In this buoyant survey, journalist Ahamed (A Matter of Trust) documents the rising number of high-profile Indian Americans in business, science, and politics over recent decades. Ahamed, who migrated to the U.S. from India in 1970, argues that unlike when she first arrived, Indians have become ubiquitous in the American public sphere, with prominent roles as “techies,” “influencers,” and “healers.” She profiles early tech founders such as Kanwal Rekhi (Excelan), Nikesh Arora (Cirrus Logic), and Suhas Patil (Sun Microsystems), who all arrived from India in the ’60s and ’70s with no more than eight dollars in their pocket (the highest amount permitted by India’s then socialist government) and ended up creating billions of dollars in wealth. Among the “influencers” profiled are sisters Chandrika Tandon (one of the first partners at management consulting firm McKinsey) and Indra Nooyi (former CEO of Pepsi), who both rebelled against their traditional family’s expectations when they realized that “our mother was stockpiling items for our marriage trousseaus.” Later chapters pivot to today’s prominent first-generation Indian Americans, like California congressman Ro Khanna, and speculate on what attributes to the outsize success of Indian immigrants, noting that perhaps the Indian emigration process plays a role, as it rigorously vets and prescreens those applying for competitive U.S. academic and work visas. It’s an upbeat, informative look at immigrant contributions to America. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This pulsating, blood-soaked slow-burn romance from writer Duggan (the Deadpool series) and artist Brown (the Massive series) joyfully remixes tropes from the samurai and western genres. Amid vigorous head-loppings, brain-splattering six-shooter action, and sword-and-spear clashes against zombie hordes, each staged and colored with sickening power, this series kickoff favors pared-down storytelling and archetypal characterization. In 1877, on opposite ends of the earth, a revenge-driven male cowboy and a defeated but incapable-of-surrender female samurai fight their doomed battles to the death, linked by smart cross-cutting and twilight imagery. Both awake with the “corpse tide” on a deserted island where other dead warriors assemble each night to fend off ravenous ghouls. As the protagonists acclimate to the afterlife and slowly discover each other’s elemental powers, Brown’s nimble, inventive layouts capture the passage of otherworldly time. Amid the plethora of battles, every decapitation is an event. Notably, though, some grindhouse conventions are upended, such as a scene of attempted rape in which the woman saves the man. More familiar are new agey hints about the mysteries of the island—perhaps inevitably, redemption is a theme. This gritty-but-heartfelt genre mash-up embraces the medium’s freedoms and possibilities without pretension. It’s perfect for readers who favor red meat and formal rigor. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cannibalistic body horror meets cosmic terror in this juicy feast of fear from Walker (The Last Siege) and Greenwood (the Stumptown series). Six bickering friends in search of an offbeat vacation pull up to a sleepy western town that was terrorized 100 years ago by a serial killer called the Butcher of the Silver Mines. (“It’s folk horror. Very popular right now,” the most online member of the group assures the gang.) After sampling the local diner’s burgers, they experience hunger, hallucinations, and worse. In classic horror fashion, when they try to escape, their car won’t start. Flashbacks fill in the characters’ backstories, while in the present, their relationships, minds, and bodies disintegrate. As the terror ratchets up from cannibalistic killers to vaster and stranger threats, Walker’s script draws from H.P. Lovecraft and his acolytes, including Laird Barron, while Greenwood’s dynamic, character-focused art has an off-kilter edge reminiscent of ’90s indie artists like Sam Kieth. Deep shadows and close-ups of meat and teeth create a menacing mood from the start. Readers with an appetite for splatter will be satisfied. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wolf, frontman for the J. Geils Band from 1967 to 1983, delivers a rollicking debut memoir. He begins with a charming recollection of his 1950s childhood in the Bronx: his father was a shy but talented singer, his mother politically conscious to the point that the FBI once came knocking at the door. Originally a painter, Wolf studied art in Boston—where he roomed with a young David Lynch—but a stint as the first all-night DJ on radio station WBCN convinced him that music was his true love. The Greenwich Village folk scene pulled Wolf back to New York, where he caught regular performances from the likes of Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker. Immersed in this world, Wolf formed the Hallucinations, which eventually morphed into the J. Geils Band. Along with rapturous descriptions of music-making and behind-the-scenes details about his contentious departure from the group, Wolf delivers a series of satisfying name-drops, including a tender account of his five-year marriage to Faye Dunaway, a passage about brushing elbows with Peter Sellers, and sections on collaborating with Ray Price, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson. Worldly-wise but never too self-serious, Wolf makes for excellent company. The rocker’s fans will be thrilled. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 |

Investigative journalist Renner (Little, Crazy Children) examines the death of a Boy Scout leader in this disturbing account. In 1995, Mike Klingler, the director of Ohio’s Seven Ranges Boy Scout Reservation, died of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances. After Klingler was accused of raping the camp’s nature and crafts director, he was dismissed before the summer session ended. Soon after, he was found in a field near his home with a bullet in his chest. In 2022, Renner—a former summer counselor at Seven Ranges—reconnected with a fellow Scout, with whom he shared his suspicions that Klingler might have been murdered. Their conversation prompted Renner to reexamine his experiences at Seven Ranges and dig into Klingler’s death. Renner buttresses his search for the truth with a searing look at the history of sexual assault in the Boy Scouts, which he notes has prompted nearly eight times as many abuse claims as those against the Catholic Church. His research turns up no easy answers, but his blend of dogged reporting and first-person recollection of the uncomfortably sexualized rituals he experienced as a young scout lends the proceedings a fierce immediacy. It’s a chilling study of unchecked power. Photos. Agent: Joëlle Delbourgo, Joëlle Delbourgo Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Reading Glasses podcaster O’Meara (The Lady from the Black Lagoon) recounts the trailblazing career of stuntwoman Helen Gibson (1892–1977), born Rose August Wenger, in this high-flying biography. O’Meara suggests Wenger’s decision to join a traveling Wild West show as a cowgirl when she was 17 reflected the early 20th-century “New Woman” movement’s push for women’s equal participation in public society. In 1911, a film producer noticed Wenger’s troupe during a performance in Venice, Calif., and hired them to appear as extras in westerns. Wenger married fellow rodeo rider Hoot Gibson in 1913 and, after he fell ill, replaced him as actor Helen Holmes’s stunt double in the western serial The Hazards of Helen. After Holmes exited the role in 1915, Wenger changed her name to Helen, took over starring duties, and continued to perform such stunts as leaping from an airplane onto a moving train and escaping from a speeding car before it careens off a cliff. Gibson’s death-defying feats astound, and O’Meara provides perceptive context on the era’s gender politics. For instance, she notes that the careers of Holmes and Gibson both suffered by the 1920s, when moral crusaders began censoring women roughhousing on film. It’s an enthralling tribute to an early Hollywood pioneer. Photos. Agent: Amy Bishop, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

The “ideologies and stereotypes” that define modern motherhood mainly serve to cast blame on mothers, writes Bollen, a U.K.-based postnatal practitioner, in this intriguing debut. Bollen posits that these “Good Mother Myths” are underpinned by two factors: the first is bad science (based on bad assumptions) that overstates findings in order to generate sensational headlines; the second is a cultural tendency to associate women with nature. Bollen breaks down what happens when these two tenets interact, showing how they create contradictions that mean whichever choice a mother makes is judged by society as the wrong one (with neither choice in fact being particularly based on well-founded guidance). For example, she cites how women are equally “vilified” for cesarean sections and home births, or for breastfeeding or formula-feeding, even though all can be necessary options depending on the circumstances. Bollen also criticizes attachment parenting, arguing that it overemphasize mothers’ abilities to shape their children’s emotional landscape. As a corrective to such mother-blaming, Bollen calls for a slew of systemic changes that prioritize new mothers’ health and access to fact-based science; she also suggests adopting a concept called “motherdom”—“an expansive conception of motherhood” that will “depose” the current “institution.” While this concept feels fairly nebulous, the book is still worthwhile for Bollen’s fascinating investigations into the origins of a slew of supposedly scientific parenting advice. It’s a satisfying revolt against holier-than-thou moralizing around mothers. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Carstensen debuts with a riveting blow-by-blow account of the Oct. 28, 2015, sinking of a boat full of refugees near the Greek island of Lesbos. Nearly 300 passengers were rescued after the overcrowded boat carrying them from Turkey capsized in the Aegean, while several dozen drowned—the single largest loss of life of the Mediterranean refugee crisis that year. Carstensen creates a vivid panorama of the event that also serves as a kaleidoscopic look at the conveyor belt–like system that turned the Mediterranean into a mass “graveyard” over the course of the 2010s. She includes fascinating perspectives from the residents of Turkish seaside towns where the financial incentives for people smuggling are so high that almost everyone is involved (“Locals who didn’t take part in this business were seen as imbeciles,” one interviewee explains), Greek rescue workers who recall arriving at a hellish scene (one recounts how a fellow deckhand spiraled into a panic attack as “cries for help rang out at them from every direction”), and a multinational group of survivors whose harrowing recollections bring vivid life, both terrible and sweet, back to the nameless dead (playful children roughhousing with their parents before the wreck; a life-jacketed man bobbing in the water during the aftermath, attempting, but failing for some time, to drown himself after losing his children). It’s a crushing account of a senseless tragedy. (Mar.)

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that more than 200 passengers drowned and several dozen were rescued.

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this charming study, Pasquier (Birds in Winter), an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, uses sleep as a lens through which to examine the ecology and behavior of birds. He explains that birds, like humans, need sleep to consolidate learning and memory, citing studies that found songbirds practice their tunes by moving their laryngeal muscles as if singing while they slumber. Picking places to roost often involves trade-offs, Pasquier contends, noting that American robins will sleep on the outer branches of fir trees because the needles provide more concealment than closer to the trunk, where there’s more protection from wind. Positing that roosting habits reveal species’ social rituals and organization, Pasquier discusses how African black ducks spend their twilight hours congregating in groups to find mates with whom to sleep, and how red-bill choughs doze in communal roosts where birds too young to mate are “socially segregated according to their age and breeding prospects” from more mature birds. Pasquier packs in a bounty of surprising trivia (many birds have the capacity to rest only half their brain while the other half remains awake, enabling common swifts, frigate birds, and other species to sleep in the air), and La Farge’s dreamy black-and-white pencil drawings are an added treat. Birders will be entranced. Illus. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Baylor University history professor Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood) provides a blistering critique of the narrowing options for female leadership in the evangelical church. Barr describes how the second half of the 20th century saw the role of the pastor’s wife morph into an unpaid “extension of the husband’s ministry,” as wives became responsible for unpaid duties ranging from the official and religious (teaching Bible studies) to the unofficial (looking presentable in church to reflect well on their husbands). She attributes these developments partly to backlash over rising rates of female ordination in the 1970s, which culminated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1984 denunciation of female pastorship. As a result, Barr explains, “pastoral wifeship” became the only viable leadership option for evangelical women. Barr highlights prominent female Christians of the past (Benedictine nuns Milburga and Hildegard of Bingen wielded power “surpass[ing] that of queens”) to argue that women’s pastorship is historically grounded, and calls on the SBC to legitimize female pastorship and allow more flexible expectations for pastor’s wives. Barr draws on extensive research to perceptively track the evolution of women’s leadership roles and explore how a rigidly hierarchal system where “male power is privileged at the cost of women” incites broader destructive effects, including the brushing aside of sexual abuse scandals under the guise of maintaining a “redemptive community.” The result is a powerful indictment of an unequal system. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink