Ridgely (When I Was a Child), a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chronicles in this meticulous account the growth of an interracial Catholic community in Newton Grove, N.C., from the 1870s through the segregation era and beyond. Contrary to Gone with the Wind–style lore, Ridgely writes, plantation life fostered interracial association in Southern households (though “unequal status” permeated “nearly every interaction”), and it was traces of this former coexistence that the post-Reconstruction push for segregation sought to erase. In this context, in the 1870s, white Southerner John Carr Monk founded the Newton Grove parish after converting to Catholicism, whose doctrine of a “singular Body of Christ” he saw as validating his idea for an interracial church community where he could worship alongside his mixed-race half brother, Solomon Monk. Carr founded the parish as “interracial, albeit internally segregated,” with seating arrangements separating the races. A brief period of outright segregation began in 1939 and desegregation occurred in 1953. Ridgely makes clear throughout that Monk was no radical (his Southern upbringing and later medical studies in the North had imbued him with the racism of his day), and that the parish he founded was no “utopia” but a community that sought unity without equality as it struggled to maintain itself within the demands of the South’s white supremacist framework. Historians of American Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Over the past 50 years, increased demands on congressional representatives and senators to fundraise and woo donors, a concurrent staggering decrease in funding for staff and resources, and threats of violence and social media vitriol resulting from rising polarization, have led to a highly dysfunctional congress, according to this astute debut study. Drawing on interviews with contemporary and former legislators and staffers, political scientist Kornberg notes that today, congress members spend only a third of their time focused on legislating, as they are diverted by these spiraling obstacles. Searching for solutions, she profiles three transformative congressional freshman classes, exploring how they enacted lasting policies. The class of 1974 included a wave of young, liberal lawmakers elected in the shadow of the Vietnam War and Watergate who prioritized coalition building, campaign finance reforms, and fighting cronyism in committee assignments. The freshmen class of 1994, fueled by a conservative backlash to the Clinton presidency, spearheaded an effort to further stymie congress, disrupting bipartisan coalition building and cutting spending. The class of 2018, elected in a midterm upset during Trump’s first presidential term, pressed senior leadership toward systemic reforms and refocused on policy issues important to the electorate. The takeaway for Kornberg is that “Congress is always changeable, shaped and reshaped by the people who walk its halls.” It’s an encouraging guidebook for the upcoming midterms. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Mathias’s urgent, eye-opening debut delves into antifa’s extralegal efforts to dox white nationalists. A “decentralized... network of militant leftists,” antifa is typically depicted as a bunch of extremist agitators or an elaborate fairy tale. But the very real organization’s primary, underreported work, Mathis explains, is “naming and shaming” pseudonymous members of groups like Identity Evropa or Bowl Patrol (creepily named after mass shooter Dylann Roof’s “bowl cut hairstyle”). While placing antifa in a lineage of lefties who, in past eras, unmasked KKK members and got into street fights with skinheads, Mathias mostly focuses on the present, documenting the group’s investigative tactics, from online sleuthing to perilous undercover operations. The latter accounts for the book’s most gripping segments, as Mathias follows antifa spy Vincent during five months he spent embedded in Patriot Front, formerly Vanguard America (renamed to obscure its connection to the 2017 Unite the Right rally). Appointed his chapter’s “official photographer and videographer,” Vincent surreptitiously surveilled the group and downloaded a whopping 440 gigabytes of their data. While Vincent’s infiltration is told with thrillerish tension, Mathias also highlights the mostly “obsessive” and “tedious” work behind doxing, which culminates in the exposure of white nationalists “in real positions of power,” including high school teachers, members of the military, and a State Department official. It’s a by turns heart-pounding and heartening glimpse of the fight against fascism in the shadows. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Can human thought be accurately described in a mathematical model? asks Griffiths (Algorithms to Live By), a psychology and computer science professor at Princeton, in this entertaining and information-rich exploration. Griffiths discusses how three frameworks for formalizing thought—rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability theory—can be combined to understand how the mind works, an idea that has strong implications for AI. Starting with mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s attempts in the 17th century to reduce logical reasonings to calculations, Griffiths details efforts throughout history to codify cognition, particularly with respect to language acquisition and development. He explains the challenges of each framework (reducing thought to rules and symbols, for example, doesn’t capture how the same set of facts can lead to different interpretations) and how the other frameworks can address those challenges and come together to form a more complete understanding of human cognition. Throughout, he points out differences between human minds and AI systems, such as the fact that AI requires massive amounts of data to solve problems whereas humans can learn from small amounts of information. Griffiths discusses academic history and abstruse mathematical concepts with ease, punctuating rarefied concepts with relatable metaphors and personal asides. Readers will enjoy this lively, enlightening work. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

British journalist Mangan (Bookworm) delivers a charming account of her reading life. To be “bookish” is to never leave the house without a book, refuse to part with childhood favorites, and always stuff holiday luggage with reading material, according to Mangan, who declares, “Bookish I was born and bookish I shall die.” She traces her relationship with reading from adolescence through adulthood, beginning in the 1980s with assigned reading for secondary school English (though initially skeptical of Lord of the Flies, she was wowed by this “book that speaks to pessimists everywhere”) and her foray into historical fiction with Light a Penny Candle. While studying literature at university, she realized literary reputations aren’t always meritocratic upon discovering the work of Anne Brontë to be more captivating than anything her more famous sisters wrote. After graduation, she shaped her life around books, working first at a bookstore and then as a columnist at the Guardian, and falling in love with and marrying a fellow bookworm. Elsewhere, she shows how books helped her through postnatal depression, the Covid-19 pandemic, and her father’s death. This poignant and funny outing (Mangan opens with how she broke her ankle while simultaneously reading a book and walking up the stairs in “an off-brand Slanket”) reveals the joys of a life lived among literature. Avid readers will feel seen. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the poetic English-language debut from Pihelgas, heroine Liine returns to her family farm to start over after ending an abusive relationship with Tarmo, whom she met 14 years earlier when he was her university professor. Back in rural Tsoriksoo from the city of Tartu, sometime in the near future with temperatures rising, she throws herself into improving the farmstead. She also becomes captivated by letters exchanged between her spinster great-aunt Elvi and a woman named Selma, who was the farm’s original proprietor, and who invited Elvi to live there with her before bequeathing the farm to her. The letters inspire Liine to imagine an alternative lifestyle for herself, especially as Tarmo pressures her to come back to him. Liine’s peace is intermittently disrupted by gunfire and explosions from nearby military training exercises, and she feels unsettled and vulnerable in the rural setting (“I need to run away from myself,” she reflects, recognizing that “being in the countryside turns you a little strange,” especially with the stultifying heat and unrelenting sun). As Liine yearns for independence, Pihelgas artfully traces her slow recovery from the bad relationship (“I breathe deeply, like a person who wants to be alive and dead at the same time, like someone who’s forgotten how to breathe and is now learning it again”). This one has much to savor. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A 20-something Korean American woman chafes at her immigrant parents’ expectations in this emotive and incisive debut novel. In 2002, third-year law student Jane Kim faces an existential crisis. Growing up in Napa, Calif., where her rage-prone father ran a string of businesses, Jane’s mother, a mink-wearing woman obsessed with Korean beauty rituals, subjected her to “unhinged bullying, the kind that made me numb, unable to think straight,” causing her to follow a career path she’d never desired for herself. Jane and her brother, Kevin, once excelled at tennis and piano, but when Kevin’s grades declined in high school, their father smashed his tennis rackets as punishment. Now a San Jose police officer, Kevin’s own anger gets the better of him, and he savagely beats a homeless man, undermining his successful career. When Jane announces that instead of taking the bar exam, she’s moving across the country to study Korean American history, the news is too much for her mother, who holds a “grieving party” to mark her departure. Lee’s character work is top notch, especially as she shows how each family member struggles with the Korean notion of han, an amalgamation of anger, grief, and regret over one’s decisions. It’s a remarkable achievement. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Strung together via dream logic, this startling experimental novel from Tse (Owlish) forays into a bizarre Hong Kong vanishing around its inhabitants. The unnamed narrator, now a young man, recounts his childhood when the world was whole and he lived with his parents, who fantasized about winning the lottery, and a younger sister whom everyone seemed to forget about. Things changed after his mother joined forces with other housewives to protest a local market’s shoddy produce, and police sprayed the women with a glitter powder that turned them into statues. Then his sister vanished out a bus window, only to return to him as a disembodied voice, and his father, who once worked at a toy factory and practiced tai chi in the park, became a couch potato, to the point of being absorbed into the home’s gigantic television set. Now, neighborhood vendors disappear around him, sidewalks turn to desert, and government checkpoints prevent easy travel. Tse risks incoherence with non sequiturs and ghastly images cramming each page, including an “island-shaped tumor” floating around the protagonist’s body, but a climactic twist ties it all together. For those willing to let these images wash over them, the novel offers a rewarding exploration of change and loss. Agent: Jessica Friedman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mulder and van Ravestein (The Sour City), heads of the marketing firm Mattmo, trace in this enjoyable history how the pickle has shaped New York City’s culinary culture. Pickling began in ancient Mesopotamia as a means of preserving foodstuffs in a hot climate, later becoming a core part of Roman gastronomy and spreading across the globe via the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It became a prominent part of American cuisine when an influx of Jews emigrated from Russia, Germany, Austria, and Poland, to lower Manhattan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bringing with them recipes and know-how, immigrant Jews made pickles in cramped tenements, shaping a thriving deli culture on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with such establishments as Russ & Daughters and Katz’s Delicatessen, and inspiring pickle companies across the country. Filled with fun facts, eye-catching photos and other ephemera (including a map of New York City’s pickle vendors and stores from 1895 to present), it makes for both a colorful food history and a testament to immigrants’ contributions to American cuisine. Readers will want to take a bite. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Africa can achieve sustainable economic growth if governments there boost agriculture and manufacturing while avoiding political upheavals and war, according to this sweeping analysis. Journalist Studwell (How Asia Works) ascribes Africa’s poverty to chronic underpopulation and European colonial rule. Thanks to booming, better-educated populations, however, African economies are now poised to take off, he argues, provided governments follow the development playbook of Asian countries like South Korea and China. The key measures, he contends, are supporting small-scale farming with land redistribution and credit for seeds and fertilizers; making targeted investments in export-oriented manufacturing that fosters industrial ecosystems; and building infrastructure. Studwell reports on the growing economies of such African countries as Mauritius, Botswana, and Ethiopia. Drawing on World Bank statistics and his own reportage on innovative farmers and dynamic manufacturing start-ups, Studwell paints richly detailed portraits of African economies and takes an optimistic stance on the continent’s future, which isn’t always convincing, given sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is economically stagnant (it was slightly poorer in 2024 than in 2014 on a per-capita GDP basis). Still, Studwell is worth reading for his fine-grained insights into African politics and economies. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink