The American Revolution was “a world war” in “all but name,” according to this revealing chronicle. Historian Bell (Stolen) tracks how the conflict “sent caravans of navy vessels... across every ocean on the planet,” precipitated “an unprecedented migrant crisis,” and “shook the political order” from the Americas to China, “securing freedom and sovereignty for millions, while deferring or denying it for many millions more.” The Continental Army was “strikingly polyglot and pluralistic,” as was the British coalition, which included Native warriors and Black fugitives from slavery. The Americans relied almost completely on foreign financing and military intervention, turning the war into a full-fledged great-power conflict, with Spain and France attacking British holdings around the world. In telling the full story, Bell places the Sons of Liberty on equal footing with “Chinese tea-pickers... Sierra Leonean separatists, Jamaican washerwomen,” and more. Particularly riveting is the story of Molly Bryant, a Mohawk woman and widow of a British “diplomat for Indian affairs,” who understood her tribal nation to be “fighting for its survival,” with “wealthy speculators” among the revolutionaries, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, “gobbling up thousands of acres” of land; she urged for an alliance with Britain to stop the “land grab.” Such riveting profiles provide a clear-eyed accounting of a formative conflict for the modern world. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Weinman (Scoundrel) provides a riveting account of the 1978 marital rape trial of John Rideout in Oregon. At the time, Weinman explains, only three states had laws against marital rape, and Oregon’s had never been tested. In most states, a wife could still not legally refuse to consent to sex with her husband, as Rideout’s wife, 23-year-old Greta, tried to do when he raped her in front of their two-year-old daughter. “I thought if I hit her, she would come out of it,” Rideout told investigators, adding that if he had “done it right,” she wouldn’t be complaining. A pretrial motion permitted the defense to bring up Greta’s sexual history, including an abortion, effectively putting her on trial instead. Rideout was acquitted, but public outrage launched marital rape to the forefront of feminist activism. Weinman charts the ensuing struggle and the tectonic cultural and legal transformations it brought about. Rideout was tried again 38 years later—and ultimately convicted—for raping two more partners (although a horror movie-esque coda reports that a recent Supreme Court decision has reversed one of the verdicts). Weinman’s skills as a storyteller shine throughout, including in her vibrant portraits of silver-haired, booming-voiced prosecutor Gary Gortmaker and his longtime nemesis, defense attorney Charles Burt. It’s a propulsive legal drama that underscores how difficult it still is to bring rapists to justice. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

The daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz offers an intimate and revealing look into her parents’ marriage. Ball and Arnaz are best known for their legendary sitcom, I Love Lucy, and also for their occasionally tempestuous relationship. But when Ball died in 1989, her daughter discovered a much different side to her parents in a box of love letters written largely between 1940 and 1951, a decade when Arnaz was occupied with his military service while Ball’s acting career was taking off in Los Angeles. The letters are presented here alongside photographs, while a timeline gives readers insight into the historical events surrounding the couple. (In July 1933, Ball was “offered a chorus girl role” and left New York for California, around the same time Desi’s home in Cuba was “burned to the ground during a violent revolution.”) After they met in 1940, their ensuing letters were full of humor and love. Once Desilu, their production company, became successful, Arnaz wrote to Ball, who was also the company’s vice president, “Dearest Veepee: May I take this opportunity to tell you how much I have enjoyed our association for the past eleven years.” Revealing, tongue-in-cheek, and relatable, this is a moving tribute to a famous partnership. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hankin, a business consultant and single parent, and Ames, a family therapist, debut with an ambitious guide to single-parenting. The authors incorporate tips from their personal experiences (as when Hankin shares a chore chart she used with her daughter), and crowd-sourced advice from single-parent Reddit users, who offer insights on topics like letting dates sleep over and balancing child-rearing with college classes. Hankin counsels solo parents on paying for childcare, noting that lesser-known options like flexible spending accounts and employer cost sharing may be available, as well as on taking smart steps to secure their family’s financial futures. Those raising children alone face many trade-offs, she acknowledges; for example, tackling tasks with DIY methods like mending clothes instead of hiring help can save money but result in lost time with kids. When it comes to relationship management, Hankin notes single parents often struggle to find friendships in a couples-oriented world and advocates for using social media to find meetups to join. While Hankin doesn’t linger long on any one subject, she gives readers plenty of ideas for forming their own single-parenting blueprints. This will be a boon to readers looking for new approaches to solo parenting. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Goddard, a literature professor at Utah Valley University, debuts with a robust biography of novelist, poet, and screenwriter Jim Harrison (1937–2016). The author paints a vivid portrait of Harrison’s tumultuous life, from his childhood in rural Michigan, where an accident left him permanently blind in one eye and he developed a deep love of nature, to his early work as a member of a raucous 1960s poetry scene in New York City before he found commercial and critical success as a novelist with the publication of Legends of the Fall in 1979. Along the way, Goddard effectively captures Harrison’s inner conflict: his primary love was poetry, but he’s best known as a novelist. In Goddard’s hands, Harrison emerges as a complicated man possessing large appetites for drinking, smoking, food, and sex (he had a “surprising callousness about extramarital flings,” Goddard writes). Harrison’s 55-year marriage to his wife, Linda, is a frustrating archival blind spot (the two mostly communicated by phone, not letters) acknowledged by Goddard, who gives readers a much deeper view of Harrison’s evolving character and development as an artist via correspondences with his friend, novelist Thomas McGuane. It’s a perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Direct cash payments to the poor have been widely lauded as a potential solution for global poverty, but this