Willis, cofounder of Make Time Wellness and wife of actor Bruce Willis, details in her compassionate debut how caregivers can better care for themselves. After 13 years of marriage, Willis began to notice that her husband was mentally and physically deteriorating. He struggled to communicate, make plans, and handle their finances, and was eventually diagnosed with aphasia and frontotemporal dementia in 2022. Drawing from her experience coming to grips with her husband’s disease, she urges caregivers to thoroughly educate themselves on a loved one’s condition (but direct friends and family to online resources to avoid continually reexplaining it to them); find community with other caregivers; and carve out time for activities that are “just for you” (before she was comfortable leaving her husband for extended periods of time, the author found solace gardening in the backyard). While suggestions for exercising, getting enough sleep, and eating right won’t be new to readers, Willis constructs a candid and convincing case that staying physically and emotionally healthy is essential to looking after someone else (she soberingly notes that 30% of caregivers die before the loved one they’re caring for, and at a rate that’s 63% higher than other people of the same age). Admirably vulnerable and openhearted, this will be a balm for readers grappling with a loved one’s recent diagnosis. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Queer studies scholar Mackenzie’s inventive if frustrating debut explores underappreciated, ambiguous “affects” like wonder and nostalgia as a means for rejecting the capitalist drive to reach productive, happy endings. The book cleverly examines the experiences of drug users and queer and trans people to show how both groups are pushed to reach “aspirational” outcomes, whether sobriety or “the fully gendered self,” a pressure the author decries as a “loss of multiplicity and the tempering of imagination.” Instead, Mackenzie turns toward concepts from the world of harm reduction and affect theory that present drug use and gender as neither positive nor negative, but chronic and “achy.” They do so through a complicated Maggie Nelson–esque blend of their own formative experiences, dense critical theory, and literary references, ranging from Anne Carson to Leslie Feinberg, to mixed results. This combination is best when it produces surprisingly poignant analyses, such as when the author reclaims nostalgia as a “form of growth” by reflecting, during a relisten to Elliot Smith’s Either/Or, on how, for trans and nonbinary youth, shyness functions as quiet refusal to conform. However, these disparate, slammed-together theories, citations, and memories—which include an unexpected detour into the history of the opioid epidemic in the U.S.—can be a challenge to follow. Still, it’s an admirably ambitious attempt to overcome “narratives not of our own making.” (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this enthralling saga, journalist Gayle (We Refuse to Forget) resurfaces the little-remembered late-19th-century effort to turn Oklahoma into a Black state. He focuses on the movement’s leader, Edward McCabe (1850–1920), tracing his rise from Wall Street clerk to one of the first prominent American proponents of Black separatism and self-governance. In Gayle’s telling, McCabe’s story is one of ambition continually thwarted but undeterred—on Wall Street, where he got his start after a fairly well-to-do upbringing, Black clerks were relegated to menial tasks, so he moved to Chicago. There he clerked for retail magnate Potter Palmer, under whose tutelage McCabe “learned how to sell a dream.” Still unsatisfied, he headed West, landing in Kansas, where a town on the cusp of insolvency presented him an opportunity to get into government. After becoming the first Black man in America elected as a state auditor, he was undermined by a racist smear campaign during his run for a third term. Yet, Odysseus-like, he simply moved on again, but this time in full possession of the political and organizational power to lead a movement, issuing advertisements throughout the country encouraging Black settlers to migrate en masse to Oklahoma Territory (and, incidentally, vote for McCabe for governor, a bid he ultimately lost; afterward, he continued on in politics still undaunted if somewhat diminished). Gayle’s stylish, brisk account elegantly incorporates many tangents (including spotlighting the Native nations being dispossessed by McCabe’s efforts). It’s one not to miss. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Essayist and art critic Kalli meditates on their lifelong love of horses in this fascinating debut. Blending history, pop culture, and memoir, Kalli considers the horse as both a tool of oppression and a symbol of liberation for Black people across the African diaspora. They investigate the role horses have played in systems of slavery, both as agents of escape and as tools of surveillance, squaring that history with their own as the child of Filipino and Jamaican immigrants who went on to become the only Black member of Columbia University’s equestrian team. Elsewhere, they offer close readings of Kanye West’s Polo iconography, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, mapping a lineage of Black equestrian aesthetics that runs from Clint Eastwood to Jamaican dancehall, and unpack the surprising class lessons they learned when reading “pony books” like National Velvet and Black Beauty. Throughout, Kalli writes with urgency and grace, grounding their wide-ranging musings with a tender image that bookends the narrative: the author resting a hand on a horse’s shoulder (“I will place my hand on a horse’s shoulder and learn about the ground beneath my feet”). Slim but potent, this packs a punch. Agent: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, Frances Goldin Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Physicist and novelist Lightman (The Transcendent Brain) and astrophysicist Rees (If Science Is to Save Us) aim in this trenchant if overly broad treatise to dispel a growing mistrust of scientists in American society. They frame the scientific process as an apolitical pursuit of truth via experiment and critical thinking, with inherent characteristics—like the fact that theories are subject to change as new information becomes available—that fuel unfair accusations that scientists are “wishy-washy.” The authors call for scientists to take responsibility for their work, both by avoiding unethical experiments and using their knowledge to inform government “planning and policy” and raise concerns about social, technological, or environmental threats. Elsewhere, Lightman and Rees caution scientists, scientific review boards, and science journalists to ensure findings aren’t sensationalized via “overly dramatic headlines” that increase public mistrust, though how exactly scientists themselves might do that is less clear. The authors make a valuable effort to dismantle stereotypes of scientists as mouthpieces of elite institutions, though they sometimes cover too much ground in their eagerness to do so, ranging from the limits of future biotechological innovations to the workings of scientific review boards. Still, this offers plenty for readers to chew on. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this comprehensive account, journalist Eisner (Taking Back the Vote) contextualizes Carole King’s career and contributions to American music. Drawing on previously published interviews and King’s own memoir—the notoriously private singer, Eisner notes, declined to be interviewed for the book—she begins with King’s childhood in a heavily Jewish part of Brooklyn, where she discovered a facility for language and was influenced by show tunes and early rock ’n’ roll. After getting pregnant at age 17, she married and dropped out of college to raise her child and write songs with her first husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin. Along the way, she churned out such hits as the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and developed an innovative piano style that involved a “complicated interplay between melody and chords, as if they are in conversation.” Later, her career as a singer-songwriter took off with such solo albums as 1971’s Tapestry. Despite following some historical tangents a bit too far, the author mostly succeeds in her efforts to situate her subject within a dynamic cultural moment where “popular musical youth culture” was flourishing and American antisemitism was fading, making space for King’s rise at “just the moment that the culture was waiting to embrace someone like her.” The result is a robust celebration of a legendary musician. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hurd (At Home and Abroad), a professor of religious studies and political science at Northwestern University, argues that for Americans, the border has not only a political but also a religious significance—“a capacity to summon a sacred American nation.” This “American border religion,” as Hurd calls it, “comes with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy of immigration and an eschatological foreign policy”; she illuminates these “theologies” across an array of mostly standalone chapters. One focuses on how, like in many religious myths, the American border religion includes the idea of asylum, or the ability of the land to confer salvation upon the deserving, and of a clerical class—consisting of border guards and national security apparatchiks—that delineates the saved and the hell-bound. Hurd’s thesis is most intriguing when she focuses on how borders are both a palpable and inchoate idea; the Department of Homeland Security, for instance, carries out border enforcement activities deep within the American state—far from any actual border—as well as all over the globe, with offices in far-off countries. (For Hurd, one notable iteration of this simultaneous extension and erasure of the border is Israel—“both countries are imagined as Holy Lands.”) It’s an original perspective on how Americans are politically motivated by feelings of sanctity that at times verge on zealotry. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Black and brown children in America’s schools are routinely subjected to demeaning treatment by teachers, according to this alarming exposé from sociologist Ray (The Making of a Teenage Service Class). In 2017, Ray embedded in a fourth grade classroom in Las Vegas, intending to study the effects of budget cuts. Instead, her observations became focused on how teachers were humiliating and mocking students on a regular basis. This “slow violence” stemmed, according to Ray, from a dehumanizing indifference to Black and brown students’ unique situations and needs. Examples include Nagli, a “talkative and enthusiastic” Black student whose baby brother died, sending her into a spiral of grief completely ignored by her teachers; Reggie, another devoted Black student, who was treated by teachers like a “predator” after they caught him looking at pornographic photos on his iPad; and Miguel, a “distracted” Latino student whom teachers kept incorrectly calling autistic. Each student was subjected to mockery and beratement from teachers rather than any sustained attempt to connect or correct. The mostly white teachers range from one who expressed a desire for a “white history month” to others who seem genuinely “tolerant” but still, in Ray’s unsettling assessment, don’t seem to perceive students of color as “full humans.” This adds to the chorus of provocative recent studies positing that majority-white environments negatively impact students of color. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this captivating and vivid history, journalist Baron (American Eclipse) recreates the mania for Mars that gripped America over a century ago. He recaps heated debates between eccentric intellectuals over the existence of intelligent life on the planet—indicated in the minds of some by straight lines, interpreted as canals, observed crisscrossing its surface. The most prominent of these “battling egos” was Percival Lowell, a Boston heir who established his own observatory; he theorized that Mars’s canals were an irrigation system preserving a dying planet. Alongside H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla’s claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell’s fantastical lectures depicting “the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive” sparked a Mars craze, which included comics, a new dance (“A Signal from Mars”), and claims from some individuals to have visited the Red Planet as “disembodied souls.” Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers’ flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined “Planet of Peace”—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

The life of James Baldwin (1924–1987) is told through four of his intimate relationships in the standout debut biography from independent scholar Boggs. The account begins with Beauford Delaney, a Harlem painter who in the 1940s taught the young writer “to see the beauty of the world around him, and to begin to see it within himself” and encouraged Baldwin’s 1948 move to Paris, where he met Lucien Happersberger, whom Baldwin called “the love of my life.” Happersberger inspired and facilitated Baldwin’s writing, particularly the novel Giovanni’s Room, giving Baldwin use of his family house in Switzerland to write. Baldwin met Turkish actor Engin Cezzar while working on a stage adaptation of Giovanni’s Room in the U.S. in the late 1950s. At the time, he was working on his novel Another Country, and beginning to play a larger role in the civil rights movement. The final relationship Boggs covers is Baldwin’s affair and collaboration with French painter Yoran Cazac. They partnered on the children’s book Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs explores in extensive detail. The author’s rigorous research, including interviews with Cazac, makes for an impressive portrait of Baldwin’s life and work. It’s a fascinating and original window into the private world of one of America’s greatest writers. Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink