Nourishing Amy blogger Lanza debuts with a poorly organized assortment of basic vegan recipes. The collection is divided into two sections of 40 recipes each: part one, “Healthy Brain,” focuses on foods that Lanza claims support cognitive function via “high levels of antioxidants, B vitamins, healthy fats, and omega-3 fatty acids”; part two, “Happy Mind,” features ingredients shown to support ”good gut bacteria” and improve one’s mood. Both sections are further split into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Lanza doesn’t spend much time on the science behind either diet, and the plentiful overlap between them makes the division feel arbitrary. Chia seeds star in both “brain food granola” and “mood-boosting” Neapolitan chia pudding, for example, breakfast recipes separated by almost 100 pages. Cocoa powder, which has been “shown to improve memory and mood,” is included in a dark chocolate truffle recipe in the first section, while dark chocolate, a “natural mood booster,” is added to a mushrooms and lentil chili in the second section. However, the recipes themselves are accessible and nutritious, with curries, salads, and protein bowls in abundance. Vegan cooks looking to expand their repertoires may find some value in Lanza’s approach, but the awkward structure limits the usefulness of this ho-hum volume. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

The 1664 deal that transferred power from the Dutch to the English in what is now New York City was an inventive act that would be foundational to the metropolis to come, according to historian Shorto’s revelatory sequel to The Island at the Center of the World. When Richard Nicolls, the Englishman tasked with capturing New Amsterdam, came up against Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch enclave, the two men astonishingly disobeyed orders from their respective empires to fight and instead negotiated peacefully. Long considered merely a sign of Dutch decline, Shorto sees more to the story of the handover: the contrarian Nicolls and the abrasive Stuyvesant were not only the right men at the right time—both constitutionally suited to ignore authority—but also a kind of new man brought into being by the very empires that had molded them. Agents of imperial capitalism, they were more interested in business than war: the deal preserved and expanded the unique system of free enterprise that had been brewing on the tiny island, with unprecedented freedom of religion and property guaranteed by Nicolls for residents of the already famously business-friendly and pluralistic city. (The earlier Dutch theft of Manhattan from the Wampanoag, Shorto suggests, also presaged another uniquely American form of dealmaking—the scam.) Shorto’s storytelling is wry and accomplished, transforming a campaign of letter-writing and procedural legerdemain into a brisk and amusing saga. Readers will be wowed. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Rock ’n’ roll has been transformed from the wild music of youth into a genre dominated by elder statesmen who traffick in nostalgia, according to this fine-grained history. Music journalist Hepworth (Never a Dull Moment) traces the start of rock’s “third act” to the 1985 Live Aid concert held at London’s Wembley stadium, where such bands as Queen drew a massive transatlantic TV audience, whetting appetites for “large spectacle” concerts that allowed fans to feel they were part of “something bigger.” That set the stage for a wave of older rockers (including the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney) to embark on seemingly endless world tours, capitalizing on nostalgia to make money off rereleases and cement their legacies in the newly established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The author skillfully breaks down how such changes have turned rock into “the very thing it was supposed to be an alternative to,” as aging musicians try to fulfill a desire for something that’s beyond music—“a sense of connection that was established at a young age” for older fans, and for younger ones a window into a mythical scene that “they couldn’t help but feel they’d missed out on.” The result is a revealing and richly detailed look at rock’s ongoing evolution. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Fat Black Femme Podcast host Higgins debuts with an earnest account of how they came to embrace their identity as a “Black, fat, queer, feminine, nonbinary man.” Narrating their story through sketches of the celebrities who influenced them, Higgins recalls learning from singer Luther Vandross’s interviews how to “duck and dodge” questions about their own sexuality during their uneasy childhood in 1990s California. As a teenager in a repressed and religious household, Higgins found a queer, fat, and Black role model in America’s Next Top Model judge André Leon Talley; later, as an adult who’d come out but was contending with the queer world’s “subtle messages—both online and off—that not just my race but my size was an issue,” Higgins admired the unapologetic confidence of fat Black queens like Latrice Royale of RuPaul’s Drag Race. While Higgins’s prose is clunky in places and their takeaways tend toward the trite (“We are not who people say we are but who we want to be”), they offer an emotionally honest discussion of the challenges of straddling diverse and sometimes competing identities. Higgins’s fans will be inspired. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Community organizer Bracy debuts with a bracing takedown of the venture capital financing model. The pressure VC places on startups to scale “at breakneck pace” drives businesses to make reckless decisions, she contends, describing how investors tanked the once profitable LocalData, which created software to help municipal governments streamline property tax information, by pushing it to expand into offerings for the real estate sector that never caught on. Exploring how other businesses bend the law in pursuit of growth, Bracy details how Shef, which delivers food prepared by amateur cooks to customers’ homes, tests the boundaries of regulations requiring salable food be cooked in commercial-grade kitchens. Elsewhere, Bracy excoriates such VC-backed companies as Uber for ushering in a gig economy that classifies would-be employees as contractors to lower costs. Bracy’s evenhanded analysis makes clear that for all VC’s failings, it has sometimes provided needed funds for such valuable companies as the insulin manufacturer Genentech, and she provides pragmatic suggestions for remedying VC’s worst excesses. For instance, she recommends requiring investors to hold their stakes in companies for longer than the standard 10 years, incentivizing them to focus on a business’s long-term viability over unsustainable short-term gains. It’s a convincing call for change. Agent: Leila Campoli, Stonesong. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

These whimsical meditations from essayist Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) reflect on the peculiarities of everyday life. One entry recounts the time Green was walking on a perilously steep road in an unnamed town and encountered a man holding a mysterious package who called himself the devil. Another describes how she met a “sorcerer” while traveling, then takes a meta turn as Greene reflects on her literary use of the figure (later revealed to be a museum director with a penchant for fantastical stories) as a metaphor open to readers’ interpretation. Greene’s illustrations, many styled after those of 19th-century naturalists, enrich the essays. For instance, the humorous “Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps” skewers the Texas senator for changing his stances with the frequency of the insects’ weeks-long life cycle, and marginal line drawings of wasps multiply on each page as the discussion of Cruz’s hypocrisy becomes increasingly damning. Greene has a knack for evocative descriptions—as when she suggests her sister’s basset hound–shar-pei mix is “built like... a claw-foot tub”—and her deliberate withholding of identifying details about the places and people that populate her essays lends them a fablelike quality reminiscent of Kafka and Borges. Every bit as strange and wonderful as the title promises, this delights. Illus. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Sottile (When the Moon Turns to Blood) offers an ambitious study of Love Has Won, a spiritual group and alleged cult. The narrative tracks the rise of the group’s leader Amy Carlson, a former McDonald’s manager who claimed to be “a reincarnated... queen of a continent called Lemuria” (as well as a reincarnated Jesus and Marilyn Monroe). “Spending more and more time online” following her 2005 divorce, Carlson mainlined conspiracies about angels and aliens, Sottile writes, eventually seeing herself as “a major player” in America’s coming “spiritual upliftment” and building a personal following. Sottile doesn’t shy away from Love Has Won’s intrinsic shock value, including Carlson’s claim she spoke to deceased “Masters” like Prince and Robin Williams and the sensational 2021 discovery of Carlson’s mummified and enshrined body, which had turned blue due to her intake of colloidal silver (the group touted the substance as “one of the highest medicines on the planet”). But Sottile also provides a meticulous ideological genealogy of Carlson’s new age influences, including 19th-century medium Helena Blavatsky—who likewise communed with “Masters”—and the long-held new age fixation on the lost civilization of Lemuria (derived from a 19th-century theory about lemurs). Leaving no crystal unturned, Sottile unearths intriguing similarities across disparate fringe groups (near-constant antisemitism, frequent female leadership) that bolster her thesis that cults are a feature, not a bug, of American spiritual life, functioning as an outlet for repressed women enmeshed in patriarchal belief structures. It’s a must-read for cult obsessives. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dolan, a VP and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, aims in this levelheaded debut guide to walk readers through the process of ceasing communication with or otherwise “stepping away from” an abusive relative. Drawing on his own decision to cut ties with his physically and emotionally abusive mother 12 years ago—and from interviews with other victims—he outlines the challenges of familial estrangement in a society where underfunded social services are ill-equipped to recognize psychological abuse; where “an army of cultural forces,” including TV shows and movies, glorify the family unit; and where social taboos frame “abandoning” one’s parents as selfish and extreme. Exploring both “partial and total separation,” Dolman recommends taking a short break from the abusive family member to get more comfortable with the idea, then making rules that the abuser must follow in order to remain in touch. If the rules are broken, it can lead to reduced contact or complete estrangement, though Dolan takes care to note that estrangement is best viewed as on a “continuum” and even total separation need not be permanent. Dolan acknowledges the deep grief that can result from cutting family members out of one’s life but makes a strong case for its value as a form of self-care that offers victims greater agency and self-knowledge. The result is a smart and sensitive primer on a tricky and little-discussed issue. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this entrancing debut chronicle, film historian Meiresonne charts the evolution of Korean cinema against the country’s transformation into a democracy. In the early 1900s, Korean theaters mostly showed European and American films and employed byeonsa (narrators) who stood near the screen to translate intertitles and explain cultural nuances. Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula loomed large over the country’s early films, Meiresonne contends, discussing how the blockbuster success of 1926’s Arirang, which follows a Korean protestor driven mad by his Japanese torturers, sparked a nationalist strain in early Korean film. The Korean War spurred a wave of melodramas—whose popularity, Meiresonne suggests, stemmed from their ability to capture audiences’ “extreme sense of helplessness in a ravaged country”—as well as a series of dictatorships that banned any movie “likely to tarnish Korea’s image abroad,” effectively stamping out realist films. Elsewhere, Meiresonne discusses how independent movies tackled such formerly taboo topics as the Korean War after the country’s democratization in the late 1980s, and how such films as Parasite garnered worldwide interest in Hallyuwood (a portmanteau of hallyu, a term for the growing prominence of Korean pop culture, and Hollywood) in the 2010s. Meiresonne seamlessly weaves film and political history into a riveting account of how Korean cinema alternatively capitulated to and challenged autocracy before growing into an internationally celebrated cultural export. Enriched by generous movie stills, this is a must for cinephiles. Photos. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Surgeon Weston (Dirty Work) takes readers on an engrossing tour of the human body. Surveying how organs function, Weston explains that the lungs, for instance, push air down passageways that “terminate in grape-like clusters called alveoli,” where oxygen crosses the “gossamer-thin” barrier between the airway and surrounding capillaries that then transport the oxygenated blood to the heart. Walkthroughs of common surgical interventions are as gripping as they are grisly, as when Weston details how harvesting a heart requires quickly draining the body by making “long slashes in the biggest veins,” dumping “fish-market quantities of ice into the cavern of chest and abdomen,” and moving the heart to an apparatus that pumps blood through it until it’s time for transplantation. Weston shatters common misconceptions, as when she explains that sex isn’t solely determined by whether one has a Y chromosome. For example, people with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome possess X and Y chromosomes but have “female” external genitalia because their bodies process male hormones atypically. Weston’s evocative descriptions will change how readers see the body (in a particularly unsettling passage, she recounts “beholding a surgeon opening a patient’s face as easily as if it were a book, to remove a large tumour”) and the anatomical trivia illuminates the astounding complexity of ordinary bodily functions. This captivates. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink