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Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy. Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. "With Paper Girl, Beth Macy masterfully assesses a dysfunctional class system witnessed both as reporter and through lived experience. This essential book reveals that resolving our current sociopolitical crisis requires not just digging for facts but digging even deeper into our very souls." —Sarah Smarsh, New York Times bestselling author of Heartland
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Liberals with Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles, by Danny Goldberg. This book documents the sixteen months in 1991-92 between the brutal beating of Rodney King by four police officers that was captured on a home video camera and the resignation of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates was reviled by the local Black and civil liberties communities because of the pattern of racism and brutality in the department, and he was uniquely powerful because of the structure of the Los Angeles City Charter and the secret files he kept on local politicians.
The effort to get Gates to step down after thirteen years as chief and to amend the City Charter to prevent another unaccountable chief from amassing that much power was led by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a former LAPD officer and the first Black mayor of the city. To overcome Gates’s entrenched power, Bradley assembled a team that included future US secretary of state Warren Christopher, the local ACLU, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and activists who saw the struggle against Gates as an important chapter in the civil rights movement. Much of the local media, especially the Los Angeles Times, was supportive of Bradley’s agenda, as was the burgeoning “gangsta rap” culture of LA, much of which emerged in reaction to the LAPD.
Goldberg’s insider saga demonstrates that cooperation between the political left and center is required to overcome white grievance and unaccountable power. “This is a book that everybody should read.” — Congresswoman Maxine Waters
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Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, by Jacob Silverman. From the pursuit of potentially apocalyptic artificial intelligence to life-extension start-ups that promise billionaires eternal youth and those who encourage the political far right around the world, the Silicon Valley techno-utopian dream has curdled. The global innovator class has the world in their hands, but they can't stand the touch.
In Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman leads us on a critical investigation into the radicalization of Silicon Valley and the billionaires that increasingly run our lives, shape the global economy, and support Donald Trump. Silverman reveals a network of tech and finance oligarchs, emboldened by the zero-interest rate years, now using their wealth to exert an increasingly radical political program. It's a bizarre, sometimes frightening, darkly humorous world where moguls preach populist revolt while dismantling the few remaining checks on their influence. “In Gilded Rage, Jacob Silverman delivers a clear-eyed anatomy of tech-addled delusion that has stubbornly eluded our media and political establishment for more than thirty years. Along the way, he recounts how the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley has curdled into a frontal assault on our democracy.” —Chris Lehmann, DC Bureau Chief of The Nation and the author of 'The Money Cult'
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Planning Miracles: How to Prevent Future Pandemics, by Jon Cohen. In 1955, the vaccine that eliminated polio was celebrated as a “planned miracle." Today, despite the astonishing global effort that came together to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 at unprecedented speed, we struggle against the rise of science denial and misinformation. Since 2020, we have had to face a terrifying truth: It’s not if we’ll experience another pandemic, it’s when. How do we prepare?
Planning Miracles tells the stories of the committed scientists at the front lines, fighting back against societal distrust and panic, monitoring the threats that exist, detecting outbreaks early, and developing new interventions as quickly as possible. Renowned science reporter Jon Cohen travels from the mountains of Vietnam to the rainforests in the Amazon, from the “wet” markets in Cambodia to fairgrounds in the United States, exploring how we can better defend ourselves against the growing threat of pandemics, and he finds surprising—and encouraging—answers. Weaving together history, reportage, and science writing, Planning Miracles is revelatory and necessary—providing hope that if we work together to plan for the next pandemic, we can avoid disaster. “The author shows no patience for bad actors, or those who help them with conspiracy theories and junk science… As the world rebuilds from the wreckage of Covid-19, policymakers would be wise to take Cohen’s work to heart. Pandemics, after all, are an ongoing fact of human life, not an anomaly." —Kirkus
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Born: A History of Childbirth, by Lucy Inglis. Whatever their ultimate outcomes, pregnancy and the act of childbirth are at once an individual and communal event. The act of childbirth informs us as unique individuals, yet at the same moment makes us part of something much greater than ourselves.
This book is the sum of many stories that combine war, art, science, and politics with the fundamental act of human existence. It is not a book about parenting or motherhood beyond the moment of delivery and the short time afterward. Instead, this is a story of the evolving role pregnancy and childbirth have played in societies through history, of the mysticism, the practicalities, and the power struggles that have shaped nations, yet also, individual identities.
Our narrative starts out in prehistory and ends now, with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, taking in mother-and-child bone fragments of the Ice Age, the cries from the medieval birthing chair, and the calls to rally of our modern age.
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Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln, by Saladin Ambar. Murder, mob rule, and the making of Abraham Lincoln—the story of three racially motivated murders in Mississippi River towns from 1835 to 1838 that inspired the speech that put Lincoln on the national map—the Lyceum Address.
- Lynched: Five white gamblers suspected of aiding a slave insurrection in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
- Burned Alive: A Black man implicated in the death of a constable in St. Louis, Missouri.
- Gunned Down: A white abolitionist in Alton, Illinois.
These weren’t just acts of mob violence—they were warnings of a nation on the edge of collapse.
In Murder on the Mississippi, award-winning historian Saladin Ambar unearths the horrors that shaped a young Abraham Lincoln’s worldview, pushing him to find his political voice in one of the earliest and most pivotal speeches of his career. Confronted by lawlessness, racial terror, and his own inner demons, Lincoln’s battle was political and deeply personal. “Locates the roots of Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery views in . . . violence, which often targeted Blacks free and enslaved, prostitutes, and white gamblers, all subject to ‘creeping mob violence.’ . . . A fresh investigation of antebellum politics and the era’s foremost champion of equality before the law.” —Kirkus Reviews
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Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow. When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better).
The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.
Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone. “I always love Cory’s shit, but Enshittification is not only a smart, funny, and refreshingly furious screed on how tech has betrayed us all—but also a bracing, daringly optimistic plan for how we can free ourselves from awfulness.” —John Hodgman CLICK HERE to read an essay drawn from the book in The Guardian.
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Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses, by Moises Naim and Quico Toro. In Charlatans, global affairs experts Moisés Naím and Quico Toro investigate how charlatans fool us and why they’ve become so influential today. They argue that modern charlatans exploit the same weak points in human cognition as the snake-oil salesmen of the old West. They earn our trust, trick us into believing they have some special skill or knowledge, then exploit us. In some ways, nothing has changed. But, today, charlatans are digital, viral, and global. Whether they’re health gurus pushing pseudoscience or crypto bros orchestrating Ponzi schemes, modern charlatans rapidly amass worldwide audiences on the internet and social media using a common set of strategies. These hucksters swiftly swindle unsuspecting victims, as our slow-moving institutions struggle to respond. “We live in an era of liars, fakers, grifters and charlatans. Moises Naim and Quico Toro explain how this happened, and what it means, in eloquent, urgent prose.”—Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag
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In the Name of Freedom: A Political Dissident's Fight for Human Rights in the NBA and Around the World, by Enes Kanter Freedom. In the Name of Freedom tells the story of how Enes Kanter, a boy with a dream in Turkey, became Enes Freedom, an American citizen, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and a fierce advocate for human rights—and the price he paid for speaking out. Enes refused to stand by as his native country descended into authoritarian dictatorship. He made his opinion known and the Erdogan regime declared him an enemy of state. His father, still in Turkey, was arrested and declared a terrorist. Enes’s Turkish passport was revoked and he was made stateless.
The experience would have broken most advocates. But it only encouraged Enes, who realized that standing for human rights was bigger than basketball. Enes soon became one of the country’s fiercest fighters for human rights. He took on the NBA for turning a blind eye to China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. He even called out Lebron James, the game’s biggest star, for using Chinese labor in his Nike shoe deal as the Chinese government cracked down on political freedoms in Hong Kong.
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38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, by Philippe Sands. In this intimate legal and historical detective story, the world-renowned lawyer traces the footsteps of two of the twentieth century’s most merciless criminals—accused of genocide and crimes against humanity—testing the limits of immunity and impunity after Nuremberg.
On the evening of October 16, 1998, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested at a medical clinic in London. After a brutal, seventeen-year reign marked by assassinations, disappearances, and torture—frequently tied to the infamous detention center at the heart of Santiago, Londres 38—Pinochet was being indicted for international crimes and extradition to Spain, opening the door to criminal charges that would follow him to the grave, in 2006.
Three decades earlier, on the evening of December 3, 1962, SS-Commander Walter Rauff was arrested in his home in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile. As the overseer of the development and use of gas vans in World War II, he was indicted for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews and faced extradition to West Germany.
In this unique blend of memoir, courtroom drama, and travelogue, Philippe Sands gives us a front row seat to the Pinochet trial—where he acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch—and teases out the dictator’s unexpected connection to a leading Nazi who ended up managing a king crab cannery in Patagonia. A decade-long journey exposes the chilling truth behind the lives of two men and their intertwined destinies on 38 Londres Street. (If you’re interested, here is an early diary I wrote here on Daily Kos telling the story of how I once had the opportunity to take down Pinochet with my Swiss Army knife.)
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Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, by Justin Marozzi. Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, complex, and controversial history. In the earliest days of Islam, Arab Muslims enslaved men, women and children as the spoils of war. Yet it was Africa which bore the brunt of the Islamic world’s insatiable demand for slave labour. Slavers plied its Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, traders raided inland for human cargo, and millions of enslaved Africans trudged across the Sahara into captivity. Meanwhile, North African corsairs turned the Mediterranean into a slaving free-for-all between Muslims, Christians and Jews.
The sheer longevity of slavery was no less surprising. Arab Muslims adapted and regulated this practice within an Islamic context. Sanctioned by the Prophet Mohammed, legitimated by the Quran and holy law, slavery endured for fifteen centuries. Abolition had few champions and came late in the day—hereditary slavery continues even today in Mali and Mauritania. Captives and Companions takes the reader on an extraordinary historical journey across deserts, continents and oceans, from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea, and reveals a hidden but vital chapter in our understanding of world civilization. "A bold, brilliant and timely history that confronts one of the most neglected and uncomfortable subjects in global history. Justin Marozzi brings to life the complexity and humanity of the Islamic world’s entanglement with slavery using an extraordinary range of sources, across more than a millennium and across sweeping geographies. Not just a mesmerizing book, but a profoundly important one too." — Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
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Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, by Francesca Wade. Drawing on never-before-seen interviews, a richly researched, sweeping examination of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century and her partner’s emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.
Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the stuff of literary legend. Many have tried to capture the spirit and glamour of the place that once entertained and fostered the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, but perhaps none as determinedly, and self-consciously, as Stein herself. In this new biography of the polarizing, trailblazing author, collector, salonnière, and tastemaker, Francesca Wade rescues Stein from the tangle of contradictions that has characterized her legacy, expertly presenting us with this towering literary figure as we’ve never seen her before. “This is not dry academia, but an insightful examination of how lives are protected, memorialised and canonised...Wade also engages, critically, creatively and respectfully with Stein’s work." —The Scotsman
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Last Rites, by Ozzy Osbourne. "People say to me, if you could do it all again, knowing what you know now, would you change anything? I'm like, f*** no. If I'd been clean and sober, I wouldn't be Ozzy. If I'd done normal, sensible things, I wouldn't be Ozzy." In 2018, at the age of sixty-nine, Ozzy Osbourne was on a triumphant farewell tour, playing to sold-out arenas and rave reviews all around the world.
Then: disaster. In a matter of just a few weeks, he went from being hospitalized with a finger infection to having to abandon his tour – and all public life – as he faced near-total paralysis from the neck down.
Last Rites is the shocking, bitterly hilarious, never-before-told story of Ozzy's descent into hell. Along the way, he reflects on his extraordinary life and career, including his marriage to wife Sharon, as well as his reflections on what it took for him to get back onstage for the triumphant Back to the Beginning concert, streamed around the world, where Ozzy reunited with his Black Sabbath bandmates for the final time. Unflinching, brutally honest, but surprisingly life-affirming, Last Rites demonstrates once again why Ozzy has transcended his status as 'The Godfather of Metal' and 'The Prince of Darkness' to become a modern-day folk hero and national treasure.
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Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In Pursuit of Remarkable Mushrooms, by Richard Fortey. The secret world of fungi is another kingdom. They do things differently there. Diverse beyond our wildest imaginations, fungi don’t obey rules. They pop up unbidden and often dressed in curious reds and greens.
They do not seem of this world, yet fungi underpin all the life around us: the "wood wide web" links the trees by a subterranean telegraph; fungi eat the fallen trunks and leaves to recycle the nutrients that keep the wood alive; they feed a host of beetles and flies, which in turn feed birds and bats. Fungi produce the most expensive foods in the world but also offer the prospect of cheap protein for all; they cure disease, and they both cause disease and kill; they are the specialists to surpass all others; their diversity thrills and bewilders.
We learn that the giant puffball produces more spores than there are known stars in the universe and fetid stinkhorns begin looking like arrivals from the planet Tharg. He tells of the fungus that turns flies into zombies, the ones that clean up metallic waste, and the delicious subterranean fungi truffe de Perigord, the delight of gourmets. "A lively writer with a penchant for slightly goofy jokes, a vast storehouse of arcane knowledge, and an inexhaustible fund of enthusiasm for his subject, Fortey is the perfect interpreter and guide to the marvels and mysteries of archaic existence." — The Boston Globe
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The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal, by Yossi Yovel. With nearly 1500 species, bats account for more than twenty percent of mammalian species. The most successful and most diverse group of mammals, bats come in different sizes, shapes, and colors, from the tiny bumblebee bat to the giant golden-crowned flying fox. Some bats eat fruit and nectar; others eat frogs, scorpions, or fish. Vampire bats feed on blood. Bats are the only mammals that can fly; their fingers have elongated through evolution to become wings with a unique, super-flexible skin membrane stretched between them. Their robust immune system is one of the reasons for their extreme longevity. A tiny bat can live for forty years.
From muddy rainforests to star-covered night deserts, from guest houses in Thailand to museum drawers full of fossils in New York, this is an eye-opening and entertaining account of a mighty mammal. “A love story for the only mammal endowed with the ability to fly. The book is fascinating throughout, and it combines stories of exotic journeys to distant islands that resonate like adventures from world literature." —The Bernstein Literature Prize Committee
