Musician Huguenor debuts with a scrupulous history of San Jose, Calif., indie label Asian Man Records and its enigmatic founder, Mike Park. Park, who still runs the label out of his parent’s garage, spent time in punk and ska bands in the 1980s and ’90s, most notably as a horn player for Skankin’ Pickle. He also ran the jokingly named Dill Records, originally founded to release Skankin’ Pickle’s music but which went on to sign and produce albums for a number of ska groups. Park left the band and label in 1996, founding Asian Man soon after. Huguenor recounts the careers of the label’s key bands, including the Lawrence Arms and the feverish making of their albums A Guided Tour of Chicago and Ghost Stories, and Alkaline Trio, which helped expand Asian Man’s offerings beyond traditional ska. While some of the label’s biggest names, like Less than Jake, eventually migrated to better-known labels, these moves spiked interest in the bands’ previous albums, driving sales at Asian Man. Throughout, Huguenor highlights Park’s ceaseless ambition and brings the history alive with exacting detail, interviews with many of the label’s musicians, and photos and excerpts from Park’s newsletters and correspondences. Devoted ska fans will want to take a look. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this unflinching audit of American history, political scientist Watts Smith (Stay Woke) surveys the many ways that Black people’s testimonies have been systematically ignored and excluded. Noting the cyclical nature of civil rights advancements and white supremacist backlashes, she suggests that the latter are often predicated on new methods of dismissing “Black evidence.” To make her case, Watts Smiths spotlights numerous well-known contemporary examples of anti-Black brutality and inequity, showing how they connect to longer histories of the suppression of Black speech. For example, she situates the questioning of the credibility of Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin, during her testimony in Martin’s murder trial, within America’s lengthy history of the exclusion of legal testimony by Black people, which she suggests has created a lasting “presumption of Black incompetence.” She discusses the viral video of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery alongside the history of gaslighting of Black witnesses to crimes—increasingly challenged today by video evidence. And she ties Black women’s higher rates of maternal mortality, likely stemming from doctors’ ongoing trivialization of Black patients’ accounts of their own pain, to the legacy of eugenics and the “medicalizing” of Blackness. By astutely placing the past in conversation with the present, this compels readers to consider the way bleak, unaddressed histories continue to cause harm. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In October 1944, the gas chamber doors at Auschwitz were closing on 800 Hungarian Jewish boys when, in a startling turn, the execution was paused and 50 were selected to unload potatoes, with a 51st boy sneaking into the lineup. Schiff, a leading collator of Holocaust testimony, spent nearly two decades researching the story, which is narrated in this harrowing account by journalist Calvin. The event, the authors note, is the only recorded instance of a last-minute gas chamber reprieve, an idea that has long held currency in popular mythologizing about the Holocaust. In 2024, the authors interviewed the only still-living survivor, Hershel Herskovic, who recalled that, ordered out of the chamber, he dressed so quickly “that he selected two right-footed shoes.” His memories, combined with the testimony from other survivors discovered in archival filmed interviews, flesh out “a golden thread of authenticity.” The most vivid recollections describe chilling encounters with Josef Mengele in the infamous sorting line; the Angel of Death moved his fingers “in a contemptuous flicking motion,” an act that was “hypnotic, theatrical, dehumanizing,” as he signified who would be sent to the gas. While the narrative can get weighed down in detail and an afterword connecting the boys’ plight to October 7 feels heavy-handed, the research is solid. It’s a significant contribution to Holocaust studies. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former Washington Post Book World editor Hartigan revisits the 1937 disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart in this globe-trotting debut. Weaving a biography of Earhart with accounts of contemporary search efforts employing cutting-edge technology, Hartigan restores a sense of wonder to Earhart’s all-too-human quest to exceed expectations and contemplates the similar impulse to greatness that motivates Earhart-ologists. In an enticing fish-out-of-water prologue, Hartigan, “a married, middle-aged mother no one had ever mistaken for adventurous,” recaps how she got drawn into the search for Earhart while on assignment for National Geographic in 2017, reporting on the first of a series of remote expeditions she would eventually accompany, which saw her trailing after anthropologists, human remains-sniffing dogs, and hi-tech autonomous vehicles across atolls and open water. The three prevailing theories of Earhart’s disappearance—that she was executed by the Japanese, stranded on a desert island, or killed on impact—get aired out via profiles of the theories’ most prominent adherents, each of whom is steadfast in their belief that they are close to solving the mystery, and that doing so will ensure fame and fortune. Biographical sections depict Earhart as a fearless flyer eager to confront every challenge but frequently hampered by financial woes and an adoring public nonetheless critical of money-making endorsements and unladylike behavior. It’s a humanistic navigation of an exuberant, questing life that continues to inspire adventure. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

This searing debut from journalist Carr explores the underexamined history of discrimination against America’s Black medical students and doctors. Seeking to understand why there remain disproportionately fewer Black physicians than Black patients, “a ratio that has barely budged in more than a century” and which negatively impacts Black patient outcomes, Carr traces a legacy of exclusion in medical training. She does so primarily through the life of her great-grandfather, Lawrence St. Clair Ferguson, a Jamaican doctor trained at Howard University, who faced numerous racist indignities, including struggling to find an internship after school, which forced him to return to Jamaica. Along the way, Carr spotlights other shocking historical examples of bias against Black medical professionals, such as white Union doctors complaining to Abraham Lincoln about having to serve alongside legendary Black surgeon Alexander T. Augusta; the devastating closure during the Spanish flu pandemic of North Carolina’s Leonard Medical School—“a key producer of Black doctors”—over stringent new American Medical Association regulations; and the AMA’s refusal to desegregate until 1968. Black doctors and students continually fought back, she notes—including founding an alternative to the AMA in 1895—but current government anti-DEI purges pose a renewed threat. It adds up to an eye-opening revelation of systemic racism in American medical training and a moving celebration of the Black doctors who persisted. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Limón, the 24th poet laureate of the U.S., urges the public to view poetry as a reminder of their shared humanity in this captivating lecture, which she delivered at the Library of Congress at the end of her tenure in April 2025. In a society increasingly plagued by loneliness and polarization, Limón declares that “if we are lucky enough to live a life in a world of poetry, we are never alone... because anyone who has ever written is with us.” Poetry can be a lifeline during times of suffering, she says, telling the stories of people she met while in her post, including a man who memorized poems to keep his mind from entering “the dark places” after his son died in war. While poetry has immense personal value, it’s especially powerful in the public realm, she asserts, describing You Are Here, a project she spearheaded that put poems in National Parks to encourage people to pay attention to the world around them. Highlighting excerpts from her favorite poems, including Emily Dickinsons’s “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” and Alberto Riós’s “A House Called Tomorrow,” Limón provides a wealth of starting points for the novice poetry reader while encouraging exploration. Passionate and hopeful, this will inspire readers to embrace poetry’s magic. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Jones (Brain Science for Lawyers, Judges, and Policymakers), a law and biology professor at Vanderbilt, delivers an accessible yet lackluster survey of how evolutionary processes shape both physical traits and human behavior. He argues that misconceptions abound about natural selection, the process through which organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive, passing on their advantageous traits to offspring. People often view natural selection as a historical process, something that shaped species into what they are today, he says, when it’s actually a ubiquitous, continuous mechanism that happens faster than people think. He demonstrates how ignoring this reality can have deleterious effects. In medicine, for example, overreliance on antibiotics has spurred the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and in the fishing industry, prioritizing the catching of large fish has led species to evolve down in size. Elsewhere, Jones reveals how understanding natural selection can lead to innovation, pointing to how researchers used computer algorithms inspired by biological evolution to produce highly effective solar panel cells and how Nike studied mountain goat’s efficiently evolved hooves to develop a grippy all-terrain shoe. While there are plenty of stimulating anecdotes, Jones falters when attempting to demonstrate how an enhanced understanding of evolution can lead to a more effective legal system, failing to move beyond broad generalizations. It’s a solid primer but offers little new insight. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former child prodigy Gupta, recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and, at age 19, one of the youngest violinists ever hired by an American orchestra, details his professional successes and personal struggles in this inspiring account. Gupta’s parents were Indian immigrants who supported their son’s musical ambitions as he grew up in the Hudson Valley in the 1990s—Gupta’s father made him his first violin out of a Cracker Jack box. They also smothered him with expectations, at one point insisting he abandon music for a career in medicine despite his significant promise. Meanwhile, Gupta details his struggles with emotional eating and details how the classical music circuit led him to burnout. The latter half of the memoir outlines how Gupta founded the nonprofit Street Symphony, which brings live music to people in Los Angeles shelters, clinics, and prisons. Anecdotes about Street Symphony, including a performance that was interrupted by a woman who told Gupta about the trials that led her to Skid Row, form the book’s most moving sections. With an open heart and sometimes brutal self-awareness, Gupta effectively illustrates how music “reaches the broken places within us and the broken places between us.” It’s a virtuoso performance. Agent: Farley Chase, Chase Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestselling historian Wulf (Magnificent Rebels) offers a revelatory biography of the little remembered but brilliant polymath and naturalist George Forster, presenting him as a “thinker far ahead of his time.” Born in 1754 into an Enlightenment-era Europe fired by “the conviction that they could control nature,” by age 19 Forster was the “assistant naturalist” aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution. What distinguishes his writings of this period, Wulf notes, was his growing horror at his shipmates’ abusive treatment of the Indigenous people they encountered and his rejection of the idea of European dominion over the natural world and Indigenous people. Forster went on to be among the first Europeans “to talk about what we now call human rights,” Wulf writes, eventually becoming an influential proponent of the French Revolution during his later years, when, working as a librarian in Germany, he devoted himself to publishing books and reviews arguing for the scientific validity of egalitarian politics. In a narrative that reads partly like a scientific adventure story, partly like a revolutionary bildungsroman, Wulf traces Forster’s mental journey—drawing on his published works and private diaries and letters—as well as his literal journey, following his path throughout Europe and the South Pacific, trying to imagine the world from his perspective as “a crosser of borders, a dreamer of worlds” who was able to see “the connections rather than divisions.” Readers will be rapt by this immersive recreation of an intellectual awakening. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Cockburn (The Spoils of War) targets military brass, corporate miscreants, and the politicians who service them in this vigorous collection of muckraking articles originally published in Harpers, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. His subjects include the Pentagon’s obsession with high-tech weaponry, like AI systems and the Air Force’s KC-56 refueling plane, that generate huge profits for defense contractors but don’t work well; America’s support of unsavory foreign leaders from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, (convicted of drug trafficking before being pardoned by Trump in 2025); political consultants’ fondness for expensive campaign television ads that earn them lucrative commissions but don’t move voters; and the exorbitant legal settlements cities are paying because of police shootings. Cockburn also launches left-populist critiques at American politicians, including Joe Biden for his pre-presidential tough on crime and corporate-friendly legislative efforts, and centrist Democrats for schmoozing with wealthy Hindu nationalist donors and exiling pro-Palestine speakers from the 2024 DNC stage, as well as Donald Trump for just about everything. Cockburn’s expertise on national security issues makes his critiques of the military particularly sharp, while some of his bugbears on the domestic front get less mileage (his anti–nuclear energy stance will likely leave some readers unconvinced in this moment of ever ratcheting upward oil prices). Still, the result is an incriminating portrait of a ruling class mired in corruption and ineptitude. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink