Today show alum Kotb (Hope Is a Rainbow) draws from her and others’ personal and professional lives for this energizing guide to self-transformation. After becoming a mother in her 50s, Kotb decided in 2024 to retire and devote herself to parenting, caring for her mom, and making room for other priorities. Tracing that decision alongside the ups and downs of her broadcasting career, she shares advice on surrendering control in order to take risks; implementing small, daily changes that build a sense of accomplishment; and making shifts when things feel right, even in the absence of an obvious trigger (“Just because something’s not broken, doesn’t mean it’s working,” she writes, adding that one should feel free to revise decisions they’ve made to please others or otherwise “for the wrong reasons”). The author’s charismatic voice will keep readers hooked, and her solid advice is bolstered by candid personal disclosures as well as brief commentary from celebrities, actors, and media figures—among them Bette Midler and Thomas Rhett—who’ve made life changes of their own. This inspires. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Maher (Miles on Miles) paints an expansive, career-spanning portrait of the country music artist in this compilation of previously published interviews. Born in 1933, Willie Nelson was raised by his grandparents in Abbott, Tex., after his parents divorced and moved away, and began playing guitar at age six. Following unglamorous stints as a cotton picker, janitor, and traveling salesman, he moved to Nashville and started writing songs, including such hits as “Crazy” and “Pretty Papers,” which were made famous by Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison, respectively. After signing with Atlantic Records in the 1970s, Nelson helped usher in a brand of “outlaw” country music that embraced rock ’n’ roll and jazz and folk influences, attracting a younger and more diverse audience. Interviews also explore in depth his beliefs in reincarnation; his use of recreational cannabis to spark creativity; and his environmental activism, including advocacy for forms of renewable energy. Despite some repetition across pieces, the broad chronological scope (spanning from 1969 through 2021) and Nelson’s open, good-natured, and often witty demeanor (“I don’t think I’m a bad singer, but I don’t think I’m that great, either”) make this an enjoyable and enlightening window into the mind of a country music great. Nelson’s fans would do well to snap this up. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Elmhirst debuts with an enthralling story of survival. In spring 1973, a British couple felt their sailboat shudder as a flailing, dying whale punched a hole in its hull. Months earlier, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had sold their possessions, abandoned “suburban domestic stress,” and embarked in their sloop Auralyn for a new life at sea. Maurice—an odd, prickly perfectionist—wanted to sail “by the stars,” so the boat had no radio transmitter. As the Auralyn sank, the couple scrambled onto a tiny inflatable raft with what food and water they could grab. Maurice despaired; Maralyn—a pretty, confident go-getter—was sure they’d be rescued. And they were, but only after 118 days adrift, during which they bludgeoned sea turtles to death, slurped water from fish eyes, caught sharks with their bare hands, and watched multiple ships sail past without noticing them. Maralyn’s iron will kept them alive, through her implementation of routines and innovations like safety pin fishhooks. The grisly details of survival are narrated by Elmhirst with vivid immediacy, and her handling of the lead-up and the aftermath are equally fascinating—including the couple’s post-rescue celebrity (when they were frequently asked to climb into their raft for photo shoots) and the surly Maurice’s alienation of everyone but his wife ahead of their even more self-isolating trip. It’s an un-put-downable saga of a relationship pushed to the limits. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist English (The Gallery of Miracles and Madness) offers a riveting look at a little-known CIA operation designed to spread alternative media throughout Soviet-controlled Poland. Communist censors banned or edited materials that depicted life beyond the Iron Curtain, unsavory parts of U.S.S.R. history, or Polish national identity; they also heavily regulated news media and restricted access to printing materials. Drawing on firsthand accounts, English shows how a network of anti-Communist activists—among them Mirosław Chojecki (who gained international recognition for going on a hunger strike while imprisoned for his publishing activities), Kultura magazine publisher Jerzy Giedroyć, and Helena Łuczywo, editor of the underground publication Mazovia Weekly—worked with the CIA to evade the censors and amplify the Polish Solidarity movement. The network created illicit broadcasts, magazines, and cassettes; smuggled books, printing materials, and radio equipment into the country; and helped fund anti-establishment efforts (including violent ones). Intrigue follows as conspirators engage in evasive maneuvers, coded messages, double-crossings, and other flimflammery. Yet, despite this spycraft-centric focus, the author steers admirably clear of divisive Cold War ideological messaging, instead maintaining a captivating focus on the sacrifices made by the activists. (At one point, English chronicles a Mazovia Weekly deputy editor’s heroic, single-handed production of an entire newspaper at a crucial moment when her colleagues were all away.) The result is a thrilling account of ordinary people fighting for their intellectual freedom. (June)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Essayist Collinsworth follows up What the Ermine Saw with a beguiling biography of Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), a groundbreaking and enigmatic figure in women’s history. After opening with Woodhull’s 1893 libel case against a British Museum Library archivist, Mr. Garnett, for “cataloging... material she insisted contained unflattering references to her,” Collinsworth rewinds to Woodhull’s humble beginnings, when she worked with her sister for their con artist father as “amazing child clairvoyants”—a trade they continued as adults, serving as spiritual consultants to Cornelius Vanderbilt. With Vanderbilt’s backing, the sisters opened a Wall Street brokerage firm (at a time when women weren’t allowed to trade stocks) and founded their own newspaper; Woodhull eventually ran for president (at a time when women couldn’t vote). Much of the book follows Woodhull’s ambitious trajectory through the eyes of Mr. Garnett, whom Collinsworth places in the role of researcher, studying the woman who sued him—a distracting and unnecessary conceit. Still, Collinsworth’s Woodhull is captivating enough that this misstep is worth overlooking—the author excels at conveying the chameleon-like nature of a woman who was “in the business of reinventing her past,” including through numerous self-published pamphlets (one so effusive that a critic remarked, “Such a book is a tomb from which no author again rises”). It’s a transfixing character study. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lennon, a contributing editor at Esquire and a convicted murderer, debuts with a fascinating blend of journalism and memoir. The author, who’s serving 28 years to life in New York’s Sing Sing prison for killing a man in Brooklyn in 2001, twines his own story with those of three fellow inmates, each also convicted of murder. Michael Shane Hale killed his older male lover in 1995; Lennon fleshes out his closeted early life in Appalachia. Milton E. Jones killed two priests during a botched robbery in late ’80s Buffalo, where he grew up poor with a teenage mother. Rob Chambers, better known as “the Preppie Killer,” notoriously killed a woman during drug-fueled sex in Central Park in 1986, then turned to creative writing behind bars (Lennon describes his work as “like an East Coast version of Bret Easton Ellis”). Lennon paints meticulous portraits of each man’s personal lives before and during prison, successfully humanizing his subjects and contextualizing their crimes. In the process, he poses provocative questions about the flattening effects of true crime-as-entertainment and makes forceful arguments for empathy. It’s both a sobering glimpse of life behind bars and a stinging rebuttal to the public’s appetite for tragedy. Agent: William LoTurco, LoTurco Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Texas State University history professor McWilliams (Eating Promiscuously) delivers a captivating biography of Frank Stanford, the Arkansas poet and enfant terrible of the Fayetteville literary scene, who died in 1978. As McWilliams notes, Stanford’s physical beauty, sexual appetite, and outsize personality made him the center of attention wherever he went, but it was his prodigious talent, voracious reading, and prolific writing that made him a poet sought after by literary magazines. Stanford dominated the University of Arkansas poetry workshop before retreating to the hills around Fayetteville to work on his magnum opus, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. McWilliams does a remarkable job connecting Stanford’s poetry with his personal life, particularly his lifelong friendship with Irv Broughton, owner of a small press and Stanford’s first publisher; his penchant for love triangles; and how his need for connection fueled his poetry. The end of Stanford’s life, which saw him cohabiting with two women in different towns and running an independent press before his death by suicide at age 29, is rendered here in spellbinding detail. It’s a page-turner. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this urgent clarion call to prevent the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI), Yudkowksy and Soares, co-leaders of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, argue that while they can’t predict the actual pathway that the demise of humanity would take, they are certain that if ASI is developed, everyone on Earth will die. The profit motive incentivizes AI companies to build smarter and smarter machines, according to the authors, and if “machines that think faster and better than humanity” get created, perhaps even by AIs doing AI research, they wouldn’t choose to keep humans around. Such machines would not only no longer need humans, they might use people’s bodies to meet their own ends, perhaps by burning all life-forms for energy. The authors moderate their ominous outlook by noting that ASI does not yet exist, and it can be prevented. They propose international treaties banning AI research that could result in superintelligence and laws that limit the number of graphic processing units that can be linked together. To drive home their point, Yudkowsky and Soares make extensive use of parables and analogies, some of which are less effective than others. They also present precious few opposing viewpoints, even though not all experts agree with their dire perspective. Still, this is a frightening warning that deserves to be reckoned with. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Social media personality Prosper brings his online video series to the page in this earnest if sappy survey of contemporary life. The project was first conceived in 2020, when, working as an ICU nurse during the Covid-19 pandemic, Prosper, a normally gregarious man, coped with the trauma by disengaging from his patients. To regain a sense of connection, he began interviewing strangers on the street and posting the interviews online. The stories in this volume are not reproductions of online content, however, but new. Each section is organized around a question (e.g., “Who was your greatest love, and why did you fall in love with them?”) and includes answers from the strangers, accompanied by photographs of them talking. In book form, however, the project lacks a certain dynamism (screen grabs of interviewees mid-sentence feel less dignified than portraits would be), and the stories themselves give little sign that much work was done to pick the wheat from the chaff. (One respondent says of their mantra “just breathe”: “It’s very simple and to the point—not everything needs to be a Robert Frost poem”). To the extent that Prosper contextualizes the stories, he mostly does so in clichés (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; “We’re more alike than different”). The result is sometimes moving but overall too squishy and inconsistent. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cultural critic McLaughlin (Sinkhole) ruminates on cancel culture’s effect on art criticism in this concise and captivating treatise. Squaring off against what she dubs “liberal realism”—i.e., the classification of art as ethically acceptable based on whether it promotes liberal moral standards—she tracks how recent attempts to give art “a dubious moral glow-up” have led to a “surreal” alternate reality of art criticism. For instance, she notes, the “sadistic” artist Chaïm Soutine, whose works exude “violence and objectification,” was recently described in Frieze magazine as “bringing ‘dignity’ to those at the bottom of the social order.” Likewise, McLaughlin highlights how this moralizing lens has a quelling effect on contemporary artworks; she points to the widely reported “offense” caused by the 2022 movie Tár as an example. McLaughlin is lucid and sharp, and readers will find themselves impressed even when they disagree. (In her rundown of the heated public response to Dana Schutz’s 2017 painting of Emmett Till in his casket, McLauglin gives only the barest credence to the accusation that the piece is part of a lineage of white artists appropriating Black suffering. While she critiques the episode with deftness, it might be a bridge too far for some—after all, surely some art might actually be in poor taste.) The result is a enjoyably provocative challenge to the status quo. (May)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink