A tidal wave of fakery, hypocrisy, and cheating is eroding society’s moral fiber, according to this earnest if underwhelming investigation. Miller (The Character Gap), a Wake Forest ethics professor, surveys a panorama of fraud, pretense, and BS, now supercharged by the internet. This includes video deepfakes, adultery websites like Ashley Madison, college students’ ubiquitous use of AI to write papers, conspiracy theories shared over social media (though this isn’t technically dishonesty, Miller contends, if the theorist genuinely believes the hoax), and pastors who preach moral purity while indulging in extramarital hookups and plagiarizing sermons. Along the way, Miller explores the psychology and philosophy of honesty, noting that people lie when the truth is an impediment to their goals, though not especially frequently (studies show the average person tells between one and two lies per day, but a few prolific liars bring up the average). With technology amplifying dishonesty’s impact, the author calls for guardrails ranging from punishments for manipulating and disseminating individuals’ images without their permission to generally promoting a culture where people (especially public figures, like celebrities) call out BS. Miller’s gently moralistic take on the subject mainly reiterates basic truisms—honesty is the right thing to do to avoid hurting others—in stolid prose, offering few new insights. The result is a dry, prosaic defense of honesty as the best policy. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this solid entry in the World of Art series, art historian Schwartz (Rembrandt’s Universe) surveys the context, systems, and styles of 17th-century Dutch painting. He attributes the abundance of Dutch artists during the period partly to the fact that the Netherlands was more urbanized than many other parts of Europe, with an abundance of cities where wealthy households and institutions were in need of decoration. He explains that most painters received work via patronage from members of the Dutch aristocracy, churches, local governments, and civic institutions like hospitals (commissions usually came through family or personal connections, though art dealers also made sales). During the second half of the century, as wealth became concentrated in fewer hands, Dutch painters competed more fiercely, leading to masterpieces but also causing some artists—including greats like Rembrandt and Vermeer—to fall on hard times. The economic situation also shaped how artists painted, the author observes, noting that limited color tones and loose brushstrokes allowed painters to “increase productivity and lower costs.” Devoting relatively little space to the superstars of Dutch art, the author takes a welcome look at overlooked figures like Adriaen van der Werff, who used a “fine brush” style to depict religious scenes, and Hollanders Willem van de Velde de Oude, a once prominent painter of seascapes. Art students will especially benefit from this comprehensive overview. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this fizzy memoir, travel writer Ruiz (12 Trips in 12 Months) recounts the year she spent traveling after breaking up with her boyfriend at age 35. She writes of arriving in Egypt immediately after the split, where visits to the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings prompted reflections on grief and resilience, while conversations with a local tour guide who had problems with her ex reminded Ruiz “that love and heartbreak exist everywhere, no matter what language you speak.” Later, a trip to Japan introduced her to the concept of kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold—which served as a metaphor for embracing one’s emotional scars. Ruiz pairs these observations with lively travel writing, offering vivid descriptions of historical sites, foods, and local color. The narrative is most involving when Ruiz sticks to chronicling her post-breakup missteps and hurdles; less effective are her sometimes-clumsy efforts to extract advice from her experiences. (Of deciding to ride a horse up a volcano in Guatemala instead of walking, she writes, “Accepting help when you need it is a strength too. The most important thing is to keep finding a way forward.”) Still, readers seeking to start over should find some inspiration here. (June)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This richly layered portrait of the 19th-century frontier from historian Nelson (Saving Yellowstone) spotlights figures whose complex lives embody an era of “chaotic and unstable... transformation.” They include Jim Beckworth, son of an enslaved woman and a white father, who spent years living as a member of an Apsaalooke community because a grieving mother insisted he was her dead son; Maria Gertrudis Barcelo, a Hispana woman who grew rich playing cards and whose “ability to assess the rapidly changing geopolitics of Nuevo Mexico” brought her fame and influence; and Little Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne “master strategist” who led his people on a thrilling flight for freedom, but turned to alcohol when he fell short. Nelson weaves her subjects’ lives together—they often quite literally cross paths—while simultaneously showing how their stories were changed or erased in favor of a more clear-cut frontier myth of white male dominance. Along the way, she highlights moments where Americans could have achieved a more just future—for instance, California missed an opportunity to write “full citizenship for all comers” into its constitution—while also offering vibrant details of daily life, like ruminative scenes where Sacajawea forages for wild licorice and artichokes and, later on, famously insists that she get to see the ocean. This complicated, sprawling epic is untamed in a good way. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Glaude (Begin Again) offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries. Glaude begins by asserting that it is “dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious” as America, particularly as it is founded on an inherent contradiction. America is both a “nation of laws” dedicated to the “equal standing of each individual” but also “a white Republic,” he notes, and it is at moments when the tension between the two “becomes unbearably felt” that “white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it.” (He cites both the Civil War and “Donald Trump’s ascendance” as examples.) But “history isn’t fate,” Glaude argues; it’s rather a “repository” that allows us “to act today with more than luck.” It is in this spirit that Glaude aims to excavate “the usefulness of the past, however ugly.” He begins in 1776 with the story of captured fugitive Moses Gordon, who “chose to drown himself rather than submit again to slavery,” and, from there, visits several other anniversaries, including the centennial celebration in 1876, which was conducted “as violence choked the life out of Reconstruction,” and the 150th celebration in 1926, which arrived during the resurgence of the KKK. The upshot isn’t just a searing revisionist history but a stirring view of America as a place “worth fighting for.” (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Wyman (The Verge) upends myths about the rise of civilization in this profound and enchanting study. He begins by noting that “in the last several decades, our grasp of humanity’s distant past has been utterly transformed” thanks to a technological revolution in the archaeological sciences. Lidar scanning, ground-penetrating radar, and DNA analysis “have generated so much data” that most people “have yet to fully grasp just how much our basic story of humanity’s past has changed.” The traditional story, he suggests, is that of “an orderly sequence... from foraging to farming... to city-dwelling.” Recent research, however, shows that major developments like farming, permanent villages, and state structures were invented independently, again and again, around the globe. This revelation “points toward a new... more variable understanding of the human past” as one of kinetic, continuous social experimentation. “For every success story,” Wyman notes, there were “just as many who came, thrived, and then died out,” like the people who built Stonehenge, who “effectively disappeared from the genetic... record.” Thus, the distant past presents a series of case studies, and, as “our species faces immense challenges in the future,” he argues, humanity must attend to these examples more carefully, since “we cannot afford to waste the very insights that might help us survive once more.” In a narrative at once demystifying and awe-inspiring, Wyman vividly conjures the distant past while at the same time making it seem like a window into the future. It’s a remarkable achievement. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this phenomenal meditation on food’s role in Black history and culture, anthropologist Reese (Black Food Matters) shares guiding principles gleaned from Black social gatherings that can help combat hunger and food insecurity. Asserting that “the values we practice and the rituals we build in our everyday lives hold keys to how to transform our food system,” she draws on interviews, oral histories, and her own experiences to make a series of tangible, elegant connections between Black tradition, community values, and on-the-ground activism. An interview with a pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore about his efforts to plant a community garden expands into a history of Black agrarian traditions and overview of solutions for the food deserts that disproportionately impact Black neighborhoods. The role of food at funerals merges into reflections on grief, care, and how “reciprocity” is a fundamental community value that “requires an openness to give and receive.” The author’s own experience organizing food distribution and housing in Texas after Winter Storm Uri caused a massive power outage in 2021 leads to a probing discussion of the differences between mutual aid and charity. Ultimately, Reese hopes to inspire readers to rekindle their sense of connection with others and “submit to being transformed in the process.” It’s a delicacy for the heart, mind, and soul. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Finance journalist O’Connell (The Broke and Beautiful Life) delivers a rigorous, incisive examination of how the corporate world simultaneously demands and punishes women’s ambition. The gender pay gap and leadership deficit, she argues, aren’t products of women’s insufficient confidence or negotiating skills but of structural forces that levy a compounding cost—financial, personal, and professional—on women, which she calls “the ambition penalty.” Drawing on survey data and behavioral economics, she debunks the notion that women can close systemic gaps through personal comportment and documents how gender biases reassert inequality even as women accumulate credentials. In addition to presenting policy solutions such as affordable childcare and universal paid family leave, she offers scripts for changing workplace culture from within. For example, she encourages readers to reframe stereotypes like “women are just less confident and more risk averse” to “women face more consequences for the risks they take.” With punchy and accessible prose, O’Connell moves fluidly between academic citations and vivid real-world examples, though she occasionally leaves the methodology behind key studies underexamined. Still, this is a persuasive accounting of the costs women face for daring to want more. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Critic and essayist LaBarge debuts with a singular mix of memoir and criticism exploring the futility of language and narrative in the aftermath of trauma. In 2009, 25-year-old LaBarge, her parents, and sister were vacationing on an island in the Caribbean when six men entered their rental home with guns and knives, ransacked the house, and held them hostage for eight hours. They survived, but the random attack fractured LaBarge’s sense of time and self. She quickly learned people don’t want to hear the details but merely “the good story,” the abbreviated version that doesn’t make anyone too uneasy. Adequately describing such an event is impossible anyway, she writes: “As you speak the story becomes something else and the reality falls away to a place more horrible, less utterable.” She turns to books and films to understand her experience, learning from Joan Didion’s memoirs on grief that magical thinking—the act of finding signals and signs in everyday life—is a form of survival. In It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, she finds characters attempting to “reintegrate into normal society after a brush with fate.” Poignant textual interpretations combine with rigorous analyses of psychology and philosophy to reveal the unrelenting pull of the past. It’s an evocative quest to find meaning in the inexplicable. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pulitzer winner Ferrer (Cuba: An American History) traces the impact of her family’s migration in this wrenching account. In 1963, less than a year after Ferrer’s birth in Cuba, her mother fled to Mexico City on the first leg of a journey to join Ferrer’s father in New York. She left behind Ferrer’s older half brother, Poly, because of a dispute with the boy’s father. Though their contact was limited, Ferrer grew devoted to Poly, naming a doll after him and occasionally calling him on the phone. They were on different tracks, however: Ferrer enrolled at Vassar, while Poly struggled to finish grade school. After arriving in the U.S. in 1980, Poly came to live with Ferrer and her parents in New Jersey, but proved an angry presence who “got into fights, stabbed people, beat me” and “threatened to kill the whole family, his girlfriend, and then himself.” Ferrer muses on the divergent paths their lives took—Poly died of hypertension in 2020 after being diagnosed with schizophrenia—without judgment or excessive psychologizing. Instead, she braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement. Agent: Gail Ross, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink