Sebastian, curator of the Morbid Kuriosity website, presents an ample compendium of 92 enigmas and oddities. All the old favorites are mentioned: cattle mutilations (are space aliens involved?); the Roswell Incident and an array of extraterrestrial abductions; the story of the mysterious plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, who got away with the ransom money and was never heard from again; and, of course, a full complement of tales about cannibals, vampires, and urban legends. The author particularly highlights the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, founders of the New England Society for Psychic Research and the inspiration for the Conjuring movie franchise. The couple “were instrumental in safeguarding countless individuals from malevolent forces,” Sebastian writes, most notably the always unsettling Annabelle, a rag doll possessed by an evil entity. Other movie franchises’ less well-known inspirations also get a spotlight—readers will be intrigued to learn about the true story that inspired Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, a 1981 article in the Los Angeles Times that described “a young Cambodian refugee” who had escaped that country’s genocide and “harbored a profound fear of sleeping, convinced that his nightmares would lead to his death.” The young man later really did die in his sleep, and researchers found several other such cases among Cambodian refugees. Readers who enjoy bite-size doses of creepiness will be pleasantly disturbed. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Oxford University researcher Harris debuts with a freewheeling history of the grassroots marijuana industry in California’s rural Mendocino County. Marijuana first arrived in the “vast, remote, rugged” county in the late 1960s with a cadre of idealistic hippies who decamped from San Francisco. Part of the back-to-the-land movement, these mostly white, middle-class newcomers purchased cheap land that had no electricity or running water but the ideal conditions for growing pot. Harris follows the rapid transformation of the Mendocino marijuana trade, from personal plots and a local barter economy to, by the late 1970s, a lucrative industry illicitly expanding deep into the forest. Harris also traces the trade’s impact on the region’s preexisting community—including skeptical rednecks, unfairly overpoliced Native Americans, and surprisingly permissive, libertarian-leaning local law enforcement—as well as the hard-lined federal anti-drug crackdowns of the 1980s. The latter makes for riveting reading as Harris vividly spotlights both the militarized overkill of Reagan-era raids, which used tactics seemingly derived from the Vietnam War (“Camouflaged National Guard members buzzed the forests in Hueys, assault rifles slung and ready”) and the growers’ clever countermeasures, including booby traps. Throughout, he highlights captivatingly eccentric local characters—one grower claimed he had “contact with extraterrestrial visitors eleven times”—as well changes brought about by legalization. It makes for a raucous look at the renegades that built the Emerald Triangle. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Even as “we are staring down the end of all things,” there is still inspiration to be found in “ancient texts,” activist and Anglican priest Helwig (Encampment) observes in her remarkable, much needed compendium of guidance for today’s trying times. Drawn from homilies that she “preached from mid-March 2020 onward,” the essays collected here address a “difficult” and “escalating” set of crises, including the fraying of social bonds evident in “visible homelessness,” a “turn toward conspiracy theories,” the rise of “strongman authoritarianism,” and accelerating climate change. Despite the “terrifying momentum” of these crises, she writes, she has found that, as she “struggle[s] with the texts the church holds to be central” (she calls homily-writing an exercise in “constraint-based literature”), she has come to see them as written by “people in trouble, people dealing with war and slavery and oppression,” who nonetheless persisted in attempting “to feed and heal and liberate” and to be “in community” with one another—whether it be via John’s concept of the Word of God, which she describes “pitch[ing] a tiny, human tent” wherever “people have struggled,” or on the Feast of All Souls, when she ruminates about the ongoing relationship “we continue to have... with our dead.” Helwig concludes that to be “in community” means that “we are pledged, in the most fearful of times, to be the people who strive to live past fear.” The result is an edifying, beautifully composed wellspring of moral courage. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this wide-ranging survey of the history of reading and writing, religious studies scholar Halldorf (Iconoclasm) traces how past technological revolutions in the written word have so thoroughly altered how people engage with information that it has led to sweeping cultural change. Among the major shifts he highlights are the early medieval move from delicate scrolls to more “convenient” codices, which allowed reading to evolve from a “sacred” to a more secular pastime; the impact the late medieval development of the index had on the emergence of modern academia; and the role industrialized, commercial printing played in the birth of nationalism, as mass produced books forged and solidified shared national identities. Today, he notes, the digital age has led a troubling decline of “deep” reading and a move to skimming, fostered by smartphones’ potential for endless scroll. (Though he notes that reading on screens is not inherently problematic—there’s obviously a huge difference, he acknowledges, between “reading on your phone” and “using a tablet specifically designed for reading.”) In an ironic concluding twist, he muses that, even as he was putting the final touches on his book, emergent AI technologies, with their ability to summarize large texts, were rapidly turning skimming into yet another “obsolete” skill. It’s a comprehensive, thought-provoking overview of how reading technology impacts the very fabric of society. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Archaeologist Stuart (The Order of Days) offers a thorough history of Mayan civilization drawing on recent leaps in research, including his own contributions to the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphics. Emphasizing that many of the figures he’s writing about have only recently been uncovered via translation, he paints a vivid picture of the centuries preceding the Classical Mayan era’s “collapse” around 900 CE. During this period, aristocrats with a penchant for revenge and a balkanized view of their own power structure (including the notion of their being four kingdoms to match the “four heavens”) fostered systemic infighting that likely brought about the disintegration of the royal system. Stuart also interrogates the idea of “collapse,” however, noting what looks like an apocalypse in the archaeological record may be a dwindling of ruling class power, as regular people extricated themselves from a failing system and migrated elsewhere to found new societies. Most fascinating are Stuart’s descriptions of this kind of mobility, with wholesale relocations of entire populations being commonplace—“abandonment was something of a constant for the ancient Maya.” The result is a robust scholarly contribution to new understandings of ancient peoples as adaptable and open to social experimentation. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Strausbaugh (Victory City) traces in this breezy biography the years French artist Marcel Duchamp spent shaping the Dadaist movement in New York City. Arriving from Paris two years after the 1913 Armory Show, where his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a buzz in the conservative American art establishment, Duchamp spent much of his adult life—more than 30 years—in New York and undertook many of his artistic experiments there. Over the years he became a key player in the American avant garde, using “readymade” objects as art (the most “infamous” of which was a urinal upended to resemble a fountain, which Strausbaugh suggests might actually have been the work of irreverent artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) and guiding such influential collectors as Peggy Guggenheim and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The author employs colorful detail to explore how Duchamp crafted his own image—he claimed for decades to be a “renegade anti-artist,” proclaimed he’d given up art for chess, and styled himself as a “loner” despite being the life of Manhattan’s “raucous, salacious” social scene. Also examined are his connections to such contemporaries as Man Ray and George Bellows. Mining contemporaneous art criticism and gossipy accounts from those in Duchamp’s personal and artistic circles, it’s a brief but lively portrait of a key player in one of the early 20th century’s most vital artistic movements. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Interviews with the Beach Boys and the producers, musicians, managers, and promoters who helped them refine and popularize their Southern California surfer sound comprise this superficial oral history. Beard, drawing partly from conversations he collected as longtime editor of Beach Boys fanzine Endless Summer Quarterly, captures the apex of the band’s success, from their 1961 founding to 1967. Among the episodes examined are the band’s 1961 signing with Capitol Records; their whirlwind early recording efforts (“within two-and-a-half-year period we did four albums,” David Marks recalled); the fraught 1964 firing of manager Murray Wilson, Brian Wilson’s father; and Brian’s decision to stop touring in 1964 following a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, aside from one satisfying chapter where candid, introspective songwriter Tony Asher narrates the making of the highly successful album Pet Sounds, these flimsy conversations leave much to be desired. Approaching the history from the perspective of a reverential fan rather than a journalist, Beard surrenders responsibility for structuring a solid framework, contextualizing the interviews, or offering much narrative insight, leaning instead on prosaic summaries and grandiose pronouncements (“Even in its incomplete form, SMiLE is the greatest rock ’n’ roll album of the twentieth century”). This falls short of its potential. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music writer Richardson (Savage Journey) unspools a comprehensive account of how Rolling Stone went from “undercapitalized San Francisco rock publication, edited by a 21-year-old college dropout,” to one of the era’s most prominent magazines. Launched in 1967, Rolling Stone was initially dismissed as just another hippie rag but distinguished itself by treating rock music seriously, “like this stuff mattered.” This was largely thanks to cofounders Ralph Gleason, a lefty jazz writer who covered the counterculture in hyperbolic yet astute prose; and Jann Wenner, a music, politics, and journalism obsessive with the rare ability for a longhair to talk seriously with men in suits. Richardson largely (and wisely) sticks to the magazine’s first decade, before Wenner—always more fan and observer than true hippie—moved the office to New York City. Those 10 years make for a speedy capsule history, capturing the magazine’s coverage of one dire milestone after another (Manson, Altamont, Nixon). But rather than using Rolling Stone to explain America, Richardson digs into the colorful personalities who made the publication what it was, from gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to such music-mad writers as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus (whose frequent scraps with Wenner are also cataloged). This doesn’t break much new ground, but it’s a captivating record of a magazine that chronicled the revolution as it happened. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Environmental journalist Tracey debuts with a moving chronicle of the decline of salt lakes and her journey to finding queer love in a world ridden with ecological crises. Growing up in the West, Tracey became captivated by salt lakes, which predominantly form in desert regions, taking note of how “their palette of glistening blue water, white salt crusts, green wetland edges, and fuchsia and emerald microbial life turned the horizon into a painting.” Their water levels, though, are shrinking as humans divert water from rivers that feed them to irrigate crops and global warming impacts weather patterns, making evaporation work faster. The consequences are far-reaching, as drying lake beds release toxic dust over nearby communities and diverted water contributes to sea level rise. Tracey relays traveling to Utah, where she joined a rally to raise awareness for the declining Great Salt Lake, and Kyrgyzstan, where she observed the Aral Sea, which was the world’s fourth-largest lake before water was diverted from it for farming. She pairs these explorations with her experience falling in love, intertwining the details of her marriage to a woman with the reengineering of Mexico’s Lake Texcoco into a park to show how both episodes reveal the beauty and delight of relinquishing expectations and forging a new path. Vivid and tender, this is a powerful work of queer ecology. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Actor and filmmaker Kouri debuts with a shallow collection of vignettes on drinking, family trauma, and self-actualization. He recounts his efforts to find artistic success, first in fiction, then acting, and finally achieving his literary ambitions through the publication of this book. Along the way, he reflects on his complicated family, including a sister who was hospitalized multiple times due to alcohol consumption, the death of his mentor at 17 and his father at 19, and a diving accident in Manhattan Beach that paralyzed his brother and divided his family. To cope with “this bombardment of tragedy,” he turned to drinking alcohol and writing fiction. While Kouri struggled to find professional success, his partner hit it big as a horror writer, complicating his relationships with her and his art. Kouri’s tone is intentionally antagonistic (“I want my books to be as exclusive as possible, totally esoteric and elitist, only relatable to a privileged few, pissing on the rest of the world and then setting fire to it, laughing while everybody burns and whines about it”), but this blunt approach frequently eschews meaningful insight. He will likely succeed in attracting a narrow audience. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink