Musician Huguenor debuts with a scrupulous history of San Jose, Calif., indie label Asian Man Records and its enigmatic founder, Mike Park. Park, who still runs the label out of his parent’s garage, spent time in punk and ska bands in the 1980s and ’90s, most notably as a horn player for Skankin’ Pickle. He also ran the jokingly named Dill Records, originally founded to release Skankin’ Pickle’s music but which went on to sign and produce albums for a number of ska groups. Park left the band and label in 1996, founding Asian Man soon after. Huguenor recounts the careers of the label’s key bands, including the Lawrence Arms and the feverish making of their albums A Guided Tour of Chicago and Ghost Stories, and Alkaline Trio, which helped expand Asian Man’s offerings beyond traditional ska. While some of the label’s biggest names, like Less than Jake, eventually migrated to better-known labels, these moves spiked interest in the bands’ previous albums, driving sales at Asian Man. Throughout, Huguenor highlights Park’s ceaseless ambition and brings the history alive with exacting detail, interviews with many of the label’s musicians, and photos and excerpts from Park’s newsletters and correspondences. Devoted ska fans will want to take a look. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this unflinching audit of American history, political scientist Watts Smith (Stay Woke) surveys the many ways that Black people’s testimonies have been systematically ignored and excluded. Noting the cyclical nature of civil rights advancements and white supremacist backlashes, she suggests that the latter are often predicated on new methods of dismissing “Black evidence.” To make her case, Watts Smiths spotlights numerous well-known contemporary examples of anti-Black brutality and inequity, showing how they connect to longer histories of the suppression of Black speech. For example, she situates the questioning of the credibility of Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin, during her testimony in Martin’s murder trial, within America’s lengthy history of the exclusion of legal testimony by Black people, which she suggests has created a lasting “presumption of Black incompetence.” She discusses the viral video of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery alongside the history of gaslighting of Black witnesses to crimes—increasingly challenged today by video evidence. And she ties Black women’s higher rates of maternal mortality, likely stemming from doctors’ ongoing trivialization of Black patients’ accounts of their own pain, to the legacy of eugenics and the “medicalizing” of Blackness. By astutely placing the past in conversation with the present, this compels readers to consider the way bleak, unaddressed histories continue to cause harm. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former Washington Post Book World editor Hartigan revisits the 1937 disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart in this globe-trotting debut. Weaving a biography of Earhart with accounts of contemporary search efforts employing cutting-edge technology, Hartigan restores a sense of wonder to Earhart’s all-too-human quest to exceed expectations and contemplates the similar impulse to greatness that motivates Earhart-ologists. In an enticing fish-out-of-water prologue, Hartigan, “a married, middle-aged mother no one had ever mistaken for adventurous,” recaps how she got drawn into the search for Earhart while on assignment for National Geographic in 2017, reporting on the first of a series of remote expeditions she would eventually accompany, which saw her trailing after anthropologists, human remains-sniffing dogs, and hi-tech autonomous vehicles across atolls and open water. The three prevailing theories of Earhart’s disappearance—that she was executed by the Japanese, stranded on a desert island, or killed on impact—get aired out via profiles of the theories’ most prominent adherents, each of whom is steadfast in their belief that they are close to solving the mystery, and that doing so will ensure fame and fortune. Biographical sections depict Earhart as a fearless flyer eager to confront every challenge but frequently hampered by financial woes and an adoring public nonetheless critical of money-making endorsements and unladylike behavior. It’s a humanistic navigation of an exuberant, questing life that continues to inspire adventure. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Limón, the 24th poet laureate of the U.S., urges the public to view poetry as a reminder of their shared humanity in this captivating lecture, which she delivered at the Library of Congress at the end of her tenure in April 2025. In a society increasingly plagued by loneliness and polarization, Limón declares that “if we are lucky enough to live a life in a world of poetry, we are never alone... because anyone who has ever written is with us.” Poetry can be a lifeline during times of suffering, she says, telling the stories of people she met while in her post, including a man who memorized poems to keep his mind from entering “the dark places” after his son died in war. While poetry has immense personal value, it’s especially powerful in the public realm, she asserts, describing You Are Here, a project she spearheaded that put poems in National Parks to encourage people to pay attention to the world around them. Highlighting excerpts from her favorite poems, including Emily Dickinsons’s “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” and Alberto Riós’s “A House Called Tomorrow,” Limón provides a wealth of starting points for the novice poetry reader while encouraging exploration. Passionate and hopeful, this will inspire readers to embrace poetry’s magic. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Morley, managing editor at Dwell, debuts with an astute exploration of the homes featured on reality TV shows and what they demonstrate about American identity, culture, and desire. The multimillion-dollar single-family dwellings of reality stars “offer windows into the good life at a time when the good life is increasingly out of reach,” Morley argues, analyzing TV shows like Selling Sunset, The Kardashians, The Bachelor, and The Real Housewives. In Selling Sunset, which follows realtors who sell luxury properties in Los Angeles, homes with scenic views of the city are coveted symbols of success and power. Morley asserts that their glossy exteriors and infinity pools offer a veneer of progressivism—but exclusively “for people for whom progress means crypto, Teslas, and the unfettered flow of capital, not the liberation of working people or some other utopian end.” Meanwhile, members of the Kardashian-Jenner family film The Kardashians in their modern farmhouse homes in Hidden Hills, Calif., evoking the independence of homesteaders. But while the “American pioneer dream” seems to work for them, “retreating for comfort into a fantasy of hard-working competitive isolation doesn’t seem that great for the rest of us,” Morley writes. Insightful and deeply researched, this exposes the false reality behind the alluring backdrops that keep viewers coming back for more. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Cockburn (The Spoils of War) targets military brass, corporate miscreants, and the politicians who service them in this vigorous collection of muckraking articles originally published in Harpers, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. His subjects include the Pentagon’s obsession with high-tech weaponry, like AI systems and the Air Force’s KC-56 refueling plane, that generate huge profits for defense contractors but don’t work well; America’s support of unsavory foreign leaders from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, (convicted of drug trafficking before being pardoned by Trump in 2025); political consultants’ fondness for expensive campaign television ads that earn them lucrative commissions but don’t move voters; and the exorbitant legal settlements cities are paying because of police shootings. Cockburn also launches left-populist critiques at American politicians, including Joe Biden for his pre-presidential tough on crime and corporate-friendly legislative efforts, and centrist Democrats for schmoozing with wealthy Hindu nationalist donors and exiling pro-Palestine speakers from the 2024 DNC stage, as well as Donald Trump for just about everything. Cockburn’s expertise on national security issues makes his critiques of the military particularly sharp, while some of his bugbears on the domestic front get less mileage (his anti–nuclear energy stance will likely leave some readers unconvinced in this moment of ever ratcheting upward oil prices). Still, the result is an incriminating portrait of a ruling class mired in corruption and ineptitude. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Playwright Dohrn debuts with a frank and fascinating chronicle of his experience as the son of Weather Underground fugitives, who were wanted in connection with the group’s 1970s bombings. He describes living one step ahead of the FBI in locations including Oregon, Chicago, and New York City until, in the early ’80s, his mother, Bernardine Dohrn, turned herself in and was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. Dohrn goes into great detail about the Weather Underground’s history as a militant leftist organization, but anchors the account in his intimate experiences as a “Weather Kid,” wondering “why my mother’s loyalty to these apparent strangers seemed to outweigh her commitment to us, her own children.” He provides no easy answers as he grapples with his parents’ commitment to their ideals at the expense of his and his two younger brothers’ safety, expressing both skepticism of their extreme politics and admiration of their impulse to improve the world by “transform[ing] what was passed down to us in order to make a better future for ourselves and our children and our children’s children.” This is a powerful blend of personal and political history. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historical novelist Morris (The Tattooist of Auschwitz) turns to contemporary fiction with an affecting if hackneyed story of a dying teen’s last wish. Jesse, 15, is in and out of the hospital with terminal leukemia. Alex, about to turn 30, is a brilliant but socially awkward coder working at a CGI studio, who lives alone except for his dog. When Jesse makes a wish through a foundation for an immersive 3-D film of her life to leave for her family after she’s gone, Alex’s company takes on the project. Working together, Alex and Jesse incorporate drawings by her younger brother, her mother’s poetry, photos of the family at their favorite picnic spot on the beach, and staged scenes featuring Jesse to surprise her family. Meanwhile, the strain of Jesse’s illness has torn her parents’ marriage apart, and her father treats Alex with contempt and hostility. What’s more, Alex’s boss wants to turn Jesse’s wish into a publicity stunt, which nearly drives Alex to quit. Though Morris avoids the maudlin by sustaining an upbeat tone, the plot veers into cliché, as when Alex finds himself falling in love with a blue-eyed social worker at the hospital. It’s a mixed bag. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A loner is forced to confront her past in this gloomy graphic novel from Late Night with the Devil actor Dastmalchian, drawn by Scaggs (Crosswind). Alix, a college student with a fiercely independent and combative Valkyrie spirit, likes to imagine that she hasn’t needed anybody since being orphaned as a child, when her parents died in a car crash. After saving a stranger from drowning—and discovering he has been following her—she embarks on a quest to uncover his identity. But the closer Alix gets to discovering what the man was after, the closer she gets to facing the pain of her long-held grief and isolation. Her real-world amateur investigation is paired with a parallel dream-realm search, after she falls Narnia-like into a fantasy world populated by characters such as a “shadow queen” and “master builder.” A little girl who looks like a broken, poorly repaired porcelain doll acts as a video game avatar, leading Alix on a symbol-laden quest that may reveal the childhood secrets she prefers suppressed. Dastmalchian’s sometimes hurried script shows flickers of potential as a mystery where the whodunit is more about healing than justice, but the impact is limited by schematic writing and Scaggs’s stiff figures, and the too-easy resolution fails to deliver the intended emotional catharsis. This feels like a pilot that’s not ready for prime time. Agent: Allie Gruensfelder, the Syndicate. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Barnes (American Contact) offers a startling, eye-opening examination of the scope and sweep of blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. in the century following the Civil War. Pushing back against the notion of blackface as a fleeting 19th-century phenomenon, Barnes meticulously traces how after the war, the practice boomed, jumping from professional stages to local venues, with amateur performances routinely staged in and funded by schools, businesses, governments, and fraternal organizations. As Barnes traces the deep entrenchment of minstrelsy in social life during the Jim Crow era—itself so named after a minstrel character—even readers familiar with the topic will be astonished by the extent of the practice’s cultural penetration, and its enduring ties to anti-Black political agendas. For instance, the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, founded in 1868 and reaching its apex in the 1920s with more than 800,000 members, was started by professional minstrels, who used the Order to “transform minstrel shows from casual entertainment into a fundraising juggernaut,” siphoning profits to segregationist politicians. Other illuminating avenues of inquiry include the Works Progress Administration’s support of blackface performances, and blackface performances staged by Japanese American internees during WWII and at FDR’s Warm Springs polio hospital. Painstaking and impressive, it’s a magisterial and disturbing reconsideration of American cultural history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink