St. Augustine’s advocacy of celibacy to avoid the dangers of female sexuality and Charles Dickens’s cautioning against putting off marriage for economic reasons are among the questionable pieces of literary advice about women on offer in this expansive study. Classicist Ruden (Perpetua) surveys seven influential, repressive writings about women’s bodies, reproductive rights, and motherhood that span more than two millennia. The works are astonishing in their own right; they include Heinrich Kramer’s “lunatic” 15th-century guide to witch-hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum, and family planning pioneer and eugenicist Marie Stopes’s Radiant Motherhood, a 1920 primer for pregnant women that advises them to wear diaphanous silk “so lightly hung that a butterfly can walk the length of her body without tearing its wings.” But the book’s greatest strength lies in Ruden’s wry criticism of the texts’ weirdness—she notes that Stopes prefers a mother to “glow like enriched uranium”—and her trenchant breakdowns of the authors’ motivations. Ovid’s antiabortion poems, for instance, are likely an attempt to curry favor with Emperor Augustus, who had recently issued new Roman morality laws, and early Christian writings restricting women’s sexuality also served to isolate them from those outside the home who might question Christian doctrine. Ruden also points to similarities between the older texts and today’s antiabortion movement (the last work she analyzes is a popular 1995 biography of antiabortion advocate Gianna Jessen). The result is a biting, revelatory overview of misogyny’s long literary history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wagman-Geller (A Room of Their Own) spotlights 25 of history’s richest women in this elegant survey. She begins with hair care mogul Madame C.J. Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire. Walker once remarked, “I got my start by giving myself a start,” and the author emphasizes her gumption, a trait she shares with others profiled here, such as Dolly Parton, who amassed wealth as an entertainer because of her business acumen. There’s more than one route to wealth, though, as these bios make clear. Among those who married rich are Zsa Zsa Gabor, who as a teen wed a diplomat and, divorcing him six months later, walked away rich, a feat she repeated several times across her subsequent nine marriages. (Of her fifth husband, she said: “He taught me housekeeping. When I divorce, I keep the house.”) Among the women who stole their wealth is Imelda Marcos, who, with her husband Francesco, the president of the Philippines, looted the government’s coffers. When the couple fled the country in 1986, Imelda left behind a fortune in clothes, including 1,060 pairs of shoes. But of course, the author wryly suggests, money doesn’t buy happiness. As Athina Onassis noted of the legal wrangling over her inheritance: “If I burn the money, there will be no problem. No money, no problem.” Readers will be enchanted by these profiles in success and excess. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mak, cofounder of ClearLife Reset, a program that aims to help people reduce or quit their use of alcohol, debuts with a lucid guide to defeating destructive habits. Drawing from her own life, the author describes how she began drinking to fit in as a teen and continued to rely on alcohol to blunt feelings of dissatisfaction as a adult. After kicking the habit in the midst of getting divorced, she was able to start “making decisions from a clearer and more confident place.” Mak explains how readers can break free from their own “dimming habits,” like binge-eating or overworking, which minimize difficult feelings but make it harder to live intentionally and to fully connect with others. Readers can do so by recognizing and acting on eight core truths, among them the notions that life is better “clear” and that one’s trauma isn’t their identity. (Overidentifying with the pain and fear that drives one’s coping mechanisms can perpetuate self-defeating narratives, according to Mak.) Readers will appreciate Mak’s refreshingly candid exploration of her attempts to live more authentically, and her flexible, middle-of-the-road approach wisely leaves room for cutting back on or reframing harmful habits rather than abstaining from them entirely. Readers looking to make major life changes will be informed and inspired. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Investigative reporter Tulsky debuts with a harrowing true crime narrative about 17-year-old Lamonte McIntyre, who was unjustly convicted of murder by a dirty cop, an unethical DA, and a judge who had a secret past relationship with the prosecutor. In the 1990s, Kansas City suffered from government corruption, a decaying downtown, and a high crime rate. When two Black Kansas City men were executed in broad daylight in 1994, the cops and city hall wanted the case wrapped up quickly to avoid further damage to the city’s reputation. They pinned the crime on McIntyre, a poor Black teenager with a drug record, who was swiftly convicted despite a lack of evidence and a solid alibi. McIntyre languished in prison until 2019, when Centurion Ministries, an Innocence Project–style nonprofit, took on his case. With the help of attorney Cheryl Pilate, McIntyre was freed in 2017 and awarded millions in damages from the city and state. Tulsky meticulously traces the perfect storm of prejudice and corruption that left McIntyre vulnerable, and wrenchingly describes his unsteady efforts to rejoin society as an adult. This horrifying account of injustice and new beginnings leaves a mark. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

This illuminating history from Dowd (Stick Figures), an art professor at Washington University, draws from the oldest printed books and the newest media to trace how illustrations in the modern era have evolved, shaped texts, and engaged audiences. Dowd demonstrates how illustrations have reflected developments in modern media and culture, from the 15th-century Nuremberg Chronicle, a lavishly illustrated “monument of book design and production,” to early-19th-century books and newspapers that negotiated ideas about the “romantic vision of childhood,” such as the illustrations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Raggedy Ann stories. He traces the origins of present-day propaganda to the “rhetorical figures” that Protestant Reformation–era cartoonists used to critique opponents, a tradition that continued through 18th-century Japanese woodcuts critiquing outsiders and into the boom in 20th-century political cartooning. Individual chapters explore how illustration and commercial art intersected with ideas of race, gender, and counterculture across the globe. Dowd’s selection of illustrations is generous, eclectic, and thought-provoking; he contrasts, for example, two illustrations of Custer’s Last Stand, one by white American illustrator F. Otto Becker and one by Indigenous artist Henry Oscar One Bull. The result sheds fresh light on a vital tool of media and culture consumption. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Score-keeping fosters creativity in games, but in real-life institutions it makes for rigid policies and distorts values, according to this trenchant philosophical investigation. University of Utah philosophy professor Nguyen (Games) explores scoring systems in games and sports, from difficulty rankings in rock climbing to idiosyncratic point schedules for fantasy role-playing games. Such score-keeping structures, he argues, create “background conditions” that enable players to creatively problem-solve and foster more captivating forms of play. Institutions, on the other hand, rely on scoring systems with simplistic data metrics that are easily measurable but often flatten value complexity, driving policy in unproductive ways. (College rankings, for example, boost the scores of schools with high rejection rates, prompting many to solicit applications from unqualified students to have more applicants to reject.) The author considers various solutions, ultimately suggesting that large institutions (and their flawed metrics) are necessary to help society remain organized and fuel big-picture initiative but that areas like art, fitness, or hobbies should be subject to flexible value systems dictated by individuals and small communities. Illustrating his ideas with lucid philosophy and descriptions of his own innumerable hobbies (Tetris, bouldering, yo-yo), Nguyen skillfully explores the ways in which humans think about progress, creativity, and play. It makes for a captivating look at how imperfect measures of success shape society. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Sherman (The Loudest Voice in the Room) delves in this juicy melodrama into the caustic, decades-long family feud over the inheritance of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. The account opens with Rupert’s son Lachlan’s 2023 move to oust his siblings—James, Liz, and their older half sister Prudence—from the family trust. Backtracking from there, Sherman traces Murdoch’s rise, from the inheritance of his own father’s Australian newspaper business through his slew of tabloid purchases in Britain and America. Murdoch’s success, the author shows, is owed to both a taste for sensationalism and a cold-blooded ruthlessness, the latter of which bleeds into his personal life, particularly via his transactional bond with his children, whom he “pit[s]... against one another” and for whom deal-making is the only way to gain their father’s attention. Indeed, the dizzying amount of sales and acquisitions can bog down the narrative’s pace, though it serves well to express the extent to which Murdoch manipulates his children for his own gain, including telling Liz that she was “his preferred successor” during his purchase of her successful TV production company only to stop talking to her once the paperwork was signed. The saga reads like a real-life Succession, a comparison even the family can see, as evidenced by their paranoia about possible leaks to the show’s writers. Readers will be riveted by this merciless battle for dynastic dominance. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this unfocused account, historian Vladic (Indianapolis) rummages through a grab bag of subjects related to continental America’s coastal defenses during WWII. They include the German U-boats that wrought havoc on U.S. freighters during the war’s early years; the Coast Guard and civilian pilots who mounted anti-U-boat patrols; Joe Desch, an electrical engineer in Ohio who designed the computers that enabled the Navy to track U-boats; mobsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who recruited criminal underlings on the New York waterfront to guard against sabotage by German spies; Countess Grace Buchanan-Dineen, a double agent who hosted parties for Nazi spies at her Detroit apartment; George Dasch, a German saboteur who turned himself in to the FBI; Japanese submarines that fired a few shells at the Oregon coast, to little effect; and, for good measure, the German V-2 rocket program. Vladic tells these stories in colorful, two-fisted prose that sounds sometimes like a newsreel (“From the shores of Long Island to the plains of Nebraska... the nation is mobilizing, driven by a fierce determination to fight”), and often like an airport thriller (“ ‘Son of a bitch!’ Frank Raven slams his fists on his desk, knocking over a stack of papers”). This has its charms, but readers will be left adrift in the sea of subplots. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

This intriguing study from historian Nesvig (Promiscuous Power) catalogs the ways in which Native and European supernatural beliefs met and intermingled in post-conquest Mexico. Drawing on Inquisition trials of women accused of sorcery in the two decades immediately following the fall of Tenochtitlan, Nesvig shows how, mostly via the socializing of newly arrived settler wives and mistresses with their Native domestic help, Iberian superstitions and beliefs mixed with Nahua (aka Aztec) spells and rituals. The Nahuans, for instance, took up the Iberian concept of the “evil eye,” and the Iberians took up the Nahuan practice of “throwing corn” as a means of casting lots and predicting the future. The Inquisition trials reveal that the church particularly targeted, from among the colonists, the Moriscan or Maghrebi women—remnants of the Muslim empire recently ousted from Iberia—who were likely mistresses or courtesans engaging in sex work. This official unease with the power women could attain through sex within lawless frontier territories stands in stark relief, in Nesvig’s account, with the openness of the women themselves, who seemed to eagerly seek to learn from other women from disparate backgrounds. “All the women in this book,” he perceptively notes, “relied on magic to assert some agency and power in a man’s political world.” While fairly academic, it’s worth checking out for those interested in the intersection of women’s history and magic. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Legal scholar Baradaran (The Quiet Coup) lays out a concise and erudite case that today’s staggering racial wealth gap is the result of decades of carefully crafted government policy. She begins with slavery, “the scaffolding upon with the American economic system was constructed” and, in legal terms, the literal theft of wages. She goes on to show how the theft of Black wealth remained a core tenet of public policy after Emancipation. Particularly damning examples include the government’s history of suppression of successful Black-owned banks, as well as the myriad ways in which white people have been beneficiaries of government-provided safety nets, subsidies, land grants, and legal favoritism. At the same time, Baradaran notes that America’s systemic theft of Black wealth ultimately hurts all average Americans, as it mainly functions to funnel money into the hands of the 1% and to stymie local economies. Baradaran’s quietly furious prose deftly guides readers through the labyrinthine world of American monetary policy and financial history, with breathtaking moments of clarity striking like lightning, as when she notes that the massive amounts of money printed by the Fed to bail out banks during the Great Recession was “trillions more” than had ever been asked for reparations. Readers will be fired up. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink