Time management expert Vanderkam (Tranquility by Tuesday) challenges the notion that time is a scarce resource in this upbeat guide. Drawing on original research into how people spend their hours and leveraging her own decade of time tracking, Vanderkam argues that feelings of scarcity stem less from overloaded schedules than from mindset. She introduces practical frameworks for viewing time as abundant, including embracing the idea that life is a circus and people are “ringmasters” managing three rings: career, relationships, and themselves. Noting that people often underestimate what they can accomplish over a long period of time, she encourages dreaming big and planning small. She shares, for example, how a couple and their two kids set out to see all 63 of America’s national parks by planning the trips out over multiple years and taking advantage of summers and smaller school-year breaks. There are also ways to organize time to welcome serendipitous moments, she explains, like by saying “yes” to new and exciting things, even if they don’t conform to the rules one sets for themselves. While Vanderkam’s advice is clear and actionable, the case studies skew heavily toward dual-career households with children, leaving readers from different economic backgrounds or life stages somewhat underrepresented. This will resonate most with readers juggling family and career demands. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Soccer is “less an invention than some side effect of the human condition,” contends journalist Greene (How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius) in this entertaining and wide-ranging exploration of the game. Greene traces the origins of the sport to medieval England’s “folk football,” a violent game in which teams kicked and threw a ball—typically a sheep’s inflated bladder or decapitated head—toward goals. In the Victorian era, the sport morphed into an aristocratic pastime and was popularized through elite private schools that had access to large areas of land. Greene interviews an array of experts to unpack the sport’s purpose and design. For example, a podiatrist explains kicking doesn’t serve much purpose for humans outside of amusement; despite it being a “tad unnatural,” early players found it a powerful and fun way to propel a ball a great distance. Elsewhere, a scientist shares how soccer games are “poorly designed experiments,” as its low-scoring nature enables random events to heavily influence results rather than consistent skill, while a stuntwoman reviews a compilation of Uruguayan player Luis Suarez’s notorious theatrics to assess soccer’s “diving” dilemma, where players exaggerate injuries to gain advantageous calls or field position. Smart and witty, this effectively reveals the complexity of the world’s most popular sport. Soccer fans will be captivated. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this head-spinning account, English literature scholar Lafaive (Daughter in Retrograde) dissects her own life alongside that of the author whose books popularized astrology in the 1960s. In 2001, at age 13, Lafaive discovered works by Linda Goodman (1925–1995) at her local library. She became obsessed, feverishly imagining Goodman as a mythic figure. At 24, following her mother’s death, Lafaive’s attachment to Goodman veered even further into magical thinking (“I... assembled items that I thought or knew Linda had owned to create a collection of fake relics”), and she embarked on a PhD with a plan to write a biography. Around the same time, Lafaive married the brilliant but self-loathing Buck, whose cruel intellect “was the rung I clung to” as she struggled in school, particularly as she was thwarted in her attempts to reach Goodman’s associates. As the narrative fluctuates between the author’s dysfunctional codependency with both Buck and Goodman, Lafaive gradually realizes that the woman she endlessly fantasized about likewise lived in a fantasy world: Goodman long maintained that both a romantic partner who left her and her daughter, who died by suicide, had “disappeared”—the latter as part of a government conspiracy involving “doubles.” Unsettled but undeterred, Lafaive forges ahead with a fantasized biography drawing on her own internal mythologizing. Manic, vulnerable, and strange, this taps into the uncanny underside of storytelling. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rogers (Facts Are Sacred), a data editor for Google, offers a rose-colored reflection on commonly googled questions. He thematically groups the queries, sprinkling his rundown with brisk commentary on how they reveal a world of seekers. There are cyclical patterns, like baby and sleep questions spiking around 2 a.m. and swelling cookbook searches every December, as well as larger social trends, like how “low calorie” supplanted “low fat” in 2013, and how Covid and the Ukraine war coincided with increased searches on anxiety. Rogers focuses mainly on unearthing uplifting patterns, like how careers “that help people” have been more popular than those “that pay well” since 2020, and how, during disasters, searches always evolve from attempts to understand the threat to attempts to proactively navigate it. He even casts frequent searches about depression and miscarriages in a positive light, as they reveal people yearning to grapple effectively with life’s most difficult challenges. Unfortunately, Rogers sometimes seems to misread questions, like when he frames “how often can I donate plasma” as evidence of altruism instead of financial desperation, or parses “does bereavement include uncles” to not be a question about work leave but rather what is socially acceptable grief. The result is a fun if shallow tour of the modern world’s most burning questions. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Singer-songwriter Malin debuts with a gritty chronicle of his artistic coming-of-age. Born to 22-year-old parents in 1967 Queens, Malin recounts a turbulent but loving childhood shaped by music and instability. After his mother took Malin and his sister to live with their grandparents to escape their father’s alcoholic outbursts, Malin channeled his restless energy into punk music, forming the band Heart Attack as a teenager and taking any gig he could land. Encounters with industry figures including Rick Rubin and Little Richard lend color to the account, as do run-ins with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, and Bob Weir. Though Malin details a hard-partying milieu, he insists he was “too afraid to try drugs,” making him both a participant in and wary observer of late-20th-century New York City hedonism. The narrative is framed by Malin’s survival of a rare spinal stroke in 2023 that sent him to Buenos Aires for stem-cell therapy and arduous rehab—an ordeal that captures the resilience he displays several times throughout the memoir. Malin’s prose style is raw, and he loves a name-drop, but his affectionate portrait of a vanished New York and the community that sustained him will resonate with artistically minded readers. It’s a tuneful self-portrait. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Actor and Big Brother star Grande debuts with a campy ode to embracing one’s differences. In pithy essays, Grande recalls his privileged Florida childhood with a doting mother and often-absent father (“By the time I was ten, I had a hundred Disney World trips under my belt. And I’m not even exaggerating”), his difficulty fitting in as a flamboyant kid in the 1980s and ’90s, and his winding journey to accepting his sexuality before coming out to his fraternity brothers in college. Grande also delves into his struggles with drug and alcohol, and recounts how his younger sister, pop star Ariana Grande, helped place him in “a very privileged, bougie rehab experience” that led to eight years of sobriety and counting. The tone throughout is so self-adulatory it can border on boastful, but Grande’s sweet admiration for his husband, Hale Leon (“My relationship with Hale is a joyful, game-based connection”), saves the day, as does his palpable desire to “live out loud and proud in the hope that [I give] permission for others to do the same, even in the reddest corners of the country.” What this fizzy self-portrait lacks in humility it makes up for in vitality. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Motherhood has “compelled women to contribute to and transform their societies” since time immemorial, according to this wide-ranging study. Beginning with an 8th or 9th century BCE clay model of a human fetus left by a pregnant woman as an offering to a goddess of childbirth, historian Cleghorn (Unwell Women) shows that women have always thought about and reckoned with motherhood as a profound and fraught state of being. The narrative spans from ancient Greece and Rome, where breastfeeding was so rare among upper-class women that having done so was mentioned on a young mother’s sarcophagus, through the early modern era, where readers encounter Elizabeth Jocelin, a 17th-century British woman who pioneered the “maternal conduct book,” a popular genre in which a mother addressed life advice to her newborn in the event of her death in childbirth. Among Cleghorn’s aims is to explore how society is always debating what is “natural” about motherhood—Are women naturally maternal? Is breastfeeding a natural means of bonding?—as well as spotlight those who pushed back against supposedly “natural” limitations. However, for a book on “radical” mothering, much time is spent describing ways that men have weighed in—readers may not be enthused, for example, to learn yet again about Plato’s notion of the “wandering uterus.” Still, it’s a meticulously comprehensive survey that, at its best, casts fascinating light on mothers’ thoughts on mothering. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This eye-opening account from Ghanaian podcaster Sekyiamah (The Sex Lives of African Women) posits that traditional African rituals can offer women and queer people new ways of thinking about their bodies and pleasure. Noting that African women’s sexuality is often seen as “sinful” or “selfish,” mostly due to the legacy of European colonial influence, Sekyiamah argues in favor of sankofa, or “revisiting the past to retrieve the good in our history.” Roaming the continent to participate in ceremonies related to sex and sexuality, she learns how to best gyrate her hips with a traditional Tanzanian sex educator and explores the eroticism of Senegalese waist beads (“an essential tool in the Senegalese woman’s sexual armory”). She also treats with respect controversial customs like labia pulling, undergone by girls ages 8 to 14, finding radical potential in the practice—“I’m not aware of any other traditions where little girls are encouraged to become intimate with their genitalia and urged to enjoy personal touch”—and observes ways in which African spiritualities sometimes embrace queerness. Rather than uncritically embracing the traditions she spotlights, the author reflects on how they can be updated and reworked through a feminist lens, though the book’s latter half, geared toward offering advice, feels a bit dull after such an invigorating travelogue. Nevertheless, readers will find this a paradigm-shifting road map to sexual reclamation. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sedentary, screen-dominated lifestyles have left Americans increasingly vulnerable to health problems ranging from obesity and cardiovascular disease to mental illness, according to this competent if familiar treatise. Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant), host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, unpacks the sedentary epidemic, noting that today’s schoolchildren spend 70% of the day seated and more than 80% of American jobs consist of mostly at-desk activities, a trend exacerbated by the advent of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. While strenuous bouts of exercise several times a week are healthy, they don’t compensate for prolonged periods of sitting; readers would be better served taking frequent, shorter breaks (five minutes of movement per every half hour spent at rest), which restart key biological processes that keep blood pressure and glucose levels in check, and oxygen supply optimal. Zomorodi’s message won’t be new to most readers, but they’ll be edified by her lucid explanations of how the modern American lifestyle harms eyesight, hearing, posture, and attention span, as well as her actionable instructions for incorporating exercise into daily routines, from tracking signs of physical overwhelm to coordinating walks with rhythmic breathing. The result is a valuable complement to such books as Michel Desmurget’s Screen Damage. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Farmer (Willard Clark), the former director of DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, offers an in-depth biography of Jack Rittenhouse, a writer, printer, publisher, and historian of the West. Born in 1912 in Kalamazoo, Mich., Rittenhouse had an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for adventure, Farmer explains. After dropping out of college during the Great Depression, he rode the rails to New York City, where he got a job as a bookseller. By 23, Rittenhouse was working in the mail room at Knopf, where he learned the ropes of advertising and marketing. Drawn to the history of the American West, he began collecting books on the region and founded Stagecoach Press in 1946, through which he published a popular guidebook to Highway 66, among other titles. Rittenhouse oversaw every aspect of the publication process at Stagecoach, from acquisitions to design and printing. Ever the book collector, he began publishing the newsletter New Mexico Book News, which “helped lay the foundation for a vibrant statewide renaissance of the New Mexico book community.” In 1968, he became an editor at the University Press of New Mexico, where he established a successful reprint series of books by Larry McMurtry, Mary Austin, and others. Complete with admiring reflections and lively prose, this is a solid tribute to a celebrated bookman. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink