Book Reviews

James Patterson has built an entire publishing ecosystem on velocity — short chapters, cliffhangers, a new title seemingly every few weeks — and pairing him with Mike Lupica, a novelist with a real sportswriter’s eye for locker rooms and small-town loyalty, produces something that reads like Patterson’s usual sprint with

Every election post-mortem in Democratic politics eventually arrives at the same unanswered question: what do you actually do with power once you have it again? Brian Tyler Cohen, the political commentator whose YouTube channel and podcast have made him one of the most-watched voices on the left, has built a

Few business-book-adjacent titles have crossed over into rap lyrics, locker rooms, and Silicon Valley reading lists quite like this one. Nearly three decades after its release, “The 48 Laws of Power” is still climbing Amazon’s nonfiction charts, proof that readers never tire of being told how the game is really

Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” has been turning up on bestseller lists again this summer, fifteen years after its original publication, and the timing isn’t an accident. As the country debates who gets to claim which version of American history heading into its 250th year, Wilkerson’s account of

A quarter-century after its first printing, “Communion: The Female Search for Love” is back on the bestseller lists, not because of a splashy reissue campaign but because readers found it themselves and started passing it along. That’s a strange, quiet kind of comeback for a book, and it says something

Every round-number anniversary America throws itself, the same ritual repeats: bunting goes up, speeches invoke the founders, and the harder truths get quietly filed away until the next commemorative decade rolls around. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s “America, U.S.A.” arrives just as the country gears up for its 250th birthday, and

How do you report on a White House that no longer bothers pretending to observe the old guardrails? That’s the challenge Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan take on in their new book, and the sheer volume of access they secured, roughly a thousand interviews conducted over two years, makes the

What happens when the woman selling the world a fantasy of simpler times actually wakes up living in one? That’s the deliciously loaded question at the center of Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, a book that turns a very online phenomenon into something sharper and stranger than a simple morality

What if the richest man in a small town spent his fortune not on himself, but on tracking down ninety-two strangers just to hand them a piece of their own history? That’s the improbable, disarming premise animating Allen Levi’s debut novel, and it works far better than it has any

John Green has spent his career making the abstract feel personal, whether he was writing about teenagers with cancer or hosting videos about the history of everything. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, he turns that same instinct toward a disease most Americans assume belongs to the past, and the result is