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
Arriving right on cue for the nation’s 250th anniversary, Bret Baier’s “The Case for America: An Argument on Behalf of Our Nation” sets out to do something that sounds almost quaint in the current media environment: make a sustained, good-faith argument for why the American experiment is still worth believing
There’s a moment in every long-running series where the author decides the audience can handle more than jokes and gore, and Matt Dinniman hits that moment hard in The Butcher’s Masquerade. Book five of the Dungeon Crawler Carl saga is still absurd, still profane, and still built around a talking
Some books explain a problem. Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” does something harder: it hands readers an entirely different vocabulary for a problem they thought they already understood. Five years after its release, the book keeps resurfacing on bestseller charts, and it’s not hard to see why — Wilkerson’s central argument feels
What does it actually mean to be American, and who gets to decide? Ben Rhodes doesn’t answer that question so much as he lets fifteen speeches argue it out across two and a half centuries, and the result is one of the more clarifying works of popular history to arrive
There’s a particular kind of ache that comes from loving someone who doesn’t know you exist — and a stranger one that comes from loving someone who exists as a person you’ve never met. Sumiko Arai’s “The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy at All” opens on that
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