Historian Richards (Black Atlantic) offers an eye-opening look at the fates of captives freed by maritime patrols after the U.S. and U.K. abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The trade continued clandestinely, so in the 1830s the British began issuing prize money for captured slave ships. This created a new system of exploitation, the author reveals, citing the case of the slave ship Progreso, wherein the “prize crew” who took over the ship forced the supposedly liberated captives—most of them children—back into the hold and flogged them for stealing water. By the time the Progreso docked in Cape Town, 177 of the liberated Africans—39.6% of the total—were dead. Once dropped in a random harbor town, getting emancipation papers required freed captives to find a court that would accept jurisdiction and declare the ship’s capture legal—no easy feat, given the onerous burden of proof. Moreover, freed captives were often required to be indentured for up to 14 years, resulting in further exploitation, including indentured freedwomen being forced to marry men at their contract owner’s behest. Throughout, the author draws canny links to the era’s macroeconomic shift from the slave trade to colonization—indeed, he notes, Britian used protecting Africans from slavery as an explicit justification for colonizing West Africa. The result is a savvy juxtaposition of individual lives and larger historical trends. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this somewhat sluggish saga of friendship and survival, Dondi draws on a stash of hundreds of letters to bring to light the story of her father, Bob Cress, who survived a doomed WWII bombing mission over the Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania. Bob and his friend John B. White, who was also the brother of Bob’s girlfriend Polley back home in Illinois, were both assigned to fly missions over Ploesti. John’s plane went down first, on August 1, 1943, during the disastrous operation Tidal Wave, the costliest U.S. air raid of the war, when 53 aircraft were lost. (Dondi writes that the oil fields were “a colossal land battleship, armored and gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.”) John was marked missed in action, and Bob and Polley exchanged letters about his fate—before Bob himself was also shot down over Ploesti several weeks later. Settling stoically into life as a POW, Bob made it his mission to find John, an ultimately fruitless task. While the book is full of unique insights—the letters, as well as two memoirs later written by Bob, reveal much about the situation on the ground in Romania in the final days of WWII—the author’s overreliance on firsthand sources (with every primary quote in italics) can be a slog. It’s a letdown. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet’s evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country’s increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Liu contextualizes these events, linking them to China’s larger historical cycles of “opening and tightening,” but her account focuses on the up-close perspectives of five Chinese “netizens” impacted by the rise and fall of the open internet. They include Ma Baoli, a formerly closeted police officer who started a website as a “sanctuary for gay men” that evolved into a popular gay hookup app, and Lü Pin, founder of “the nation’s most influential feminist publication.” Liu conveys how these individuals’ emotional and interior lives were shaped by events in the digital world, from their excitement at discovering a community online to the pain and isolation caused by growing restrictions and even the outright deletion of their platforms (Lü describes the latter as “like having a part of myself die before my eyes”). Through other interviews, including with a Weibo editor pressured to silence posts about a high-speed train crash, the author spotlights the state’s chillingly singular promotion of content with “positive energy,” as well as netizens’ coy means of evading censorship, such as #MeToo activists’ usage of the phrase rice bunny, pronounced “mi tu.” It amounts to a vital and subversive window into a cloistered but sprawling online world. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

“The story of Nintendo... is the story of video games as a whole,” asserts journalist MacDonald (You Died) in this entertaining history of the Japanese gaming company. Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi started Nintendo in the 1890s to sell illustrated handmade playing cards known as hanafuda. Decades later, the company brought on engineer Gunpei Yokoi, who created one of Nintendo’s first successful toys, an extendable plastic gripper known as the Ultra Hand. Nintendo’s first gaming console, the Color TV-Game 6, entered the market in 1977 and hit games, like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon, launched the company into global prominence. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata saw games not just as a form of entertainment, MacDonald explains, but as a way of improving quality of life. She chronicles how the company helped popularize handheld gaming with the creation of the Game Boy in 1989 and innovated touch-screen controls, as seen on the Nintendo DS, before smartphones were commonplace. MacDonald writes with a gamer’s keen eye for the intricacies of play and a thoughtful appreciation for Nintendo’s commitment to innovate and have fun. This is a must-read for gamers. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

“The secret to success isn’t being the smartest person in the room. It’s being the kindest one with the clearest compass,” asserts sports executive Meltzer (Game-Time Decision Making) in this refreshing business guide. The book draws on advice Meltzer was given when he was negotiating a $900 million deal to return the NFL’s St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles as CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment (the agency that inspired the film Jerry Maguire). Company founder Steinberg told him, “David, always be fair. Don’t negotiate to the last penny, and don’t do business with dicks.” This experience helped the author develop four core values that guide his personal and professional relationships: empathy and forgiveness, gratitude, accountability, and effective communication. These traits, he says, “act like a magnet,” attracting people who bring out one’s best. Throughout, he emphasizes self-care as foundational and strategic; forgiveness, for example, isn’t about forgetting or excusing others’ behaviors, but “choosing peace over pain.” Most of Meltzer’s advice is rooted in entertaining anecdotes, such as an exchange with former MLB pitcher Vida Blue that taught him to view the past with reverence and humor. He occasionally refers to research, but, unfortunately, provides few details or citations. Still, business leaders will find this a practical resource. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and singer-songwriter Darnielle (Wolf in White Van) unpacks his 30-year career as founding member of the Mountain Goats in this illuminating compilation of song lyrics and background notes. Darnielle explains that many of his early songs “had their roots in a sequence of poems... before I got the bright idea to set some of them to music.” Entries vary from detailing events and individuals depicted in the songs to broader overviews situating the author at inflection points in his life and work (after 1997, he writes, his love songs became less frequent as he got more interested in “knottier themes—death, struggle, alienation”). Intriguingly, a number of entries are based on songs never released or only performed live. Others provide intimate details on how songs took shape in the studio. “One thing music has over poetry is this freedom to improvise,” Darnielle writes, noting how the phrase “moonless” in the song “Transcendental Youth” changed in the studio to “nameless dark,” to better paint the picture of the song’s gloomy subjects, “people in a dark room who have not had enough to eat.” Darnielle’s attention to structure, scene, and evocative phrasing is apparent in both his lyrics and his rich, self-aware explanations, which shed light on his creative process and evolving relationship to his work. This is catnip for the author’s fans. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Music biographer Rees (Shooting Star) pieces together a colorful if crowded oral history of album-oriented rock and its key practitioners, including Journey, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard. The genre emerged in the disco-dominated mid-1970s, as record execs brainstormed a mix of polished pop melodies and hard rock suited to the increasingly popular FM radio format. Rees traces the genre’s history in chronological chapters, unraveling its roots (radio executive Lee Abrams describes wanting to develop a highly commercial, radio-friendly genre where listeners already knew the artist; another executive notes that the aim was to create songs that “giv[e] you goose bumps... even before the vocal comes in”); the origins of specific bands, like Toto; and how the genre influenced the music industry, including by inspiring the 1981 debut of MTV, which featured music videos by AOR bands. (The channel ultimately contributed to the genre’s decline, however, as the popularity of music videos began to erode “the sanctity of the relationship between listener and radio,” according to solo artist Billy Squier.) Rees nicely balances the expected tales of sex and drugs with more intimate, revealing disclosures from AOR acts, even if the cocktail-party cacophony of quotes may confuse readers less familiar with the era. Still, superfans of 1970s and ’80s rock will find this a screaming good time. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Has self-publishing enabled a greater number of writers from marginalized groups to find an audience for their work, or is it perpetuating the publishing industry’s historical inequities? Parnell, a lecturer in digital publishing at Melbourne University, makes the case for the latter in this incisive debut study. Through data analysis and interviews with writers of color who self-publish on Wattpad and Amazon, she shows how systematic inequalities have emerged on these platforms. Among her troubling examples are Amazon’s system for flagging adult material in self-published books, which seems to have an implicit bias against cover art featuring Black people, as well as Wattpad’s relationship with its “Stars Program” authors, who are contracted to write serial novels on the site, but get little support from Wattpad when they become targets of harassment in the comments section. Parnell also spotlights age-old systemic biases being perpetuated in new ways, like Amazon’s complex “browse categories” classification system, which replicates the BISAC system’s long-standing, much criticized practice of designating books by and about marginalized people separately from “General” categories. (Parnell argues that Amazon’s system is even worse in this regard, since new categories proliferate unchecked.) Throughout, Parnell offers intriguing insights that may even surprise publishing insiders, such as when she explores Wattpad’s large footprint in the Philippines, Brazil, and Turkey. Book industry professionals will be engrossed. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and biographer Mann (Bogie & Bacall) delivers a meticulous and humane reconsideration of one of America’s most sensationalized unsolved murders. Rather than dwell on the lurid mythology surrounding the 1947 killing of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated body was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot, Mann sets out to restore complexity and dignity to a woman long reduced to tabloid caricature. Drawing on extensive archival research and overlooked police files, he traces Short’s troubled upbringing in Massachusetts and her zigzag path to Los Angeles after dropping out of high school. Mann challenges the image of Short as a “man-crazy” fame seeker, presenting her instead as a restless young woman navigating economic precarity and unstable housing. Through careful reconstruction of her final months, he charts her movements through Tinseltown’s underbelly of drifters and aspiring actors, exploring how the city’s culture of exploitation left her exposed. Though Mann revisits familiar suspects, he sketches a fresh and more plausible theory of her death without claiming absolute certainty. For true crime devotees and Black Dahlia obsessives, this is a must. Agent: Malaga Baldi, Malaga Baldi Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former associate White House counsel Green’s tender debut unpacks his family’s past in the once thriving Black community of Quince Orchard, Md. The son of a preacher, he traces his path from Yale Law School to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, explaining how, as his professional world expanded, he was drawn homeward by the urgency of recording his 95-year-old grandmother’s memories before they faded. The nonlinear narrative moves between his childhood, behind-the-scenes view of Washington, and his interviews with family members. Through these conversations, he reconstructs the history of Quince Orchard, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and illuminates how housing discrimination and other destructive forces shaped the area across the 20th century. Stories of family feuds, contested inheritances, and community triumphs unfold alongside broader histories, including the merger of three formerly segregated Christian congregations in Maryland in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the symbolism of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Green’s lucid, unadorned prose bolsters a memoir that’s as much about recovering a vanished world as understanding one’s place within it. Readers of family history and overlooked Black American stories will find this especially rewarding. Agent: Sarah Passick and Mia Vitale, Park, Fine & Brower. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink