In this fascinating memoir, psychiatric nurse Burgess (A Killer by Design) delves into her experiences as an expert witness in some of the most high-profile criminal cases of the past 30 years. With a robust background in researching trauma and the effects of sexual abuse at Boston hospitals, Burgess began tangling with the court system in the 1970s, when she advocated for rape victims, who, if they spoke out at all, were often treated as criminals. While most of Burgess’s work was with women, her profile as an expert witness rose during the trial of the Menendez brothers, where her testimony corroborated chilling details of the abuse they suffered as children at the hands of their father. Burgess also recalls helping the FBI pioneer the practice of criminal profiling, and interviewing and providing professional mental health assessments for accusers of Bill Cosby and Larry Nassar. Throughout, she’s an empathetic, matter-of-fact guide, chronicling the growing acceptance of testimony about psychological responses to trauma from a front-row perspective. True crime fans should take a look. Agent: Alice Fried Martell, Martell Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Poet Aldegheri (Free to Go) pushes the boundaries of a “historically male-dominated genre” with this captivating anthology of travel essays by women. Extending beyond themes of conquest and superhuman endurance, entries touch on vulnerability and disenfranchisement, with Leena Rustom Nammari’s “Dispatches from a Road Less Travelled” detailing the indignities of moving through the West Bank weeks after the start of the war in Gaza (“It is a humiliating way to travel”). Fear is an undercurrent in “Attention Please,” in which Janette Ayachi escapes a violent marriage with her two small children, while motherhood is an odyssey of its own in Jemma Neville’s “From Our Own Correspondent,” which likens diary entries from her days with twin toddlers to dispatches from a foreign land. Even the more traditional adventure stories feel fresh: Anna Fleming describes getting her period while preparing to summit Mont Blanc (there is little water or privacy, and few tampons), while Lee Craigie’s “Rewriting the Hero’s Journey” offers a “radical” approach to a bike race: responding to the body’s needs and centering strength over exhaustion. Memorable and thought-provoking, the essays do valuable work in broadening what it means to explore, unpacking the complex realities “of what happens when women move through the world in their brave, scared, messy bodies.” Readers will be eager to take the trip. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

This robust chronicle from historian Kaufman (Black Tudors) excavates the lives of nine female British enslavers. In the popular imagination, the enslaver is almost always male, but Kaufman demonstrates that marrying an heiress was an “overlooked... route to acquiring” slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most famous heiress of this sort is fictional—Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester—while among the real-life heiresses covered here are Jane Cholmeley, Jane Austen’s “stingy aunt” who has cameos in several of Austen’s novels, and Mary Ramsay, who appears in a vicious poem by poet Robert Burns in which he calls her a woman with “hands that took, but never gave.” These female enslavers were just as callous as their male counterparts, Kaufmann diligently shows. Her research is impressive; she frequently leaves her subjects behind in their mansions to dive into the history of slavery in the West Indies, and spends ample time delineating the stories of enslaved people and their relationships to these heiresses (among her aims is to move her British readers, “with [their] strong sense of ‘fair play,’” to reevaluate their upbeat understanding of their own national history). She follows the money doggedly—as money is the driver behind almost every plot point in the book—but the endless look into inheritances, investments, and debts grows a bit wearying. Still, serious students of history will learn much. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Couvson (Pushout), CEO of the philanthropic organization G4GC, makes a passionate case for supporting girls of color with investments in education, mentorship, mental and emotional wellness—and most of all, time. She envisions a future for women and girls of color “informed by love.” Through a series of conversations about investing in girls conducted with luminaries including poet Nikki Giovanni, sociologist Bertice Berry, and activist Tarana Burke, Couvson spotlights how important it is for young women of color to attain a robust self-knowledge, an understanding of the world around them, and a sense of purpose. Couvson also shares her own professional experiences as a nonprofit executive addressing structural barriers to girls’ success, including gender-based violence and economic inequality. She reminds readers regularly that while infrastructure may feel impossible to change, “people make policies” and therefore have the power to impact them, and laments that “less than 1 percent of philanthropic giving” goes to causes specifically supporting women and girls of color. While the advicee is addressed to those in the nonprofit world, the wealth of insights and anecdotes will appeal to educators, parents, and anyone seeking tools to bring about a better future for young women of color. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

The problem at the root of capitalism’s relationship with nature isn’t exploitation per se, but that nature is treated as “free,” writes political scientist Battistoni (A Planet to Win) in this stimulating treatise. The author traces the capitalist view of nature as a “free gift”—as opposed to a commodity that can be exchanged—from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, focusing on Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s ideas about what distinguishes human labor from natural resources. Elsewhere, Battistoni links this theoretical framework not just to resource extraction but the “externalization” of damage done to nature (with pollution considered “surplus matter” of the production process) and even why the “natural” work of reproductive labor goes uncompensated. Battistoni is a rigorous and skilled polemicist; she showcases her original close readings of classic texts without veering too far into the weeds. Her investigation adds up to a fascinating look at how a “free” nature functions, ironically, to restrict human freedom to make ethical and socially responsible decisions: “By compelling us to treat nature as a free gift, capitalism limits our ability to act on our judgements about... how we ought to value other kinds of beings, and how we might live differently as a result.” It adds up to an insightful theoretical approach to the climate crisis. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Sports writer Leblond revisits in his propulsive English-language debut the life of Alfred Nakache, an Olympic athlete who was forced to swim for his guards’ entertainment at Auschwitz. Born into the French Jewish community in Algiers, Nakache developed into a competitive swimmer in his youth and broke a world breaststroke record in 1941. However, Nakache also became the target of antisemitic attacks in the press; by 1943 he was banned by the Vichy government from competing in sports. Shortly after, he and his wife and daughter were deported to Auschwitz; his family was gassed immediately, while Nakache was sent to a work detail. Recognized as a celebrity, he was singled out for humiliation, forced to swim for hours in a freezing, rancid pond. An emaciated but determined Nakache survived until the camp’s liberation, and he competed again in the 1948 Olympics. Leblond writes with a gripping, novelistic flare. (“This time Alfred my boy, you’re going to give it everything.... If you get below your previous time, you’ll be allowed a bit of meat. If not, we’ll have another of our specialties for you. A surprise, Alfred my boy, a surprise,” says the commandant of Auschwitz III in a characterization that is somehow both cartoonishly villainous and believable.) Readers will be hooked. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this witty and thought-provoking examination of America’s relationship with bears, historian Horowitz (American Dreams, American Nightmares) zeroes in on the ways that humans have feared, loved, and exploited these charismatic creatures. He begins with famed frontiersmen Grizzly Adams, who teamed up with P.T. Barnum to capture and train performing bears, and Hugh Glass, whose saga, which involved being left for dead after a bear attack, inspired the 2015 film The Revenant. Horowitz then traces how bears’ position as the ultimate terror in the American wilderness gave way to a cuddly, child-friendly demeanor in the era of conservation—the “Teddy Bear,” modeled on champion of conservationism Teddy Roosevelt, being not only a hinge point, according to Horowitz, but a seminal moment in U.S. culture. He pegs its creation as one of the first modern pop culture phenomena, as well as the first instance of Americans anthropomorphizing nature. Ever since, bears have held a special “celebrity” status—not just in the U.S., but internationally, with Winnie the Pooh and Paddington emerging in Teddy’s wake. Bears began to frequently symbolize positive human-nature relationships, the inverse of the horror they once engendered (Horowitz traces how an ugly old crone mauled to death by bears evolved through the years into pretty young Goldilocks, who no longer gets eaten for her trespasses). Wide-ranging and entertaining, this is a clever work of cultural history. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this disappointing account of space exploration, astrobiologist Scharf (The Ascent of Information) posits that it is human nature, pushed by evolutionary pressure, to explore new frontiers, and outer space is the next obvious realm to venture into. Throughout, Scharf uses Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle to survey the shores of South America as a metaphor for humanity’s move into space, explaining that the insights Darwin gained about evolution later allowed humans to alter that process, including through gene-editing tools. Journeying off-planet, Scharf argues, would be a similar inflection point that unlocks “new evolutionary opportunities.” Scharf also offers a whirlwind history of the scientific developments that led to the U.S. space program, dives into the wide array of manned and unmanned missions sponsored by countries and corporate interests, and details the nature of celestial bodies within the solar system. There’s intriguing information throughout, like how oxygen from Earth occasionally makes its way to the moon and how solar storms can be so extreme that had an astronaut been on the moon in August 1972, he would have received a deadly dose of radiation. Despite such captivating details, Scharf fails to meld them into a coherent whole. The result will leave readers feeling lost. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

New York Times reporter Belson (Hello Kitty) offers a candid history of how NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft turned the NFL into an immensely profitable institution. The NFL brought in $23 billion in 2024, Belson notes, making it “essentially a Fortune 500 company masquerading as a sports League.” Today, NFL games attract huge television audiences, the Super Bowl is a “de facto national holiday,” and the teams play in billion-dollar stadiums. None of this was inevitable, Belson argues. The NFL was relatively small until the 1990s, when sponsorships and television packages shot up revenue. Jones and Kraft, who bought their teams in 1989 and 1994, respectively, were eager for success and built the Cowboys and Patriots into two of sports’ most valuable franchises through aggressively marketing. In 2006, they backed Goodell to be the next commissioner, who went on to cut record-setting deals with networks and sponsors. Belson adeptly analyzes controversies during Goodell’s tenure, including a class action lawsuit from thousands of players alleging the NFL lied about the risks of repeated hits to the head. He skewers the league’s response, writing that the NFL was “at its most bloodless, sidestepping a major controversy by throwing money at the problem.” This eye-opening report bares all. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this affecting memoir, Kaplan (Unravished) examines her relationship with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. When Kaplan was growing up, her father was private and habitually distant, rarely looking her in the eyes. She posits that they never “found comfortable or honest footing together because we were too alike: shy, cripplingly private, overly vulnerable, hoarders of our true selves.” Still, after Justin’s death from Parkinson’s, Kaplan felt compelled to “feel what it felt to be him.” She began by reading Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, the book that earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for the first time. From there, she tried to piece together her own imperfect biography of her father, sifting through documents and letters that illuminated his closeness as a child with the family’s housekeeper and reflecting on his relationship with Kaplan’s mother, the writer Anne Bernays, who felt stifled in her own creative life by sexism and her husband’s considerable shadow. Kaplan finds few smoking guns, but her project honors her father’s stated goal of examining “the tensions between the familiar, shared life of human beings.” Melancholy and meticulously written, this excavation of a literary lineage isn’t easy to forget. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink