The invention of the internet is a double-edged sword: The ease and instantaneous nature of advanced technology have guided the evolution of modern communication as much as they’ve given power to the predators lurking in the unsavory corners of the web. Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls is a timely work that combines the vulnerability of personal experience and the researched, fact-based reporting of nonfiction.

Goldberg, a victims’ rights attorney based in Brooklyn, doesn’t just empathize with the pain and trauma of her clients; she has firsthand understanding of the hell that a perpetrator can inflict on someone’s life. She writes, “Some people call me ‘a passionate advocate’ or a ‘social justice warrior.’ I’d rather be called a ruthless motherfucker.” Before founding her own law firm in 2014, she was battling a deranged ex-boyfriend who had made it his mission to make her “pay” for ending their relationship. His love and adoration seemed to quickly dissolve into the obsessive need for control. The breakup pulled back the curtain and revealed a man who had declared psychological war: spamming Goldberg’s inbox and phone with threatening and violent messages, filing a false police report and harassing her friends and family. The ex-boyfriend’s campaign of terror lasted for a year. And while it had been a harrowing period of time, Goldberg realized a new purpose: becoming an advocate for victims, the advocate she wished she’d had in her corner while dealing with her ex.

Goldberg’s writing is especially compelling when she focuses on specific clients she has helped. There is no such thing as a “standard” victim; the individuals mentioned in the book hail from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, geographical locations and genders. While these clients are certainly victims of the vindictive acts of offenders, whom Goldberg classifies as “psychos, pervs, assholes, and trolls,” she doesn’t frame their misfortunes as signs of character weakness or indicators of personal fault. When Macie, a 17-year-old girl, and her mother wanted to hire Goldberg following a schoolwide leak of the daughter’s intimate photos to her then-boyfriend, Goldberg didn’t shame her. On the contrary, Goldberg was truly angry—angry at the boyfriend for violating Macie’s privacy and trust and angry at the gender-biased judgment of the school administration, who decided to punish Macie and not the boy.

While her tone is more conversational than rigidly academic, Goldberg provides solid research to supplement her anecdotes. An important, harrowing look into the dark underbelly of the internet, this book sheds light on the mistreatment of victims and on the society and justice system that often fail them.

Eating fast food unites almost all Americans and, increasingly, many millions more throughout the world. From fast food’s modest origins in the early decades of the 20th century to the huge industry it has become today, we can trace the history of the United States through the development of this popular American institution. With the ability to adapt to changing tastes and trends, to meet the public’s need for something to eat that’s generally inexpensive, quick and the same every time you order it, fast food has become a permanent part of American culture. 

In his enlightening and fun-to-read Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom, Adam Chandler explores the complex industry that sprang from fry cook Walt Anderson’s “invention” of the hamburger in Wichita, Kansas, in 1916. Anderson’s partnership with real estate developer Billy Ingram led to the establishment of White Castle restaurants, which continue to thrive today and even celebrate their most loyal fans in their Cravers Hall of Fame.

The founders of many fast-food companies came from modest backgrounds, but through sheer determination, hard work and good luck, they achieved success. Colonel Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken is the most representative of the American dream in this regard. Despite setbacks that would discourage most people, his secret recipe, colorful personality and keen marketing skills propelled him to succeed.

Ray Kroc was so impressed by the hamburger stand created by Dick and Mac McDonald in California that he bought it from them, and McDonald’s eventually became the greatest fast-food success story of all. Kroc, a former sales representative of paper cups and milkshake machines, was “exacting, fastidious, and cruel” and took pride in saying he made more millionaires than anyone else in the United States.

There is much more here about customer loyalty and fast-food restaurants as meeting places. Based on interviews and careful research, this is a book to savor, especially if you’re a fast-food fan. 

May 23, 2015, started out as a particularly good day for Travis Rieder. He enjoyed the early morning hours with his toddler daughter while his wife slept, then set out for a motorcycle tour in the mountains. Less than three blocks into his ride, however, disaster struck when a van pulled out of an intersection and broadsided Rieder, traumatically injuring his left foot. While doctors were able to salvage the limb, he was left with an open wound for a month and faced multiple surgeries, years of recovery and the news that he was unlikely to ever walk unaided.

Sadly, there was even more to this nightmare. Those first months of seemingly endless, searing pain left Rieder addicted to opioids, with no medical professionals willing or able to help him withdraw from his medications, despite his and his wife’s desperate pleas for help. “I thought I would die—either from the withdrawal itself or by my own hand,” Rieder writes in his powerful, informative memoir, In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle With Opioids.

A research scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, Rieder is uniquely equipped to narrate not only his own story but also a broader look at America’s opioid problem. His prose is clear and compelling, whether he’s describing a torturous night spent writhing on the bathroom floor, not sure he can survive until morning, or examining the science and history of addiction and the changes needed in our health care system and society’s approach to the issue. Never pedantic, Rieder eloquently explains that addiction is “a health problem rather than a criminal justice problem” that needs to be addressed “with evidence-based therapies rather than punishment.”

Rieder was lucky. His unyielding determination allowed him to kick his opioid habit and learn to walk without assistance. Realizing that he was hardly alone in his addiction struggle, he listened to the advice of his colleagues: “Tell the story. Shine a light. Don’t let the suffering of people . . . exist in darkness anymore.”

The result is an important book that goes hand in hand with Beth Macy’s Dopesick. Readers of both will not only be enlightened but likely find their attitudes about this devastating crisis transformed.

There are few literary voices today who explore the intricacies of human migration better than Suketu Mehta. It’s a subject he knows well—as a journalist, but also as an immigrant in the U.S. who has lived in cities all over the world and descends from a family of “mercantile wanderers.” To him, migration is just life.

But today, intense deliberation over immigration is a prevailing concern. All across the globe—but especially in Western countries, from Spain to the U.S. to the U.K.—countries are closing their borders to all refugees and immigrants, with devastating results. In his new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Mehta delivers an emotional, timely polemic railing against this trend of fear, discrimination and hatred that has gripped so many countries, especially ours.

In a heroic effort to dispel racist, destructive myths surrounding immigration, Mehta travels from city to city speaking to people at places like Friendship Park at the Mexican-American border. He also visits other countries like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to hear the heartbreaking stories of regular people trying to migrate for a better life.

With humanity and keen insight, Mehta explores why people are migrating with higher frequency and explains why immigrants throughout history have always elicited reactionary views and backlash. But most importantly, he explains why we should stop falling for the same hateful rhetoric over and over again. Drawing from the history of racism and colonialism, he makes a case for why refugees and migrants have a positive influence on society instead of a negative one. His simple answer to anyone who asks why immigrants are coming here is: We are here because you were there. 

Pulling from history, personal experiences and intimate profiles, Mehta examines the backlash to immigration, what’s behind it and why we have good reasons to be hopeful about the future.

“I talk to a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me,” writes author Rachel Louise Snyder on the first page of No Visible Bruises. She begins with the case of Michelle Mosure Monson, fatally shot by her abusive husband, Rocky. He also killed their two children before committing suicide. Years later, Snyder sat down with Michelle’s father, trying to unravel what happened. She watched hours of home videos. She connected with Michelle’s family, law enforcement and community members who were traumatized by the crime. Most didn’t want to talk about Michelle. They felt complicit, wracked with regret and grief. 

The suffering induced by domestic violence is bigger than we can begin to understand, Snyder explains. Because these crimes are generally perceived as private, it’s nearly impossible to trace the collective impact. Snyder sets herself to the task, arguing that we need a broader research-based view of domestic violence. 

Snyder’s careful reporting about Michelle’s case lays the foundation for the many other stories she examines. Beyond the victims and their families, Snyder profiles several men who are trying to overcome their violent tendencies. She visits them in prison and sits in on counseling sessions, showing how hard it is for them to be aware of their processes of escalation—and how easy it is for them to slip back into violent tendencies that put them and those around them at risk.

Finally, Snyder examines what interventions are interrupting the cycle of violence. This section offers tangible hope that our collective efforts, especially those that unite professionals around high-risk cases, can result in real change. Although No Visible Bruises is not easy or light reading, Snyder’s willingness to tell the intimate stories of domestic violence sheds light on an often neglected subject. All of us have a stake in becoming more aware of and responsive to private violence, and this book proves why.

Among the many flaws of the frenzied 24/7 news cycle is the lack of context for the latest breaking news story. That’s what makes New York University professor and historian Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America such a valuable contribution to our understanding of the fractious debate over immigration and the attendant controversy over a wall along the United States’ southern border.

Grandin’s compact survey of American history spans the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present, but at its heart is historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” which argued, as Grandin summarizes it, that “the expansion of settlement across a frontier of ‘free land’ created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism.” Relying on a rich trove of source materials, both primary and secondary, Grandin pointedly contends that this mythic “Edenic utopia” has now been eclipsed by the shadow of a concrete and steel border wall, “America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier.”

Whether he’s decrying the “Jacksonian consensus” over the means of westward migration, which promoted a ruthless regime “forged in frontier expansion and racist war,” or critiquing free trade agreements like NAFTA and post-9/11 American foreign policy, with its open-ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Grandin finds plenty of targets of all political stripes. But he reserves some of his harshest criticism of a country he says has “lived past the end of its myth” for President Trump and the segment of the American electorate he represents. “Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry,” Grandin writes, “a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.” 

Grandin concludes The End of the Myth on an even more ominous note, observing that future generations will face a stark choice between “barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” Regardless of whether one accepts Grandin’s Manichaean prophecy, with all the bitterness of the conflict it foretells, there is no escaping the need to come to terms with the painful legacy that’s meticulously revisited in this unsettling book.

In 1975, three young black men (two were teenagers at the time) were sent to death row after they were convicted of the vicious murder of a salesman outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite there being no physical evidence tying them to the crime, they were arrested and convicted solely on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy, Edward Vernon. Years later as an adult, Vernon recanted his testimony, and the three men were exonerated after spending several decades in prison.

Told with profound empathy and deeply researched history, Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America uncovers the shameful story of the longest wrongful incarceration in the history of the United States to end in exoneration.

In his debut, Washington Post journalist Kyle Swenson expertly unravels two connected stories: the personal histories of three innocent black men (Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu and Rickey Jackson) who were sent to prison for almost four decades for a murder they didn’t commit; and the history of Cleveland, a city embedded in an unmovable, corrupt system that allowed gross injustice to thrive. A formerly booming industrial town in the early 20th century, Cleveland was falling apart by 1975 from decades of neglect, systemic racism, poverty and police corruption. With dramatic, cinematic detail, Swenson connects this to a larger problem by showing how federal policies on both the war on drugs and the war on crime have devastated targeted communities in Cleveland and across the country, and have resulted in one of the most overburdened and draconian justice systems in the western world.

Though small reforms and cosmetic changes may be slowly lifting the burden of history, this book questions the very nature of the justice system—and whom it benefits.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, starred review, February 2019

Fans of polymath Maria Popova’s popular website, Brain Pickings, will find themselves right at home in Figuring, her audacious new work of intellectual history that focuses on the lives of a coterie of brilliant women, some well-known and others less so, whose gifts in fields like astronomy, literature, ecology and art have helped shape our world.

Popova’s goal in this book is to tease out the “invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and place.” Time and again her nimble mind and deep intellectual curiosity make those connections plausible and compelling, like the link that bonds 19th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, who discovered a new comet in 1847, to Vera Rubin, who became the first woman permitted to use the Palomar Observatory in the 1960s.

For Popova, subjects like literary critic Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson and sculptor Harriet Hosmer are not disembodied intellects from the past. In describing the often frustrating courses of their personal—and especially romantic—lives, Popova exposes the tension between mundane human existence and the unrelenting demands of great science and art.

Though most of Popova’s icons flourished in the 19th century, she devotes considerable attention to a deeply sympathetic portrait of marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, whose 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, decried the indiscriminate use of pesticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement. Popova especially admires the way Carson “pioneered a new aesthetic of poetic science writing, inviting the human reader to consider Earth from the nonhuman perspective.”

Popova’s own mellifluous prose enhances her discussion of even the most arcane topics. She draws extensive quotations from primary sources, allowing her subjects to speak at length in their often eloquent, always fascinating voices. Figuring invites the reader to engage with complex ideas and challenging personalities, unearthing a wealth of material for further reflection along the way. 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the election of President Obama in 2009, many young black men and women saw hope in the promise of the American dream—the belief that hard work and unrelenting persistence guaranteed a seat at the table. But as the years passed, the envisioned path of upward mobility proved impassable. And yet, the reality of the lives of black millennials in a post-Obama nation isn’t a portrait of total despair. For Reniqua Allen, Eisner Fellow at the Nation Institute, the demystifying of the American dream represents a chance to abandon the expectations of white America and forge a new path. It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America is a portrait of young black people grappling with the enduring legacy of white supremacy. Combining nuanced reporting with the intimacies of personal experience, Allen showcases the lives of black millennials, which are rarely portrayed with accuracy in mainstream media.

Gathering the stories of more than 75 black Americans living everywhere from sprawling cities to contained suburbs, Allen dismantles the conditional terms of a lie that has been peddled for decades. The American dream says that the road to success is built upon meritocracy, but black millennials soon discovered that education alone couldn’t fully shatter institutional racism and systemic discrimination. Allen shares the experience of Michael, a former college athlete with a crippling amount of undergraduate student debt. Like many of his peers, Michael did everything “right.” But Michael lost his athletic scholarship due to injury before graduation. He was determined to finish his education, despite the mounting debt. Although he doesn’t consider his experience “a sob story,” it’s in line with the stories of many black Americans who followed the rules put in place by white America.

In this insightful book, the idea of the American dream is proven to be a fairy tale at best, and a nightmare at worst.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.