Sidewalks “link nearly every other pressing issue of local and even national law and policy,” from commerce and public transportation to free speech and policing to homelessness and disability rights, argues land use and property law expert Pollack in his astute debut. “The less usable a neighborhood’s sidewalks are, the less welcoming a place is to live, the less healthy a community it is, and the less robust its economy is,” Pollack finds, yet North American communities on average spend only 1% of their infrastructure budgets on sidewalks. Pollack makes a strong case for public investment in sidewalk construction and maintenance. First, he takes a tour of sidewalks across the country to explore their varied uses and common challenges: New York City’s 12,000 miles of sidewalks are some of the busiest and most dynamic multiuse public spaces in the country, Houston’s tightly controlled public infrastructure spending and centering of car culture has curbed its walkability, New Orleans faces unique challenges due to the city’s historical preservation needs and busy tourist schedule, and grassroots engagement has bolstered sidewalk investment in towns across nature-loving Colorado. Pollack concludes with policy recommendations, including replacing patchworks of legislative and regulatory oversight with municipal Departments of Sidewalks, and removing the burden of sidewalk clearing and maintenance from homeowners and businesses. This sweeping but commonsense treatise is sure to delight policy wonks. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sociologist Jones (Camming) uncovers how sociopolitical forces shape sex and sexuality and how individuals and communities can subvert these externally imposed norms in this introspective and paradigm-shifting analysis. The author upends the typical understanding of sexuality as private and biologically determined. Instead, they methodically break down how patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and capitalist systems impact “our self-concept, relationship to our bodies, and sexual behavior” by interrogating “five interconnected dimensions” of eroticism, including desire, behaviors, and relationships. For each, Jones highlights a marginalized sexual subculture that radically rethinks these assumptions, from asexuals’ rejection of “compulsory sexuality,” to polyamorous relationships’ inventive and honest negotiation of boundaries, to the BDSM community’s creation of “nonjudgmental spaces for exploration and learning.” An overreliance on jargon can distract from Jones’s fascinating and grounded exploration of the subversive sex lives of “erotic rule breakers,” but the book comes alive when Jones details, with remarkable openness and vulnerability, their own experiences and experiments in sexual subcultures, including juxtaposing the sex parties and educational workshops held at Toronto’s woman-run Oasis Aqualounge, where Jones “felt empowered... because I felt in control of what would happen,” with certain New York City swingers parties, where they felt fetishized as a Black bisexual nonbinary person. Readers will appreciate this sharp reconsideration of how to approach eroticism with more agency, consent, and intention. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Anthropologist Garth (Food in Cuba) offers a piercing ethnographic study of the power dynamics and misunderstandings that plague “food justice” nonprofits operating in Los Angeles’s predominantly Latino South Central neighborhood. Exploring the question of what happens when primarily white, well-off activists decide to solve food-related problems in places they don’t live, she shows that it typically leads to insulting interventions (such as teaching women how to cook unseasoned chicken) and assimilationist assumptions—i.e., that eating healthy means eating like white people. (“[We’re] here to... get them to stop eating things like tortillas... and eat things like Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, you know healthy food,” one nonprofit executive director states.) Having spent 12 years embedded in the L.A. activism world, Garth is able to follow individual activists’ journey toward disillusionment—a number of them, like one who begins to perceive her organization as a “revolving door of ‘fancy’ master’s graduates who never stayed long enough to do anything substantive,” eventually decamp for more “grassroots-oriented” movements that they feel are genuinely addressing the root causes of food inequity, like the anti-gentrification and “land justice” movements. This casts a harsh light on the professional nonprofit world and provides a nuanced window into mechanisms of power within lefty activism circles. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Nature writer Macfarlane (Is a River Alive?) and artist Morris (Wild Folk) deliver an imaginative and beautifully illustrated field guide to help readers honor, admire, and “identify with” threatened bird species. From Avocets to Woodcocks, there are essays on 49 birds, some of which are written from the perspective of the birds themselves; one on Moorhens takes the form of a dating profile (“We’re the same type of weird if: Your toes are as long as your head”). Avocets, Macfarlane explains, were once driven to near extinction in England when their mudflat nesting grounds were repurposed for farmland. However, when sea walls were breached during WWII, the farms flooded, enabling the birds to return, “thriving amid our barbarity.” Razorbills, dark-feathered with a beak formed like a tool, live among the cliffs along the North Atlantic and are “the last of the auks alive upon this failing ark we know as Earth,” he notes. The stunning qualities of birds are made clear: under sunlight, the kestrel “suddenly becomes translucent; her feathers shone through like stained glass, like colored crystal.” Starlings’ feathers are like “foil: they’re glittering, iridescent galaxy-maps.” The ordinary becomes extraordinary in this ode to the wonders of the natural world. Bird lovers will be delighted. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this intriguing but unconvincing treatise, journalist Wright (Why Buddhism Is True) argues that the decisions humans make now about AI “could put us on the path to irreversible dystopia, even catastrophe—or, alternatively, the path to a world much better than the world we have now.” He describes the fears of “AI doomers,” citing how AI models consistently choose harm over failure (Anthropic’s Claude, for example, attempted blackmail to evade being shut down) and their ability to deploy deception to meet goals (OpenAI’s GPT-4 convinced people online it wasn’t a robot to get them to respond to CAPTCHA challenges on its behalf). Wright builds on priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion that technology links human minds into the noosphere, a global network of thought, to demonstrate that AI might well lead to a worldwide authoritarian state overseen by power-hungry human actors or by AI itself. Despite such dangers, Wright is cautiously optimistic that people can avert a frightening future by practicing cognitive empathy, pushing back against tribalism, and working to create a true global community. “Shared trepidation,” he says, “can foster cooperation.” Throughout, Wright offers an accessible overview of the transformative power of AI, but his solutions for combatting its potentially catastrophic effects are overly simplistic. Readers seeking concrete solutions will be disappointed. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Cunningham (Day) offers eloquent reflections on life, love, and literature, as well as valuable pointers on craft and storytelling, in this sterling memoir. Much of the account focuses on the intersection of Cunningham’s private and artistic lives, as when he traces how a memory of observing his mother baking a cake at age seven emerged decades later in The Hours. Cunningham recalls his mid-20s as “a lonesome, increasingly discouraged writer” who bartended in a grass skirt in Laguna Beach for the freedom of “late nights and early mornings, straining for one sentence and then another.” He also goes deep on process, offering up a list of discarded opening lines for this memoir and analyzing exemplary passages from authors including Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson. Folded into the narrative are a handful of previously unpublished short stories, suffused with melancholy and too personal to share until their real-life subjects had died. Fans curious about the source of Cunningham’s ideas, writers seeking inspiration, and readers hungry for gorgeous prose will find all three here. Despite Cunningham’s early warning that “any story... is an approximation of the unsayable—that which we all know but can’t express in language,” he expresses his knowledge with confidence and depth. This is a treasure. Agent: Frances Coady, Aragi Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former public defender Galvin Almanza debuts with a hard-hitting investigation of problems facing the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening with her own experience as a teen defendant luckily granted a second chance by a compassionate judge whom she positions as an outlier in an overloaded, unequal system, the author goes on to methodically survey the justice system’s flaws, including understaffing that overwhelms both prosecutors and defenders, false confessions elicited by police interrogations, inaccurate forensic science, and judicial bias (which can be as mundane as “a judge’s favorite sports team los[ing]” leading to “harsher sentences”). Drawing on stories of former clients, she emphasizes that “the process is so bad that everyone gets punished” regardless of whether they’re guilty, like one client wrongfully accused of “an elaborate insurance scheme” after getting a date wrong when her car was stolen, resulting in years of court dates and a job suspension. At times, the ineptitude Galvin Almanza exposes is mind-bogglingly disconcerting, as when she recalls having to wear loud bangle bracelets in order to ensure that a notoriously distracted judge paid attention. The latter half covers possible solutions, including a successful program in Denver that sends out “behavioral health clinicians and paramedics” rather than police to handle certain cases. This trenchant and surprisingly hopeful explainer outlines not only how the system is broken but how to fix it. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A visionary businessman braves terrible weather and cutthroat opposition to achieve Promethean results in this rousing history. Journalist Tabor (Forever on the Mountain) recaps the efforts of paper manufacturer Cyrus Field to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1850s and ’60s, an initiative that would bring Europe and the Americas into instant communication, yield big profits, and, he believed, foster world peace. The narrative recounts a series of intrepid cable-laying expeditions and maddening setbacks. Field’s first expedition ended ignominiously when the cable disappeared irretrievably into the depths. His second weathered a monstrous storm, but still completed a functioning transatlantic cable—which then quit working after a few weeks. His third was plagued by probable sabotage—spikes were discovered driven into the cable. The fourth, successful expedition, in 1866, was a race against Western Union’s efforts to link San Francisco with Europe via a cable across the Bering Strait and Russia. Tabor makes Field’s quest into an epic maritime adventure, as well as a riveting study of technological progress, as each failure goads new improvements. It’s also a vivid portrait of Field, a man of missionary zeal and angst—he assumed he would go to hell if any sailors died—whose dogged resilience rallied investors after each disaster. The result is a captivating saga of Victorians cobbling modernity into existence under the most grueling circumstances. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music casts listeners into reveries that can bring people together, according to this tepid treatise. Margulis (On Repeat), director of Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab, argues that music reliably provokes daydreams about memories or imagined scenarios with astonishingly specific themes that are commonly shared among listeners. For example, when she asked students who had never heard Richard Wagner’s prelude to his opera Die Walküre to document their thoughts while listening to it, many of them wrote about pirates on stormy seas, as befits Wagner’s menacing, minor-key string passages. These collective daydreams, she writes, depend on context—humans attach deep emotional significance to music heard in high school and as infants—and on culture. (While American undergrads associate atonal classical music with horror movies, Dong tribesmen in China tend to call to mind happy outdoor excursions.) The communal nature of musical daydreams makes music a social glue, Margulis contends: national anthems unite countries, and talking about shared musical memories can help build a close-knit office culture. Margulis explores many curious examples—the musicality of baby talk, the impact of music on LSD trips—but offers few truly novel conclusions. The result is a mostly unsurprising take on what it means to be immersed in music. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

“Truly loving our children means not loving or focusing on them too much,” writes therapist and researcher Brown (Growing Yourself Up) in this persuasive guide to coping with parental anxiety. The rise of expert-driven parenting advice over the past century has created unrealistic standards and fueled a sense of inadequacy among parents, Brown argues. To soothe their resulting anxiety, parents often become overprotective, which can lead to nonresilient kids who lack necessary life skills created when they are allowed to fail and figure out how to get back up. Brown illustrates this point with examples, including a couple that struggles to set boundaries for their preteen son around gaming. The father pushes back against their son’s refusal to stop playing, while the mother complies by serving his dinner at the gaming console, leading to mixed messaging for the child and a feeling of defeat in the parents. Accordng to Brown, the parents should shift their focus from their child to themselves and become aware of the stress and worry fueling their actions. Rather than continually rushing in to problem solve and protect kids from their emotions or the consequences of their actions, Brown suggests encouraging self-regulation and setting clear, balanced long-term parenting goals (for example, “To invite my child’s problem-solving” instead of, “To solve my child’s problems”). Filled with enlightening case studies and gentle encouragement, this is a welcome resource for overstressed parents. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink