Spring New Releases

Book Recommendations for the Maverick Reader Type

For the Maverick Reader Type, spring brings a bold selection of new releases in social science and nonfiction, offering loud opinions, big ideas, and thought-provoking insights. These book recommendations are perfect for those who love to challenge conventional thinking and dive into fearless, unapologetic narratives.

With new books coming in March, April, and May, you'll find plenty of fresh perspectives to fuel your passion for bold reads. These spring new releases promise to spark conversation and ignite change.

may new releases

Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers

by Mark Blyth - Nicolò Fraccaroli

Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. What's more, tariffs and trade wars threaten to accelerate inflation again. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.

Is a River Alive?

by Robert MacFarlane

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Across the Board: How Games Make Us Human

by Tim Clare

Across the Board is a rollicking journey through the history and culture of tabletop games and the unparalleled way that they bring people together

Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they're everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers.

No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

by Rebecca Solnit

In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean.

Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness

by David Attenborough - Colin Butfield

Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the earth's future.

Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder, and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet--the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate, and creates the air we breathe. This book showcase the oceans' remarkable resilience: they can, and in some cases have, recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.

So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

by Caro de Robertis

From the acclaimed novelist, a first-of-its-kind, deeply personal, and moving oral history of a generation of trans and gender nonconforming elders of color--from leading activists to artists to ordinary citizens--who tell their own stories of breathtaking courage, cultural innovations, and acts of resistance.

So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world.

april new book recommendations

A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory

by Jagadish Shukla

The amazing true story of the man behind modern weather prediction

Consider a world without weather prediction. How would we know when to evacuate communities ahead of fires or floods, or figure out what to wear tomorrow? Until 40 years ago, we couldn't forecast weather conditions beyond ten days. Renowned climate scientist Dr. Jagadish Shukla is largely to thank for modern weather forecasting. Born in rural India with no electricity, plumbing, or formal schools, he attended classes that were held in a cow shed. Shukla grew up amid turmoil: overwhelming monsoons, devastating droughts, and unpredictable crop yields.

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

by Sophie Gilbert

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and "riot grrrl" feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more.

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

by Michael Luo

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 (Time)

Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan--Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.

Of My Own Making: A Memoir

by Daria Burke

We are not defined by our origin stories. We choose who we become.

Daria Burke's childhood growing up under the shadow of an absent father and a mother debilitated by drug addiction was marked by neglect and poverty. Despite these fractured beginnings, she forges a triumphant path out of Detroit and into fashion's C-Suite. After ten years of therapy, she believes her healing journey is complete.

Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future

by Alan Weisman

One of Heatmap's 18 Climate Books to Read in 2025

The award-winning environmental journalist's extraordinary, long-awaited portrait of hope and resilience as we face a fractured and uncertain future

In this profoundly human and moving narrative, the bestselling author of The World Without Us returns with a book ten years in the making: a study of what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet's existential crisis. His new book, Hope Dies Last, is a literary evocation of our current predicament and the core resolve of our species against the most precarious odds we have ever faced.

march new Releases

The Big We

by Hali Lee

Drawing from the experiences of real-life giving circles, philanthropy leader Hali Lee challenges our traditional understanding of giving, showing how everyday people can take back philanthropy from the billionaires and make the world a better place.

When you think of philanthropy, what do you envision? Uber wealthy donors? Extravagant galas? In recent decades, philanthropy has come to be seen as something exclusive to those with an abundance of resources. But giving doesn't have to mean donating millions of dollars. It can be as simple as a group of people who come together to do something good in their community.

Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer

by Dylan Mulvaney

"Dylan makes me laugh and makes me brave. I love Paper Doll, and I love this woman." --Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

Actress and content creator Dylan Mulvaney's honest account of her journey through girlhood

When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan's personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world.

Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope

by Amanda Nguyen

One of TIME and Oprah Daily's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

A brave and imaginative memoir by the Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, detailing her healing journey and groundbreaking activism in the aftermath of her rape at Harvard.

In 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen's life was changed forever when she was raped at Harvard.

Determined to not let her assault derail her goal of joining NASA after graduation, Nguyen opted for her rape kit to be filed under "Jane Doe." But she was shocked to learn her choice to stay anonymous gave her only six months to take action before the state destroyed her kit, rendering any future legal action impossible. Nguyen knew then that she had two options: surrender to a law that effectively denied her justice, or fight for a change--not only for herself but for survivors everywhere.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world's deadliest infectious disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile.

Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle with China for My Land and My People

by Dalai Lama

In this unique book offering personal, spiritual, and historical reflections--some never shared before--His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells the full story of his struggle with China to save Tibet and its people for nearly seventy-five years.

The Dalai Lama has had to contend with the People's Republic of China for about his entire life. He was sixteen years old when Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, only nineteen when he had his first meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing, and twenty-five when he was forced to escape to India and became a leader in exile. In the decades since, he has faced Communist China's leaders--Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping--in his efforts to protect Tibet and its people, with their distinct language, culture, religion, history, and environment, in the face of the greatest possible obstacles.

Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children

by Noliwe Rooks

A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author's family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice

On May 17, 1954 the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision's goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods were shuttered or saw their funding dwindle, Black educators were fired en masse, and Black children faced discrimination and violence from their white peers as they joined resource-rich schools that were ill-prepared for the influx of new students.

A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19

by Edna Bonhomme

A deeply reported, insightful, and literary account of humankind's battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines--in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body.

Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.

With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health.

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