Aarathi Prasad’s entertaining and enlightening history of silk brims with story and scientific detail, revealing a surprising history well worth knowing.
Biographer Susan Page paints a colorful portrait of trailblazer Barbara Walters in her compulsively readable The Rulebreaker.
Saying “no judgment” is a cover for our desire to judge, posits Lauren Oyler. As a cultural critic for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s and other such publications, Oyler is in the business of judging, and she doesn’t hold back in her debut collection of essays. TED Talks, Goodreads reviewers, the “vulnerability” trend, that thing Martin Scorsese said about Marvel—her takes would be dizzying if she were not so skilled in constructing solid arguments that deepen our understanding of cultural criticism. No Judgment is deeply funny and wise.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Harvard introductory course in African American Studies is legendary. Who among us would hesitate to attend a lecture with the award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist and cultural critic? The Black Box distills the lessons of the seminar as Gates tracks the Black authors who have sought self-definition through writing across genres to create places of belonging.
Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.
In The Dead Don’t Need Reminding, Chicago poet Julian Randall braids memoir, history and cultural criticism, revealing himself to be a gifted storyteller.
Comedy writer Chelsea Devantez romps through personal embarrassments, traumas and triumphs in her memoir, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This.
The election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land had many Americans questioning their choices. Sarah McCammon, NPR political correspondent and co-host of “The NPR Politics Podcast,” found herself at a tipping point. In The Exvangelicals, she writes about growing up in an evangelical church and leaving it. Intertwining journalism with memoir, McCammon sheds light on a religious movement that is on the brink.
Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, is back with a new memoir, Splinters, in which she reflects on early motherhood in tandem with her relationship with her own mother. Sharp and honest, Jamison tries to reconcile the person she is with the stories she has internalized about herself, and in doing so, she shares a perspective on motherhood that teems with insight.
Journalist Tracie McMillan’s latest investigates how five families—including her own—benefit from systemic white privilege.
The Fairbanks Four tells the story of four young Athabaskan men who were convicted of murdering a white teenager in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1997. As was the case with The Central Park Five, the men were railroaded by local police and served decades in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. Brian Patrick O’Donoghue narrates the details of their harrowing story and that of the community members who rallied around them.
Ann Powers’ biography of Joni Mitchell is a travelogue of one of the greatest artistic journeys ever taken, and it’s a pleasure to go along for the ride.
In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Laron crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
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