Arkansas, the Clementine Times. Jade’s boss decides to acquire the newspaper and sends her to convince Seb to sell. Her return stirs up dormant passions, but when Seb starts to suspect that she’s feigning her feelings to strike a deal, it’ll take plenty of faith to help the pair mend things—and for Jade to finally open up about the rocky childhood she’s hidden from many in her life. Though Fuller’s lighthearted story brims with quirky characters and southern charm, she adeptly weaves the main narrative with a moving plotline about the challenges of an upbringing in the foster care system and its lasting consequences on kids and families. Readers will race through this. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hugo Award winner Scalzi makes a surprise return to his Old Man’s War series a decade after the publication of The End of All Things with this tightly plotted story of interspecies negotiations. Ten years have passed in-universe as well, and Gretchen Trujillo, former resident of Roanoke Colony, now works as a diplomat for the human Colonial Union in their relations with the extraterrestrial Obin. When the asteroid housing the 50,000-person Unity Colony—a top-secret trial community exploring whether the participants in the peace treaty between the CU, Earth, and the Conclave of alien species can coexist—vanishes from space, Gretchen and her Obin assistant/bodyguard, Ranare, investigate. It becomes clear that the politics and technology of the hyper-intelligent and extremely patronizing Consu aliens are central to solving the mystery and saving the colony. To learn more, Gretchen agrees to become the Consu’s liaison to what they see as lesser species, pulling on her Obin connections to supplement her knowledge. While this installment is light on politics, Scalzi leans into many other series staples—dramatic fight scenes, technical challenges, and bold personalities—and does a good job providing just enough exposition for readers who have forgotten the backstory while keeping the current situation feeling vital. For diehard fans, this will be a treat. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Aaronovitch successfully mixes things up for Det. Sgt. Peter Grant in the entertaining 10th Rivers of London urban fantasy (after 2023’s Amongst Our Weapons), set in an alternate contemporary Britain where magic is real. Peter, who is also a wizard, heads on vacation to Scotland with his wife, Beverley, a river goddess; their twin toddler daughters; and his parents, who insist on joining them. Naturally, the trip turns into a business holiday; Peter is drawn into a whodunit by his friend, Dr. Abdul Walid, who recruits him to make sense of the murder of a man who, Abdul was shocked to discover, has gills. The killing may be related to a recent series of attacks on sheep in the area by something that leaves bite marks resembling those of a large cat. Aaronovitch’s trademark humor is in evidence through Peter’s witty narration as he connects these two quirky cases. Series fans will not be disappointed. (July)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Schleyer debuts with a delightful historical whodunit. In 1910, wealthy twins Easton and Weston Asquith have gathered at a manor on England’s Lammore Lake to celebrate their respective engagements. Conniving heir Easton is now with his brother’s former love, Eloise Sutcliffe, while Weston has resigned himself to marrying the plain but wealthy Della Drewitt. During the week’s festivities, someone attempts to poison Weston, kicking off a series of increasingly bold attempts on his life. Though Della isn’t exactly in love with her fiancé, she’s keen enough to infer that taking the Asquith family name might put her in danger, so she starts snooping around the party for suspects. As she and other guests wind their way through the manor house, finding hidden hallways and ferreting out secrets, bodies start to pile up, and a wicked manipulation plot emerges. Schleyer toggles perspectives and tosses out clues with aplomb, making each of her main characters surprisingly three-dimensional and well worth spending time with. Add in a convoluted—but never incomprehensible—whodunit plot that will stump even seasoned genre readers, and this works on every level. Agent: Sophie Cudd, Book Group. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

“Order needs to be in constant creative tension with disorder for cities to thrive,” according to this scattershot collection from urbanist Ebrahim, journalist John Lorinc (Dream States), Spacing magazine editor Dylan Reid, and architect Leslie Woo. Less than authorized, ground-up approaches to urbanism and city planning are the main focus, mostly in the Toronto area, with an emphasis on how communities’ vital creative impulses are often stifled by local regulations and a top-down approach from government. For instance, “A Beach Like No Other” is a rollicking account of residents in Toronto’s Bloordale neighborhood coming together against the city’s wishes during Covid lockdown to make a community “beach” on an abandoned lot. Other essays include “Cities for Women and Girls,” which considers how to reduce sexual assault on public transport, and “Desire Lines in the Sand,” a solid look at the history of queer beaches. The pieces run the gamut from creative speculation, such as in “Conway’s First Walk Home, Little Jamaica, 2035,” which imagines a safe and well-planned Toronto neighborhood years into the future, to up-close, nitty-gritty accounts of regional governance that unfortunately make for rather dry reading. Still, students of urbanism looking for an alternative to the straight and narrow path will find much to consider. (June)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

This winsome memoir from photographer Mann (Remembered Light) offers practical guidance for artists. Peppered with anecdotes from a lifetime of professional wins and losses, Mann’s advice is both conventional (“If it were easy, everyone would be doing it”) and unexpected (“I pragmatically decided that insecurity... could be my friend”). Excerpts from journals and letters shed light on life events and preoccupations that inspired Mann’s work, and dispel the myth that “when [real artists are] not making art, they are drinking absinthe with friends and vacationing on St. Barts.” Elsewhere, Mann shares “failed pictures” from her photographic memoir, Hold Still, to counter assumptions that “you get better as you go, not repeating the mistakes of the past,” and plunges into thorny questions of selling out, recalling a time she accepted a free trip to Qatar to take the emir’s portrait but refused further payment (“Artistic true north is variable”). Similarly delicate balances—between light and shadow in photos, humility and chutzpah in life—provide the account with a running theme. Throughout, Mann is a clear-eyed, self-deprecating guide, framing her many mistakes as part of a lifelong creative practice. In the process, she reminds readers that there’s nothing static about still photography. This entertains as much as it enlightens. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink