In this incisive account, political scientist Shapiro (Uncommon Sense) considers how “the widespread optimism that prevailed when the Berlin Wall came down” has given way “to politics whose closest parallels are to the 1930s when fascism and communism obliterated democracies.” Arguing that this moment was not inevitable, he tracks how it was caused by crucial missteps by a variety of leaders. These include, most prominently, the neoconservatives who saw in the aftermath of 9/11 an opportunity to remake the world in America’s image, whose hubris was captured in the words of Bush administration adviser Ron Suskind: “We are an Empire... when we act we create our own reality.” This sort of power drunkenness meant missed post-9/11 opportunities to strengthen UN leadership and a genuine rules-based order, Shapiro writes. In later chapters, he casts blame on President Clinton’s dismissal of the idea that enlarging NATO would provoke Russia, as well as President Obama’s refusal, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, to shore up the labor market, even as he was advised that male workers were losing high-paying jobs in record numbers, a factor crucial to the populist rise of Trump. Shapiro’s sharp examination shows how voters around the world ended up disillusioned, a disenchantment he direly calls “the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” It’s a stark wake-up call. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

CBS News correspondent Vigliotti (Before It’s Gone) offers a riveting account of the 2025 Palisades fire and the shocking governmental failures that fueled it. The book opens a day into the disaster, with L.A. mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom apparently more concerned with rebuilding in time for the 2028 Olympics than fighting the still raging inferno, let alone questioning what had caused it. Leaping back in time, the author provides a gripping hour-by-hour recap of the week leading up to the January 7 blaze, portraying it as a perfect storm of incompetence. As dire warnings mounted, Mayor Bass left the country, Emergency Management director Carol Parks seemingly took the weekend off, and fire chief Crowley failed to recall off-duty firefighters, which “could have doubled staffing.” Vigliotti shares his firsthand experiences covering the disaster, from his disbelief at seeing tree-cutters working as the fire already raged (“It’s like they thought they had today to prepare”) to his efforts to save one resident’s stranded dogs. He also juxtaposes the governmental ineptitude and resulting chaos—panicked families fleeing on foot from gridlocked traffic; residents defending their homes with garden hoses while shouting “Where are the firefighters?”—with the foresight and preparedness of businessman Rick Caruso’s private firefighting team, which successfully defended his shopping center. It adds up to a dystopian account of a government’s disregard for the well-being of its people. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

The fascinating debut from photographer Sharkey collects hundreds of celebrity passport photos taken across more than 70 years at his family’s London passport photo service. Opened by the author’s father in 1953, the studio quickly became a go-to for celebrities thanks to its discretion and 10-minute turnaround, first via darkroom and later digital camera. The featured photos include a 1974 shot of a faintly smiling Mohammad Ali, taken after the boxer forgot his passport en route to a fight in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; a 1955 photo of actor Errol Flynn, who reportedly kicked the studio door open, announced “Yep, it’s me,” toured the darkroom, and flirted with another customer; and an understated, bashful-looking 1997 shot of “studio regular” Hugh Laurie, who distracted gawking fans by pointing out a photo of British boxer Martin Power. Other photos offer a brief window into the stars’ careers, including a 1997 shot of a dark-haired Kate Winslet staring straight into the camera (she had the photo taken for her role in 1998’s Hideous Kinky). The author steers clear of name-dropping with his humble, nostalgic tone, and the stylistic constraints of the photos allow their subjects’ personalities to shine through in ways that can be surprisingly intimate and revealing. This will delight film buffs, music fans, and photography lovers alike. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Comedian Freid debuts with a chatty guide to modern dating. Writing from the perspective of a “pretty regular guy,” he contends that much of modern heterosexual dating angst stems from over-interpretation; most men are not orchestrating elaborate emotional strategies but operating from ego and comfort. Elsewhere, he outlines the benefits and drawbacks of meeting potential partners via family, friends, dating apps, and bars; how to parse dating app profiles; and how to navigate texting in the early stages of a relationship. Readers should evaluate potential partners by their actions instead of their app profiles, he argues. “He may be holding a cute baby or dog, or at the top of a sick mountain, and you think, Family guy who’s also adventurous and therefore probably the love of my life. But that’s not him! He’s the guy talking to you and putting two spaces after a period, and using u to mean you.” Later sections break down discussing relationship exclusivity, introducing partners to friends and family, and breakups. While broad claims about “most guys” lack nuance, Freid brings welcome levity to his generally sound advice on knowing what one wants from a partner and communicating directly to get it. The result is a friendly and refreshingly blunt resource for exhausted daters. (June)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Leadership consultant Pontefract (Work-Life Bloom) delivers a well-researched exploration of how aging populations are influencing the labor force. By 2032, he explains, Americans age 65 and older will comprise 8.6% of the workforce—a 31% increase from 2022. This demographic shift has profound implications, Pontefract warns: young workers will be in short supply and high demand, middle-aged workers will be stretched thin training younger workers and replacing senior leadership, and older workers will be a necessity as companies won’t be able to afford to nudge them into retirement. Longer life spans, declining birth rates, and compromised social safety nets mean more older individuals will have to work. There are ways to combat what Pontefract calls the “Age Debt”; Zurich Insurance Group, for example, introduced flexible arrangements and job-sharing programs that allow older workers to continue their careers without maintaining a full-time workload. The key, Pontefract explains, is to integrate the skills and wisdom of seasoned employees into a company’s strategy. Like many business book authors, Pontefract relies on somewhat clunky metaphors (younger, mid-career, and senior workers are, respectively, “Rivers,” “Rocks,” and “Rubies”), but these are minor irritants given his thorough research and frank discussion of ageism. Business leaders should heed this timely call to embrace the changing workforce. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Particle physicist Malik debuts with a broad overview of humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos. Beginning in ancient times, she explains how the Babylonians recorded celestial events, believing the sky contained messages from the gods, and moves through the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, when astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo advocated for a heliocentric view of the universe. Turning to the 20th century, she chronicles Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the existence of other galaxies and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which revolutionized scientists’ understanding of space and time. Her reach extends from the quantum level, exploring the numerous particles comprising atoms, to the edge of the cosmos, speculating on the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Elsewhere, she describes the creation of life on Earth, including the theory that all known life forms descended from a universal ancestor, and the universe’s ultimate death 100 trillion years from now when it “will ultimately wind down to a point where nothing at all happens.” Malik succeeds in demonstrating that “the ‘truths’ we hold to be indisputable are liable to be swept away in the next scientific revolution,” but in tackling such an immense expanse of history, she eschews depth in favor of breadth. This is best suited for those looking for an abbreviated summary of physics and astronomy. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lutz (Victorian Paper Art and Craft), an English professor at Penn State, delivers a dazzling, rigorously researched biography of Emily Brontë, the mysterious and elusive author of Wuthering Heights. Using weather reports, neighbors’ diaries, newspaper articles, and the Brontë family’s surviving possessions, Lutz attempts to “reconstruct the texture of [Brontë’s] days.” Born in 1818, Brontë grew up on the Yorkshire moors, where she led a nonconformist life. She refused to marry, preferring instead to run her family’s home after the death of her mother and two of her older sisters. This rebellion against society’s norms allowed her the freedom to pursue the two things she loved to do most: write and wander. Brontë was an insomniac obsessed with the macabre and fantasy worlds of her own creation. While she spent periods of her life away at school and abroad, they never lasted long, as she craved the solitude and liberty of the wild terrain of northern England. Though Brontë died at age 30, she produced a staggering amount of work, most of which she preferred to keep private. Frustratingly little remains of those thousands of pages (it’s not known what happened to them), but Lutz paints a vivid portrait of a singular, peculiar writer. Readers will be rapt. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Karas (Where’s Whitey?) blends memoir and true crime in this intriguing family history. Her mother’s family, the Rhode Island Blumenthals, were a large Lithuanian Jewish clan already haunted by tragedy when Karas was born in 1944: a drunk driving accident had killed six family members nine years earlier. Then, in 1954, Karas’s 18-year-old cousin Ronnie confessed to murdering his family’s dressmaker. Ronnie claimed he did it because the woman was having an affair with his father, but relatives suspected that Ronnie was either also having an affair with the dead woman, was a bored rich kind seeking thrills, or was taking the fall for somebody else. He spent the next 12 years in prison and descended into alcoholism after he was paroled in 1967. In 2015, three years after Ronnie’s death, Karas was moved to look at the whole saga with a reporter’s eye. She probes the profound impact of the drunk driving accident on her aunts and uncles, digs into her ancestors’ entanglements with bootlegging, and reexamines the pressures put on Ronnie to redeem the Blumenthal name. Along the way, she nimbly balances the disclosure of scandalous family secrets with a prevailing sense of empathy. It’s a bruising portrait of generational trauma. Agent: Doug Grad, Doug Grad Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this enlightening account, science writer Levenson (So Very Small) surveys 300 years of vaccine opposition. Noting that much of today’s antivax rhetoric is in fact centuries old, he starts with the first smallpox inoculations in the 18th century, finding that vaccine skepticism has long taken the same few approaches. They include religious interpretations of inoculation as “a prideful intervention in God’s plan”; fears of the peril posed by experimental science (sometimes a legitimate concern—the author doesn’t shy away from examining catastrophic medical failures, like a 1955 incident in which vaccines induced live polio in children resulting in paralysis and death); and notions that compulsory vaccination is an affront to individual liberty. At times, these arguments come from surprising sources, like Walt Whitman, who lumped vaccines alongside steamboats and gunpowder as “unnatural interventions that rendered people less ‘peaceable and happy,’ ” and who, Levenson perceptively notes, “sketched much of what would become the modern wellness program” in his Manly Health and Training. Indeed, the similarities to today’s antivax movement that Levenson surfaces are often uncanny, like an 1805 pamphlet that fearmongered about vaccinated children experiencing “a train of symptoms... similar to those which always arise from an absorption of extraneous and poisonous matter.” The result is a trenchant demonstration of how contemporary antivax ideology is not only inaccurate but rooted in outmoded, antimodern sentiments. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this hard-hitting exposé, former federal prosecutor Ballou (Plunder) probes the injustices of mandatory arbitration clauses. Lurking in the fine print of employment and customer agreements, these clauses force victims of corporate misdeeds—from credit card holders dinged for bogus charges to employees of American Apparel who made sexual assault allegations against its CEO—into private arbitration instead of lawsuits in regular courts. These “secret courts” are inherently corrupt, according to Ballou, who notes that private arbitration firms get lucrative repeat business if they rule in favor of corporate defendants, which they usually do. In addition to offering no right of appeal, forced arbitration also, he argues, lets companies pilfer a little money from a lot of people with impunity—think rising Ticketmaster fees—by banning consumers from joining class action lawsuits. Ballou traces the problem to decades of legally dicey and ethically suspect Supreme Court rulings from both conservative justices—Antonin Scalia got free luxury hunting trips from businessmen who benefited from his proarbitration opinions, Ballou reports—and liberals like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who voided a Montana disclosure law that required agreements to highlight arbitration clauses up front. Ballou unpacks labyrinthine legal reasoning in clear, down-to-earth prose that spotlights the human cost of “a cruel and lawless system.” It’s a forceful indictment of one of America’s most unjust and problematic legal frameworks. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink