Good evening, everyone. Here are my eighteen nonfiction titles published today that I’ve found especially interesting. I can’t help but notice one theme in today’s releases: the onslaught of the MAGA crew against democracy and the rush towards fascism seems to have everyone trying to figure out how in the hell we got to this place. This week brings no less than six books that deal with how conspiratorial thinking takes over in America. Hey, and among some Beatles fans, maybe the Yoko Ono biography could be considered a book about a conspiracy as well.
This Week’s notable new nonfiction
- There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone. The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless. “Brian Goldstone has done something remarkable: distilled clearly, in compelling narrative form, so much of what has gone wrong in America since the 1970s. The heartbreaking brutality and inhumanity of the world he depicts will shock many readers—as it should.”—Adelle Waldman, author of Help Wanted
- After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion, by David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe. In After Dobbs, law professor David S. Cohen and sociologist Carole Joffe interview 24 people across all different fields in abortion and in different state political environments to uncover how the abortion providing community and its allies prepared for, and then responded to this momentous event. Taking place across three intervals throughout 2022—pre-Dobbs in early 2022, right after Dobbs, and then six months later—these interviews showcase how nimble thinking on the part of providers, growth and new delivery models of abortion pills, and the never-ending work of those who help with abortion travel and funding have ensured most people who want them are still getting abortions, even without Roe. “After Dobbs is a timely and desperately needed road map for hope and resilience. With clarity and insight, Cohen and Joffe offer a vital reminder that even in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles and injustices, people find a way to resist.” —Jessica Valenti, author of Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win
- The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, by Mike Tidwell. In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell's story depicts the neighborhood's battle to save the trees and combat climate change.
The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block coping with Lyme disease, a church with solar panels on its roof and floodwater in its basement, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids –all in the same neighborhood and all against the backdrop of 2023’s record global temperatures and raging wildfires and hurricanes. “Few American writers render the climate crisis so vividly—not in statistics and headlines, but in the daily elegies sung quietly in the backs of our heads. This is a book about community, human and non-, holding together as the places we live in come apart.” - Daniel Sherrell, author Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World
- Hate Won't Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It, by Mallory McMorrow. Mallory McMorrow was on the verge of giving up. She knew the work of legislating wouldn’t be easy, but she hadn’t been expecting an insidious culture of sexual harassment, armed protestors storming the state Capitol, or colleagues who had zero interest in reaching across the aisle to get anything meaningful done. Where could one even start? But then fate forced her hand. A Senate colleague called her out as a “groomer”—for standing up for LGBTQ+ kids and fighting against attempts to whitewash history in our schools. In response, Mallory delivered a blistering rebuke with a speech from the Michigan Senate floor that reverberated throughout the country and the world, leading many long-jaded political pundits to hail Mallory’s action as a “blueprint” for fighting back. Here, Mallory pulls back the curtain on what it’s like to work in today’s politic arena, rife with conspiracy theories and division—yet emerges clear-eyed, offering actionable steps for building community and creating change.
- Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazism, by Scott Payne, with Michelle Shephard. When Scott Payne was growing up, an ‘80s kid with a big attitude and a taste for sleeveless shirts, he could never have envisioned where he’d find himself on Halloween night 2019. Having transformed into “Pale Horse” and infiltrated the nation's most dangerous, fastest-growing white supremacy group, The Base, he was huddled with a cell of neo-Nazis in the backwoods of Georgia as they slaughtered a goat and drank its blood in a ritual sacrifice.
A decorated agent dubbed the “Hillbilly Donnie Brasco,” Payne takes readers along with him on some of the most terrifying and riskiest assignments in FBI history. He went deep undercover with the lethal Outlaw Motorcycle Club in Massachusetts; to the front lines of the opioid epidemic in Tennessee; and infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. Through it all, he stayed married to the love of his life, raised two girls, and spent his Sundays at church, sustained by family and faith. “A fast-paced, riveting account of what white nationalist terror cells look like from the inside. Scott Payne’s first-hand experience and Michelle Shephard’s expert storytelling make a formidable combination.” —Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
- The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America, by David Pakman. If there is one thing the 2024 election cycle showed us, it’s how the right-wing has benefited and capitalized on disinformation and the polarization of US politics. Critical thinking and media literacy are on a rapid decline, and our republic is unable to agree upon a shared set of facts.
Infused with Pakman’s signature pragmatic insight and examples from real-world debates, The Echo Machine is an invitation to think, question, and understand how we got to this point and what we can do to mend our broken system. Readers will learn how our political system has transformed into a toxic echo chamber, why leftism offers a better path forward to society’s most pressing issues, and how we can improve discourse with critical thinking, media literacy, and public education. “For anyone who wants to stand up to disinformation and deepen their understanding of politics without getting lost in jargon, this book is essential reading.”
—Brian Tyler Cohen, YouTuber and author of Shameless
- Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age, by Leah Sottile. Journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward the recent surge of New Age influencing American Culture. She looks at self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha, who have built devout followings based on their teachings. For more than a century, this pastel-colored world of love, light and enlightenment has been built upon a foundation of conspiracies, antisemitism, nationalism and a rejection of science.
In Blazing Eye Sees All, Sottile seeks to understand the quest for New Age spirituality in an era of fear that has made us open to anything that claims to bring relief from war, the climate crisis, COVID 19, and the myriad of other issues we face. At the same time, she attempts to draw a line between truly helpful, healing ideas and snake oil—helping us sort through the crystals to find true clarity. "Leaving no crystal unturned, Sottile unearths intriguing similarities across disparate fringe groups (near-constant antisemitism, frequent female leadership) that bolster her thesis that cults are a feature, not a bug, of American spiritual life, functioning as an outlet for repressed women enmeshed in patriarchal belief structures. It’s a must-read for cult obsessives."—Publisher's Weekly
- Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America, by Jane Borden. Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.
With in-depth research and compelling insight, Borden uncovers the American history you didn’t learn in school, including how we are still being brainwashed, making us a nation of easy marks for con artists and strong men. Along the way, she also revisits some of the most fascinating cults in this country—including, the Mankind United and Love Has Won—presenting them as integral parts of our national psyche rather than aberrations. "Jane Borden has turned years of rigorous research into an engrossing, unputdownable narrative. Anyone interested in cults, religious studies, or their own relationship to belonging should consider this book canon."
—Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking
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Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today, by Phil Tinline. In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ingenious satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone’s fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction (passed off as the honest truth) that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the “cost of peace,” setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York (which lent the resulting book, Report from Iron Mountain, its name). In Lewin’s telling, this gathering of the nation’s academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate.
Lewin didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d created a narrative that fed the interests of both ends of the political spectrum—by promoting the idea that the government uses centralized power for evil. What fascinates about Phil Tinline’s revelation-filled recreation of that ingenious hoax is seeing how it explodes into America’s consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin’s fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology. “[How] a zany ’60s leftist hoax became a progenitor of Trumpism….[This] account of a jest gone terribly wrong makes for fascinating—and eye-opening—reading.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, by Leor Zmigrod. In The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod reveals the deep connection between political beliefs and the biology of the brain. Drawing on her own pioneering research, she uncovers the complex interplay between biology and environment that predisposes some individuals to rigid ways of thinking, and explains how ideologies take hold of our brains, fundamentally changing the way we think, act and interact with others. She shows how ideologues of all types struggle to change their thought patterns when faced with new information, culminating in the radical message that our politics are not superficial but are woven into the fabric of our minds. "An extraordinary, eye-opening, and startlingly original book, showing what ideology does to the human brain, and casting a bright new light on the sources and nature of dogmatism, ideology, and open-mindedness. Packed with insights, this is a remarkable achievement."
—Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University and author of Decisions About Decisions
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The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion, by Rebecca Lemov. Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone.
The Instability of Truth exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, from the brainwashing techniques used against American POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. In our increasingly data-driven world, anyone can fall victim to mind control. Lemov identifies invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction to coerce and persuade in everyday life. “From the Korean War to Facebook, this riveting volume tracks the history of systems built to bend our wills and rewire our minds. Timely, frightening, and impossible to put down.”
— Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Stanford University
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A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, by Jeanne Carstensen. On October 28, 2015, a boat meant for only a few dozen passengers capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Hundreds of refugees, forced in desperation onto the overloaded boat manned by armed smugglers, were tossed into a roiling sea. The resulting loss of life, the largest in a single day during the crisis in the Aegean, shocked the world.
Now, after nearly a decade of research, interviews, and investigation, reporter Jeanne Carstensen has captured every detail of the dramatic twenty-four hours. This includes the recollections of the refugees’ lives before they left their homes and a full account of the courageous rescue efforts of the Greek islanders and volunteers rushing to help, even as their government and the EU failed to act. In this remarkable narrative feat, Carstensen brilliantly showcases the extraordinary heroism of ordinary people in extreme circumstances.
In a world where forced migration is on the rise, A Greek Tragedy challenges us to confront our collective humanity. “A Greek Tragedy is a gripping, heart-wrenching tale with a huge cast, and it is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the migrations and the injustices of our modern world.”—Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls and Deep Down Dark
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AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, by Gary Rivlin. Through LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the legendary investor whom the Wall Street Journal once called, “the most connected person in Silicon Valley,” Rivlin is granted access to a number of companies on the cutting-edge of AI research, such as Inflection AI, the company Hoffman cofounded in 2022, and OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup that sparked it all with its release at the end of that year of ChatGPT. In addition to Hoffman, Rivlin introduces us to other AI experts, including OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an early AI startup that Google bought for $650 million in 2014. Rivlin also brings readers inside Microsoft, Meta, Google and other tech giants scrambling to keep pace. “Chatbots in the future—and probably sooner—will eagerly consume Gary Rivlin's AI Valley to answer questions about the companies that competed and connived to build what might be the last invention of our species. For now, it's a ripping read for humans.” — Steven Levy, editor at large at WIRED, author of Facebook: The Inside Story
- Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us, by Herman Pontzer, PhD. How does the body work—and why does it seem to work so differently for each of us? Why do we grow tall or short, obese or slim? Why do some of us stay healthy despite our bad habits while others who do all the right things fall ill? When we look around the planet, why do people vary in skin color, facial features, stature, body proportions, and disease risk? The answer is both simple and powerful: We’re different because we’re adaptable. Over the past 100,000 years, as humans expanded into every biome on the planet, our bodies were fine-tuned to our local environments. Adaptability is at the heart of being human and the engine of our diversity – our species’ original superpower. Crucially, we come to see how understanding our bodies helps us make sense of the big issues we face today, from vaccines to heart disease, IQ to athletic excellence, diets and obesity to sex and gender, and what we can do to live longer and healthier. “Adaptable is the book I've been waiting for. It answers questions that nag us today about the human condition and describes how we got here. It’s an engaging and down-to earth read that bristles with up-to-date and thoughtfully provocative scholarship.” —Nina G. Jablonski, PhD, professor of anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University
- Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea, by Matt Ridley. The New York Times bestselling author of Genome and The Evolution of Everything revisits Darwin’s revelatory theory of mate choice through the close study of the peculiar rituals of birds, and considers how this mating process complicates our own view of human evolution. Evolutionary biologists can explain why males are generally the eager sellers, females the discriminating buyers. But they struggle to explain why, in some species, this extravagance goes beyond the mere gaudy, taking on bizarre shapes, postures, and behavior. And further, why these bird displays seem beautiful to us humans, a species with seemingly no skin in the game. “In his highly readable book, Ridley suggests that if we suppose our own evolution conforms to general patterns found throughout nature, perhaps it has been manifestations of wit, intelligence and mind that have appealed, over the eons, to the females of our own lineage.” — Jonathan Kingdon, zoologist and author of Origin Africa
- When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter. When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, and readers, as well as many of the faces that would come to appear in Vanity Fair’s pages. He went on to run the magazine with overwhelming success for the next two and a half decades. “Canadian journalist Graydon Carter learned the ropes at Time and Life before co-founding the magazine Spy. But he’s best known for his work as editor of Vanity Fair between 1992 and 2017, the period that dominates his breezy memoir. There’s Hollywood gossip, score-settling and tales from the era of limitless editorial budgets.” —Monocle
- Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour. The definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1990s alt-rock festival Lollapalooza―told by the musicians, roadies, and industry insiders who lived it. Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the tour’s pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock’s rise – as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large. "The Lollapalooza tour defined "alternative culture" in the nineties with lineups that bridged rock, hip-hop, and performance art. The book, Lollapalooza, collects the musicians' unbelievable-yet-true stories into an indispensable page turner and shows how a tour like Lollapalooza could never happen the same way again.” —Kory Grow, Rolling Stone
- Yoko: A Biography, by David Sheff. John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as the world’s most famous unknown artist. “Everybody knows her name, but no one knows what she does.” She has only been important to history insofar as she impacted Lennon. Throughout her life, Yoko has been a caricature, curiosity, and, often, a villain—an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud. The Lennon/Beatles saga is one of the greatest stories ever told, but Yoko’s part has been missing—hidden in the Beatles’ formidable shadow, further obscured by flagrant misogyny and racism. This definitive biography of Yoko Ono’s life will change that. In this book, Yoko Ono takes centerstage.
Yoko’s life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey. Yoko spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo, and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism, and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless, and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime imaginable: breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history. Drawing from his experiences and interviews with her, her family, closest friends, collaborators, and many others, Sheff shows us Yoko’s nine decades—one of the most unlikely and remarkable lives ever lived.
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