Debut author Rader expands on his social media account of the same name for this entertaining look at the visual parallels between art and athletics. He organizes the book by sport, finding the “violence, chaos, and tension” of football in Juan Gris’s cubist Portrait of Pablo Picasso, which he sets alongside an up-close shot of quarterback Trevor Lawrence, his features askew from a hit to the head. For basketball, an image of women’s college coach Dawn Staley cutting down the net after winning the national championship is paired with Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture Perseus with the Head of Medusa, whose serpentine hair and entrails mirror the net in Staley’s hand. Elsewhere, a photo of baseball star Jackie Robinson sliding into a base is juxtaposed with Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau’s The Shepherd David, whose biblical subject straddles a lion in victory. (All three, the author writes, were pioneers—Robinson for breaking the color barrier in baseball when he joined the Dodgers in 1947, Bouguereau for succeeding in the male-dominated painting world, and David for “taking on the larger-than-life Goliath.”) That’s as deep as the analysis gets, but the parallels drawn here are surprising and often irresistibly funny. This will delight the author’s fans and win him some new ones. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Atlantic columnist Bogost (Play Anything) makes a convincing case for reclaiming “the lost joy of everyday interactions” with the sensory world. According to the author, the gratification of interacting with the physical world has declined as technology has “dematerialized” society, reducing opportunities to use physical tickets, operate a stick shift, and more. This has coincided with the rise of behavioral science-supported ideas that happiness rests on big-picture goals and long-term satisfaction, and that sensory pleasures are distracting. Such arguments are flawed, Bogot contends, because they assume sensory gratification gets in the way of seeking big-picture happiness, and because they frame happiness as a matter of optimizing one’s life. In reality, happiness is more nuanced and rests in part on the joys of engaging “with the rich, dense” physical world and inhabiting the small, seemingly unremarkable moments that comprise most of life. The author’s suggested solutions, which consist mostly of actively tuning into one’s senses or taking up a physical hobby like knitting, aren’t novel, but he persuasively highlights what’s lost when people drift away from “the equipment that runs their daily lives.” Readers will want to stop and smell the roses. (July)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

“In order to restore the charismatic megafauna of the American East, conservationists have needed to not only reimagine the land, but also to remake it,” contends environmental journalist Moore (Pawpaw) in this captivating account of efforts to return animals to their native landscapes. The eastern U.S. was once filled with forests and all sorts of wildlife, he explains, including large mammals typically associated with the West like bison and elk, until unregulated hunting and industrialization led to their decline. But conservationists have been working in recent decades to reassemble the wild east. Moore examines three case studies: elk, bison, and red wolves. After being reintroduced to eastern Kentucky in the late 1990s, elk, a species once locally extinct due to hunting and habitat loss, grew into a sustainable herd. The reclamation of tall grass prairies in Illinois enabled the return of bison in the 2010s, who in turn support the ecosystem by grazing. In North Carolina, efforts to recover one of the world’s rarest mammal species, the American red wolf, have sparked conflict between conservationists and landowners who question the carnivores’ right to exist. Moore’s deep research and often cinematic storytelling reveal the power individuals have to shape public policy. It’s an inspiring portrait of ecological recovery. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalists Days (Obama’s Legacy) and Dodson (We Refuse to Be Silent) provide a concise overview of the grassroots movements that have shaped American history and expanded the country’s conception of freedom. The movements covered range from Indigenous Americans’ resistance against colonization to the contemporary fight against climate change, with special emphasis on visionary radicals like John Brown and the ways that past movement wins affect the present, such as the early-20th-century labor movement’s indelible impact on daily life. Along the way, Days and Dodson ruminate on the long, arduous process of creating lasting change; they note, in particular, how quickly wins of the civil rights and feminist movements have been unraveled by the Trump administration. The book covers an impressive amount of ground at a brisk pace, making it a useful reminder of, or introduction to, pivotal moments in U.S. history. However, there’s no guiding narrative to pull these stories together other than a somewhat vague “hope that enlightenment will eventually prevail” and “pray[ers] that the three equal branches of government will preserve our system of checks and balances.” Such meager hopes and prayers blunt the impact of the hard-fought wins cataloged throughout. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Barbier (King Hancock) offers an enlightening examination of the part alcohol played in America’s founding. The intoxicant was at the core of the colonies’ prerevolutionary discontent over taxes—the 1764 Sugar Act was a revision of the earlier Molasses Act, and both laws were understood as a regulation on alcohol production. (Molasses, a by-product of sugar refining, is the main ingredient of rum.) Another avenue of alcohol’s influence was the fact that taverns served as Patriot headquarters in each of the 13 colonies—including as after-hours hangouts for the Continental Congress. (It was these informal drinking sessions that allowed radicals like John Adams to warm up their fellow delegates to the idea of voting for independence, Barbier suggests.) As she traces events chronologically, highlighting ways that boozy meetups affected the course of the revolution (like a 1769 hangout on a field outside Boston organized by Sam Adams that helped lower the class inhibitions between legislators and tradesmen), Barbier provides satisfyingly rich mise-en-scène, including details about the founding fathers’ preferred beverages (wealthy John Hancock only drank the finest wines, naturally) and explanations of long-forgotten customs and controversies (Boston briefly tried to ban toasts—since returning a toast was socially mandatory—as a way of getting people to cut back). This one goes down easy. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Entrepreneur Bradford-Scott debuts with a stranger-than-fiction account of growing up in Ontario and Florida as the daughter of a career criminal. Though Bradford-Scott’s father, Jean Claude Garofoli, was ostensibly a jeweler, the author learned of his criminality at age 12 in 1977, when she stepped off the school bus to find police cars on her lawn. Instead of explaining the scene, Bradford-Scott’s mother bundled her into her grandmother’s car and announced they’d be moving to Florida while her father handled some “business.” In the late ’80s, Garofoli went to prison on drug trafficking charges, and Bradford-Scott made peace with his legacy. Decades later, however, Bradford-Scott’s mother presented her with a binder containing a manuscript her father had written behind bars. Reading it revealed that Garofoli’s shady dealings went far deeper than she realized, and may have included helping the CIA fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Eventually, Bradford-Scott found closure by expressing her complicated feelings in letters she addressed to Garofoli after his death (“Your legacy isn’t just in the challenges I’ve had to overcome; it’s in the courage I’ve developed to keep moving forward”). Propulsive and emotionally nuanced, this satisfies. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Sanghara (Empireworld) provides an expansive, thought-provoking reconsideration of British musician George Michael. Arguing that Michael has been denied the plaudits bestowed on contemporaries like Madonna or Prince, Sanghera embarks on a roving survey of his public and private life, covering his preternatural songwriting ability (he wrote “Careless Whisper” at 17); his controversial advocacy against the Iraq War, a stance he took “at significant personal cost”; and his refusal to be publicly shamed after being arrested in a Los Angeles bathroom in 1998 for a “lewd act” (a particularly courageous response given the “toxic” tabloid press environment of the 1980s and ’90s). While the account’s broad scope can make it feel overstuffed, Sanghera gives welcome due to the complexities of Michael’s life, from his “mixed and changing feelings about being an LGBTQ activist” to his overwhelming perfectionism and struggles with drug addiction. Along the way, Sanghera also shines a light on less well-known corners of Michael’s life, exploring how his upbringing as a child of a Cypriot immigrant father may have amplified his creative drive and openness to different types of music. It adds up to a worthy reassessment of an influential pop star. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist McDougall’s ambitious debut traces the evolution of modern dance in New York City in the 20th century. He explores how the city’s dancers and choreographers reworked familiar forms, with George Balanchine making New York the epicenter of American ballet in the 1930s and ’40s while drawing subtly from jazz in dances that broke “ballet’s familiar lines.” In later decades, Alvin Ailey Jr. reshaped modern dance, jazz, and ballet in performances like Revelations, a gospel-influenced ballet that drew on his Texas roots to “speak to African Americans’ shared experience of struggle and hope” and attracted new, nonwhite audiences to the art form. McDougall also explores how vastly different dance styles coexisted in the city, with the high-kicking “militant unison” of the Rockettes, whose popularity climbed in the ’30s and ’40s, contrasting with the looseness and abstraction of jazz and downtown troupes like the Communist Workers Dance League. While the author sometimes struggles to synthesize the wealth of material, he comprehensively catalogs the people and places who shaped the city’s dance innovations and teases out how dance intersected with or served as a testing ground for questions about race and gender. Dance aficionados will find plenty of interest. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Critic and historian Butler (The Method) offers a comprehensive overview of the religious right’s targeting of artists and arts funding in the 1980s and ’90s. The account begins with a 1974 school board fight over a proposed new curriculum in Kanawha County, W.Va., which spiraled into “a season of acrimony, terror, and violence,” including shootings and bombings. The episode marked the emergence of a newly emboldened right, led by the likes of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, that realized “concessions could be wrung... if protestors simply caused enough trouble.” This same pattern played out repeatedly, Butler shows, as he surveys the era’s biggest flash points, including the cancellation of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s posthumous exhibition in Washington, D.C.; the vetoing of NEA fellowships for four performance artists; and artist David Wojnarowicz’s inflammatory essay fantasizing about “dousing... Helms in gasoline and burning him to death.” Throughout, Butler incisively highlights the spiraling damage inflicted by the tepid responses of arts supporters like NEA chairman John Frohnmayer, who, desperate to protect the Endowment, agreed to diminish artists’ freedom of expression, and of the liberal establishment as a whole, which squeamishly demurred from defending works like Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with “a whip stuck in his rectum.” While disappointingly light on connections to present-day government censorship efforts, this nonetheless makes for a dramatic retelling of a sea change in American arts and politics. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former New York state senator Squadron debuts with an energizing call for more left-wingers to engage with state-level politics. Drawing on his own experiences as well as those of legislators from other states, Squadron spotlights the oft-overlooked power and impact state governments have on everyday life, and argues that the federal government has much less power than people assume. (His wide range of case studies include minimum wage laws, housing regulations, Medicaid expansion, gun control efforts, and reproductive rights.) Explaining that Republicans have long understood that states are the prime movers in American politics, Squadron recaps how, through organized efforts like those of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right has garnered increasing power in state legislatures while Democrats have been asleep at the wheel. Interviews with legislators from Alaska, New Hampshire, and Nebraska highlight that each state has a unique legislative structure, even as they all face the same mounting threats, particularly increased gerrymandering that reduces the possibility of bipartisanship. Squadron’s personal anecdotes can run long, but he offers direct, clear guidance on how to get involved on the state level. The result is a plausible path forward for progressive activists hoping to curb the country’s rightward trend. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink