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You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip isn’t a volume of titillating tales. Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of novel God Spare the Girls (2021) interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture, and reflects on its role in her own life.

Rather, in this well-researched, passionate ode to shared storytelling, the journalist and author of the novel God Spare the Girls interrogates the concept of gossip, examines its place in popular culture and reflects on its role in her own life.

McKinney traces her gossip origin story back to her childhood in the evangelical Christian faith, which considers gossip “unequivocally, absolutely an affront against God, closer to murder or adultery than dancing.” Now, having left the church, she asserts, “It is certainly true that gossip is not helpful if your goal is to maintain the status quo and keep the peace, but those are two things Jesus Himself was very uninterested in doing.” Especially, she realized, when “the codifying of gossip as a sin could be used as a shield for misbehaving men in power to subjugate women in their congregations.”

The theme of gossip as liberation echoes throughout You Didn’t Hear This From Me, as does its ability to inform and, often, prevent harm, create community and help us better understand ourselves. McKinney adeptly leads readers through in-depth consideration of everything from the epic of Gilgamesh to Gossip Girl, saucy Doja Cat lyrics and Françoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso, analyzing gossip-adjacent phenomena like urban legends, conspiracy theories and whisper networks along the way.

McKinney’s fans are sure to be just as obsessed with You Didn’t Hear This From Me as they are with the “Normal Gossip” podcast she created and hosted for three years, wherein she and guests reveled in anonymous listener-submitted juicy stories. (Launched in 2022, the pod has 10 million listens and counting; in December 2024, McKinney handed the reins to a new host.) Her voice is smart and funny, and her arguments for considering gossip valuable and meaningful are compelling and clearly heartfelt. There’s no longer any shame in her game, either; she is “professionally nosy,” and beckons readers to join her in viewing gossip with a more appreciative eye—perhaps luxuriating in “the joy of snooping” while they’re at it.

The host of the “Normal Gossip” podcast, Kelsey McKinney, investigates gossip with an appreciative eye in her winning ode to snooping, You Didn’t Hear This From Me.

Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science

Plundered

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Deeply researched and as readable as a novel, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America identifies an element of structural racism that constrains and disadvantages so many people of color. Scholar Bernadette Atuahene and her team of researchers call this “predatory governance.”

Along with better-known discriminatory policies like redlining and exclusionary zoning, Atuahene says predatory governance—“when local governments intentionally or unintentionally raise public dollars through racist policies”—affects Black homeownership in poor communities throughout the country. Atuahene’s focus is the city of Detroit, where local government has confiscated one in three homes through tax foreclosure. Plundered unspools an intricate story of a nearly-bankrupt city unconstitutionally overtaxing homes in poor Black neighborhoods, resulting in property tax evictions, loss of generational wealth, rampant speculation and a rise of entrepreneurial slumlords.

Depressing? Enraging? More than a little. Plundered is also illuminating, humane and even hopeful. In an inspiring afterword, Atuahene details her research methods. Viewing herself as an ethnographer, she is deeply engaged with her subjects, rather than neutral. She digs well beneath the surface of the lives of the people she interviews and allows them to access and amend the record. Her goal as a storyteller is “to use each person’s virtues as well as their imperfections to make their humanity shine.” As a result, even people we might dismiss as malicious and greedy—a Florida investor buying repossessed homes as investments for Argentina’s wealthy elite, for example—are granted moments to express a flicker of humanity.

Even more important and moving are the in-depth stories of people like Myrisha Brown, whose grandfather, Tommie Brown Jr., moved from the South to Detroit in the early 20th century for a low-level but steady job at Ford Motor Company. Brown’s ability to buy a home was constrained in ways that another Detroit man, an Italian immigrant named Paris Bucci, similarly employed, did not experience.

Tracked over decades, the contrasting stories of homeownership and growth of family wealth for Brown and Bucci is eye-opening. Myrisha, a vibrant woman and the caretaker of her family, struggles to retain their home and neighborhood. She ultimately fails because of the predatory forces Atuahene exposes. Another narrative would likely blame Myrisha’s loss on personal failings. But Plundered offers a more accurate and humane story of what is happening in poor Black neighborhoods in Detroit and elsewhere.

As readable as a novel, Bernadette Atuahene’s Plundered unspools the intricate story of how a nearly-bankrupt Detroit unconstitutionally overtaxed homes in poor Black neighborhoods.

Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science

Calling In

Review by Natalia Berry

by Natalia Berry

Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel by Loretta J. Ross is a transformational guide that challenges the reflexive public disavowals commonly known as canceling; instead, Ross advocates for coalition building, understanding and justice. In a social media era shaped by movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Ross examines the utility of public shaming as a political tool while exposing how collective outrage can hinder mutual organizing efforts. Equal parts memoir, manifesto and manual, Calling In champions accountability that’s rooted in empathy, understanding and shared humanity.

Ross weaves her personal stories with insights from influential thinkers such as poet Audre Lorde, author and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman and Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, creating a rich and compelling narrative. Drawing from her decades in feminist activism, Ross addresses issues like leftist infighting and the need to center joy in social justice work. Poignant personal anecdotes—such as working with convicted rapists after receiving a letter from one during her time at the Washington D.C. Rape Crisis Center—underscore her transformative approach. Equally honest about her failures, Ross reflects on moments like lashing out at a younger colleague at SisterSong, a women of color-led reproductive justice collective she co-founded, to illustrate the difficulty and necessity of “calling in.”

The book’s most compelling argument is its challenge to examine why humans are drawn to spectacle and moral superiority. Ross recognizes that criticism of cancel culture can often serve as a right-wing dog whistle, and sees “calling out” as effective and even necessary when seeking justice for sexual and domestic violence survivors, or violent bigotry and hatred. However, she asks us to rethink the dehumanizing takedown cycle as a form of internet entertainment. While anger and guilt can feel justified, she argues they are not always effective tools for progress. Instead, she advocates for joy and empathy as radical acts of resistance, requiring belief in others’ potential and a commitment to building community—practices that take effort and humility to master.

Calling In is especially timely in the polarized political climate of the past few decades, emphasizing the importance of bridging divides and reclaiming our shared humanity. Courageous, practical and ultimately, very hopeful, Ross’ work is an essential read for anyone yearning to move beyond destructive public disavowals and toward meaningful, sustainable change.

In Calling In, veteran feminist activist Loretta J. Ross powerfully argues that we must give up cancel culture to reclaim our shared humanity.

Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science

Unassimilable

Review by Annie Harvieux

by Annie Harvieux

Sociologist and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie has wrestled with a conundrum for her entire life: Is it better to assimilate into mainstream American culture, or embrace one’s own heritage and, thus, stand out? In her scholarly yet personal book, Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century, Mabute-Louie finds these options to be a false binary. Twining memoiristic reflections with Asian American political and cultural history, her book proposes a third, freeing alternative: becoming unassimilable.

Mabute-Louie grew up in California’s San Gabriel Valley, an “ethnoburb” rich in Chinese groceries, language academies, churches and small businesses. She describes her popo (maternal grandmother) moving to the area from Hong Kong after a stressful divorce in her 70s. Able to speak Cantonese, prepare her favorite foods and make new friends in California thanks to the robust Chinese community, Mabute-Louie’s popo quickly thrived. “My popo and the ethnoburb demonstrate that we can create our own power and belonging without learning English, participating in White institutions, and Americanizing,” she writes. “But it is a communal endeavor, one that requires everybody’s imagination and care.” Rather than an act of individualism, unassimilability is an “interdependent community of popos finding each other.”

The author builds her book’s central case by describing her personal experience coming to racial consciousness, and discussing key selections from Asian American history and culture. She details the contrast between her ethnoburb and her largely white private school, her complex relationship with Chinese American Christian culture, and the liberatory framework she found for herself in academia through Ethnic Studies. The interspersed Asian American history ranges from American immigration quotas and bans during World War II, to the origins of the “model minority” stereotype, to fights over affirmative action’s value and impact on Asian students, to political conflicts both among broader communities of color and within Asian communities. At each chapter’s end, the author’s illustrations and comics provide bonus reflections.

Mabute-Louie shows how being unassimilable provides opportunity for wholeness, mission and community. “I am not ‘torn between two cultures,’ as they say, because I occupy a third space in the diaspora,” Mabute-Louie writes, “from where a collective identity emerges that is neither repulsed by foreignness nor longing for Whiteness, but adamantly unassimilable.”

In her powerful manifesto, Bianca Mabute-Louie unapologetically rejects assimilation and forges an Asian American identity on her own terms.

American History, History, Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science History American History

The Crazies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Who owns the wind? Should people use their own property as they see fit, even if it has an impact on their neighbors? Drawing on transcripts from court proceedings, county commission meetings and public inquiries, as well as a wealth of interviews, Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Gamerman explores these questions and others in her riveting The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West.

In Big Timber, Montana, population 1,673, winds howl down from the Crazy Mountains, 30-odd jagged peaks that surround the valley in which generations of ranchers have eked out a living raising cattle or sheep. With views of the Yellowstone River, the land is marked by a rugged beauty. In recent years, wealthy, politically connected figures have built private retreats in the area. Most often, these folks are neighbors, as was the case of Rick Jarrett, a fifth-generation rancher on the land, and billionaire Robert Gordy, who “collected land the way other rich men collect art.” In 2015, Jarrett was struggling to pay his debts and secure the ranch for his family’s future generations. For Jarrett, as for any rancher, financial security was elusive because profits from the annual sale of cattle had to be turned back into maintaining the ranch, often with little left over.

When wind prospector Marty Wilde came along, offering to put up wind turbines on Jarrett’s ranch, the rancher jumped at the chance to profit off this natural commodity: the winds screaming down the Crazies. Wilde’s Crazy Mountain Wind company would also provide electricity to Big Timber, and have environmental and economic benefits for the whole town. Billionaire Gordy immediately objected to the plan: Windmills, he claimed, would be an eyesore, marring the beauty of vistas he enjoyed from his property. The Crazies tracks this sprawling modern-day David and Goliath epic through lawsuits and appeals and public hearings for over two years.

Gamerman’s captivating account of the struggle over private property, conservation, renewable energy and greed in a small corner of Montana is a gripping parable for our times.

Who owns the wind? A fifth-generation rancher and billionaire go to court over the matter in Amy Gamerman’s captivating The Crazies.

Nonfiction, Self-Help, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science Self-Help

Reclaiming the Black Body

Review by Natalia Berry

by Natalia Berry

Reclaiming the Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within explores how eating disorders, or eating imbalances, as author Alishia McCullough aptly calls them, flourish under white, Western capitalist power structures, and have a unique impact on Black and brown women. McCullough investigates the origins of our negative relationships with food and our bodies, and shares the tools we can employ to reach healing transformation.

McCullough, a licensed clinical mental health therapist and founder of Black and Embodied Counseling and Consulting, is profoundly engaging and empathetic. “Embodiment,” the core principle of McCullough’s counseling philosophy, means self-acceptance that stems from connecting the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of ourselves. She offers new language for clinical terms, writing, “It is not that our eating is disordered, it’s that our relationship to our bodies and how we have come to nourish ourselves has become fragmented and created imbalance within us.” She’s specifically concerned with how historical forces have caused this fragmentation. For example, body-hatred as experienced by Black people can be traced to chattel slavery, lack of land ownership and food scarcity; one way to process this is through somatic therapy, which McCullough defines as “a body-centered approach that examines the mind-body connection.”

This book serves as a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma against fat people, especially Black and Indigenous women in larger bodies. Along with sharing her own experiences in these areas, McCullough covers subjects like patriarchal indoctrination, body-shaming, fatphobia and Black beauty standards. As much as Reclaiming the Black Body is a historical and sociocultural study, it’s also a deeply insightful guide for people of color struggling with body image, self-worth and confusion around what is healthy. It takes sharp aim at diet culture, self-imposed eating restrictions and so-called “health journeys” popular in Western society. In guided practice segments at the end of each chapter, McCullough turns to the reader and asks questions to help them reflect on how food and body insecurity have played a role in their lives.

McCullough specifically addresses Black women throughout: “You are dealing with a normal adaptive response to surviving in a system that was invented to deem your existence as something that should not have survived past the plantation,” she insists, adding, “I repeat: It is not your fault.” Innovative and groundbreaking, Reclaiming the Black Body asks us to consider the ways in which we are disconnected from ourselves and why. Embodiment is a lifelong revolutionary act that requires support and self-compassion. McCullough assures us that it’s worth it, and there is hope and healing ahead.

Alishia McCullough’s groundbreaking Reclaiming the Black Body takes a sharp aim at diet culture, providing a much-needed foil to the misinformation and stigma about fat people and a deeply insightful guide for women of color struggling with body image.

Nonfiction, Politics, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science Politics

99% Perspiration

Review by Alejandro Ramirez

by Alejandro Ramirez

American ideology stresses the value of hard work, tying it not just to wealth but to character. But we know hard work doesn’t always pay: Today, income inequality is worse than ever and wages have stagnated. But the pernicious idea that one’s value is tied to their employment status persists, influencing policies around welfare, housing, education and more. The COVID-19 pandemic changed many people’s views on work and government aid, but also inspired employers to rail against workers who sought employment elsewhere. It is against the pandemic backdrop that Adam Chandler begins 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, which seeks to break down the myth of the American work ethic and offer new ways to think about our relationship with our jobs.

Chandler, a journalist who traced the history of modern America through fast food in 2019’s Drive-Thru Dreams, uses the first half of his book to track how the U.S. came to place so much emphasis on the value of “hard work.” That’s not just the somber toil of farmsteading Pilgrims, but also the individualist hustle associated with Thomas Edison. Chandler dives into history, picking apart the folklore that became the basis for our modern attitude towards work, from Benjamin Franklin’s musings to the glitz of the Chicago World’s Fair.

There’s an element of travel journalism at play, as he visits areas like Plymouth Rock and an Osage Nation reservation in Oklahoma. Sometimes these excursions feel more like detours from the subject at hand, as Chandler sets up a stronger second half, which slices through modern Americans’ unhealthy relationship to work. Technology keeps office workers tethered to their desks regardless of time or location, low-wage workers struggle with erratic schedules, and politicians decry the neediest as leeches. While Chandler explores possible solutions, like a universal basic income, he also calls for a realignment of this country’s values, touting the benefits of a society more invested in the health of the community than the potential for individuals to strike it rich.

Chandler’s breezy writing style makes the book an easy read with plenty of eye-popping statistics and gut-wrenching anecdotes. More importantly, 99% Perspiration will make readers question their own relationship to work, what their jobs mean to them, and why employment is so integral to our identity.

Adam Chandler’s history of labor can make readers question their own relationship to work, what their jobs mean to them, and why employment is so integral to our identity.

Nature, Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science Nature

The Serviceberry

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

by mónica teresa ortiz

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is the latest offering from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, one of the great Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes. This slim but powerful volume continues the work of her previous books, including Gathering Moss and the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass. Here, she draws from the traditional Anishinaabe economy for her understanding of reciprocity and gift economies, ones where, she writes, “a system of redistribution of wealth [is] based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing.”

Through vivid descriptions of the heartbeats around her—cedar waxwings, bluebirds, neighbors sharing garden-grown zucchini—Kimmerer immerses readers in her kinship and connection to the land. Moving between Western science and her own Potawatomi knowledge, she illustrates an accessible model for building reciprocal relationships with both nonhuman and human life around us through the harvesting and sharing of a fruit known as Amelanchier—or serviceberry, “Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis.” Kimmerer writes that “ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance” and informs us that serviceberries are medicinal fruits that also synchronize “the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready.”

Kimmerer breaks down how an extractive economic system like capitalism, which focuses on individualism, competition and exploitation of resources, impacts our spirits; she does so in a language and tone that is generous, even toward the violence of such a system. Indigenous people, she explains, change themselves to suit the land’s changes of harvest, whereas Western methods of farming attempt to make the land suit a population’s desires and consumptions. “We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs,” Kimmerer notes, “rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time.”

“The land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual.” The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, returns with a powerful meditation on economics rooted in abundance and sharing.

Environment, Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science Environment

Power Metal

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

by Harvey Freedenberg

When we bring our mobile phone to life with a tap or settle in behind the wheel of our car, few of us give much thought to the raw materials required to make these sometimes miraculous- seeming devices work. Journalist Vince Beiser has reflected deeply on that subject, and the result, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape Our Future, is a sharp cautionary tale about the dilemmas facing humanity as we advance deeper into what he calls the Electro-Digital Age, especially as we pursue the essential transition to an energy-renewable future.

Everything comes with a cost, Beiser reminds us, even when it comes to the use of so-called critical metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel. These resources are fundamental to the massive expansion of electric cars and the clean energy sources (namely solar and wind power) that are necessary to combat climate change. What makes that truth problematic, he argues, is that the inevitable price of progress often falls most heavily on the residents of impoverished countries who bear the burden of first extracting these materials and later disposing of the batteries and printed circuit boards, for example, in which they’re used.

Beiser’s journey to this insight takes him from the streets of his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, where he tracks an “urban miner” digging through dumpsters for salvageable products like copper wiring, to a lithium mining operation in Chile’s Atacama desert, to a garbage dump in Lagos, Nigeria, where “e-waste scrappers” work in hazardous conditions to recycle electronic products. Power Metal is a concise, but thoroughly researched, work crammed with eye-popping statistics—among them the fact that 75 pounds of ore must be mined to build one four-and-a-half ounce iPhone. It investigates highly touted technologies like sea mining, whose promised benefits may conceal massive environmental risks.

In the final section of his book, Beiser offers some prescriptions to reduce the planet’s insatiable demand for resources that go beyond costly and energy-intensive recycling, including broadening the scope of right to repair laws, making urban spaces more friendly to bicyclists and deeply questioning our infatuation with the automobile. Whatever one thinks of the practicality of some of his proposals, Beiser has performed a vital service by alerting both policymakers and ordinary citizens to some of the critical choices facing us.

Power Metal sounds the alarm on the environmental and social consequences of electronic and digital energy—and how the ways we are combating climate change come at a cost.

History, Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science History

Custodians of Wonder

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

by Sarah McCraw Crow

“So often, we hear stories about the first person to do something: the innovators, the pioneers,” Eliot Stein writes in his introduction to Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. “But rarely is there a whisper for the last person to carry on a tradition, or a pause to look back and consider how these rites have shaped us and the places we come from.” Stein offers more than a whisper as he highlights 10 such customs around the world, profiling the women and men who preserve them.

Some of these customs are food- or craft-based, like the rare Sardinian pasta so fine that it’s called su filindeu (threads of God); and an ancient West African percussion instrument called a balafon that has been protected by a tiny village for 800 years. Others are rituals or jobs, like that of the night watchman in Ystad, Sweden, who every night climbs 14 stories of a 13th-century church to a bell tower to keep watch over the village, blowing a horn every 15 minutes to declare that all is well.

Stein sets his scenes in vividly painted settings. Introducing the temple village of Aranmula, on India’s southwestern coast, he writes, “Coconut trees swooped low like Nike swooshes over the water’s edge. . . . The night before, hot, heavy raindrops the size of nickels had fallen sideways in sheets.” Each chapter offers an in-depth profile of a practitioner, like Sudhammal J., Aranmula’s 48-year-old “Secret Lady Keeper,” who carries on her family’s ancient craft of melting tin, copper and other metals to make a highly reflective mirror believed to reveal one’s true self. Throughout these profiles, Stein threads cultural, geographic and political history, drawing out a few key details, and compressing centuries of history into a few paragraphs.

Despite the subtitle, not all the book’s customs are ancient. Asia’s last film poster painter practices a 20th-century craft. Nor are all the customs disappearing: The Japanese maker of traditional fermented soy sauce has seen demand grow, and he’s committed to helping others learn traditional techniques. Ultimately, Custodians of Wonder is a hopeful book, making the case that seemingly idiosyncratic and antiquated practices in distant corners of the world still matter; they reveal a particular place’s identity, and offer comfort, community and beauty even through centuries of change.

Eliot Stein’s vivid Custodians of Wonder documents the last people maintaining some of the world’s ancient cultural traditions, and proves that comfort, community and beauty never get old.

Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science

The Indian Card

Review by Deborah Mason

by Deborah Mason

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and a former advisor on homelessness and Native American issues in the Obama administration, loves data. When she noticed that the number of people self-identifying as “American Indian or Alaska Native” on the U.S. Census has more than doubled since 2000, while the number of enrolled members of federally recognized tribes has remained low, she wanted to know why. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, Schuettpelz not only details how these records hide a history of racism, genocide and erasure, but also how they continue to affect Native people.

The federal government has recorded the number of Native Americans throughout its history, with varying degrees of accuracy. Before ejecting Natives from their land and forcing them on death marches to reservations, the counts were expansive. But when records were used to mete out some kind of reparative benefit, the government’s definition of “tribe” or “Indian” was contracted to exclude as many people as possible. These rules also dictated tribal policy: To receive recognition from the federal government, tribes must have a constitution with similarly restrictive qualifications for membership.

Schuettpelz uses archival records to divulge insights into America’s disastrous history with Native people, while her in-depth interviews with present-day Indigenous Americans reveal how their lives and identities continue to be shaped by that history. For example, the Meskwaki constitution requires its members to trace their ancestry patrilineally. Tricia Long, one interviewee, is “the epitome of what it means to be part of a tribe,” yet she cannot pass her Meskwaki membership onto her older son because his father is white. Her younger son, whose father is Meskwaki, is entitled to tribal benefits like “land rights on the settlement, per capita payments, access to health care, housing assistance.” Her older son is entitled to none of this.

Schuettpelz herself has questions about her own identity. She is enrolled as a Lumbee member because one of her grandparents was Lumbee, but she did not grow up in the Lumbee community. Is she, she asks herself, Native enough? Her questions are open-ended, and her responses are invitations to further conversations in this powerful and important read.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s powerful The Indian Card considers the history of Native American tribal membership and its impacts on people today.

Environment, Nonfiction, Social Science

Nonfiction Social Science Environment

Valley So Low

Review by Stephen Elliott

by Stephen Elliott

The crusading savant with messy hair and scattered papers is a common protagonist in legal thrillers. The archetype—played by Mark Ruffalo or Julia Roberts or Matt Damon in films over the years—comes to life in attorney Jim Scott, the center of gravity in Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. Here, Tennessee-based journalist Jared Sullivan chronicles a yearslong battle in the wake of one of America’s worst environmental disasters.

In December 2008, a dike ruptured at a power plant in East Tennessee, deluging the surrounding rivers and landscape with more than 1 billion gallons of coal waste. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility corporation, pledged to clean up its mess, and hired engineering conglomerate Jacobs Engineering to oversee the work.

It didn’t take long before the cleanup workers started falling ill. Though they’d been told repeatedly the site was safe and the air was clean, the workers began to suspect the coal ash they were cleaning up was to blame for their new ailments and faltering health. They alleged that Jacobs was preventing them from wearing protective gear and tampering with air quality sensor data in an effort to avoid further public scrutiny and speed the lucrative project along.

Sullivan tells the story of the workers, the TVA and Jacobs officials in charge and, centrally, Scott and his collaborators, who took on the workers’ case in an effort to extract justice from the tragic disaster. The author paints vivid portraits of key characters; love lives and family dramas help render the victims in color, making their plight all the more upsetting.

Horrifying details and anecdotes pile up as the story unfolds, and it’s easy to understand how righteous anger could fuel a lengthy legal quest with no promise of financial reward. Propulsive and written with flair, Valley So Low is a valuable addition to the pantheon of legal thrillers.

Jared Sullivan’s Valley So Low chronicles an environmental disaster in Tennessee with the flair of a propulsive legal thriller.