concise debut study makes a strong case that they don’t work. Economist Henderson draws on myriad examples, among them a five-year-old program in India that enabled the needy to buy a kilogram of rice for one rupee; in 2018, it was replaced with a program that deposited cash to recipients’ bank accounts. While many applauded greater autonomy for the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries themselves were not happy. Among other problems, the timing of when payments would be deposited was confusing, and the added step of having to withdraw cash led to fewer people benefiting—the elderly and disabled were disproportionately not using the program. Henderson also debunks a study purporting to show that monthly cash payments to low-income mothers positively impacted the brains of their infants, and points to how a direct cash program in Chad led to those not selected for the payments “refus[ing] to pay back” money borrowed from program recipients, who were “seen as wealthy.” Henderson doesn’t claim that direct payments are never the answer; he notes that direct assistance is vital following a natural disaster. But for routine giving, Henderson advocates for “radical decentralization”: local decision-making about how resources should be allocated. It’s a cogent critique of a trendy philanthropic tool. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, embodies the tortured soul of technocratic liberalism in this melodramatic biography. Journalist Philip Taubman (Secret Empire) and his political scientist brother William (Gorbachev) trace McNamara’s rise through the military-industrial complex, first as a colonel helping make the Air Force more efficient during WWII and then as an executive at Ford. The book centers on McNamara’s management, as defense secretary, of the Vietnam War, which he initially supported but concluded was unwinnable in late 1965. He nevertheless continued to publicly maintain, citing misleading statistics, that it was going well, while privately urging Johnson to seek peace. The strain led to psychological turmoil, including incidents of public weeping. Subsequent chapters cover McNamara’s later acknowledgments that the war was wrong. The Taubmans’ psychologizing of McNamara is heavy-handed: they say his mother “infantilized” him merely because she told him to eat well and stay warm at Harvard, and make much of McNamara’s apparent platonic affair with Jacqueline Kennedy. (Jackie danced with him, shared poems, and beat on his chest while yelling at him to “stop the slaughter.”) The narrative is more revealing when focusing on prosaic factors—like that arguing more forcefully against the war would probably have gotten McNamara fired. McNamara’s spiritual ordeal, despite the authors’ efforts, never comes off as more than a sideshow to the Vietnam tragedy. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Ward (The Vietnam War) once again partners with documentarian Burns (Blood Memory) for this comprehensive history of the birth of America. As with the authors’ past collaborations, the book is a companion to Burns’s upcoming documentary of the same name. According to Burns’s preface, the revolution is “our epic song, our epic verse,” and the book honors the scope of the conflict with a lavish array of maps, paintings, and photographs of historical sites. But the bulk of the volume is comprised of Ward’s lucid prose and exquisitely rendered details. (About the Massachusetts militiamen: “They were farmers and artisans and shopkeepers, mostly, wearing... homespun clothes.... Local blacksmiths had hammered out their officers’ swords.”) Ward doesn’t shy away from the subject’s darker currents, including the great paradox at its center: How could men pursuing liberty be comfortable with slavery? “Five enslaved people captured at Yorktown were returned to Thomas Jefferson,” he writes of the end of the war. “Two more—both women—were returned to George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” In passages like this, Ward doesn’t let historical triumphs overshadow tragedies. As Burns puts it, the revolution is often seen “in gallant, bloodless terms,” whereas the achievement of this volume is to be forthright and occasionally critical, but still grand and stirring. All truths are self-evident for Burns and Ward, not just the easy ones. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this blunt yet accessible debut guide, Biesinger, whose modernist illustrations have been featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times, outlines basic legal rights and best practices for freelance artists. Biesinger shares his personal frustrations, including a design studio copying one of his illustrations, a frame shop selling bootlegs of his art, and one of his prints appearing in an influencer’s monetized video—situations in which “there is no design-oriented 911 to call.” For each case, he unpacks the legality, ethics, and options available to an artist, including how those who can’t afford a lawsuit can seek justice outside the legal system. He also highlights the differences between homage and theft, explores the ways in which the internet has blurred understandings of creative ownership, and provides tips on building a career as a freelance artist. All of these ideas are illustrated with Biesinger’s bold, imaginative black-and-white artwork. While the no-frills writing sometimes rambles, Biesinger’s honesty and willingness to share his hard-earned lessons make this an invaluable resource. Aspiring artists looking to strike out on their own would do well to take a look. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Investigative journalist O’Meara follows up 2005’s Psyched Out with a disappointing diatribe about the evils of psychiatry, psychiatrists, psychotropic drugs, the FDA, and groups she derisively refers to as “the numbskulls at NIMH” and the “psycho-wizards at the APA.” O’Meara reiterates some of the strongest points from the original version and updates them with newer statistics: psychiatry is a muddy and imprecise discipline; the DSM has been the subject of controversy; drugs are often over-prescribed; and pharmaceutical companies frequently act in ways that are less than upstanding. However, the book suffers from O’Meara’s poor grounding in science. For example, the fact that scientists can’t explain the factors underlying mental disorders (or why certain drugs work for some and not others) is not—as she suggests—a matter of ineptitude but a reflection of the ongoing nature of brain research. Her reasoning is also highly selective; she cites pages of psychiatric drug contraindications from the Physicians’ Desk Reference without mentioning that all drugs have adverse effects, and her attempts to link school shootings with the rise in psychiatric drug prescriptions rely on tenuous logic and outright speculation. Psychiatry is a fascinating and rapidly evolving field; it deserves better than this. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink