Bestselling historian Wulf (Magnificent Rebels) offers a revelatory biography of the little remembered but brilliant polymath and naturalist George Forster, presenting him as a “thinker far ahead of his time.” Born in 1754 into an Enlightenment-era Europe fired by “the conviction that they could control nature,” by age 19 Forster was the “assistant naturalist” aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution. What distinguishes his writings of this period, Wulf notes, was his growing horror at his shipmates’ abusive treatment of the Indigenous people they encountered and his rejection of the idea of European dominion over the natural world and Indigenous people. Forster went on to be among the first Europeans “to talk about what we now call human rights,” Wulf writes, eventually becoming an influential proponent of the French Revolution during his later years, when, working as a librarian in Germany, he devoted himself to publishing books and reviews arguing for the scientific validity of egalitarian politics. In a narrative that reads partly like a scientific adventure story, partly like a revolutionary bildungsroman, Wulf traces Forster’s mental journey—drawing on his published works and private diaries and letters—as well as his literal journey, following his path throughout Europe and the South Pacific, trying to imagine the world from his perspective as “a crosser of borders, a dreamer of worlds” who was able to see “the connections rather than divisions.” Readers will be rapt by this immersive recreation of an intellectual awakening. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Cockburn (The Spoils of War) targets military brass, corporate miscreants, and the politicians who service them in this vigorous collection of muckraking articles originally published in Harpers, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. His subjects include the Pentagon’s obsession with high-tech weaponry, like AI systems and the Air Force’s KC-56 refueling plane, that generate huge profits for defense contractors but don’t work well; America’s support of unsavory foreign leaders from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, (convicted of drug trafficking before being pardoned by Trump in 2025); political consultants’ fondness for expensive campaign television ads that earn them lucrative commissions but don’t move voters; and the exorbitant legal settlements cities are paying because of police shootings. Cockburn also launches left-populist critiques at American politicians, including Joe Biden for his pre-presidential tough on crime and corporate-friendly legislative efforts, and centrist Democrats for schmoozing with wealthy Hindu nationalist donors and exiling pro-Palestine speakers from the 2024 DNC stage, as well as Donald Trump for just about everything. Cockburn’s expertise on national security issues makes his critiques of the military particularly sharp, while some of his bugbears on the domestic front get less mileage (his anti–nuclear energy stance will likely leave some readers unconvinced in this moment of ever ratcheting upward oil prices). Still, the result is an incriminating portrait of a ruling class mired in corruption and ineptitude. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

With this down-to-earth guide, Kamb (Level Up Your Life), founder of the online fitness community NerdFitness, lays out a roadmap to starting over after failure. After signing a contract in 2023 for a book about making “progress when life doesn’t go according to plan,” the author endured a number of disruptions of his own, including a divorce and business problems that led him to downsize his company, forcing him to reconsider his goals and begin again. Drawing on those experiences, he explains how readers can do the same by reframing setbacks as the result of trying something worthwhile and a source of valuable information about oneself. He outlines a four-part program for starting over: pausing to assess whether “what we’re doing is actually helping or hurting us,” accepting the situation instead of avoiding it, formulating a new strategy using lessons from past failures, and adjusting the plan according to internal feedback. Kamb offers plenty of concrete tools for making change, like racking up quick wins to build momentum, connecting with others who have similar goals, and swapping out long-term objectives for less overwhelming time-bound “experiments.” (For example, rather than setting out to lose weight, readers would be better served testing out whether running a few times a week for 30 days improves their health.) Enlivened with plenty of personal anecdotes and a solid dose of self-deprecating humor, it’s an upbeat invitation to start afresh. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Kleon (Steal Like an Artist) draws inspiration from his kids’ freewheeling approach to making art for these cheery, upbeat lessons on creativity. He writes that having rigid expectations of what art should be amplifies self-criticism and stymies creativity; readers would be better served abandoning those hang-ups and embracing a beginner’s mindset. (“When you don’t know what you’re doing but you’ve decided to do it anyway.... You fail a lot, but occasionally stumble into brilliance.”) He also expounds on the benefits of not being afraid to make decisions that seem strange or foolish, since they can open the door to “our most wild, daring creative work”; embracing curiosity; carving out plenty of unstructured time to “play” instead of working toward a specific goal; and imbibing a steady stream of books, movies, and other “intellectual nourishment” as inspiration. Full of fun, wryly witty wisdom (and quotes from such artists as John Cleese, Ray Bradbury, and Doris Lessing), this serves as a charming—if not wholly novel—reminder to let go in order to tap into one’s freest creative self. Artists who feel stuck will savor it. Illus. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Playwright Dohrn debuts with a frank and fascinating chronicle of his experience as the son of Weather Underground fugitives, who were wanted in connection with the group’s 1970s bombings. He describes living one step ahead of the FBI in locations including Oregon, Chicago, and New York City until, in the early ’80s, his mother, Bernardine Dohrn, turned herself in and was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. Dohrn goes into great detail about the Weather Underground’s history as a militant leftist organization, but anchors the account in his intimate experiences as a “Weather Kid,” wondering “why my mother’s loyalty to these apparent strangers seemed to outweigh her commitment to us, her own children.” He provides no easy answers as he grapples with his parents’ commitment to noble ideals at the expense of his and his two younger brothers’ safety, at once somewhat skeptical of his parents’ extreme politics and admiring of their impulse to improve the world by “transform[ing] what was passed down to us in order to make a better future for ourselves and our children and our children’s children.” This is a powerful blend of personal and political history. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Barnes (American Contact) offers a startling, eye-opening examination of the scope and sweep of blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. in the century following the Civil War. Pushing back against the notion of blackface as a fleeting 19th-century phenomenon, Barnes meticulously traces how after the war, the practice boomed, jumping from professional stages to local venues, with amateur performances routinely staged in and funded by schools, businesses, governments, and fraternal organizations. As Barnes traces the deep entrenchment of minstrelsy in social life during the Jim Crow era—itself so named after a minstrel character—even readers familiar with the topic will be astonished by the extent of the practice’s cultural penetration, and its enduring ties to anti-Black political agendas. For instance, the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, founded in 1868 and reaching its apex in the 1920s with more than 800,000 members, was started by professional minstrels, who used the Order to “transform minstrel shows from casual entertainment into a fundraising juggernaut,” siphoning profits to segregationist politicians. Other illuminating avenues of inquiry include the Works Progress Administration’s support of blackface performances, and blackface performances staged by Japanese American internees during WWII and at FDR’s Warm Springs polio hospital. Painstaking and impressive, it’s a magisterial and disturbing reconsideration of American cultural history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this superb history, Atlantic staff writer Tiffany (Everything I Need I Get from You) profiles a cadre of women who, skeptical of the Warren Commission, pursued dogged amateur investigations of the Kennedy assassination, raising questions that continue to be salient today. Tiffany particularly focuses on three women whose long-term contributions were most influential: Oklahoma housewife Shirley Martin, a passionate Kennedy supporter; New York–based World Health Organization analyst Sylvia Meagher, who felt distrustful of the government after having been dragged before a Loyalty Board during the Red Scare; and Beverly Hills housewife Maggie Field, who became obsessed with how illogical the chain of events was that culminated in Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination. The trio, Tiffany writes, approached their research with astonishing tenacity. Martin made frequent trips to Dallas, interviewing witnesses and becoming close with Oswald’s mother—and getting surveilled by the FBI. Meagher combed through the Warren Commission’s 18,000 pages of evidence, meticulously indexing “incongruities.” Field collected and distributed evidence, including hosting an early screening of the Zapruder film and creating enlargements of a polaroid taken at “the instant of the fatal head shot.” Tiffany paints an intimate portrait of the women’s growing camaraderie, shared frustration with male fellow skeptics, and eventual discord over New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s shambolic conspiracy trial. It’s an extraordinary account of a relentless search for truth. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Curators Barnes and Rolls-Bentley (coauthor of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between) offer an accessible if overly brief introduction to queer art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Spotlighting art that “troubles normative (especially heteronormative and cisgendered) ways of thinking, categorizing or being,” they cover artists who depict themselves as a means of “asserting their visibility on their own terms”; who reconstruct histories of queer life; who portray romantic and platonic queer love; and who use their work to envision new futures that spurn “inherited limits” and allow “queerness [to] thrive by design.” Household names like Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol appear alongside such contemporary artists as Salman Toor. (Entries for each artist provide a representative artwork, brief biography, and list of key works.) The authors conclude with a timeline of queer art history, a short glossary, and suggestions for further reading. There’s plenty of good information to be found here, but the entries exist in a vacuum, sufficiently discussing each artist’s engagement with queer themes but doing relatively little to provide context or encourage interconnected thinking. It’s a useful reference book, with limits. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Psychotherapist Alpert (Be Fearless) turns the world of modern therapy on its head with this provocative challenge to what he sees as a flawed system stoking rising rates of anxiety and depression. Alpert catalogs some of the forces that have shaped today’s mental health crisis, including social media, political divisions, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, but assigns most of the blame to a type of ineffectual therapy where clinicians validate patients’ self-diagnosed problems and allow them to engage in endless cycles of venting without helping them grow. This, he writes, fosters a fragile, dependent mindset that harms individual patients while shaping a society that’s generally more selfish, less resilient, and socially disconnected. Good therapy, however, still has the power to help those who need it—by equipping patients with concrete tools, challenging them to grow, and helping them develop the independence needed to ultimately leave therapy. While Alpert sometimes stretches his thesis too far in arguing for how therapy has amplified today’s crisis of polarization, he provides a refreshing and well-reasoned look at the ways the practice falls short of its goals in the paradoxical interest of making patients feel good. This will be of interest to those on both sides of the couch. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

“We should no longer accept living a world that has been designed by men, for men,” contends debut author Reuther, an industrial designer and former global creative director at Nike, in this pointed critique of how products and spaces are often designed to suit men at the expense of women. Reuther offers examples of design choices that range from insulting to dangerous. Footwear brands, she explains, make sneakers for women by scaling down men’s sizes and recoloring them pink (“shrink it and pink it”), even though women have different anatomical and functional needs than men. Crash test dummies, firefighting gear, and personal protective equipment are also largely modeled on male anatomy. She also highlights how women have been involved in design throughout history but their talent and contributions often went overlooked, as was the case with Helene Rother Ackernecht, who in 1942 became the first woman to design automobiles for GM, though her male manager was credited for her work. Turning prescriptive, Reuther insists inclusive design produces better outcomes for everyone. Her industry fluency gives her argument a granular edge, but her conclusion (“We need a world that acknowledges both equality and difference”) brings little new to the conversation. Still, it’s an enlightening recap of how faulty design choices became the norm. (July)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink