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TikTokker Rallo (I Didn’t Know I Needed This) reflects on navigating the turbulence of one’s 20s in these candid, confessional essays. Many of the entries zero in on the perils of comparison; “Does Anyone Else Know WTF to Do About Imposter Syndrome?” explores the author’s struggles with feeling out of place in school and social settings, and calls for an accepting culture where young people can more openly “commiserate and explore and find ourselves together.” Elsewhere, “Does Anyone Else Feel Like They Need to Stop Scrolling?” analyzes social media’s role in facilitating both connection and alienation that stems from comparison culture. “Does Anyone Else Feel Like They’re Having a Quarter-Life Crisis?” unpacks the grief of revising “invisible timelines” for marriage, career, and stability, while also reckoning with the freedom of rewriting expectations. Rallo’s voice is conversational and refreshingly funny, particularly when she’s skewering the contradictions of “adulting,” though the essays tend to circle the same themes—imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and the search for purpose—without offering much in the way of fresh insight. Still, Rallo’s candid approach will go a long way toward reassuring young adults that they’re not alone. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lawyer Garner (Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage) uncovers in this scrupulous biography the life of artist and etcher Oskar Stoessel. Born in 1879 Austria, Stoessel passed the notoriously difficult entrance exam for the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (the same year Adolf Hitler failed to gain admittance), where he honed his etching skills, later forging connections with giants like Gustav Klimt and building a roster of famous subjects, including authors, actors, and diplomats. In 1939, he and his brother were driven by Hitler’s rise to immigrate to New York. George Messersmith, an American diplomat who’d commissioned a portrait from Stoessel, helped the artist establish connections, arranging portrait sessions with Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Stoessel’s depiction was said to be Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite) and numerous Supreme Court justices. Still, antisemitism in the art world kept Stoessel from achieving real renown, according to Garner; at 80, he returned to Austria and died four years later. Garner studiously digs through Stoessel’s correspondences with Supreme Court justices to meticulously track the artist’s career in America, setting it against an uneasy postwar atmosphere in which eagerness to move past the conflict often led to open xenophobia. The result is a worthy resurrection of a little-known artist. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Nature writer Kumar (Conversations with Birds) explores the history and diversity of apples in this thorough mix of memoir and ecology. Growing up in northern India, Kumar started foraging for apples at age 5 in the Himalayan foothills. Now living in New Mexico, where grocery store apples are “cardboard-like” and “hollow,” she began searching for wild apple trees and exploring America’s frayed relationship with the fruit. Originating in central Asia, apples were first brought to North America by Spanish conquistadores and French Jesuits in the 1500s and 1600s. Over the next centuries, apples were cultivated coast to coast and became the most diverse domesticated crop in America, at one point having more than 16,000 named varieties. Now, only a fifth remain available, thanks to industrial agriculture’s focus on high yields of supermarket-ready fruits. The decline in diversity leads to dull flavors, Kumar explains, and leaves the fruit more vulnerable to climate change and disease. The author couples her extensive research with personal stories, including numerous anecdotes about home gardening and raising children. The narrative meanders at times and is often bogged down by metaphors (“This wild gardening, tucked into the margins of our lives”). Still, readers will be inspired to reconnect with nature. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

“The enslaved rebelled against their captivity throughout the entire [400-year] period” of the Atlantic slave system, according to this stunning revisionist saga. Historian Hazareesingh (Black Spartacus) chronicles myriad examples of “verbal expressions of dissent,” escapes and slave ship mutinies, “poison and sabotage,” acts of self-harm that denied the enslavers one’s labor, as well as “military rebellion, insurgency, and warfare.” He also argues that “enslaved resistance must be evaluated beyond the single criterion of whether it led to the direct overthrow of the institution of slavery,” pointing out that, for centuries, resistance was a vital practice that fostered “dignity and autonomy” for millions. “Resistance thinking,” he writes, cultivated “networks of community and solidarity” that eventually became “forms of self-governance.” Hazareesingh traces this legacy of resistance directly to Africa, where many communities, targeted by “African imperial armies and slave-raiding parties,” refused to submit; many of these groups not only survived but thrived, and seeded oral traditions among those enslaved that resistance was possible. Hazareesingh likewise tracks the spiritual dimensions of resistance thinking throughout the Atlantic world, showing how oath-taking, sacred rituals, and new religious narratives forged new political identities, with one striking example being Nat Turner, who “shrouded his preparations” for rebellion in the story of “his personal journey towards the Kingdom of Heaven.” Pointedly demonstrating that the enslaved’s efforts contributed more to their freedom than “the campaigns of enlightened white abolitionists,” this is a remarkable reorientation of the history of the modern world. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. In three sections, Iyer directly addresses her grandfather, her father, and finally, readers. Through family lore and public records, she retraces her grandfather’s travels to Burma, where he worked as an engineer for the British colonial government, and the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where he returned to live out Gandhi’s ideals of compassion and self-reliance. She then addresses her father, a social worker who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and died in the early 2000s. His sensitivity to animal suffering inculcated Iyer with a deep compassion for all living things, and led her to step away from her engineering career to pursue writing and animal rights advocacy. Some of the pieces in this section read like long-form journalism, including one where Iyer visits egg farms in India and sees chickens being slaughtered by people who don’t eat animal products. The strands binding these chapters with the book’s final section, in which Iyer shares her struggles to conceive a child with her husband, can feel tenuous, but she manages to stitch everything together through thoughtful musings on Tamil poetry and Hindu philosophy. This singular personal history edifies as much as it charms. Agent: Anjali Singh, Anjali Singh Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Identity politics and social justice are on the menu in this hit-or-miss installment of Mariner’s annual anthology of the year’s best culinary and travel writing. Noting that “any discussion of food (or travel) that ignores power is incomplete,” editor Terry (Black Food) highlights themes of resistance, survival, queerness, and “the politics of pleasure.” Some of the essays explore sociocultural material with aplomb, including John Paul Brammer’s memoir of eating rattlesnake as part of his raucous coming of age as a gay boy in Oklahoma, and Henry Wismayer’s withering, incisive critique of the banality of modern tourism. Others amount to stolid soapboxing; Ayurella Horn-Muller, for example, hammers home the irony that some American farmworkers are food insecure, proving mostly that poorly paid people are poor without revealing much more. Some of the best essays focus raptly on the food, among them Giri Nathan’s shell-shocked homage to Ugly Baby, a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn known for its bizarre, searingly hot dishes. (“In Ugly Baby’s strange crucible, all my rules are suspended: I ate brain, and would probably eat human if it were wrapped in a banana leaf and sold to me with deceitful slivers of lemongrass, kra pow, and kaffir lime leaves.”) The result is a hodgepodge of the delectable and the dreary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Radio producer Long debuts with a serviceable recap of the career of singer Perry Como (1912–2001). Born to Italian immigrants in small-town Canonsburg, Pa., Como grew up influenced by the crooning styles of Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby. His career got off to a rocky start; after he joined the Ted Weems Orchestra as a vocalist in 1936, record executives found his style too similar to that of fellow crooner Crosby, though with time Como abandoned the “vocal fluctuations of his early efforts” for a “more consistent and rounded tone.” Long carefully traces Perry’s solo career after he left the Weems band in 1942, his hosting of numerous radio shows, and his career in television. Long also frames Como’s career against the backdrop of a rapidly changing entertainment industry, though the discussions of advances in record technology and the genesis of color TV sometimes preclude more complex insights into the subject’s character. It’s a solid overview of Como’s professional milestones, but readers seeking a deeper understanding of the man himself will be left wanting. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this evocative account, Velikonja (The Chosen Few), a Slovenian cultural studies scholar who has served as a visiting professor in Ukraine several times since the 2022 Russian invasion, provides snapshots of everyday life in the country while analyzing the protest art and rhetoric that has emerged in response to the war. “Not for a moment do I imagine encapsulating it in all its immensely complex and painful reality,” he writes. “These are more its fragments, chips that rolled toward me as much as I rolled toward them.” Some of the vignettes and photographs are especially resonant and eye-opening, including an exploration of how patriotic imagery has worked its way into the design of packaged foods, and a graffito of a fierce but adorable kitten getting ready for combat. Velikonja also reflects on how the war has shaped spoken language in Ukraine, including the ongoing minimization of the Russian language, which he relates to similarly heated linguistic politics in Slovenia. Velikonja manages to address some of the nuances of the conflict without straying from an overall condemnation of Russia (“There is no excuse for a full military attack”). With an eye for poignant detail and an urgent sense of the larger historical questions at hand, this makes for an immersive and unpredictable examination of war’s reverberations throughout society. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books, debuts with a comprehensive biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886–1973), founder of the early-20th-century avant-garde magazine The Little Review. Following her privileged upbringing in Indiana, Anderson’s drive for “self-expression” took her to Chicago, where she immersed herself in the burgeoning literary scene. Launched in 1914, The Little Review was initially intended as “a monthly magazine of criticism,” but it eventually published some of the era’s biggest experimental writers, including Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Moving to New York and later Paris, Anderson remained staunchly dedicated to her editorial vision, even when it risked alienating her readership, such as with editorials in support of anarchist Emma Goldman and the serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The latter, deemed obscene, led to criminal charges against Anderson and the U.S. Post Office burning issues of The Little Review. While tracking Anderson’s involvement with the more famous Ulysses obscenity trial, Morgan still keeps the story centered on her intriguing life story, including numerous creative and romantic relationships with women and her fascinatingly bizarre involvement with a commune that practiced the “Fourth Way,” a “labyrinthine system of manual labor, performance art, physical exercise, and psychological examination.” Readers will savor this enlightening depiction of a little-discussed but influential figure of both modernism and queer history. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This rollicking account from historian Gardner (The Earth Is All That Lasts) revisits the Wild West exploits of Wyatt Earp, an itinerant policeman known for his coolheadedness, and Doc Holliday, a part-time dentist and full-time gambling addict. Holliday saved Wyatt from getting jumped in Dodge City in 1878, and later became a regular in the Earp posse in Tombstone, Ariz., where Wyatt and his brothers Virgil and Morgan became lawmen. There they squared off against a gang known as the Cowboys, eventually precipitating the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The Earps and Holliday prevailed, but the Cowboys later assassinated Morgan, provoking the Earps and Holliday to a monthlong vengeance campaign that made national headlines. Gardner’s retelling of this famous incident paints a colorful, atmospheric panorama of the Wild West as an archipelago of saloons, gambling dens, and whorehouses where brutal violence was status quo. Gardner conveys it all in two-fisted prose that smacks of a Hollywood western; while he brings some nuance to the tale—highlighting, for instance, that Wyatt pivoted easily between lawbreaker and lawman—he still finds a lot to admire about the duo (“Their odd but endearing friendship [is] a bona fide saga if there ever was one”). The result is a raucous and entertaining slice of Americana. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink