Motherhood has “compelled women to contribute to and transform their societies” since time immemorial, according to this wide-ranging study. Beginning with an 8th or 9th century BCE clay model of a human fetus left by a pregnant woman as an offering to a goddess of childbirth, historian Cleghorn (Unwell Women) shows that women have always thought about and reckoned with motherhood as a profound and fraught state of being. The narrative spans from ancient Greece and Rome, where breastfeeding was so rare among upper-class women that having done so was mentioned on a young mother’s sarcophagus, through the early modern era, where readers encounter Elizabeth Jocelin, a 17th-century British woman who pioneered the “maternal conduct book,” a popular genre in which a mother addressed life advice to her newborn in the event of her death in childbirth. Among Cleghorn’s aims is to explore how society is always debating what is “natural” about motherhood—Are women naturally maternal? Is breastfeeding a natural means of bonding?—as well as spotlight those who pushed back against supposedly “natural” limitations. However, for a book on “radical” mothering, much time is spent describing ways that men have weighed in—readers may not be enthused, for example, to learn yet again about Plato’s notion of the “wandering uterus.” Still, it’s a meticulously comprehensive survey that, at its best, casts fascinating light on mothers’ thoughts on mothering. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This eye-opening account from Ghanaian podcaster Sekyiamah (The Sex Lives of African Women) posits that traditional African rituals can offer women and queer people new ways of thinking about their bodies and pleasure. Noting that African women’s sexuality is often seen as “sinful” or “selfish,” mostly due to the legacy of European colonial influence, Sekyiamah argues in favor of sankofa, or “revisiting the past to retrieve the good in our history.” Roaming the continent to participate in ceremonies related to sex and sexuality, she learns how to best gyrate her hips with a traditional Tanzanian sex educator and explores the eroticism of Senegalese waist beads (“an essential tool in the Senegalese woman’s sexual armory”). She also treats with respect controversial customs like labia pulling, undergone by girls ages 8 to 14, finding radical potential in the practice—“I’m not aware of any other traditions where little girls are encouraged to become intimate with their genitalia and urged to enjoy personal touch”—and observes ways in which African spiritualities sometimes embrace queerness. Rather than uncritically embracing the traditions she spotlights, the author reflects on how they can be updated and reworked through a feminist lens, though the book’s latter half, geared toward offering advice, feels a bit dull after such an invigorating travelogue. Nevertheless, readers will find this a paradigm-shifting road map to sexual reclamation. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sedentary, screen-dominated lifestyles have left Americans increasingly vulnerable to health problems ranging from obesity and cardiovascular disease to mental illness, according to this competent if familiar treatise. Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant), host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, unpacks the sedentary epidemic, noting that today’s schoolchildren spend 70% of the day seated and more than 80% of American jobs consist of mostly at-desk activities, a trend exacerbated by the advent of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. While strenuous bouts of exercise several times a week are healthy, they don’t compensate for prolonged periods of sitting; readers would be better served taking frequent, shorter breaks (five minutes of movement per every half hour spent at rest), which restart key biological processes that keep blood pressure and glucose levels in check, and oxygen supply optimal. Zomorodi’s message won’t be new to most readers, but they’ll be edified by her lucid explanations of how the modern American lifestyle harms eyesight, hearing, posture, and attention span, as well as her actionable instructions for incorporating exercise into daily routines, from tracking signs of physical overwhelm to coordinating walks with rhythmic breathing. The result is a valuable complement to such books as Michel Desmurget’s Screen Damage. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Farmer (Willard Clark), the former director of DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, offers an in-depth biography of Jack Rittenhouse, a writer, printer, publisher, and historian of the West. Born in 1912 in Kalamazoo, Mich., Rittenhouse had an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for adventure, Farmer explains. After dropping out of college during the Great Depression, he rode the rails to New York City, where he got a job as a bookseller. By 23, Rittenhouse was working in the mail room at Knopf, where he learned the ropes of advertising and marketing. Drawn to the history of the American West, he began collecting books on the region and founded Stagecoach Press in 1946, through which he published a popular guidebook to Highway 66, among other titles. Rittenhouse oversaw every aspect of the publication process at Stagecoach, from acquisitions to design and printing. Ever the book collector, he began publishing the newsletter New Mexico Book News, which “helped lay the foundation for a vibrant statewide renaissance of the New Mexico book community.” In 1968, he became an editor at the University Press of New Mexico, where he established a successful reprint series of books by Larry McMurtry, Mary Austin, and others. Complete with admiring reflections and lively prose, this is a solid tribute to a celebrated bookman. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

“Play is the essence of parenting,” argues family therapist Van Dusen in this innovative debut guide to helping parents connect with their kids. She explains that playtime activities, such as role-play and storytelling, help children express their emotions and make sense of their world, and offer parents insight into their children, enabling more effective communication. When her son once refused to leave a playdate, for example, she persuaded him to get in the car by pretending it was a train and shouting, “All aboard!” “You’d think I had performed a magic trick,” she says. “What I really did was speak my child’s language.” Acknowledging that play-based parenting doesn’t come naturally to everyone, she offers recommendations, like talking about tough situations through puppets or having kids draw a story about their feelings. Playing with kids doesn’t have to be exhausting for overwhelmed caretakers, she notes, suggesting such passive activities as watching children put on a performance or fashion show. She points to play as a powerful tool for emotional self-regulation and suggests playful solutions for managing meltdowns and tantrums, such as racing to the car when it’s time to leave the playground. Filled with creative suggestions and real-life examples, this is a boon for parents hoping to better communicate with their children. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

“I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead,” writes Hustvedt (Mothers, Fathers, and Others) in the opening sentences of this tender tribute to Baumgartner author Auster, who died of lung cancer in 2024. What follows is a catalog of Auster’s final months, full of hospital stays, emails to concerned friends and family, and Hustvedt’s late-night memories of the couple’s 43 years together. “If your father dies... I will lose my everyday,” Hustvedt recalls telling the couple’s daughter, Sophie, shortly after Auster was diagnosed in 2023. She infuses memories of everyday activities like checking the mail, cooking dinner together, and reading each other’s proofs with a palpable romantic magic. After Auster’s death, Hustvedt wrenchingly captures the way time was “deranged beyond recognition” as she wandered their Brooklyn home in his clothes, ate his favorite meals, and sat staring at his untouched pens and typewriter while being plagued by the aroma of his cigars. The book’s title comes from Auster’s stated desire to return as a ghost; Hustvedt sweetly fulfills his wishes by recounting anecdotes from his life and sharing letters he wrote to her and their children. The result is an elegy that’s at once heart-swelling and devastating. Agent: Amanda Urban, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Political theorist Mitchell (Carbon Democracy) offers a paradigm-shifting critique of the logic that underlies the modern economy. Today is “an age in which extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from unfathomable sources,” Mitchell writes, noting that even critics of the current system seem unable to reckon with the vast and concentrated wealth “conjured... out of thin air” by speculative financial markets. To fully reckon with this “mode of acquiring unearned wealth” that is “the defining feature of our contemporary form of life,” Mitchell argues that one must understand what capital actually is. Capital, he asserts, is foremost “a practical means of consuming the future.” By way of explanation, he traces the origins of “modern investor-owned firms” back to “armed trading corporations” like the Dutch East India Company, which had displaced “older merchant networks... of the Indo-Islamic world” that had put limits on speculation as unethical. With the colonial expansion of Europe, such limits were disregarded. Today, rampant speculation is seen as natural, with the rich living on “unearned income” that “those coming later” are expected to pay. Ultimately, it is time itself that has been “colonized,” Mitchell chillingly explains. He chases his theme across centuries and around the globe, along the way emphasizing the most drastic and global consequence of capital’s theft from the future: climate catastrophe. This bracing and original analysis demands a reorientation of many received wisdoms. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

The “centuries-long White... genocide against Indians” was central to the creation of racial identity in America, according to this trenchant study. Historian Silverman (This Land Is Their Land) argues that “at the outset of the colonial era, European settlers did not yet conceive of themselves as Whites” but rather identified as “Christians” (as distinct from the “savages” they sought to displace). However, over decades of violence, land theft, and “the development of a slave system that initially targeted Indians as well as Africans,” Euro-Americans increasingly justified their genocidal ambitions through a newly imagined logic of a “natural” hierarchy of peoples. As Silverman tracks the ideology of race developing in the language of those invested in frontier politics and Indian removal, he challenges recent scholarship positing that “racial ideology” was “an elite production” emerging from the realms of science and theology. It was the “lower-status Whites,” such as smallholding farmers, miners, and soldiers, who were the direct beneficiaries and “vanguard” of the “conquest of Indian country.” As such, they were the “greatest proponents of genocidal anti-Indian racism.” Repeatedly emphasizing that “racial meanings” were “the result of people pursuing their own immediate material... interests,” Silverman makes a powerful case that this history is crucial to understanding what motivates today’s resurgent “violent, conspiratorially minded” white nationalism. It’s a clear-eyed, forensic accounting of America’s original sin. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this penetrating and moving debut, journalist Ellis examines past and present African American life in his hometown of Minneapolis. Returning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the author sees the subsequent upheaval not as an aberration but “an unpaid bill long overdue.” He seeks to interrogate the legacy of racial disparity hidden beneath Minneapolis’s guise of good-natured liberalism, drawing on extensive research and on-the-ground reporting to paint a portrait of a city with “a history of disparity that [is] as long as its contributions to the struggle for civil rights.” For example, even though Minnesota banned slavery in 1858 and gave African Americans the right to vote before the 15th Amendment was ratified, they continued to be treated as second-class citizens in Minneapolis, particularly via redlining. Furthermore, the city’s political responses to police brutality and discrimination often “prioritized white feelings over challenging white behavior,” as exemplified by Mayor Hubert Humphrey’s “antibias training” for police, which framed “systemic failures as bad personal behavior.” Ellis’s affecting research into his own family’s history forms the book’s emotional core, as he traces multiple generations who “thrived in spite of the continued failures of the state.” The result is a searing account of Black survival in a city built on broken promises, and a damning view of liberalism as willing to pick and choose when equality is a virtue. (June)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

This perceptive study by political scientist Ost (The Defeat of Solidarity) traces ways in which the fascist movements of yesteryear differ from today’s populist “red pill” politics. Comparing today’s movements with those of Hitler and Mussolini, Ost shows how contemporary far-right parties—he looks most closely at India, Poland, and the U.S.—are leaning as much into populist rhetoric as exclusionary rhetoric, are winning at the polls, and are less often resorting to violence. Additionally, they’re more likely to draw on socialism as a political tool. In short, the “red pill” right is an agile shape-shifter that is hard to for critics to pin down, partly because it has learned to tiptoe up to the edge of authoritarianism without crossing the line, and partly because it’s drawing more heavily on the left-wing, populist tools within the fascist toolbox. Ost suggests that today’s far right should be viewed as a sort of reformed fascism, an idea embraced by far-right figures themselves; he cites one supporter of Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party who griped that “Hitler gave fascism a bad name.” The author astutely concludes that, rather than falling into the trap of opposing populism, the left must strive to outpace the right on “radicalism, economic populism, and political toughness” if it wants to win. It’s a robust and energizing dissection of a protean foe. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink