Former public defender Galvin Almanza debuts with a hard-hitting investigation of problems facing the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening with her own experience as a teen defendant luckily granted a second chance by a compassionate judge whom she positions as an outlier in an overloaded, unequal system, the author goes on to methodically survey the justice system’s flaws, including understaffing that overwhelms both prosecutors and defenders, false confessions elicited by police interrogations, inaccurate forensic science, and judicial bias (which can be as mundane as “a judge’s favorite sports team los[ing]” leading to “harsher sentences”). Drawing on stories of former clients, she emphasizes that “the process is so bad that everyone gets punished” regardless of whether they’re guilty, like one client wrongfully accused of “an elaborate insurance scheme” after getting a date wrong when her car was stolen, resulting in years of court dates and a job suspension. At times, the ineptitude Galvin Almanza exposes is mind-bogglingly disconcerting, as when she recalls having to wear loud bangle bracelets in order to ensure that a notoriously distracted judge paid attention. The latter half covers possible solutions, including a successful program in Denver that sends out “behavioral health clinicians and paramedics” rather than police to handle certain cases. This trenchant and surprisingly hopeful explainer outlines not only how the system is broken but how to fix it. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A visionary businessman braves terrible weather and cutthroat opposition to achieve Promethean results in this rousing history. Journalist Tabor (Forever on the Mountain) recaps the efforts of paper manufacturer Cyrus Field to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1850s and ’60s, an initiative that would bring Europe and the Americas into instant communication, yield big profits, and, he believed, foster world peace. The narrative recounts a series of intrepid cable-laying expeditions and maddening setbacks. Field’s first expedition ended ignominiously when the cable disappeared irretrievably into the depths. His second weathered a monstrous storm, but still completed a functioning transatlantic cable—which then quit working after a few weeks. His third was plagued by probable sabotage—spikes were discovered driven into the cable. The fourth, successful expedition, in 1866, was a race against Western Union’s efforts to link San Francisco with Europe via a cable across the Bering Strait and Russia. Tabor makes Field’s quest into an epic maritime adventure, as well as a riveting study of technological progress, as each failure goads new improvements. It’s also a vivid portrait of Field, a man of missionary zeal and angst—he assumed he would go to hell if any sailors died—whose dogged resilience rallied investors after each disaster. The result is a captivating saga of Victorians cobbling modernity into existence under the most grueling circumstances. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music casts listeners into reveries that can bring people together, according to this tepid treatise. Margulis (On Repeat), director of Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab, argues that music reliably provokes daydreams about memories or imagined scenarios with astonishingly specific themes that are commonly shared among listeners. For example, when she asked students who had never heard Richard Wagner’s prelude to his opera Die Walküre to document their thoughts while listening to it, many of them wrote about pirates on stormy seas, as befits Wagner’s menacing, minor-key string passages. These collective daydreams, she writes, depend on context—humans attach deep emotional significance to music heard in high school and as infants—and on culture. (While American undergrads associate atonal classical music with horror movies, Dong tribesmen in China tend to call to mind happy outdoor excursions.) The communal nature of musical daydreams makes music a social glue, Margulis contends: national anthems unite countries, and talking about shared musical memories can help build a close-knit office culture. Margulis explores many curious examples—the musicality of baby talk, the impact of music on LSD trips—but offers few truly novel conclusions. The result is a mostly unsurprising take on what it means to be immersed in music. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

“Truly loving our children means not loving or focusing on them too much,” writes therapist and researcher Brown (Growing Yourself Up) in this persuasive guide to coping with parental anxiety. The rise of expert-driven parenting advice over the past century has created unrealistic standards and fueled a sense of inadequacy among parents, Brown argues. To soothe their resulting anxiety, parents often become overprotective, which can lead to nonresilient kids who lack necessary life skills created when they are allowed to fail and figure out how to get back up. Brown illustrates this point with examples, including a couple that struggles to set boundaries for their preteen son around gaming. The father pushes back against their son’s refusal to stop playing, while the mother complies by serving his dinner at the gaming console, leading to mixed messaging for the child and a feeling of defeat in the parents. Accordng to Brown, the parents should shift their focus from their child to themselves and become aware of the stress and worry fueling their actions. Rather than continually rushing in to problem solve and protect kids from their emotions or the consequences of their actions, Brown suggests encouraging self-regulation and setting clear, balanced long-term parenting goals (for example, “To invite my child’s problem-solving” instead of, “To solve my child’s problems”). Filled with enlightening case studies and gentle encouragement, this is a welcome resource for overstressed parents. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Comedian Baker debuts with a bittersweet account of her dysfunctional upbringing, sobriety, comedy career, and experiences of marriage and motherhood. A solid chunk of the memoir turns on Baker’s drunken 20s in 2000s New York City, which helped give rise to her comedic voice. She parallels childhood memories of her mother’s alcoholism with her own struggles to get sober: “Leaving behind the bulletproof confidence of my drunken identity, of the girl who could walk into any room and situation certain she could handle it,” Baker writes, “was the scariest thing I’d ever done.” A professional breakthrough came in 2018, after Amy Schumer DM’ed Baker on Twitter and asked her to open for her (“Having one of your comedy gods pick you out of obscurity... is the kind of shit I thought only happened in movies that rushed the plot”). Throughout, Baker is bold, funny, and self-incriminating, keenly aware of the racial and class privileges—her grandfather was George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state—that afforded her second chances many addicts never receive, though a few attempts to mine her entitlement for laughs fall flat. She saves the day with genuine gratitude for her success and the stabilizing forces of her husband and daughter. Readers will be charmed. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

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