In this devastating account, journalist Baroud (These Chains Will Be Broken) traces multiple generations of his Palestinian family tree as each confronts the Israeli occupation. He begins with family matriarch Madallah Abdulnabi’s childhood in idyllic Beit Daras, from which she was forcibly expelled during the 1948 Nakba. Baroud depicts the expulsion with haunting imagery—“hundreds of women and children rushed to the southern road where sunflowers were in full bloom”—and harrowing flashes of carnage (“two little sisters shot holding hands”). These vivid descriptions clarify how the Nakba’s trauma continues to resonate through subsequent generations, particularly as Baroud turns toward the Gaza branch of his family. He catalogs their experiences of “imprisonment, torture, and loss,” including those of Madallah’s son, Ehab al-Badrasawi. In 1987, to the dismay of other family members, Ehab, then a “scrawny” 11-year-old, participated in the first intifada, which erupted after “an Israeli had deliberately run over Palestinian[s]... waiting by a bus stop.” Later, Ehab joined Hamas after Israeli forces killed his younger brother Wael. The book hurtles toward October 7 with mounting horror as both Ehab’s son and nephew join the fight, and it comes to seem as if Wael’s death had “sealed the fate... of the al-Badrasawi family.” It’s an indelible depiction of the generational trauma that defines the Palestinian struggle. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Anthropologist­–turned–New Age celebrity author Carlos Castaneda was a fraud and a cult leader, but also a powerful writer who tilled psychologically fertile material, according to this entrancing biography. Novelist Marshall (A Separate Reality) probes the 1968 book that launched Castaneda to prominence, Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, a supposedly nonfictional account of Castaneda’s apprenticeship to the eponymous Mexican shaman, who urged the use of hallucinogens. The book became a touchstone of 1960s counterculture, and then spent subsequent decades being debunked. (Don Juan didn’t exist; his pensées were cribbed from Nietzsche and Sartre.) Marshall paints Castaneda as a charismatic liar—he fibbed about his age, name, upbringing, military service, and marriage—who, as a writer, turned mystical abstractions into arresting stories and imagery, including, Marshall perceptively argues, oblique references to his own tortured longing to erase his personal history. Later chapters explore Castaneda’s leadership of a sexually manipulative cult that claimed to confer immortality via martial arts. Marshall combines a colorful account of Castaneda’s sly triumphs with shrewd analysis of the toxic psychodramas by which he overawed his followers. (After his death in 1998, four cult leaders disappeared and are believed to have died by group suicide.) In the portait that emerges, Castaneda appears as captivating as Don Juan himself—a principal architect, for all his chicanery, of modern pop spirituality. This enthralls. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This expansive overview from Horak (Girls Will Be Boys), a film studies professor at Carleton University, analyzes films and videos made by transgender creators in the U.S. and Canada from the 1990s to the 2020s, demonstrating that “trans filmmaking can create new worlds of possibility.” She begins by examining harmful stereotypes in mainstream media, noting trans characters have historically been used to provoke laughter, fear, or pity. The rise of trans activism and creation of trans film festivals in the 1990s led to a burst of trans-made films. This continued into the 2000s with the proliferation of affordable technology like digital cameras, editing software, and online platforms like YouTube, where amateurs could distribute their work. Horak examines key themes in trans-made films, like chosen families; often exiled from their communities of origin, trans people rely on circles of queer friends, as seen in Wu Tsang’s 2012 documentary, Wildness, which explores how a bar in Los Angeles offers community to trans Latina women. Trans-made films also reveal the complex personhood of trans youth, explore sexuality and desire, and grapple with questions of embodiment and transition. Though it occasionally leans on academic jargon, Horak’s survey is impressively comprehensive, as it includes big-budget films as well as short-form videos on TikTok. The result is a significant contribution to trans media studies. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pelster (Limber), director of the creative writing program at Hamline University, delivers a raw and tender collection of essays about personal and global catastrophes. Recounting the literal and metaphorical fires that have shaped her life—from house fires to explosive family secrets—Pelster wonders if the world must experience crisis before necessary change happens. In the title essay, she reflects on learning shortly after having a baby that her husband had had multiple affairs. The revelation was a “spark” that “lit her life on fire”; soon afterward, she discovered her father’s drug addiction and lost her apartment in an electrical fire, leading her to conclude it was not her old life she wanted back but a “new way of being.” In “Good Animals,” she reflects on how extracting herself from the toxic men in her life required her to stop believing in changeability. Now, to have hope for the “burning planet” amid climate change, she wants to “resurrect [her] belief in change.” Pelster expertly captures the innocence of youth and beautifully renders the feeling of being on the precipice of something new: “She lies in bed, and the scorched plain of the future unfurls before her in the dark.” Poetic and candid, this is a welcome invitation to embrace the evolution that destruction can bring. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Political organizer Howard connects her Appalachian upbringing to her career in social justice, in this deeply felt debut. Born in Kentucky, Howard saw her early years scarred by addiction, domestic violence, and economic precarity. But she also recalls her father sharing his love of books with her, as well as his fierce sense of indignation at the rich’s exploitation of the poor. While working as an adjunct women’s studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University in 2006, Howard attended an orientation hosted by a community organizing network to recruit new members. She discovered her knack for organizing during an assignment in Jacksonville, Fla., where she helped Black and Latino churches form an interfaith coalition. After returning to Kentucky, she worked on campaigns to raise Louisville’s minimum wage and restore voting rights to felons. Frustrated by her employers’ hesitancy to grapple with the racial elements of the injustices they addressed, Howard began the painful process of reckoning with the dark forces that shaped her environment, including the spread of slavery and the corporate takeover of family farms. While Howard’s empathetic account stands in welcome contrast to caricatures of Appalachian life, of particular note is her unwillingness to let the gender and racial disparities endemic to the region slide. The result is a refreshing, clear-eyed chronicle of a political awakening. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

With this unique anthology, Pulitzer winner Meacham (And There Was Light) aims to inspire by spotlighting tense moments of political polarization and conflicting viewpoints throughout American history. He does this by juxtaposing progressive and conservative texts, such as those defending slavery and those arguing for its abolition. Canonical works like the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King’s “Promised Land” speech, the Declaration of the Rights of Women drafted at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, and Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” are pitted against the likes of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that upheld segregation and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephen’s argument that slavery is morally good. These back-and-forths continue through the pro-peace and pro-war movements around both the Vietnam War and the “war on terror,” and around 20th-century fights for women’s rights, racial minority rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. While these documents are stirring and worthwhile, an astute reader already steeped in American progressive mythology will note that 20th-century battles and individuals that are less settled matters on the left get elided—there’s no Milton Friedman, no Henry Kissinger, and no one directly opposing them. Still, there’s much powerful thought to soak up here. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian De La Bédoyère (Populus) presents a darkly fascinating new transcription of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, a statesman and notorious womanizer whose private journals offer a shockingly candid glimpse of 17th-century England. Pepys, the author explains in his introduction, was the son of a “modest tailor” who witnessed the Great Fire of London and the execution of Charles I, survived the civil war, and rose through the ranks of Charles II’s government. Pepys also inexplicably “chose to record his private life in graphic and incriminating detail” in a secretive shorthand. Yet Bedoyere argues that “the true extent and implications of Pepys’s self-confessed adulterous activity, including the coercion and sexual violence... have often been... evaded” by previous transcriptions. They are presented here in full, including molestations of servant girls and assaults on his wife. Between these lurid scenes, there are frequent passages of “self-disgust or even loathing,” as Pepys seems to use his diary to both “help expiate his guilt” and “create a titillating record of... pleasure.” Besides the shocking confessions, the diaries are notable for Pepys’s frank assessments of the depravity of Charles II’s court and the horrors of the plague years, as well as for their distinctive form as a kind of proto–stream of consciousness. This unique work of scholarship conjures from the past a captivating if wretched figure. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this lively revisitation of the Seminole Wars, journalist and historian Holmes (12 Seconds of Silence) highlights the fortitude and clever military tactics of the rebels. The 1835 standoff between the Seminole tribes under Chief Micanopy and the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson was precipitated by U.S. acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1821. Southern Americans rushed in to violently claim lands and expand slavery. When Jackson became president in 1829, he demanded the Seminoles relocate to Oklahoma; when some Seminoles refused, he sent the Army to forcibly remove them. Micanopy and his close “Fellowhood” of advisers, including a free Black American known as Abraham and the famous Creek warrior Osceola, were among those who encouraged the Seminoles to stay and fight. Abraham, Micanopy’s “sense bearer,” a position akin to prime minister or privy counselor, was able to move through both the Indigenous and white worlds, and frequently reconnoitered in the latter. Meanwhile Osceola led guerilla forces in lightning-quick attacks that then melted away into Florida’s inhospitable swamplands and nearly impenetrable interior. Holmes also spotlights the American military officers who led the invasion, and whose racist underestimation of their opponents, particularly because many were Black, led to the “costliest” conflict of the Indian Wars. Fast-paced and action-packed, it’s a riveting look at courage and military prowess displayed in the face of insurmountable odds. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

The ingenious debut treatise from legal scholar Ossei-Owusu asserts that the ways in which American lawyers are schooled and trained are a crucial factor in maintaining the inequities of the U.S. legal system. Having grown up in a Black working-class family in the Bronx, as a young law student Ossei-Owusu perceived himself as an outsider looking into the legal profession, and carefully observed its goings-on. Recapping his experiences as a law student, practicing lawyer, and now law professor, Ossei-Owusu points to discrepancies he encountered between the legal field’s claims of impartial justice and actual on-the-ground practices, which typically reinforced marginalization of minorities. He presents these gaps as not just a matter of hypocrisy but entrenched dissonance in the legal profession’s worldview. Starting with concepts typically covered in the first year of law school, Ossei-Owusu shows how students “are taught to approach legal problems with a distance that can push human suffering to the margins.” This separation between legal theory and lived experience, reinforced by lessons in “thinking like a lawyer,” only grows as graduates advance in their profession, becoming judges and policymakers. Though his account delves deeply into legal abstractions, Ossei-Owusu writes with ease and grace. This makes a cloistered world accessible to the lay reader and serves as an invaluable glimpse of how inequality is maintained in America. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

What do Superman, the teddy bear, and chattering wind-up teeth have in common? All were invented by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants, writes sociologist Kimmel (Guyland), great-grandnephew of the founder of the Ideal Toy Corporation, in this eye-opening history. Modern American childhood was created by those who never experienced a carefree childhood themselves, Kimmel notes; Jews arriving from Eastern Europe to late-19th-century New York City encountered crushing poverty that meant children grew up “largely on the street.” Toymaking, meanwhile, was “small, relatively genteel, and almost entirely Protestant,” with toys made mostly in Europe, until WWI embargoes helped the American toy industry boom. Plus, as the U.S. moved away from stern Puritanical ideals about “idle hands” and toward a sense of childhood as a separate stage of development filled with play, Yiddish notions of children as blessings fit nicely into the new progressive mold. Among the creators profiled are the Hassenfield brothers, rag sellers who eventually founded Hasbro; children’s book authors like Maurice Sendak; and Jewish woodcarvers who fashioned elaborate carousels. The book pops with gleeful toy history (like Ideal Toy Company’s “Baby Jesus doll,” which the pope inexplicably endorsed but no one bought), though Kimmel sometimes overreaches (it seems unlikely that Spider-Man is even “indirectly inspired” by a spider that saved King David). It’s an entertaining exploration of the sweeping influence of immigrant artists on American life. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink