Travel blogger Rubiner (Fun with the Family in Iowa) became a dedicated diary keeper in 1977, at age 14, and has since filled 82 volumes with her musings and observations. In this illuminating account, she explores, among other things, why people feel the need to keep diaries, how these private writings are useful for historians, and how this practice has evolved in the digital age. Among the diarists referenced are such famous figures as Samuel Pepys, Queen Victoria, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, and Taylor Swift. But the author also spotlights diaries by lesser known figures that led to fresh historical insights when read in later eras, such as women whose experiences and opinions couldn’t be made public, as well as various explorers, naturalists, homesteaders, factory workers, prisoners of war, and others whose diaries exposed suppressed truths. Along the way, the author tracks how material changes to the diary’s form have altered people’s relationship to diary-keeping—during the 1800s, ready-made diaries sent the practice mainstream, feeding into a general rise in literacy; during the internet era, diaries suddenly had an audience, leading to a shift in how diaries were addressed and to the rising popularity, Rubiner perceptively notes, of a “confessional culture” and new types of “ego media” like memoirs and podcasts. While the prose is a bit workmanlike, this bursts with insights that entertain. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Palmer, cofounder and former vice president of the Amazon Labor Union, debuts with a conversational how-to for unionizing one’s workplace. In April 2022, the Staten Island Amazon fulfillment center where Palmer worked became the company’s first unionized facility in America. Palmer lays out how he and his compatriots did it, starting with the conditions that led to the union drive in the first place, including racism and dangerous working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. He covers the basics, including how to find a labor lawyer and how to set up a website and secure funds; describes what made the Amazon Labor Union specifically work so well (he chalks it up to their embrace of music, food, and culture); and describes some common setbacks and company counterattacks, such as grueling “captive audience meetings” where workers are required to listen to hours of antiunion arguments. Throughout, his guidance is as common sense as it is compassionate: “This may all be starting to feel overwhelming. You’re working a job and now suddenly I’m saying you need to go home and study state and federal law in your spare time? I know that can feel like a lot,” he writes. It’s a useful manual for those with a budding interest in unionizing. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Poet and literature scholar Bennett (Spoken Word) offers a sprawling meditation on the history of African American child geniuses and prodigies. The author opens with recollections of his own upbringing by parents who saw him as a gifted child “destined for a path that would further the cause of our people’s freedom.” As he progressed through his studies, however, Bennett experienced the double-edged sword of such high expectations—“There was no middle ground: I was either an exemplar or a washout.” From there, the author employs a unique assortment of history, criticism, disability studies, and memoir to explore what it means to have potential as a Black child, delving into the early lives of such luminaries as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as those of lesser-known figures like Thomas Fuller, an enslaved mathematical genius known as “The Virginia Calculator,” and Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, a late-19th-century pianist who could precisely replay any musical performance he heard. While Bennett’s expansive analysis at times meanders, it abounds with insights, such as his perceptive deconstruction of the stereotype of the singular lone genius—the author carefully tracks how his subjects’ success came down to the care and education provided by teachers, families, churches, communities, and artistic forebears. It adds up to a profound rumination on what is needed to foster children’s promise. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Film historian Hofler (The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson) provides a chatty and entertaining behind-the-scenes account of the many lives of the classic film A Star Is Born. The movie was first made (starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March) in 1937 as a loose take on actress Barbara Stanwyck’s tumultuous marriage to vaudeville star Frank Fay; as the young Stanwyck’s star rose, Fay’s dimmed and he descended into alcoholism, precipitating the relationship’s demise. Hofler overviews the film’s remakes, including in 1954 as a comeback vehicle for Judy Garland; a 1976 version set in the rock and roll industry starring Barbra Streisand (whose gutsy character, Hofler asserts, was a kind of corrective to her real-life relationship with boyfriend Jon Peters, who tried to exert “all-encompassing” control over her career); and a 2018 version starring Lady Gaga in her Oscar-nominated film debut. While Hofler’s prose can be clunky, fans will delight in his attention to detail and trivia, including alternate casting options (Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant were considered as potential costars with Garland; Beyoncé was originally envisioned as the star of the 2018 remake). Informative and enjoyable, this will be popcorn for fans of the movie. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

The parallel careers of David Bowie and Prince get the full “academic treatment” in this intermittently illuminating anthology from Brooks (Liner Notes from the Revolution), a professor of Black studies at Yale. Bowie and Prince, who died within months of one another in 2016, each achieved notoriety for transcending gender conventions while pushing rock music into weirder, more expansive territory. Several refreshingly blunt and sometimes gossipy interviews with such decades-long creative partners as fellow musicians Donny McCaslin and Sheila E., film director D.A. Pennebaker, and costume designer Marie France discuss the artists’ impact. Scholarly offerings chart their cultural footprints; essays from Tavia Nyong’o, Francesca T. Royster, and Brooks persuasively unpack how both Bowie and Prince were creatively molded by Black women collaborators, despite being constrained in some ways by sexism (and for Bowie, by a 1970s flirtation with “white supremacist fascist cosplay”). Though some essays tread the same ground and disorienting shifts in tone can distract, the volume is rife with rigorous analysis, careful scholarship, and a few delightfully quirky sections (like “Critical Karaoke” interludes meditating on individual songs). It’s a unique if uneven contribution to the scholarship on two rock music greats. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

“This isn’t theory,” says father of three and former Navy SEAL Webb (Mastering Fear) of this no-nonsense parenting guide. “It’s blood, sweat, and the kind of trial by fire that only raising kids can deliver.” Connecting his military expertise to parenting, Webb explains the importance of building mental toughness—the ability to choose calmness in times of chaos—and passing it along to children through behavior modeling and encouragement. The goal is to raise puddle jumpers, or independent doers “who leap into life’s messy, muddy moments with full-hearted abandon.” Webb stresses the importance of assigning age-appropriate responsibilities, like making dinner or babysitting siblings; letting kids work to achieve their goals; and surrounding children with positive role models. Allowing kids to experience the consequences of their actions without bailing them out leaves lasting lessons, he contends, while compassionate discipline and clear expectations build trust and respect. As Webb points out, most kids eventually fly the nest; the job of parenting, then, is to equip them with tools to navigate their futures confidently as the parent role changes “from household commander to coach.” Filled with hard-won insights, this is a boon for parents. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This stirring account from novelist and translator Nović (True Biz) explores the fraught intersections of deaf identity, eugenics, and the adoption process. After slowly losing her hearing as a child and failing a school-mandated hearing test at age 12, Nović concealed her disability by “reading books and reading lips and staying quiet.” From that personal entry point, she widens her lens to examine the long history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities, including prejudices within deaf institutions, where whiteness, patriarchy, and ableism have often replicated broader American power structures. Nović traces contemporary injustices—such as the denial of interpreters, Miranda rights, and basic protections to deaf people in encounters with police—back to their historical roots, from Alexander Graham Bell’s suppression of sign language in the name of preserving so-called “Americanness” to Nazi Germany’s eugenics programs. Particularly strong are the chapters on adoption, which detail both the bureaucratic barriers and inner conflicts that Nović, a white woman, experienced while attempting to adopt her brown deaf son. Lucid and rigorously researched, Nović’s memoir offers a powerful critique of the systems that have marginalized deaf Americans across the decades. It’s a sobering must-read. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this labyrinthine history, journalist Senior (The Tyrant’s Shadow) recaps the exploits of the Cambridge Five. Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blun became ardent communists in the 1930s while studying at Cambridge and were recruited by Soviet agents to seek government positions with access to wartime secrets. The intelligence they produced was so voluminous that Moscow analysts had trouble reading it all, Senior writes, and included crucial information on Anglo-American war plans and the atomic bomb program. The author particularly highlights the spies’ role in helping Stalin consolidate Soviet rule over Eastern Europe during the early Cold War, including providing intelligence that led to the execution of Western spies in Soviet territory. Senior’s colorful narrative portrays spying as a decidedly shambolic enterprise: at the Bletchley Park cryptanalysis compound, Cairncross would scoop top secret documents off the floor and stuff them down his pants; on one occasion, a handler found an alcoholic Burgess “in the toilets, where all the precious Foreign Office documents had spilled out of his briefcase and onto the floor.” Senior also makes it a semi-tragic story of idealism corrupted by ideology, facilitated by an establishment “chapocracy” that held well-bred Cambridge chaps to be incapable of such treachery—and then shielded them after they were exposed. Elegantly written and stocked with charismatic, spectacularly flawed characters, it’s a captivating, psychologically probing spy saga. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Over the past 50 years, increased demands on congressional representatives and senators to fundraise and woo donors, a concurrent staggering decrease in funding for staff and resources, and threats of violence and social media vitriol resulting from rising polarization, have led to a highly dysfunctional congress, according to this astute debut study. Drawing on interviews with contemporary and former legislators and staffers, political scientist Kornberg notes that today, congress members spend only a third of their time focused on legislating, as they are diverted by these spiraling obstacles. Searching for solutions, she profiles three transformative congressional freshman classes, exploring how they enacted lasting policies. The class of 1974 included a wave of young, liberal lawmakers elected in the shadow of the Vietnam War and Watergate who prioritized coalition building, campaign finance reforms, and fighting cronyism in committee assignments. The freshmen class of 1994, fueled by a conservative backlash to the Clinton presidency, spearheaded an effort to further stymie congress, disrupting bipartisan coalition building and cutting spending. The class of 2018, elected in a midterm upset during Trump’s first presidential term, pressed senior leadership toward systemic reforms and refocused on policy issues important to the electorate. The takeaway for Kornberg is that “Congress is always changeable, shaped and reshaped by the people who walk its halls.” It’s an encouraging guidebook for the upcoming midterms. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Mathias’s urgent, eye-opening debut delves into antifa’s extralegal efforts to dox white nationalists. A “decentralized... network of militant leftists,” antifa is typically depicted as a bunch of extremist agitators or an elaborate fairy tale. But the very real organization’s primary, underreported work, Mathis explains, is “naming and shaming” pseudonymous members of groups like Identity Evropa or Bowl Patrol (creepily named after mass shooter Dylann Roof’s “bowl cut hairstyle”). While placing antifa in a lineage of lefties who, in past eras, unmasked KKK members and got into street fights with skinheads, Mathias mostly focuses on the present, documenting the group’s investigative tactics, from online sleuthing to perilous undercover operations. The latter accounts for the book’s most gripping segments, as Mathias follows antifa spy Vincent during five months he spent embedded in Patriot Front, formerly Vanguard America (renamed to obscure its connection to the 2017 Unite the Right rally). Appointed his chapter’s “official photographer and videographer,” Vincent surreptitiously surveilled the group and downloaded a whopping 440 gigabytes of their data. While Vincent’s infiltration is told with thrillerish tension, Mathias also highlights the mostly “obsessive” and “tedious” work behind doxing, which culminates in the exposure of white nationalists “in real positions of power,” including high school teachers, members of the military, and a State Department official. It’s a by turns heart-pounding and heartening glimpse of the fight against fascism in the shadows. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink