“Data is the most powerful force in society today,” designer Lupi (Dear Data) and brand strategist Cox (What a Building Does) observe in this wide-ranging collection of interviews exploring the increasing dominance of numerical data as a communicative tool. Pinpointing the Covid pandemic as the “rude awakening” that first plunged the world into its ongoing fixation with data tracking and data visualization, the authors speak to experts ranging from a TV meteorologist to a MoMA curator. The q&a-style conversations touch on myriad hot button issues, including the use of data to fight climate change and how data collecting has been a “leading factor in making the case for... legal protections for trans people.” Alongside the interviews, Lupi and Cox reflect on their own data visualization projects, such as a “poetic meditation” on the U.S. census that brainstorms ways to make its staid questions into a “richer encapsulation of human identity,” and Lupi’s data-focused attempts to “try to figure out what was happening to me” by tracking her symptoms, medications, and treatments when struggling with long Covid. Ingeniously, some of the most fascinating responses come from the simplest questions, like a prompt to define data: an artist calls it “a form of memory”; a “tech pioneer” asserts, “Data is life”; a writer labels it “a magical thing.” It’s an illuminating look at data’s growing ubiquity. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this captivating volume, folklorist Mayor (The First Fossil Hunters) guides readers through the emerging field of geomythology, which revisits ancient myths for what they reveal of natural history. She examines 53 tales from around the world, showing how they evolved from premodern peoples’ need to make sense of natural occurrences, usually ones that were unprecedented and inexplicable, like meteor strikes, disappearing lakes, and frogs and fish falling from the skies. These myths, she writes, provide insight into the ways people have been trying to make rational, proto-scientific sense of the natural world for thousands of years, but also preserve memories of violent catastrophes. These include the volcanic eruption of Budj Bim in Southern Australia a little over 36,000 years ago —Aboriginal tales of the event “convey perceptive observations and understanding of natural evidence” that have “help[ed] scientists to understand... geological events in Australia’s remote past.” In between tales of flaming bodies of water and singing sand dunes, Mayor also includes contemporary geomyths like the Chicago Rat Hole, an impression shaped like a rat’s body in a city sidewalk that drew Chicagoans bearing tokens (pennies, flowers, candles, cheese) in early 2024, which help to illustrate that “the human impulse to find meaning... in an extraordinary event... is a strong, timeless, and evolutionarily valuable tendency.” Written with wit and erudition, this delights. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

With this frenetic homage to cult classic horror films, first serialized via Substack, Peterson (Strong Bones) delivers a relentless and over-the-top supernatural thriller. When an elite FBI task force slays the supernatural slasher who’d been stalking a summer camp for decades, they unknowingly tip the balance of the cosmos, setting off an apocalyptic series of natural disasters. To restore the status quo, the enigmatic being overseeing Hell’s minions on Earth recruits Letta Starchild, daughter of an infamous cult leader, to replace him as Guildmaster. Her initiation test: break her mother’s soul out of Hell. Letta assembles a team for the heist, including two former friends from her mother’s Starchild Ranch: FBI agent Frith, who triggered the cataclysm, and hyperactive conspiracy theorist Nicky Nicodemus. Along with a supernatural Dream Master and a killer-possessed teddy bear, the gang enters supernatural realms to obtain a key, open a vault, and extract Letta’s mother. But with the universe at stake and time running out, they’re up against impossible odds. Peterson packs the text with tongue-in-cheek pop culture references, often to the point of distraction. Still, plot twists, side quests, unfolding backstories, and wild cosmology keep the pages turning on the way to a brutal climax. Fans of self-aware meta-horror will want to check this out. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This kaleidoscopic account from historian Davis (From Head Shops to Whole Foods) looks at how local “police provocateurs” and federal intelligence agencies manipulated and harassed the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s from both within and without. Drawing on testimonies uncovered during the 1975 congressional Church Committee hearings, at which many covert ops against the “Black freedom and antiwar movements” were “unmasked” to the American public, Davis considers how local acts of sabotage (like the NYPD’s use of undercover spies) and open violence (like Birmingham’s “red squads”) worked in lockstep with more cohesive federal efforts to discredit groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and hasten the end of the civil rights movement. The result is a convincing, shrewdly structured case that there isn’t as much sunlight between the undercover FBI agent and the brutalizing riot cop as many Americans would like to think. Particularly deft is how Davis traces the ethos of “political policing” that motivated J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program back to anti-anarchist efforts in the 1900s. Davis also pays keen attention to how activists fought back, astutely arguing that civil rights groups’ responses to political policing laid a foundation for today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a vital corrective to the idea that anti-racist activists, then or now, are fighting in a vacuum. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This thorough and damning account from journalist Di Cintio (Driven) profiles migrant workers who traveled to Canada from Costa Rica, India, and the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker program and found themselves subjected to inhumane and dangerous working conditions. Delving into the history of the program, which was founded in 1973, and its inner workings, he argues that it is inherently flawed, as it allows the workers to be drastically taken advantage of due to restrictions that keep them from moving jobs and, in some instances, from receiving medical care. While some business owners and other stakeholders Di Cintio speaks with concede that “our migrant labour system allows bad actors to act badly,” Di Cintio goes further, arguing that “the problem isn’t a few bad apples,” and that the system is in fact working as designed, in a punitive and harmful manner. He does so via tangential explorations of the exploitative situations faced by other migrants ranging from foreign students studying in Canada to human-trafficking victims. While offering precise and useful insights into the Canadian system, Di Cintio also provides rich food for thought about the role migration plays in the global order. It’s worth a look for anyone concerned about the harsh treatment of migrants. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this stirring tribute, Clyburn, South Carolina’s ninth Black congressman, profiles his eight predecessors, Black Republicans who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1868 to 1897. They include Robert Smalls, who won his freedom during the Civil War by hijacking a Confederate ship; George Washington Murray, an ex-slave who became a prosperous landowner; and Richard Cain, a prominent freeborn Methodist minister. Their saga starts with extraordinary hopes in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment and federal civil rights laws enforced by federal occupation troops gave Black South Carolinians the right to vote, resulting in a state legislature and Congressional delegation dominated by Black Republicans who pursued measures to give freedmen land, education, and equality. Later chapters recount the backlash: hundreds of Republicans were murdered by the KKK and the Red Shirt militia, Democratic election officials stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters, and unfairly implemented voting regulations caused Black voter registration to plummet. Clyburn chronicles the dogged struggle of his eight predecessors to preserve Black rights—Smalls was almost killed when Red Shirts invaded a campaign rally—as they navigated Democratic violence, an increasingly indifferent Congress, and intra-Party rivalries. The narrative is full of drama, and Clyburn adds insights from his own experience breaking racial barriers as a civil-rights-era politician. It adds up to a gripping account of political courage under the most fraught circumstances. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Set in 1925 Paris, the latest from two-time World Fantasy Award winner Powers (My Brother’s Keeper) is a colorful dark fantasy spun from the exploits of the Lost Generation. Among them is American expatriate Harry Nolan, who is confronted one afternoon by Genevieve “Vivi” Chastain, a 19-year-old orphan who holds him at gunpoint and demands to read an article he has been hired to illustrate by a local newspaper. The piece—which was written by Ernest Hemingway—is an interview with an aged bullfighter that references both the legend of the Phoenician god Moloch and a means of destroying him, and it has aroused the ire of the sauteurs, a secret society devoted to Moloch, who achieve immortality by repeatedly commandeering the bodies of young children. Vivi, it turns out, is a victim of one such sauteur, with whom she shares a body. Her efforts to shake this usurper’s soul pitch her and Harry headlong into wild escapades involving Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, a ghoulish traipse through the catacombs, and a fiery finale in Spain. Powers dextrously weaves invented myth with real historical detail to create a gripping adventure. Readers are sure to be hooked. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Latta debuts with a disquieting look at abuses of power in America’s evangelical megachurches, which he paints as currently undergoing consolidation under an insular tier of power brokers. He first delves into the troubling issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by church leaders, and the machinations that allow them to repeatedly return to positions of authority in new churches. From there, he explores the physical, psychological, and economic ways that megachurches and affiliated institutions can take advantage of devout believers, including one evangelical program so violent that an outsider mistook it for a kidnapping, prompting police involvement. Finally, the book explores the way that megachurches can draw parishioners away from smaller churches, often leading to their closure, even as, in a fascinating turn, he shows that in the 2020s, many megachurches have begun franchising, meaning physical congregations are technically growing smaller again, though remaining tightly linked to a hub church. Along the way, Latta spotlights people who are working to address a flawed system, among them Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham who has made it his mission to fight sexual assault within religious communities. Latta also troublingly notes the ways in which some megachurches have aligned themselves with Trumpian politics. The result is a harrowing look at a growing and in many ways unaccountable force in American political life. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Rosenberg (Another Zionism, Another Judaism) offers a harsh and ruminative look at Israel’s early years. Born and raised in Sweden to Polish parents, Rosenberg migrated to Israel as a teen in 1962 with his mother after his father’s death. During the two and a half years Rosenberg lived there before returning to Sweden, he never so much as spoke to an Arab Palestinian, he recalls, even as the “Arab threat” was a constant refrain, with Arabs routinely portrayed in pop culture as “sneaky, bloodthirsty and cowardly.” The European Jews that dominated elite Israeli society weren’t much nicer to “oriental or Sephardic” Jews either, he notes, considering them uncivilized. Drawing on archival sources alongside his own recollections, Rosenberg traces how Zionists conceptualized Israel as a homeland for the “new type of Jew”—“blonde, blue-eyed, tough, physical and nonintellectual”—which made the fact that Israel had to be constituted with “weakling” Holocaust survivors a shameful disappointment to Zionists. At the same time, he notes, the memory of the Holocaust made vengeance a central tenet of political life. (He points to an Israeli soldier and Auschwitz survivor who admitted to killing hundreds of Egyptian civilians during the 1956 Sinai War because it was “great revenge.”) To this day, Rosenberg argues, a potent mix of shame and vengeance keep Israelis caught in a cycle of violence. It’s a profound reckoning. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gaythwaite (Underburn) delves into the secret lives of his seemingly ordinary protagonists in this contemplative collection of 11 stories. The title entry follows a gay former hustler who fondly remembers a man he fell in love with, but betrayed and exploited. The narrator of “If Only You Knew” grapples with his similarities to his father, who abandoned the family when the narrator was a boy. In “Off the Grid,” Katie’s husband proudly returns to their suburban home after a fistfight, resurfacing her memories of her violent ex-boyfriend and his untimely death. Gaythwaite can be prone to repetition—“The Lost Object Exercise” also features a gay man whose hustling past has caught up with him, while the protagonist of “The Simple Part” recalls the sudden death of a former lover and withholds these thoughts from his current boyfriend. Still, these stories get a great deal of mileage from what goes unsaid, sidestepping melodrama and leaving the reader to consider the impact of the characters’ tumultuous pasts on their current lives. There’s much to admire in this well-crafted collection. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Brandt & Hochman. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink