Art historian Dempsey (Styles, Schools & Movements) explores in this thought-provoking survey how women have been portrayed in art over the past 500 years. In 80 short essays—one for each work—she explores how renderings of the female body have shaped and been shaped by societal values. Titian and Alexandre Cabanel’s paintings of Venus, for example, depict an idealized nude figure whose “mythical assignment” allowed her to be viewed without scandal, while Édouard Manet’s Olympia shocked audiences with its subject’s “confrontational gaze” and helped to “modernize the tradition of the female nude.” Dempsey also considers how these works responded to their political contexts. For example, Lee Miller’s 1944 photograph FFIWorker, Paris, France, depicts a Resistance fighter whose striking hairstyle and bright lipstick served as an implicit rebuke of Nazi ideals of femininity. British sculptor John Bell’s 1853 work A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic, which portrays a shackled African woman, communicated a pointed anti-slavery message during the American Civil War. Also discussed are Australian sculptor Julie Rrap’s SOMOS (Standing on My Own Shoulders), which features two life-size casts of the 73-year-old artist’s body, and Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s Nuestra senora de las iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), which documents the everyday lives of the Zapotec people. Comprehensive and lucidly written, this is a worthy addition to any art lover’s library. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Haddon (The Porpoise) pieces together family photographs, illustrations, and vivid biographical snippets for this panoramic memoir. Moving nonsequentially, Haddon mines his memories of growing up in Northampton with self-involved parents (“You have to remember... that he only wanted one child,” his mother told his sister when she complained their father didn’t love her), a stint as a young adult caretaking for a rigidly religious disabled man, and his time as a children’s book author and illustrator. He also discusses his turn to writing for adults, though he admits it’s hard to separate recollections of writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from “memories of the answers I’ve given” in interviews. The focus, though, is squarely on his relationships and his intellectual fascinations, including the fickle nature of memory and the mind, caring for his obstinate parents in their decline, and theories about writing as a kind of mysterious descent into the subconscious. Interspersed throughout are Haddon’s drawings, including a painting of his mother sitting at his father’s bedside, along with photos and ephemera like his paternal grandfather’s cigarette cards. Haddon writes of his “inability to weave the patchily remembered events of [his] own life into a coherent narrative,” but the result is utterly transfixing in its meandering approach. It’s a strange, beautiful work that exposes the inner workings of a creative mind. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this unique biography, Holland (Conversations with Wilde), Oscar Wilde’s grandson, explores the long-lasting impact of Wilde’s criminal conviction for homosexuality in London in 1895 and seeks to clear up misconceptions related to the incident. Holland starts with Wilde’s final years—his release from prison in 1897 until his death at 46 three years later—but the majority of the book focuses on Wilde’s friends and family. Wilde’s ex-lover, Bosie Douglas, proved litigious, suing Wilde biographer Arthur Ransome for implying he was responsible for Wilde’s downfall. Wilde had a disparate impact on his two sons, “one wanting to claim what little of his father’s artistic temperament he might have inherited and the other desperately anxious to distance himself from it at all costs.” Elsewhere, Holland elucidates the development and protection of his grandfather’s literary reputation as first his parents, then he, process copyright claims, work with biographers and filmmakers, and debunk fake manuscripts. Holland makes a valuable addition to Wilde scholarship, but the promised myth-busting focuses mostly on details that will speak only to the most obsessive Wilde fans, such as the motive behind a donation to erect a statue on Wilde’s grave. While the account’s comprehensiveness comes at the cost of narrative propulsion, this is sure to make a splash among Wilde scholars. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

American-Israeli Holocaust scholar Bartov (Anatomy of a Genocide) offers a powerful meditation on his birth country’s turn toward violence. Bartov chronicles the “tragic transformation of Zionism” from a movement that “sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression” into “a state ideology of ethno-nationalism.” Lamenting the “bitter cunning of history,” Bartov confronts the awful resonances between his academic work about the Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He reflects impactfully on growing up in Tel Aviv neighborhoods “built... over the remnants of Palestinian villages,” and on his IDF service, when he was wounded in a training accident that was subsequently covered up, which he pegs as an early glimpse of his government’s compromised ethics. Concluding that Israel’s extremism is at least partly an “inevitable consequence of... settler colonialism,” Bartov finds some hope for reconciliation in the idea of drawing connections between the Holocaust and the 1948 Nakba, the forced displacement of Palestinians, asserting that “reflecting jointly on these two crucial events can have a transformative effect on Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian mutual understanding.” Nevertheless, he remains a realist, recognizing that equality for Palestinians would have to be essentially forced upon the Israeli political class and could “only happen under firm and determined American leadership.” It’s a clear-eyed work of moral reckoning. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Finnish psychologist Lassander makes her English-language debut with a measured guide to how money influences daily routines, relationships, and happiness, in which she argues that aligning one’s finances with their values can improve overall well-being. She demonstrates how financial habits, like saving and attitudes toward debt, are often learned from one’s family and culture, and examines the complex role emotions play in financial decisions. A person, for example, might find security and pleasure from shopping and turn to the activity when feeling low, but this can lead to shame and regret when the credit card bill arrives. Lassander encourages readers to identify and understand their core values and let them guide financial decisions. To do so, she offers mindfulness exercises, like closing one’s eyes and asking, “What does a balanced and good relationship with the economy look like in my life?” as well as values-based money management tips, like “Enjoy your home as a home.... Ownership is not the most important issue.” Elsewhere, she shows readers how to deal with financial setbacks and how to determine personal notions of financial success. Readers seeking concrete financial instruction will find the advice more conceptual than tactical, and the book’s breadth occasionally dilutes its focus. Still, the author’s emphasis on values-driven decision-making offers a distinctive alternative to performance-oriented wealth-building programs. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stob (The Art of Public Speaking), a professor of American studies and communication studies at Vanderbilt, casts an uneven light on one family’s outsize role in the rise of phrenology. After tracing the pseudoscience’s foundations in German academia, the author tracks how the blue-blooded Fowler siblings—Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte—relentlessly advocated for phrenology in 19th-century America via lectures, heated arguments with skeptics, their own publishing house, and a Lower Manhattan storefront-cum-tourist attraction filled with skulls. Stob contextualizes their work within the era’s broader pop-culture amalgamation of self-improvement, celebrity, and spectacle, along the way providing numerous oddball anecdotes about the Fowlers’ examinations of subjects’ heads (a butcher’s child was deemed to have “extremely large Destructiveness,” accounting for his macabre glee at watching cattle being slaughtered). Stob also offers captivatingly bizarre profiles of the Fowlers themselves, especially Orson, who penned thousand-page books on sex and promoted octagon-shaped houses. However, the author’s fondness for the Fowlers and apparently earnest desire to reappraise phrenology, long associated with eugenics, leads him to, at times, downplay the siblings’ racist views. Similarly peculiar is a concluding section offering tips on “DIY phrenology” (“Whenever you examine a stranger, you’ll need to start a bit more carefully”). Such sour notes overshadow an otherwise morbidly fascinating tale of obsession. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Smith (The Golden Ticket) chronicles in this charming, bittersweet memoir a road trip she took across California with her mother and daughter in 2023. Though the trip’s destination—the Field of Light art installation in Paso Robles—is carefully planned, missed turns, minor mishaps, and emotional detours arise after “the stylish one, the responsible one, and the fun one” (Smith’s mother, Smith, and Smith’s daughter, respectively) depart from Palo Alto. As the miles tick by, Smith interweaves travelogue with family history, recalling anecdotes both comic and poignant, including her grandfather’s obsession with CB radios and a disastrous incident when her grandmother accidentally flung her wedding ring into a zoo enclosure in Rome. The women are linked, too, by pop culture, including a shared affinity for The White Lotus (“There is something deeply satisfying in watching rich people having a terrible time in one of the most beautiful places on earth”). Beneath the humor runs a graver current, as Smith discusses her family’s Soviet-Jewish heritage and the varied fates of her ancestors after Germany invaded the Soviet Union during WWII. It adds up to a modest but affecting account of cross-generational exchange. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Astrophysicist Oluseyi (A Quantum Life) asserts in this disappointing treatise that the universe can be broken down into nine realms. One night, while observing the stars with a telescope, he spotted the Andromeda galaxy. Despite being 2.5 million light-years away, the “hazy blob” appeared larger than the much closer moon. That moment sparked a revelation: “I began to imagine reality as layered—not just in scale, but in rules.” At the level of galaxies, or what he calls the Cosmological Realm, notions of time and distance conceivable in the human world (the Middle Realm) fall away. Similarly, at the subatomic level, or the Quantum Realm, particles far too small for humans to see defy classical physics. Despite their vast differences, all the realms coexist, he posits, “fitting together like interlocking gears” and making existence possible. Some of the realms Oluseyi presents involve speculative thinking. For instance, in the section on the Realm of Imagination—the intellectual space where science enables educated guesses about the future—he hypothesizes how humans will respond to the eventual death of the sun, arguing it’s more reasonable for humans to build their own artificial star than search for another inhabitable planet. Despite his chatty style and colloquial language, Oluseyi struggles to clearly explain complex physics concepts. General readers will be left scratching their heads. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bloomberg journalist Chellel (Dead in the Water) sheds light on advantage gambling, or using math and technology to beat the house, through the stories of three of its pioneers in this fascinating history. In the 1970s, gamblers Bill Nelson, Rob Reitzen, and Bill Benter arrived in Las Vegas obsessed with beating the house, and went on to redefine what that meant. Nelson’s success with a computer-driven sports betting syndicate drew FBI scrutiny before he resurfaced with a lucrative roulette operation. Reitzen went from playing poker in casinos to founding online poker sites where human players competed against algorithmic bots, with fortunes won and lost at dizzying speed. The most spectacular arc belongs to Benter, who became a legend in Hong Kong and U.S. horse racing by combining massive betting syndicates with sophisticated statistical modeling, and later parlayed his winnings into the Benter Foundation, which supports causes including the arts, Alzheimer’s research, and financial education. Chellel balances technical explanations with vivid character portraits, making complicated systems accessible to the layperson. With its colorful cast and levelheaded look at the arms race between gamblers and casinos, this is an addictive profile of the rule breakers who anticipated gambling’s data-driven future. Readers will be thrilled. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, WME. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A pair of explosions bookend this amusing debut memoir from Canadian philanthropist Thicke. In 1972, when Thicke was 14, she and her brother returned to their Ontario farmhouse with their father, Dacker, only to find it burned to the ground after he let the fire insurance lapse. “Well kids,” he responded, “now we’re free!” Over a decade later, Dacker triggered an accidental gas explosion in his motor home, then commented only that his face would look “as smooth as a baby’s bottom” when he healed. In between conflagrations, Thicke chronicles growing up mostly under Dacker’s loving but absentminded care after her parents’ divorce. The family’s financial security relied mostly on the success of his harebrained moneymaking schemes, including selling scrap metal and inventing a machine to capture gold particles that slip through sieves. As exasperating—and occasionally harrowing—as her early years often were, Thicke nonetheless captures her father’s soft heart: when she was an adult, her best friend died in a plane crash, and her mother hesitated to make a short trip to console her, while Dacker flew immediately to her side from Hawaii. Compassionate, poignant, and surprising, this is a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about complicated parent-child bonds. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink