Weingarten, the president of the AFT, America’s largest educators’ union, debuts with a rousing inquiry into “what teachers do” and “why those who are afraid of freedom... try to stop” them. The book focuses on the onslaught faced by public school teachers during the two Trump administrations—in 2023 alone, she notes, 110 bills were presented in state legislatures attempting to curtail what teachers can and cannot do. In New Hampshire, the state education commissioner even set up a website encouraging the public to report educators who were illegally teaching about racism. The book contains a wealth of such examples from around the country, which Weingarten presents as an effort not only to smash the foundations of the American public school system but to pave the way for fascism, which she defines as the abandonment of logic and empirical evidence in favor of fanciful truths that the “leader” invents and espouses to his acolytes, who parrot them back as a show of loyalty. Public school teachers, she astutely observes, do four things that make them the number one enemies of fascism and its aims: impart critical thinking skills, create welcoming communities, foster lower-class students’ ability to achieve economic success, and serves as anchors of the labor movement. It adds up to a galvanizing portrait of teachers as society’s best bulwarks against anti-intellectualism and retrograde thinking. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Could an airplane evacuate two American medical professionals with Ebola from West Africa without infecting the crew? That’s the dire question at the heart of this gripping real-life thriller from journalist and former paramedic Hazzard (American Sirens). The saga beings with an unexpected 2014 phone call from the State Department to Phoenix Air’s COO, inquiring if the company’s untested biocontainment tent could be used to fly a critically ill doctor, Kent Brantly, and a volunteer, Nancy Writebol, from the “epicenter of the deadliest Ebola outbreak in human history.” Despite the “huge, almost incalculable” risk, Phoenix Air, which first made its name flying explosives, including Muammar Gadhafi’s “suitcase nuke,” fulfilled its reputation of “saying yes when everybody else said no.” The author documents the astonishing week-and-a-half mission with tense velocity, as Phoenix Air rapidly develops and tests a protocol to prevent “the scariest death imaginable” using mostly PPE from Home Depot. Numerous roadblocks occur during the two rescue flights themselves, from the plane’s cabin not pressurizing to airports turning the jets away. Hazzard also spotlights the heroism of the doctors and volunteers in Liberia who found themselves caring for their own colleagues and the Emory University hospital staff who received the patients, juxtaposing this selfless determination to “save the saviors” with the concurrent “media shitstorm” that led to public hysteria and protests outside Emory. It’s an absolute nail-biter. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

University of Bristol comp lit lecturer Kosick (Material Poetics in Hemispheric America) delves in this comprehensive account into the history of the Alternative Press, a Detroit-based indie that from the 1960s to the 1990s published cutting-edge experimental art, poetry, and literature. It’s contributors—including Amiri Baraka, Robert Bly, Robert Creely, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginbsberg, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles—are a veritable who’s who of the late-20th-century American avant-garde, but in Kosick’s telling the press’s founding and early years are a story of local pride and tight-knit community. “We always wanted to publish our friends. Why would you want to publish your enemies?” quips Ken Mikolowski, who cofounded the press with his wife, Ann. It was over time, Kosick writes, that the Alternative Press built up trust with authors farther afield, becoming a flagship of the national and even the global avant garde. Kosick dedicates part of her account to highlighting the difficulty she encountered in her study of the press’s history, as much of its output has not been properly archived (a fact she chalks up partly to the underground press’s limited and idiosyncratic print runs, which ranged from bumper stickers to bookmarks, and partly to mainstream academia’s overlooking of broadsides printed in a city better known for churning out automobiles). It adds up to an evocative overview of a legendary publisher. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

A moral panic over a lurid sex scandal becomes culture war fodder for a polarized nation in this nuanced unearthing of a little-remembered episode in 1830s Prussia. Historian Clark (Revolutionary Spring) recaps how, in the sleepy university town of Königsberg, two Lutheran pastors, Johann Wilhelm Ebel and Heinrich Diestel, began to preach outlandish teachings, including that the universe emerged from the mixing of a “fire egg” with a “water egg.” Women from prominent families flocked to the “Ebelian” movement, and the attempts of “two female adherents... to eject their husbands from their house” over their newfound religious differences led to a torrent of public accusations against the group. Ebel in particular was singled out, accused of encouraging female followers to “engage in... sexual impropriety.” Rumors even circulated that two young women adherents had “died of exhaustion caused by excessive arousal.” What followed, Clark observes, was a remarkably modern “media storm.” The Ebelians became a flash point for a divided public that was easily riled about religion. The media, he explains, was built to cater to this appetite for controversy, and was rampant with disinformation. Clark astutely notes that, much like with today’s moral panics, concern about gender conformity seemed to be the panic’s prime motivator. (Ebel himself was described by one detractor as “a hermaphrodite.”) This meticulously researched history astonishes in its timeliness. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this ardent yet repetitive essay collection, author and activist Solnit (No Straight Road Takes You There) argues that social progress, while not always immediate or linear, is still occurring. Explaining that change is “invisible” over longer stretches of time, once the “baseline” has been forgotten, the author recaps the significant social advancements of the past several decades, including civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ equality, and the environmental movement. Along the way, she highlights the profound evolutions taking place within each issue. The fight for Indigenous rights and recognition, for example, has in recent years seen major strides forward, with federal lands being restored to tribal ownership and rapidly spreading public awareness that depicting Native Americans as “vanished, faded away, extinct” is offensive. The author’s optimism doesn’t cloud her ability to see the severity of today’s ongoing far-right backlash, but she does reinterpret it as a violent trashing of a dying old world that will lead to the birth of a new one—a world with a greater understanding of the “interconnection” between people, animals, and nature. While it’s a powerful idea, the author’s continual reworking of the phrase “beginnings are what come after endings” and constant reassertion that change will emerge “so subtly, so slowly” can come off like she’s trying to convince herself as much as readers. The result is a well-intentioned but faulty antidote against fatalism. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Larman (The Windsors at War) explores in this comprehensive account the critically overlooked second half of David Bowie’s career. The book opens in the late 1980s, when Bowie was recording albums and touring as a member of the rock band Tin Machine, before releasing a string of solo albums. Though none reached the heights of his 1970s and ’80s output, creative partnerships with such producers as Brian Eno helped Bowie go in new directions, from 1999’s heavily acoustic Hours to the industrial pop of 2002’s Heathens, and eventually return to critical and commercial relevance. After suffering a heart attack on stage in Prague in 2004, Bowie retired from touring and did not release a new album for 12 years; the critically lauded Blackstar came out only two days before his 2016 death. Drawing on a wealth of research, the author highlights the creative challenges faced by a star who was perceived to have “peaked long before... reach[ing] the age of forty,” and gives due to the “flawed but often brilliant moments” on Bowie’s path to reinventing himself. This casts fresh light on the rock star. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music writer Givony (Not for You) pulls from interviews and personal experience for a vivid, nostalgic chronicle of Brooklyn’s DIY indie scene in the early aughts. Spanning from 2004 to 2014, the account spotlights lesser-known artists like Oneida, a band who “specialized in performances that went on as long as twelve hours”; Skeletons, whose “sound could veer from Afrobeat to indie pop to noise”; and Sea Ray, whose eclectic style set them apart “from their more fashion-forward peers.” All three groups helped build the indie scene and a network of “unconventional venues” where bands got their starts. The author also catalogs the music media that shaped the scene (including Pitchfork, once able to “lift an artist from obscurity at its whim”) and explains how the atmosphere of post-9/11 uncertainty, coupled with immense technological changes, pushed artists in new creative directions. The scene began to fizzle by the beginning of the 2010s, as bands were priced out of an increasingly gentrified Brooklyn and indie music leaked into the mainstream. Despite sometimes indulging in overlong tangents, Givony captures the era’s energy in vibrant prose (“that singular strip of Kent Avenue... was both a party and an experiment in self-governance every night”). The result is an effusive and intimate ode to a heady period of music history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

The short-lived 1990 TV series Twin Peaks cast a long cultural shadow, according to this energetic account from film critic Meslow (From Hollywood with Love). In 1988, filmmaker David Lynch and TV veteran Mark Frost brainstormed the project as a surrealist mystery centered on the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer. The premise left the show’s creators in something of a bind, Meslow explains, as they sought to “keep moving the mystery forward” without fully resolving the murder “because no one had any good ideas yet for what a post–Laura Palmer Twin Peaks might look like.” The show was canceled shortly after the killer was revealed in season two, though its cult popularity continued to grow thanks to buzz generated by its cliff-hanger ending and “hyper-serialized quality,” which made it an “irresistible prospect on DVD.” Frost and Lynch later returned to the material, with Lynch making a prequel film, 1992’s Fire Walk with Me, and the two teaming up for Twin Peaks: The Return, an 18-part miniseries released 25 years after the original show ended. Meslow interweaves his diligent account of the show’s cultural legacy with delightful peeks into its idiosyncratic production and the eccentric directorial style of Lynch, who advised Lara Flynn Boyle during one long, difficult-to-shoot scene to “think of how gently a deer has to move in the snow.” Fans will be riveted. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Popova (The Universe in Verse), creator of the blog The Marginalian, delivers a masterful exploration of life’s meaning by weaving together profiles of visionaries and discussions of science, art, and nature. She begins with Captain James Cook en route to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the Transit of Venus. Upon arrival, he documented a society startlingly unlike that of his native England, an anecdote that prompts Popova to reflect on humanity’s penchant to reject otherness (“the discomfort with which we recoil at cultural practices and personal choices different from our own... reveal[s] our own fears and insecurities”). Elsewhere, Popova discusses 18th-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who illuminated the nature of life by identifying oxygen and hydrogen; author Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein reveals the power of social conditioning; abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who set out to prove one can “refuse to be made a monster by the world’s monstrosity”; and geologist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift forever altered humanity’s view of the planet. In Popova’s hands, their struggles and successes combine in a lyrical symphony of truth, made richer by reflections on the nature of the color blue, NASA’s Kepler mission, the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, the invention of the bicycle, and more. “Every story is the story of the world,” Popova deftly reveals. This is multifaceted and marvelous. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Geobiologist Knoll (A Brief History of Earth) offers a stimulating primer on how interactions between the planet’s physical environment and living beings have shaped the world throughout time. He argues that life has influenced Earth in big and small ways, just as the physical Earth has shaped ecology and evolution. He begins by explaining how carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, water, and oxygen cycle through organisms and the environment. But these cycles haven’t always existed; scientists believe, for example, that oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago when cyanobacteria evolved to release the element as a waste product. This so-called “Great Oxygenation Event” transformed the planet, paving the way for the evolution of organisms that rely on oxygen. Elsewhere, Knoll reveals how sunlight, plate tectonics, ocean circulation, and organisms have interacted to enable the planet to be habitable for most of its history and discusses how humans have disrupted natural patterns through the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in climate change and other environmental maladies. Knoll does an impressive job of lucidly explaining both geological and biological processes, providing necessary background without being pedantic. Readers will be informed and entertained. Photos. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink