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

Biographer Weber (Mondrian) offers an impressively detailed portrait of Anni Albers, a weaver whose 1949 show at the Museum of Modern Art marked the museum’s first solo textile exhibition. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1899 Germany, Albers had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder that prevented her from playing sports, but spurred her to develop her natural artistic abilities. In 1922, she was accepted to the Bauhaus, an institute founded by Walter Gropius that merged artistry and craftsmanship, where she developed her weaving skills and met her future husband Josef Albers, an artist who became a Bauhaus faculty member. After the Nazis shuttered the institute in 1933, Josef was recruited to join the faculty of North Carolina’s Black Mountain College and the couple headed for the United States, where they spent the rest of their lives. Albers eventually took up printmaking, in part to overcome the inherent physical limitations of and low public regard for textile work. Drawing from extensive interviews with his subject, the author carefully situates Albers’s career against a vivid depiction of the WWII-era art world and the Bauhaus, bolstered by brief portraits of key figures like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. It’s an intimate study of an overlooked artist and the creative milieu from which she emerged. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Actor and novelist O’Connell (Just by Looking at Him) reflects in this smart and funny collection on navigating relationships, addiction, and Hollywood as a gay man with disabilities. Born with cerebral palsy in 1986, O’Connell was hit by a car at age 20, which caused him to develop a muscle condition called compartment syndrome. (“I am apparently the Pokémon of disability,” he jokes. “I gotta catch ’em all!”) He describes how his disability shaped his sexuality, writing of one partner, “I’m in a war for you to see me as a person rather than a challenge.” Throughout most of his 20s, he was celibate and grappled with addiction to alcohol and pain killers. After finding professional success—first as a blogger in the 2010s for the site Thought Catalog and then writing and starring in the Netflix adaptation of his memoir, I’m Special—he got sober. “The Slut Diaries” recounts his sexual escapades after opening up his relationship with his long-term boyfriend, a choice that helped him strengthen his confidence and embrace his sexuality. The subsequent piece, “6,875 Words About Love,” gives an honest account of the complexity that freedom brought to his relationship. O’Connell writes with a breezy style that feels like gossiping with a friend. The result is a laugh-out-loud page-turner. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Clark-Flory (Want Me) tracks down her long-lost half-sister in this plaintive memoir. In 1965 Indiana, Clark-Flory’s future mother, Deb, was an 18-year-old white woman who became pregnant by a Nigerian student. Deb’s father sent her to a home for unwed mothers, where she gave her daughter up for adoption. More than five decades later, Clark-Flory, who was raised as an only child, located her half-sister, Kathy, by then a flourishing grandmother, and the two quickly bonded. That story frames Clark-Flory’s explorations of the shame that once surrounded out-of-wedlock pregnancies, especially those resulting from interracial relationships; her loving but sometimes fraught relationship with Deb; her own conflicted quest for sexual autonomy; and her reflections on being a wife and mother. Clark-Flory writes movingly of the predicament of young women pressured into forfeiting their children, and of Deb’s lingering anguish (“ ‘I think about her every day of my life,’ she said in a gush of a whisper that sounded like air being let out of a tire”). Some of the author’s passionate social commentary, including her suggestion that “the punishment of sex workers was essential to getting women to accept unpaid labor in the family home,” is less convincing. Still, it’s a poignant family saga. Agent: Jamie Carr, Book Group. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

“Kids’ books merit grown-up conversation,” children’s author Barnett (Rumpelstiltskin) asserts in his by turns grave and playful treatise. Lamenting that there’s “almost no serious critical attention” paid to this “widely read, deeply loved, highly profitable literature,” Barnett urges adult readers to reflect on how “we control the production, reception, and consumption of the books kids read.” He goes on to deliver a stream of insights (“Children’s publishing operates without any meaningful participation from children”) mixed with tongue-in-cheek observations (“Children are terrible customers. They have no real income.... Many of my readers cannot, technically, read”). Barnett’s observations include that the book-buying habits of adults, rooted in their own nostalgia, have kept decades-old children’s titles in print; that the more “didactic” branch of American children’s publishing has “beget a hulking kindness industrial complex”; and that the “poetic achievement” of Goodnight Moon exemplifies what he believes to be the highest goal of children’s literature—to provide striking observations of the small, daily “hard things children must do alone,” such as going to sleep. (“To have your worries validated... is such a rare gift when you’re a kid,” he notes.) It’s a poignant refresher for “dead dull finished grown-ups” on childhood’s role as an “in-between place full of uncertainty.” (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

This searing deep dive from journalist Craven (Our Veterans) spotlights a brutal strain of masculinity inculcated by America’s military education establishment. Surveying the histories of the five service academies, particularly West Point, along with several private military schools, he pegs the institutions as having promoted an aggressive, controlling masculine ideal that has bled outward into American society for centuries. Starting with the tenure of Sylvanus Thayer, the authoritarian “godfather” of West Point, Craven traces how military education “breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence” through dehumanizing hazing methods. He also notes that periodic attempts at reform, which began as early as the 1900 hazing death of West Point cadet Oscar Booz, have failed to bring about lasting change. Most strikingly, he highlights ancillary institutions that have promoted the military school ethos to the rest of society, including the Boy Scouts and ROTC fraternities, and traces the ways in which, even as military schools’ profile improved in the latter 20th century as they garnered a reputation for reforming difficult students, they subjected Black and female cadets to ostracization and harassment. The schools also were crucibles of right-wing thought, he notes, pointing in particular to the deep penetration of evangelical Christianity into the Air Force Academy. It amounts to a unique and vital perspective on America’s masculinity crisis. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist and historian Clavin (Running Deep) offers a by-the-numbers account of the Battle of Little Bighorn. In June 1876, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The battle bristled with larger-than-life figures, from the brave-but-misguided General Custer, to the “unkillable” Crazy Horse and the stoic Sitting Bull, who had a vision foretelling Custer’s downfall. Noting that he aims to tell the story “without overanalyzing and taking detours,” Clavin sets up the action that led to Custer’s infamous last stand in short dry chapters; the backstory involves much betrayal and reneging on promises by the federal government, and the radicalization of warriors like Crazy Horse by earlier massacres of Native encampments. The book becomes more spirited during the battle itself, which is naturally dramatic, as well as terrifying, infuriating (one general spends most of the battle “meandering” about), and gory. A fascinating figure who emerges is Moving Robe Woman, a Lakota 23-year-old who plunges into battle with her face painted red, avenging her 10-year-old brother who’d been killed a few days earlier and mutilating those she slaughters. But the overreliance on long quotes from other histories undermines Clavin’s authority, especially when he leans on them during dramatic moments. Still, it’s a serviceable retelling of a famous clash of titans. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

This lyrical testament to the power of Black community in Philadelphia and beyond combines finely wrought essays by activist and educator Rogers (How We Stay Free), vibrant snapshots from photographer Karim Brown, and quotes from Black visionaries past and present. The title is drawn from a song of the same name by Philly rapper PnB Rock, who was shot and killed during a robbery in 2022; Rogers notes that the song “encapsulates the tantamount grief and unresolved trauma of generation(s) of Black Philadelphia youth besieged by intracommunal violence, the pervasive effects of organized abandonment, and the overall climate of anti-Black racism.” He invites readers to embrace that grief while reaching for healing, hope, and joy. Brown, whose luminous slice-of-life images of Black Philadelphia are interspersed throughout, offers his own short essay on how “becoming relatively conscious of my Blackness and its relationship with the greater context of the world... shoved me into using the camera to articulate the contradictions... joy, and sorrow” of “the everyday existence of Black folk.” Rogers’s words and Brown’s images are arranged in conversation with excerpts from luminaries like Toni Morrison and Nina Simone and contemporary thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Kiese Laymon, and Hanif Abdurraqib. The result is a radiant vision of a hopeful Black present and future. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

“The disappearance of lesbian bars is not the tragedy I once thought it was,” Karp, host of the Cruising Karp podcast, reflects in her heartening debut travelogue. In 2020, following a string of closures, the media began sounding the death knell of the lesbian bar, prompting Karp to embark on a road trip to visit the handful that remained. But as she traveled, new bars kept opening; the country, it turned out, “was on the cusp of a lesbian bar resurgence.” Organized by region, the book recaps stories of beloved bars alongside profiles of their owners, employees, and regulars. In Washington, D.C., As You Are co-owners Jo and Coach recall how working together on the lesbian-centric basement floor of a gay men’s bar inspired them to open their own more inclusive space. At the Sports Bra in Portland, Ore., owner Jenny Nguyen recaps the challenging process of opening the nation’s first women’s sports bar, a model now being widely mimicked. Jonda Valentine, founder of the Lipstick Lounge in Nashville, Tenn., reflects on how getting kicked out of her family’s church led her to open a welcoming space of her own. “The contemporary lesbian bar is gender expansive, trans inclusive, intersectional, and accessible,” Karp notes, finding that today’s lesbian spaces have evolved to oppose conservative attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. Readers will find this a bracingly optimistic chronicle of modern queer life. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink