Book Reviews

A funny thing happened on the way to the top of the bestseller lists this year: the reigning number-one novel in America wasn’t engineered by a marketing department or fronted by a celebrity name. It came from a sixty-something singer-songwriter in Georgia who quietly self-published his debut in 2023, sold

What if the line between angel, alien, and algorithm is thinner than any of us assume? That’s the unsettling question at the center of D.W. Pasulka’s “The Others.” Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, spends the book tracing a thread that runs from

Few campaign operatives walk out of their own party’s national convention mid-speech and film the exit. Evan Barker did, and “Nothing Left” is her attempt to explain why. Barker spent nearly a decade as one of the Democratic Party’s most effective fundraisers, pulling in tens of millions of dollars for

Some memoirs ask you to pity the place they escaped. “All That’s Unseen” asks something harder: to sit with the contradictions of a home you both needed to leave and refuse to let anyone flatten into a punchline. Emilee Hackney grew up in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, inside a

Bible skeptics have long argued that scripture’s historical claims outrun the archaeological record. In The Stones Cry Out, Dinesh D’Souza sets out to flip that argument on its head, arguing that the ground itself has quietly been building a case for the Bible’s reliability for decades — we just haven’t

Most personal finance books are engineered to make you feel behind — behind on saving, behind on investing, behind on retirement math you were supposed to have mastered by thirty. Morgan Housel’s The Art of Spending Money does something rarer: it asks why getting money right hasn’t made most of

David Goggins was overweight, broke, and working an exterminator job with cockroaches falling on him through ceiling tiles when he decided, on a whim, to become a Navy SEAL. He gave himself three months to lose over a hundred pounds. That single decision is the engine of “Can’t Hurt Me,”

Mark Manson opens his mega-bestseller by introducing us to Charles Bukowski, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking failure who became one of the most celebrated writers of his generation not by chasing positivity but by refusing to lie to himself about how bad he was. It’s a strange opening for a self-help book,

Three little girls sit for a portrait in 1881, all ribbons and reflected light, painted by a rising artist named Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Sixty years later, one of those girls will be dead in Auschwitz. That is the gut-punch premise Catherine Ostler builds “The Renoir Girls” around, and it never loosens

Some couples fall in love slowly, over long conversations and shared glances. Allie Hayes and Dean Di Laurentis fall into bed first and figure out the rest later — and somehow it works. “The Score,” the third installment in Elle Kennedy’s wildly popular Off-Campus series, currently sits at No. 8