Ruth Franklin’s thoughtfully probing The Many Lives of Anne Frank illuminates the “kaleidoscope of meanings” ascribed to the titular author and her foundational work.
Reading at times like a legal thriller, Michelle Adams’ The Containment sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system.
The elegantly illustrated A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects shows that Black Americans have always been the bearers—not merely the recipients—of innovation.
U.S. national security, foreign policy and politics reporter Julia Ioffe makes her literary debut with Motherland, a book that seeks to show how Russia’s history is inextricably linked to its women. Ioffe, whose family escaped the Soviet Union and migrated to New York City when she was 7, puts her formidable journalism skills to use as she braids family memoir with history, illuminating how the country’s treatment of women paved the way to the rise of today’s authoritarian government.
Imani Perry showed her ability to weave historical research with sharp, sparkling analysis in 2022’s National Book Award-winning South to America. In Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, she explores how the color blue has been intertwined with Black life: in the dyeing of indigo, the religious traditions of various African cultures, the literature of Zora Neale Hurston, the revolutionary politics of Black freedom fighters and much more.
Who owns the wind? A fifth-generation rancher and billionaire go to court over the matter in Amy Gamerman’s captivating The Crazies.
The stunning, adventurous Embers of the Hands examines the lives of everyday Vikings who otherwise might have been lost to history.
Everyone living in our so-called “post” colonial world, especially anyone who’s ever been a tourist, should read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.
Zeinab Badawi’s incredible An African History of Africa should be studied in every school across the West.
Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s indispensable In Open Contempt examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma.
Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
Lydia Reeder celebrates the female physician who debunked sexist Victorian-era medicine in The Cure for Women.
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