Biologist and illustrator Sardet (Plankton) delivers a dazzling illustrated overview of the origin and evolution of living things, from the first protocells to complex multicellular organisms. Sardet’s history of evolution and biodiversity begins with Charles Darwin’s first sketch of the tree of life and proceeds through Lynn Margulis’s depiction of five kingdoms of life and the most recent mapping of relationships between organisms through genetic sequencing. Elsewhere, readers learn about LUCA, the elusive “last universal common ancestor,” the strange biology of viruses and their outsize influence on evolution and ecosystems, and the astonishingly complex inner machinery and dynamic lives of cells. Sardet details no shortage of strange and fascinating creatures, like the “blob,” an amoeba that can solve mazes. The eye-catching imagery includes period drawings and lithographs, images of cells from under the microscope, stunning photographs of trilobite fossils and exploding stars, and the author’s own colorful drawings of cells inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s “calligrams,” poems in which words are arranged to form an image. Throughout, QR codes guide readers to computer animations of molecular processes. This is an informative and entertaining exploration of the building blocks of life. Illus. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this stirring chronicle, Valdosta State University history professor Aiello (White Ice) recounts Muhammad Ali’s return to boxing in 1970 and the rise of Black power in Atlanta. Ali had become a “global celebrity” after winning the heavyweight championship in 1964, Aiello explains, but after becoming an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and a conscientious objector, he was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his boxing titles. His stand against the draft angered a large part of his fan base, but it also ignited activism in sports, Aiello writes, “giving a kind of permission to Black athletes who wanted to use their platforms for social justice.” Ali was exiled from boxing for more than three years before Leroy Johnson, Georgia’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction, used his influence to get Ali back in the ring in Atlanta, where he would fight Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweight contender and a critic of Ali’s politics. Ali’s return spurred pushback and death threats, but a large swath of Black celebrities and residents showed up in support, and Ali defeated Quarry after three brutal rounds. “Black Atlanta had resurrected Ali,” Aiello writes. His captivating and deeply researched account seamlessly weaves together the politics of race and sports. This is a knockout. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

Critic and fiction writer Winterson (Night Side of the River) anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Casting herself as Aladdin, Winterson examines contemporary ills from climate change to doomscrolling—and more timeless concerns from misogyny to religion—in freewheeling essays that invite readers to take a closer look at the fabric of their daily lives. One minute, Winterson is proclaiming that social media’s “weapons of mass distraction... shrink the human mind” and declaring phone addiction “a miserable way to live”; the next, she exalts fiction’s power to illuminate “inner realities that gradually press forward into our outer circumstance.” Faith in story eventually emerges as the book’s main concern, with Winterson encouraging readers to apply a literary analyst’s lens to the problems of today: “The present is often provisional,” she writes. “We don’t understand it till it’s over.” Though the concepts can be dense, Winterson’s language is accessible and unfussy, and an irrepressible sense of play animates the project. By the time it’s over, readers will feel like they’re seeing the world around them through brand new eyes. Agent: Caroline Michel, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

Improving one’s well-being starts with steady, consistent progress, contends psychologist Ben-Shahar (Happiness Studies) in this concise, accessible guide. The book is rooted in the author’s idea of Minimum Viable Interventions, or “activities that are as brief as possible and as long as necessary to bring about real, significant, and lasting change.” MVIs aim to close the gap that can exist “between theory and practice” by creating a low barrier to action, making them easier to accomplish and therefore build momentum and motivation. Among the interventions suggested are low-key meditation practices—essentially, setting a reminder on one’s phone to focus on the present—to boost spiritual health, and intentional listening strategies to improve relationship satisfaction. Ben-Shahar’s no-nonsense approach and ability to translate essential truths into simple, effective tools will be especially valuable for readers who feel frustrated with more theoretical self-help books. This one-sitting guide effectively reveals how small steps can spur major change. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ravalec, a filmmaker and author of the photo book Japan Visions, revels in the wild world of 1960s and ’70s Japanese counterculture in this riotous collection. In the rocky era between postwar reconstruction and the 1980s economic bubble, a small, inventive group of Japanese artists shaped an art scene where, in the words of illustrator Tadanori Yokoo, “something new was created and broken down every day.” The book homes in on the era’s changes in photography—especially from the groundbreaking journal Provoke, which mixed “raw, grainy, and high-contrast images” with “philosophical texts and manifestos”—but also includes generous examples of painting, collage, poster art, experimental theater, and performance art, accompanied by the artists’ recollections. Much of the work highlighted is politically charged, including striking photographs of Hiroshima’s aftermath and student protests against the Vietnam War. But there’s also plenty of room for the playful, the sexual, and the bizarre, including works of psychedelia, Neo-Dada, ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), a sexy photo shoot featuring novelist Yukio Mishima, and erotic rope bondage. The book’s stylish, Pop Art–inspired layouts set a funky and edgy mood, and the text enriches the art rather than crowding it out. The result is an energetic, eye-popping peek into the history of the Asian avant-garde. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this tired debut, music journalist McCabe lionizes “larger-than-life” rock music titans from 1955 to the present. Each chapter covers a star’s early life, career, and contributions, beginning with Elvis Presley, whose controversial musical style and “slow-burning sexuality” spurred a younger generation to “break free of the sexual mores of their parents and kick against the racial inequalities which split American society.” Later chapters highlight such stars as Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Anthony Kiedis, whose struggles with drug addiction illustrate the contradictions of a rock lifestyle in which “creative brilliance” and self-destruction are often inseparable. Despite some enjoyably colorful anecdotes (including Iggy Pop vomiting on his audience during a 1970 concert), there’s not much in the way of a thesis tying these mini-bios together, and few new insights into the well-known group of men emerge. Even the more intriguing questions raised in the book’s introduction—“what does it mean to be a rock god in a world where the cultural geography is unrecognisable from the era in which the art form was born?”—feel rhetorical and go mostly unaddressed. The result is a superfluous collection of tributes to stars who’ve already received their laurels. Photos. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this spellbinding biography, literary historian Greenblatt (The Swerve) recreates the short life of English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, arguing that Marlowe’s poems and plays, with their skepticism about religious and political authority, ushered in the English Renaissance. The son of a poor cobbler, Marlowe distinguished himself at King’s School in Canterbury, clearing a path for him to attend Cambridge, where he excelled in Latin, translating Ovid’s love poems. He then turned to playwriting, producing in the 1580s Tamburlaine, a play based on the Central Asian emperor Timur that Greenblatt explains is about the “impious breaking of every rule, the ruthless satisfaction of desire, and the triumph of the will.” Greenblatt examines how Marlowe produced dramatic innovations that Shakespeare would later use in his plays; the soliloquy, for example, appeared for the first time on stage in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Marlowe created the English history play with his Edward II. Marlowe was murdered at age 29 in an apparent struggle over a bill in a tavern. Throughout, Greenblatt vividly recreates the dangerous and dark world of Elizabethan London, with its “narrow streets filled with excrement and offal, severed heads of convicted traitors struck up on spikes for passersby to contemplate.” Readers will be captivated. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian and novelist Russell (The Palace) winnows fact from fiction in this peppery, humane look at the complex love life of a regent known for his controversies and scandals. Russell begins with the monarch’s turbulent childhood, charting his upbringing and ascension despite failed coups, “sadistic” tutors, and multiple traumatizing family deaths. Enlisting a deep bench of first and secondhand sources, Russell traces how the king’s political and sexual consciousness developed through connections with “favorites,” though he argues that some of James’s plausible youthful love affairs with these favorites rest on circumstantial evidence at best. (For instance, the king’s exact connection to Esme Stuart—“onto whom James latched as an adolescent”—Russell finds impossible to determine.) But as James comes into power in England, so too, Russell shows, does his heart; Russell reconstructs James’s adult romances with six favorites, including “chief favorite” Alexander Lindsay; James’s “remarkable” wife, Queen Anna of Denmark; and most movingly, Lord George Villiers, James’s “great love” and companion of a decade. In urbane and sometimes salacious prose, Russell shows James for all his faults and favors (he’s a “superb huntsman” with a “filthy” sense of humor and an unfortunately murderous tolerance for witch-hunting), with an eye to debunking the crueler myths around his private life as the product of the era’s homophobia. It’s a sly, precise, and persuasive biography, fit for both gleeful gossips and students of Jacobean history. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this gripping history, classicist Mueller (Race and the Making of the Mormon People) uncovers the life and complicated legacy of Wakara, the Ute tribal leader who during the 1840s commandeered the 700-mile crescent of commercially prosperous land spanning from New Mexico through Utah to California known as the Old Spanish Trail. Known for his brutality, Wakara started out as the “greatest horse thief in history”—so prolific that the efforts required to police him eventually contributed to the “fall of Mexico-era California,” Mueller asserts. Wakara then graduated to slave trading in captive Native people, amassing a small fortune in cattle and cash. In presenting the story of this complex character, Mueller unravels the mythic notion of the colonization of the frontier as a straightforward standoff between Native peoples and European settler colonialists. For example, he revisits an incident from 1850 in which Wakara asked for a son of Mormon leader Isaac Morley as payment for allowing Mormons to settle on Ute land in Utah. Using DNA evidence, Mueller reveals that Wakara’s own daughter had likewise been “adopted” by a white family, in a ritual act of child exchange, contradicting a racist retelling of the story over the years in which Wakara’s request had been reduced to a “whim” of the “savage” Natives. It makes for an eye-opening and layered new vision of the American West. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Illustrator Duval debuts with an eye-opening compendium of passionate and powerful women throughout history who chose a life unencumbered by husbands or children. Her brief biographies are organized around themes, such as a section on defying traditional gender norms in the ancient world that includes, among others, Lady Triêu (c. 225–248), a warrior maiden who became a national symbol in Vietnam, and Hypatia (c. 350–415), a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who broke significant gender norms by teaching in public. A section on financial independence highlights women who found ways to make money in periods when women were barred from most kinds of work, among them Rosalba Carriera (c. 1675–1757), a Venetian pastel portraitist, and Annie Smith Peck (1850–1935), a skillful mountaineer who turned her daring and notoriety into a moneymaking profession as a public lecturer and writer of travel guides. The section labeled “Prioritizing Pursuits Other Than Marriage” contains such famous names as Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American Hollywood star. Each profile provides insight into these women’s historic periods while also inspiring admiration for their gumption. It’s a potent collection of role models for women and girls. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink