American studies scholar Gelman debuts with a trenchant, elucidating history of the Anti-Defamation League. The book opens with the 1993 raid on the ADL’s San Francisco offices for “spying on civil rights groups and antiracist organizers,” a revelation that, as the New York Times wrote, “caused confusion for some liberals” due to the Jewish organization’s longtime association with civil rights. A similar culture shock occurred in 2025 as the ADL brushed aside Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute as “an awkward gesture” while also labeling protesters of Israel’s assault on Gaza as “supporters of terror.” Delving into the ADL’s little-told history, the author uncovers a long legacy of such conservative stances, as the organization repeatedly worked to sideline or actively target leftists. Among the revelations is an upending of the myth of the ADL’s founding as a response to Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia; instead, Gelman asserts, the ADL “was formed in 1913 by midwestern German Jews of the fraternal lodge B’nai B’rith” worried that the influx of “uncouth” and impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms were “changing the perception of Jewishness.” Following the organization across the 20th century, the author unearths a multitude of right-wing positions, from “insist[ing] that antisemitism did not play a role” in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs to supporting neoconservative policy in Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s by pegging leftist governments as antisemitic. It’s a gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Welsh (Happily Ever Older) offers an illuminating survey of the challenges older women face in North America today. Life expectancy is increasing, and women are living longer than men on average. Yet, after years of being paid less than men, taking time off work for motherhood, or, as single or divorced moms, spending all their earnings on their children, women are left with smaller pensions and savings. “Add unaffordable housing to the mix,” Welsh notes, “and it is women... whose older years turn to hell.” The author interviews advocates for the elderly and profiles older women who are financially struggling in order to spotlight such systemic issues as well as offer cogent advice—she touches on the importance of maintaining social interaction, romance, and sex late in life, and also presents some creative means for getting by on a reduced income. The specter of late in life homelessness is the most striking takeaway, however, as Welsh casts a harrowing light on the growing number of senior women who are drowning in medical debt and living out of their cars. Concluding chapters detail efforts in Canada to build more social housing for seniors as well as the increasing number of elderly women living with roommates. It’s an unsettling but, unfortunately, practical guide to aging. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Filmmaker and novelist Moral (Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards) challenges portrayals of Alfred Hitchcock as “a flawed figure with a dark side” in this disappointing reappraisal. Moral investigates two biographies by Donald Spoto—The Dark Side of Genius (1983) and Spellbound by Beauty (2008)—asserting that Spoto framed Hitchcock as a tortured, monstrous person for dramatic effect. Chronicling the director’s rise, Moral demonstrates Hitchcock was obsessed with precision, demanding perfection from actors and often clashing with studio executives over the script and final cut. The book draws on the interview Spoto conducted with actress Tippi Hedren six months after Hitchcock’s death in 1980, in which she discussed Hitchcock’s alleged psychological abuse and sexual harassment during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. Moral compares the interview, which was later transcribed and archived, to Spoto’s interpretations of it, finding that Spoto asked leading questions and created “inconsistencies and serious embellishments” that exposed his personal conflict with the director, whom he felt rejected him. Rather than simply refuting Spoto’s claims, Moral casts aspersions on Spoto’s character, much like he criticizes Spoto for doing to Hitchcock. Elsewhere, he details Hitchcock’s enduring influence on directors like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro. Unfortunately, his attempts to resuscitate Hitchcock’s moral reputation result in an overly simplistic representation of a complex individual. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

This lively report from journalist and novelist Doctorow (Enshittification) examines the hype around AI, encouraging people to make the technology work for them, not the other way around. In automation theory, he explains, centaurs are people assisted by machines (a person riding a bike or wearing a hearing aid), while reverse centaurs are those forced to act as assistants to a machine (an assembly line worker). This distinction is at the heart of the debate about the usefulness of AI tools, he argues, explaining that those who swear the tools are useless have had AI imposed upon them, while those who extol its utility are people who get to decide when and how to use it. AI companies, he asserts, have lured investors by overhyping the technology and using accounting gimmicks that inflate revenues. The “AI bubble” is destined to pop, he contends, predicting the economic fallout will rival the pandemic recession. On the bright side, he believes people will benefit from “a kind of AI residue” long after the bubble has burst—such as cheap, open-source models that run on personal computers and do things like transcription and image processing. Accessible and comprehensive, this is a useful guide to wading through the discourse around AI. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this openhearted debut, former Secretary of the Interior Haaland traces her path from a modest childhood to the upper ranks of American politics. She recalls a 1960s upbringing shaped by games, chores, and the influence of her strict but loving Laguna Pueblo mother and Norwegian American father, a decorated Marine officer. Haaland threads her mother’s and grandmother’s recipes into the narrative to illustrate how food is as important to her biography as activism and public service. She also writes candidly about confronting her alcoholism, depicting recovery—a major theme in her family tree—as incremental and demanding work. That persistence carries through other milestones in her biography, including raising her daughter, launching a small business, and pursuing higher education later in life. After earning a law degree from the University of New Mexico, she entered politics and, eventually, made a successful run for Congress in 2018. Though the book’s political chapters are measured rather than revelatory, they convincingly emphasize the importance of civic engagement for Native communities historically excluded from higher education and government. Throughout, Haaland’s voice remains accessible and encouraging, offering pragmatic messages of resilience that feel both lived-in and universal. This grounded and gently inspiring account will resonate with readers. (July)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and poet Durbin (MacArthur Park) traces in this illuminating dual biography the fraught relationship between two little-remembered but influential gay artists who helped shape the 1960s and ’70s art scene in New York City and abroad. Photographer Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and sculptor and painter Paul Thek (1933–1988) met through a mutual friend in 1956 Florida and became lovers in 1960, initiating a roughly decade-and-a-half-long relationship as rocky as it was magnetic, thanks to the volatile mix of Peter’s anger and Paul’s deteriorating mental stability. The author explores their time spent in early 1960s New York, where they worked with artists like Andy Warhol and “pushed the possibilities of what a gay relationship looked like in the pre-Stonewall era”; their time in Europe on Fulbright scholarships; and the jobs they sought in the commercial art world. Along with probing his subjects’ personalities, Durbin maps the connections they forged with other mid-20th-century artists, especially Susan Sontag. (Thek slept with her; Hujar may have inspired some of her thoughts on camp.) Durbin excels at lavish descriptions of both artists’ work, though the parallel biography approach can be difficult to follow as their relationship recedes behind the overlapping chronologies of each man’s life. Still, it’s a captivating portrait of a vibrant creative era. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Art historian Blackwell Baines (20 Masterpieces at Mount Stewart) offers a delightfully macabre history of the haunted house, beginning with what she pegs as the origins of the modern archetype—Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic Strawberry Hill House, a “glimmering white miniature castle” boasting an atmosphere of “gloomth” (Walpole’s quirky “portmanteau of the words ‘gloom’ and ‘warmth’”) that inspired The Castle of Otranto, the first gothic novel. From there, the author surveys haunted houses in the U.S., Britain, and Japan. Part travelogue and part architectural history—with a dash of film criticism when Blackwell Baines reflects on the Amityville Horror house—the book offers plenty of thrills, from Henry VIII’s doomed wife Catherine Howard perpetually fleeing down the Haunted Hallway at Hampton Court to “a pallid woman desperate for a drink of water” at the appropriately named Chillingham Castle. Along the way, the author examines how popular spectral tropes, particularly of women and children, connect with Western understandings of domestic spaces as the private settings of “the most dramatic experiences of human existence”; spotlights how ghost stories evolve with changes in social awareness, such as the transformation of a ghost at Louisiana’s Myrtle Plantation from a French woman to an enslaved woman; and explores the myriad ways a building’s architectural vibes can generate a sense of haunting. It’s an entertaining expedition into eerie spaces. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this haphazard group portrait of the Kennedy clan and the British royals, Town & Country editor Hallemann recaps decades of the families’ interactions, which gave the Irish American upstarts access to elegance and class while burnishing the Brits with Camelot’s energy and glamor. President Kennedy’s assassination brought real pathos to the relationship, in Hallemann’s telling: Prince Philip marched somberly behind Jackie in the funeral procession, while Elizabeth dedicated a lovely Runnymede site to JFK’s memory. Moving on to the celebrity generation of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr., Hallemann focuses on their shared struggle against paparazzi. (Along with provoking the car crash that killed Diana, dread of photographers prompted JFK Jr. to pilot his own plane to Hyannis Port rather than fly commercial on the day of the deadly crash that killed him, the author suggests.) With next-generation Kennedy prestige subsiding, later chapters center on Windsor intra-family squabbles. (“According to Harry, the Cambridges... were upset over a lack of Easter gifts between the families and the overly familiar way Meghan referenced Kate’s hormones.”) Hallemann steadfastly emphasizes public engagements over private dysfunctions—scandals are but briefly and primly alluded to rather than dished up hot, while lengthy sections get bogged down in the formal meet-and-greets and tedious charity galas where Windsors typically encounter Kennedys. The result is respectful but stuffy and uninvolving. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Flyn (Islands of Abandonment) delivers an exhilarating exploration of the nature and meaning of wild lands. The ideal of untouched wilderness is a myth, she argues, revealing that human history is present in even the most remote landscapes. She travels to deserts, mountains, and forests around the world to demonstrate how humanity’s conception of wilderness has changed over time. A trip to Egypt’s Mount Sinai elucidates wilderness’s ancient roots as a symbol of penance and renewal, as she discusses how people would search the desert for spiritual insight. In medieval times, wilderness came to be associated with the supernatural, as Flyn demonstrates through her visit to Transylvania, where people once believed werewolves and witches inhabited the woods. Over time, as the world industrialized and urbanized, efforts were made to preserve natural landscapes—at first, for the sake of aesthetics and recreation and then, as environmental anxiety grew, to protect natural resources and biodiversity. However, the global conservation movement has displaced millions of people from their homelands, according to Flyn. In Uganda, for example, efforts to protect mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest led to the removal of Indigenous Batwa forest people, who then became destitute. Throughout, Flyn blends exciting travel writing with deep philosophical discussions. Readers will be forced to rethink what wilderness is and whom it benefits. (July)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist and poet Kemick (Hello, Horse) knits together his wide-ranging preoccupations—Christmas villages, dogs, marine life—for a funny and poignant memoir-in-essays on grief and longing. In “Playing God,” Kemick reflects on his obsession with the Christmas village he’s been assembling since he was a teenager. He compares hiding his compulsion to research new additions to his dog’s skulking behind the bathtub when she needs to vomit, explaining “it’s natural to want to be alone when you’re doing what instinct demands.” In “Sweeping It Under the Carpet,” Kemick describes being unable to vacuum a patch of green shag carpet “phlegmatically faded” by the blond hair of his family’s dog, Buddy, after they put him down. Elsewhere, a visit to the Vancouver Aquarium, home to the first Canadian beluga born in captivity, prompts Kemick to weigh his fascination with the awe-inspiring creatures against his belief that captive breeding is not only bad but “we are made worse by it,” as it excuses “our slithering pollution” of the planet. Kemick’s wit and curmudgeonly self-regard is offset by his palpable adoration of his partner, Litia, evoking the work of David Sedaris. It’s a weird and rewarding ride. (July)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink