Historian Golden Kellem examines 19th-century circus culture for what it reveals about the “performance” of gender in this illuminating debut study. Becoming a circus star—that is, a performer in high-flying aerial acts or other center-ring performances, like lion taming—“required women to be extraordinary but relatable, alluring but appropriate, thrilling but also unthreatening,” the author writes; such respectability was often reinforced by fictionalized backstories provided for media coverage of performers’ personal lives. At the same time, many popular “human curiosities” were geared toward defining the ideal, or unideal, woman. These included P.T. Barnum’s “Circassian Beauty,” an exoticization of white racial purity (she had allegedly escaped an Ottoman harem), as well as performers of color dehumanized under stage names like the “Bear Woman” or the “Missing Link” and women with disabilities or physical differences who were similarly gawked at. While many such performers reported mistreatment, others found personal freedom otherwise unheard of for women at the time. Mining this wealth of data—including new information about some of the era’s biggest acts—Goldem Kellem paints an intriguing portrait of the circus as a place that, uniquely for its time, “presented a wide spectrum of gendered characters, evoked by the sort of visual shorthand that read well from the cheap seats.” Readers will be wowed. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

That the Sahara is “empty, barren and everywhere the same” is a misperception anthropologist Scheele (The Value of Disorder) sets out to correct in this captivating study. She dates the notion partly to the impression created by medieval Europe’s first “aerial view” map, which depicted North Africa, a place of little importance to European travelers, as an unpeopled expanse. Such a barren wasteland was ripe for the “orientalist” imaginings of the colonial era through today’s foreign policy complex, which tends to perceive the region as “ungoverned space.” To counter such perspectives, Scheele unravels common Sahara myths: only 15% of the region is covered by sand dunes, the rest being “mostly rocky hard surface or desert pavement”; the “oasis garden” is largely fictive; and reports of desert “slavery” are mostly misrepresentations of either the current migrant crisis (when sub-Saharan Africans end up stranded in North Africa due largely to Western meddling, the oft-elided subtext of articles on “Libyan people smuggling”) or of a past system in which kin-less people needed to commit their labor to a new group in order to survive. Drawing on her own extensive travels, Scheele presents an invigorating alternate vision of the Sahara as a place where social life is deeply intertwined with ecology but which is just as varied and complex as anywhere. It’s an immersive view of a too often oversimplified region. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Susskind (The Future of the Professions), president of the Society for Computers and Law, offers a just-detailed-enough overview of “the benefits and threats” of artificial intelligence. Explaining the difference between “process-thinkers” and “outcome-thinkers,” he notes that the former are more interested in how AI works while the latter care about what it can accomplish. He cites Noam Chomsky as an example of a process-thinker and Henry Kissinger as an example of an outcome-thinker, and argues that grasping the difference between the two is crucial to understanding the history of AI and where it’s headed. Elsewhere, Susskind contends that it’s not crazy to think AI has the potential to “generate unprecedented economic value” and to ameliorate the effects of climate change. He takes a comprehensive look at such possible benefits, but he also recognizes that the risks might be equally large. These include AI’s potential weaponization by bad actors and the possibility for “relentless surveillance.” He concludes that balancing the pros and cons “is the defining challenge of our age.” Rendering intricate matters of law and ethics in accessible terms, Susskind makes good on his promise “to offer some assurance that you don’t need to be a technology expert to think and talk sensibly about the impact of AI.” There’s much here to chew on. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

It’s time to ditch optimism and face the facts about the future of the planet, according to this provocative if verbose study from Notre Dame English professor Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene). He argues that humanity is facing “the end of the world as we know it,” that it’s too late to take remedial action to combat climate change, that capitalism is too entrenched in society to be reformed, and that “the myth of progress” hinders people’s ability to imagine the collapse of society. The time has come, Scranton contends, to accept ethical pessimism, which he defines as “a commitment to future existence that by definition cannot be imagined” and which in his telling fosters “empirical accuracy, resilience, compassion, [and] egalitarianism.” Scranton’s at his best when detailing how other cultures have navigated societal collapse. For example, he cites the Indigenous peoples of North and South America after the European genocide against them as an example of the “struggle to articulate a meaningful life after the end of the world.” Unfortunately, his prose has a tendency to tangle itself in knots, resulting in winding, paragraph-length sentences peppered with jargon. Still, patient readers will find startling insights here. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this engrossing memoir, first published in 1955, late Russian microbiologist Borodin details his life up until he defected to the West in 1948. Born in 1905 in the south of Russia, Borodin absorbed the brutalities of the country’s civil war as a young student. His description of living through “mass famine, lice and typhus, with no fuel in the freezing cold winter” in the following years sets the stage for his struggles as a scientist under Soviet rule. After serving in the Red Army, Borodin turned to microbiology, and eventually rose to become head of a laboratory by the 1930s. He survived Stalinist purges and earned the Order of Lenin for training state snipers and engineering meat substitutes but eventually grew conflicted over his collaborations with Stalin’s government. “You are also responsible for all these denunciations, violence and executions you calmly witnessed, because if there were no people like you, the very structure would never exist,” he thinks to himself. His disillusionment culminated in his renouncement of Soviet citizenship, which he justified in a pointed letter to a Soviet ambassador that closes the book. Borodin’s raw account captures the tension between his love of science and hatred of tyranny. It’s a unique perspective on the first decades of the Soviet Union. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Anthropomorphism is an “utterly charming linchpin of the human mind,” contends animal cognition researcher Gregg (If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal) in this captivating survey. His study of the tendency to assign human-like attributes to the nonhuman covers household pets, cars, hurricanes, and teddy bears. Among other examples, Gregg describes a couple in search of a location for a dolphin-assisted water birth (some people believe the animals “are genuinely interested in helping humans deliver their babies”) and explains the tendency to humanize chatbots. It’s not all silly; Gregg also covers anthropomorphism’s darker side, including its manipulative use by politicians and advertisers, as when an Ikea ad garnered sympathy for a “poor, abandoned little lamp.” Elsewhere, he digs into how “the twisting of the Anthropo-Dial” can lead people to view groups other than their own as less than human. Delivering more than a compendium of colorful anecdotes, Gregg uses these examples to discuss evolutionary theories of anthropomorphism that posit it ensures humans “never miss the opportunity” to connect socially and may function as a “prediction-making device” for others’ desires. Filled with intriguing stories and astute explanations, this is a superb work of popular science. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biographer Sebba (Ethel Rosenberg) offers a nuanced and unsettling exploration of the role music played at Auschwitz. The camp’s all-female orchestra was the pet project of brutal camp leader Maria Mandl, who thought it would lend her “gravitas” in the eyes of Nazi higher-ups. From early 1943 to late 1944, the orchestra grew to over 40 members under the fierce and controversial leadership of conductor and internee Alma Rosé, a famous violinist (and Gustav Mahler’s niece) who expanded it to fit as many Jewish women as possible, pushing against orders to keep it majority non-Jewish. In Sebba’s telling, Rosé was a lonely, angry, and complex figure who would scream at musicians for a false note and stay up all night writing out music from memory. While she could be cruel, acceptance into her orchestra meant salvation from the gas chambers. The book quickly dispatches any romantic notion that music somehow transcended the camp’s horrors—quite the opposite, as the musicians had to play cheery marches while fellow prisoners hobbled off to horrific, often fatal working conditions (“madhouse music... a damned rhythm of fear,” one survivor called it) and play the classics for SS guards who used music to “recharge emotionally” (noted one musician, “One moment they want Schumann’s Träumerei, the next moment they are putting people in the fire”). It’s a chilling account of the sublime being twisted to inhumane ends. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Washington Post staff writer Davenport (The Space Barons) offers a captivating, fast-paced account of the ambitions and rivalries of the billionaires and superpowers driving modern space exploration. Opening with the successful 2024 launch and landing of SpaceX’s Starship, the “most powerful rocket ever assembled,” Davenport follows the manic progress toward deep space exploration, largely led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin as they battle over billion-dollar contracts from NASA, as well as by an increasingly competitive China. Well sourced with a surprising level of access to major players like Musk, the book’s fly-on-the-wall perspective contrasts the American organizations’ divergent managerial styles: SpaceX’s no-sleep, breakneck speed; Blue Origin’s “homey, comfortable vibe”; and NASA’s conservative caution. These distinctions provide insight into the tensions behind historic achievements, such as experienced astronauts’ skepticism about flying SpaceX’s Dragon capsule without a stick (“like flying an iPhone”); they also help explain ongoing failures, like Blue Origin’s frequent trailing behind SpaceX’s innovation. Among the narrative’s many amusing behind-the-scenes anecdotes are a Blue Origin senior vice president who consoles disappointed employees after the loss of a lunar lander contract by playing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” and Musk’s relentless “string of insults” aimed at Bezos. It makes for a revealing glimpse into the egomaniacal antics, stagnant bureaucracy, and awe-inspiring advancement that define the new space age. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) offers a scintillating account of a 1928 expedition to the Himalayan plateau undertaken by Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, the two eldest sons of Theodore Roosevelt. Their goal was to find and shoot a panda, a creature so rarely sighted that many thought it to be a myth. The brothers, Holt writes, hoped to achieve the status of world-famous explorers and thus escape the shadow of their big-game-hunting father, whose taxidermied kills filled America’s natural history museums. Among their party was Herbert Stevens, a British biologist “incapable of being in a hurry”; Suydam Cutting, a friend of Ted’s with comically little experience to recommend him for the journey; and 19-year-old Tai Jack Young, an NYU student of Chinese heritage who came on board as an interpreter but was overwhelmed by the plethora of local dialects. The team was unprepared as well for the dangerous weather conditions, and their survival ended up depending upon local guides, often women, with “superior knowledge of the mountains, superlative endurance,” and the skill to fend off bandits. After five months of trekking, the group found and killed their gentle, slow-moving prey, but, as Holt shows through her vivid, layered narrative, the experience filled them with a mounting horror and dramatically changed their attitudes toward ecological conservation. Readers will relish this graceful combination of enlightening research and propulsive action. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this loving tribute, Hischak (Parts & Labor), director and curator of the Edward Gorey House, does not attempt a comprehensive catalog of the artist’s work. Hischak largely sidesteps Gorey’s career as a professional illustrator of other people’s books, a lucrative day job that allowed him the freedom to pursue his own strange obsessions. Instead, he presents Gorey as a “laudable model of how an artist maintains the equilibrium of creating highly successful commercial work while constantly producing unconventional works,” and features mainly the latter. These include masterpieces like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book in which 26 children die in increasingly terrible ways, which, though now a classic, was considered unmarketable and incomprehensible when it was first published in 1963. While also incorporating some straightforward biography—Gorey’s childhood was itinerant and somewhat troubled—this survey, playful to its core, does more showing than telling, excavating the artist beneath the commercial powerhouse with lovely reproductions of his early strange tales for children, pieces of personal ephemera like his collection of ticket stubs from the New York City Ballet (of which he was a devotee), and notes on his style of dress (“beatnik dandy,” a biographer once termed it). It’s an inventive and intimate retrospective of the most hallucinatory parts of a surreal body of work. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink