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 noble ideals at the expense of his and his two younger brothers’ safety, at once somewhat skeptical of his parents’ extreme politics and admiring 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

Curators Barnes and Rolls-Bentley (coauthor of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between) offer an accessible if overly brief introduction to queer art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Spotlighting art that “troubles normative (especially heteronormative and cisgendered) ways of thinking, categorizing or being,” they cover artists who depict themselves as a means of “asserting their visibility on their own terms”; who reconstruct histories of queer life; who portray romantic and platonic queer love; and who use their work to envision new futures that spurn “inherited limits” and allow “queerness [to] thrive by design.” Household names like Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol appear alongside such contemporary artists as Salman Toor. (Entries for each artist provide a representative artwork, brief biography, and list of key works.) The authors conclude with a timeline of queer art history, a short glossary, and suggestions for further reading. There’s plenty of good information to be found here, but the entries exist in a vacuum, sufficiently discussing each artist’s engagement with queer themes but doing relatively little to provide context or encourage interconnected thinking. It’s a useful reference book, with limits. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Psychotherapist Alpert (Be Fearless) turns the world of modern therapy on its head with this provocative challenge to what he sees as a flawed system stoking rising rates of anxiety and depression. Alpert catalogs some of the forces that have shaped today’s mental health crisis, including social media, political divisions, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, but assigns most of the blame to a type of ineffectual therapy where clinicians validate patients’ self-diagnosed problems and allow them to engage in endless cycles of venting without helping them grow. This, he writes, fosters a fragile, dependent mindset that harms individual patients while shaping a society that’s generally more selfish, less resilient, and socially disconnected. Good therapy, however, still has the power to help those who need it—by equipping patients with concrete tools, challenging them to grow, and helping them develop the independence needed to ultimately leave therapy. While Alpert sometimes stretches his thesis too far in arguing for how therapy has amplified today’s crisis of polarization, he provides a refreshing and well-reasoned look at the ways the practice falls short of its goals in the paradoxical interest of making patients feel good. This will be of interest to those on both sides of the couch. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Tech journalist Stern debuts with an entertaining exploration of AI’s impact on everyday life. Stern spent a year using as many AI tools as possible, enlisting the technology to monitor her health, provide career advice, plan meals, and travel. The results alternate between hilarious, hopeful, and foreboding. On vacation in Phoenix, Stern, her wife, and their two young children agreed to be chauffeured by self-driving cars wherever they went. On one excursion, the Waymo driving Stern and her seven-year-old son braked sharply and veered within a few feet of a concrete wall, apparently reacting to Stern’s videographer, who was leaning out the window of another car. “It was the only time I’ve ever been genuinely scared in one of these cars,” Stern says. Elsewhere, she reflects on enrolling in a college class, where she quickly learned she could get good grades while putting in minimal effort thanks to ChatGPT, sparking worry about the technology’s impact on critical thinking. Still, Stern acknowledges that without the editing, researching, data processing, and interviewing assistance provided by AI, writing this book would have taken her at least six months longer. Stern’s balanced, clear-eyed assessments and crisp, funny prose (“I was teetering on the edge of the AI-byss”) make this stand out among the growing crowd of books on AI. Illus. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

New mothers possess superhuman abilities and sustainable electricity wards off the climate crisis in this clever blend of fantasy and speculative fiction from Tsao (The Majesties), set in an alternate version of Sydney. Despite these seeming advances, protagonist Vivi has been left behind. Plagued by postpartum fatigue, she lacks the powers gained by other mothers in the final stage of labor, called “rebirth,” during which they give birth to their “fetal mother.” The fetal mother then quickly grows to the mother’s size and cannibalizes her, and this new version of the mother holds preternatural strength, energy, and maternal instincts. Vivi was cannibalized but ineffectively, and she’s been diagnosed with “malabsorption.” After her husband gives her a cruel ultimatum—divorce or induced labor, to repeat the rebirth—she leaves him. Vivi, who is ethnically Chinese and immigrated to Australia from her native Indonesia with her family, seeks refuge with her uncle, who helps her train as an electrician, and she becomes a “hobbler,” providing power to those who can’t afford to convert their homes for service by the new grid. There’s a lot going on here, and while the narrative feels cluttered, Tsao cannily uses the fantastical elements to explore a new mother’s anxieties about measuring up to other mothers. It’s worth a look. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Anthropologist Garth (Food in Cuba) offers a piercing ethnographic study of the power dynamics and misunderstandings that plague “food justice” nonprofits operating in Los Angeles’s predominantly Latino South Central neighborhood. Exploring the question of what happens when primarily white, well-off activists decide to solve food-related problems in places they don’t live, she shows that it typically leads to insulting interventions (such as teaching women how to cook unseasoned chicken) and assimilationist assumptions—i.e., that eating healthy means eating like white people. (“[We’re] here to... get them to stop eating things like tortillas... and eat things like Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, you know healthy food,” one nonprofit executive director states.) Having spent 12 years embedded in the L.A. activism world, Garth is able to follow individual activists’ journey toward disillusionment—a number of them, like one who begins to perceive her organization as a “revolving door of ‘fancy’ master’s graduates who never stayed long enough to do anything substantive,” eventually decamp for more “grassroots-oriented” movements that they feel are genuinely addressing the root causes of food inequity, like the anti-gentrification and “land justice” movements. This casts a harsh light on the professional nonprofit world and provides a nuanced window into mechanisms of power within lefty activism circles. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink