American journalists routinely mislead the public when reporting on the police, according to this troubling study. Civil rights lawyer Karakatsanis (Usual Cruelty) argues that police are neglecting their duty to fight and solve crime, citing studies showing officers spend only 4% of their time responding to violent crime and rarely pursue endemic white-collar crimes like wage theft. He contends that such criticism of the police rarely makes it into the news because of the sway held by savvy police PR departments (the LAPD alone employs 25 full-time PR specialists). Karakatsanis’s close readings of news articles from major outlets show that journalists habitually regurgitate pro-police narratives—many of which revolve around how more funding for law enforcement is needed to bring down crime rates—and omit the perspectives of non-police experts and studies showing that law enforcement has no correlation with crime rates (which are instead affected by social factors like unemployment). Such pro-funding “propaganda” about law enforcement and crime rates works its way into the news in roundabout ways, Karakatsanis demonstrates; for example, a 2022 Atlantic article suggested that a court backlog in Albuquerque caused an uptick in homicides, implying that resolving the backlog would somehow reduce homicides—not only a nonsensical theory, according to Karakatsanis, but one disproven by the fact that other crimes with similar backlogs saw declines over the same period. Karakatsanis’s meticulous study suggests a disturbing lack of analytical ability from reporters. Readers will be aghast. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this poignant war narrative, historian Edsel (The Monuments Men, also with Witter) profiles American soldiers buried at a U.S. military cemetery in the Dutch town of Margraten, as well as the Dutch residents who commemorated them there. The soldiers include Edward and James Norton, twin brothers whose B-26 bomber crashed off the Dutch coast in 1943, and Robert G. Cole, a colonel in the 101st Airborne Division, who was killed by a German sniper. Intertwined are profiles of Margraten’s Dutch residents, who endured hardship and fear under German occupation and were overjoyed when American forces liberated the area in 1944. Chief among them is Emilie van Kessenich, who, after the war, organized for Dutch people to “adopt” each of the cemetery’s graves, so that “no fallen American” would be “left without a mourner.” Through these portraits Edsel explores a wide range of wartime experiences: chaplains penning sermons; tank crewmen trapped in desperate firefights; clandestine resistance operatives spiriting downed Allied pilots to safety; Dutch officials forced to collaborate with the Germans. He also delves into the somber work of the U.S. military’s Graves Registration Service, charged with documenting and burying dead soldiers, a job both gruesomely dispassionate—“SKULL CRUSHED. REMAINS COMPLETE,” reads a typical summing-up of one lieutenant’s demise—and emotionally fraught. It’s an intimate, moving look at the war that extracts deep meaning from the carnage and loss. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this erudite collection, Hutchinson (School of Instructions), a NBCC Award–winning poet, ruminates on colonialism, diasporic identity, and home. The sea serves as a recurring motif in essays that encompass Hutchinson’s fond recollections of reading Treasure Island as a child on his grandmother’s veranda overlooking the Caribbean Sea in Jamaica, as well as considerations of how artists have grappled with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. For instance, he describes how British artist Donald Rodney sketched drops of blood while plagued with visions of slave ships during a hospital stint for the sickle-cell anemia that would kill him in 1998. The tension between the ocean’s splendor and its role in this brutal history permeates the volume, as when Hutchinson recounts breaking down in tears while eating a meal from a street vendor during a trip to Senegal that he undertook to better understand his heritage: “Sentimental or romantic, there’s a faith I’m unwilling to concede that in eating a fish from the same terrible sea my ancestors endured or perished in, I was in spirit with them.” Hutchinson elegantly probes the painful history of Atlantic slavery with a potent combination of intimate personal reflections and sophisticated artistic exegesis. It’s a worthy complement to Dionne Brand’s Salvage. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biographer White follows up The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock with a kaleidoscopic portrait of Princess Diana (1961–1997), as viewed by the people whose lives she touched. Describing how the princess’s 1991 diplomatic visit to Pakistan and romantic relationship with British Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan endeared her to many in the country, White suggests that some Pakistani women saw Diana’s tumultuous relationship with Prince Charles as akin to their own troubled arranged marriages. Diana’s outspoken advocacy on behalf of AIDS patients made her a “gay icon,” White contends, arguing that her memory “has become entwined with a particular idea of gay experience, in which defiance and radical honesty are king and queen.” White’s central contention is that people see in Diana what they wish to see. For instance, he notes that the anti-monarchist Julie Burchill called the princess “the greatest force for republicanism since Oliver Cromwell” despite Diana, as White sees it, helping to revitalize the Windsors’ flagging reputation. White takes an evenhanded perspective on his subject—positing that the princess could be “beguiling and frustrating, admirable and infuriating, weirdly clueless and astonishingly astute”—and while he’s largely uninterested in discovering the “real” Diana behind the myth, his panoramic approach attests to her lasting influence across the world. This achieves the difficult task of finding a novel take on the much-discussed former royal. Photos. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Anthropologist Thomas debuts with an essential meditation on fire’s role on a warming planet. The central narrative recounts his six-month tenure as a member of the Los Padres Hotshots, an elite federal fire-fighting crew, in 2021, discussing how even as the group engaged in lighthearted prank wars with other crews, they struggled with the stress of working under perilous conditions. Providing visceral accounts of his most harrowing deployments, Thomas describes, for instance, falling off a small cliff after passing out while battling a Big Sur megafire in 123 °F heat, only to haul himself back up to the top and continue clearing brush. Supplementing his recollections, Thomas provides captivating background on how colonial-era bans on Indigenous controlled burns set the stage for today’s inadequate fire suppression practices; how climate change has made fires more severe and frequent; and how private firefighters, retardant manufacturers, and lumber companies take advantage of fire disasters by selling to the government often faulty services that prioritize profit over effectiveness. Writing with exceptional verve, Thomas captures the furious intensity of working on the fire line (“The sawyers circled one another like swordsmen in a duel, cutting every last branch they could find until none were left and they faced each other with heaving chests and sweat pouring through the grime”). Narrative nonfiction doesn’t get better than this. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Cheney Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Harvell (Ocean Outbreak), an ecology professor emeritus at Cornell University, serves up an entrancing examination of marine invertebrates’ many peculiarities. She describes, for instance, how the coral skeleton has evolved to act “like a hall of mirrors” directing sunlight toward the tiny photosynthetic algae that live within coral and generate energy for its host. Sea slugs known as nudibranchs upended prevailing scientific wisdom that “cells and tissues were not shared between different species,” she writes, discussing how they incorporate into their own defensive systems the “vicious stinging cells called nematocysts” that they absorb from the anemones they prey on. Exploring scientific efforts to harness aquatic creatures’ adaptations for humanity’s benefit, Harvell describes how pharmaceutical companies are working to incorporate the cancer-slowing chemicals produced by sea sponges into drug treatments, and how doctors hope coral-derived materials might one day be used as a substitute for human bone in reconstructive surgeries. Throughout, Harvell emphasizes invertebrates’ outsize influence on their ecosystems, describing how giant clams filter pathogenic bacteria from water and how coral provide protection from waves and erosion for the crustaceans, fish, and other creatures that live on reefs. Buoyed by fascinating trivia and lay reader–friendly science, this should be a no-brainer for nature lovers. Agent: Katherine Flynn, Calligraph. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This vibrant biography from journalist Cahalan, author of The Great Pretender, chronicles the life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935–2002), a prominent figure in the 1960s psychedelic movement and Timothy Leary’s wife from 1967 through 1976. She was a high school dropout and two-time divorcée in 1965, when she met Timothy while visiting Millbrook, N.Y., where the former psychologist ran an “acid commune” studying psychedelic drugs. Fleeing an abusive relationship, Rosemary joined the Millbrook community and struck up a romance with Timothy, whose tendency to view women as free domestic laborers and sex objects put a strain on their relationship. Delving into Rosemary’s many run-ins with the law, Cahalan describes how two drug-related deaths on the Southern California commune where Rosemary and Timothy lived in the late ’60s resulted in police raids and Timothy’s conviction on marijuana possession charges. He served only a fraction of his 20-year sentence, however, because Rosemary arranged for the Weather Underground to break him out in 1970. She spent most of the ensuing decades dodging American law enforcement by traveling throughout South America and the Caribbean until her outstanding warrants were expunged in the 1990s. Cahalan uses Rosemary’s stranger than fiction story to offer a vivid portrait of how flower power cracked up in the ’70s. It’s an electric account of a remarkable life and the end of an era. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this excellent study, science journalist Hall (Wisdom) surveys the distinctive biology and behavior of snakes. He describes, for instance, how the sidewinder achieves lateral locomotion by using its head as an anchor while pushing its body to the side, and how female snakes across species can prevent unwanted insemination by closing their oviducts or increasing the acidity of their genitals, destroying sperm. Serpents have more complex social lives than commonly appreciated, Hall posits, noting that some rattlesnake mothers care for their young after birth, prefer hanging out with certain fellow females over others, and entrust such “friends” to babysit their brood. Examining what humans stand to learn from the reptiles, Hall details how scientists hope to develop new diabetes treatments for humans by studying how pythons cope with the insulin shock of consuming prey 1.6 times their body mass “in one gulp.” The surprising science will change how readers view snakes, and sections tracing how cultures throughout history have viewed the creatures shed light on how they became so maligned. For example, Hall suggests snakes became Christian symbols of evil in part because of the religion’s efforts to vilify followers of the Greek god Asklepios, who was said to have learned his healing techniques from snakes. The result is a revelatory take on the much feared reptiles. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Munson (Willa Grove) invites readers to tap into their creativity with this spirited if overbusy guide. Shamed as a young child for asking too many questions, Munson vacillated between giving free rein to her creativity in theater productions and her journal and adhering to rigid social rules at her boarding school. Describing how becoming a novelist as an adult inspired her to rediscover her wonder (the sensitive, curious, emotional part of oneself), she models—via suggested writing prompts—how readers can do the same by identifying their “wonder wound” (the person, place, or moment in one’s life that dismantled their curiosity) and how it was perpetuated in adulthood by their inner critic. Reviving one’s wonder can involve connecting to one’s “liberated, wise, self-accepting” inner child and joining communities that support creative pursuits. Unfortunately, Munson’s promising premise gets overtaken by her own responses to the writing prompts, with agonizingly detailed recollections of her struggles and formative childhood experiences crowding out useful guidance and lending this the feel of a repurposed memoir. The result is a well-intentioned but circuitous road map to reigniting one’s inner spark. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kultur’d podcaster Quammie debuts with a chatty and inspiring guide to finding one’s way in the world. Loosely tracing how her divorce spurred her to rebuild her life, she highlights the small joys of new beginnings, recalling, for example, the sense of possibility afforded by picking out her own IKEA furniture. She also celebrates taking baby steps toward intimidating goals and finding a partner with whom to “drop all pretense... and just be yourself” (the energy normally spent worrying about a partner’s judgments can be used to strengthen the relationship). While some sections tread familiar ground, others use Quammie’s experience as an “overachieving Black girl who grew into an overachieving Black woman” to anchor valuable advice on negotiating power dynamics in professional spaces. For example, she argues that avoiding displays of humility can cut off opportunities for connection (“Each time you... reply with an emphatic ‘thank you!’ you’ll create room for something more”), and provides guidance on grappling with imposter syndrome. Readers will feel empowered. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink