Maverick Book Recommendations
If you seek books that push boundaries, this season is strong. Spring releases explore activism, identity, history, politics and social change. The voices are distinct and often provocative. Poetry and experimental fiction also make an appearance. These reads spark conversation and reflection.
May New Release Books:
American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington
by H W Brands
From historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes an inspiring portrait of George Washington that examines his unrivaled leadership in the birth of America.
“With this masterly volume, Brands has further solidified his standing as one of our nation's greatest historians. American Patriarch is by turns brilliant and bold. ” -- Justin Vaughn, founder and director of the Presidential Greatness Project
From his early military career and role among the Virginia gentry, to his leadership during the American Revolution and reluctant return to public service as the first president of the United States, American Patriarch brings to life the man who was called on time and again by his peers to lead.
With a dazzling cast of characters--from the French and Indians on the Ohio frontier; to the Marquis de Lafayette, Benedict Arnold, and Baron von Steuben on the revolutionary battlefield; to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton locked in conflict during his presidency--American Patriarch casts Washington as the icon of American virtue who wrested America free from British control, gave credibility to the Constitution, and crafted the norms that would steady America as a nation for generations to follow.
Arriving in time for the 250th anniversary of American independence, this is a masterful portrait of Washington as the unrivaled leader of his times.
The Last of the Old Breed: An Oral History of the Final Marines from World War II
by Scott Davis
An oral history of the brutal Pacific Theater in WWII, told by many of the last living U.S. Marine veterans.
During World War II, over 16 million Americans served in the Armed Forces. Today, less than 1 percent are still alive. The Last of the Old Breed is an unprecedented oral history of the final living United States Marines from World War II, featuring over 130 veterans, ranging in age from 90 to 103. Told in harrowing detail, the witnesses reveal the brutal reality of combat against a fanatical enemy and the heavy toll it took on their post-war lives.
From retirement facilities, veteran's hospitals, and modest homes across the country, the last witnesses opened up about the war like never before, determined to leave an honest account for future generations. For many of the veterans, this was the first - and final - time telling their stories.
The Last of the Old Breed is a rare, unvarnished look at the Pacific War, in the words of those who were there. These are the stories that could not be told - until now.
On Witness and Respair: Essays
by Jesmyn Ward
The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as "the heir apparent to Toni Morrison" (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy's footsteps when she promises always to "Tell it straight. Tell it all."
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood--the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright's novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison.
Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies--including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner's sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward's powers as "one of America's finest living writers" (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
Sonny Boy: A Memoir
by Al Pacino
The Instant New York Times Bestseller - One of People Magazine's Top 10 Books of the Year
"The rare celebrity memoir that's also a literary read. As funny as it is reflective, it shares stories behind Pacino's hardscrabble upbringing, classic films and journey to icon status." --People Magazine
From one of the most iconic actors in the history of film, an astonishingly revelatory account of a creative life in full
To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies--The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon--that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.
But Pacino was in his mid-thirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York's fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe.
Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book's golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions--the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.
Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull
by Tom Clavin
A dramatic new look at Custer's Last Stand in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, by the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is.
On June 25-27, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was fought between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, the battle resulted in the devastating defeat of U.S. forces and was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
This dramatic look at the Little Bighorn battle includes not only the Native American point of view-with two dynamic Native figures, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on prominent display-but also the impact it had on the Plains Indians. It turned out to be their last stand too because a vengeful nation quashed any remaining resistance, with a conclusive massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, almost simultaneous with the murder of Sitting Bull.
In addition, Custer's character by June 1876 is at the heart of this world-famous disaster. For all his celebrated bravery, especially at Gettysburg 13 years earlier, Custer became a devout media hound, desperate to gain fame. Even, some say, his own demise was a misguided attempt at grabbing national headlines: He envisioned a massacre - just not his own. As both the camera and the tabloid came of age, George Armstrong Custer became America's first bona fide celebrity.
Vengeance is a thrilling read, filled with action, legendary characters, and poignance for the impact this had on Native Americans and the shape of the American West.
April Books:
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
by Noam Scheiber
The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America.
In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised.
The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore.
While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide--from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers' rooms--Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.
With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come.
Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living
by Peter Jones
In this charming journey into the past, a historian reveals medieval wisdom that can still guide us today
"One of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read."
-Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England
Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know-- that for all its reputation for darkness and superstition, the Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help. So he set out on a journey to explore the wisdom of medieval scholars, saints, and mystics, looking for an alternative path through the challenges of modern life.
Never in history, Jones marvels in Self-Help from the Middle Ages, has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works as in the medieval centuries. Although today we think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, at the height of their currency, they were a path to self-knowledge and self-forgiveness. Together, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were a psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.
In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, Jones explores each sin, searching the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Giotto, the intimate confessions of Dante and Margery Kempe, and the personal struggles of Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Along the way he discovers a treasure trove of lost truths about temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief that still pulse with life. With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, his book is a gift to all who love history and anyone who has ever sought wisdom from the past.
Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents
by Valerie Fridland
A fun, smart and surprising dive into the past, present and future of accents - and the enduring power of sounding different
Accents have long held our fascination. As far back as the 7th century BCE, Egyptian pharaohs experimented with babies to test out theories about the "original" accent and the Old Testament relays how a small difference in the pronunciation of "s" became a fatal litmus test of tribal belonging. Still today, from dinner parties to job interviews, you'll find people kicking up dust about things like where and how to pronounce a 't, ' as in, never in "often," but with proper British poshness, as in "t(y)une."
In Why We Talk Funny, linguist Valerie Fridland unlocks the secrets of what linguistic science, psychology and history can tell us about the evolution of human speech, why accents develop, and how they shape our professional and social lives. With a healthy dose of her signature humor and captivating anecdotes, Fridland explores how the twin forces of physiology and psychology along with the need to fit in changes the trajectory of speech over languages and lifetimes, diving deep into the history and social forces driving the way people talk. Along the way, she emphasizes that accents don't always set us apart, they can also bring us together. Whether it's the accent that hints at your hometown, your group, your social status or your ethnicity, the sounds we say reveal a lot about who we are and where we've been - even for those who might think they have no accent at all.
The story of language is the story of humanity, and as Fridland reminds us, the funny sounds we make - whether from the mouths of ancient ancestors or the tongues of screenbound teens - all come from the same powerful desire to communicate and belong. Why We Talk Funny will change the way you think about your own accent - and transform the way you listen to the sounds of others.
From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan
by Suzy Hansen
One neighborhood in Istanbul: a window on a city, country, region, and world in a state of upheaval.
Karagumruk, an Istanbul neighborhood once dominated by Ottoman-era homes, is now known for petty thieves, cheap apartment blocks, and a massive influx of Syrian refugees. It's here that Suzy Hansen went looking for the truth behind the headlines of the Turkish president Erdoğan's authoritarian turn, a catastrophic regional war, and an accelerating geopolitical crisis. She asks: Was Turkey a harbinger of what would soon arise in other countries, the resurgence of authoritarianism? Or do the lives of this neighborhood, and the transformations of Erdoğan's Turkey, reveal a more complex story?
During a decade spent reporting from Karagumruk, Hansen discovered the neighborhood's secrets and got to know its people: Ismail, the longtime muhtar, or neighborhood councilman; Huseyin, a loyalist for Erdoğan's Islamic nationalist AK party; and Ebru, a real estate agent and mother with ambitions to unseat Ismail. Through these local perspectives, Hansen connects the events unfolding in Karagümrük to the forces roiling Turkey, the Middle East, and the world, capturing the sweep of the last ten years in microcosm.
From the author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country, From Life Itself is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers lessons for all of us who feel the pressure of the disorienting global forces remaking our lives.
march Books:
The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America's Birds
by James H McCommons
"A definitive history of bird conservation in America." (Kirkus Reviews, starred)
From the time the country was founded, early Americans assumed that the land's natural resources were infinite, including its birds, which were zealously hunted for food, game, and fashion. With the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon--a bird once so numerous that its flocks darkened the sky in flight--many realized actions needed to be taken if other birds were to be saved. What followed was both a spiritual awakening and a great crusade to save birds and their habitat. The campaign took place on many battlefields: society teas in Boston, hunt clubs on the East Coast, the mangroves in the Everglades, and in the editorial pages of newspapers and periodicals. From many corners of the country the bird protection movement was born and brought together a remarkable coalition of people and organizations to save America's birds.
Good Woman: A Reckoning
by Savala Nolan
A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine
A raw and lyrical exploration of the confining expectations of womanhood and, if we dare, what lies beyond those limitations--from a writer Roxane Gay calls "vibrant and thoughtful."
Gorgeous, badass, and practically waiting to pounce, Good Woman: A Reckoning is acclaimed essayist Savala Nolan's follow-up to her "standout collection" (New York Times Book Review) Don't Let It Get You Down.
A lifetime of playing by the rules of female social conditioning is not what it's cracked up to be for Nolan. The years of making herself smaller (literally and metaphorically); the sexual advances that led to more than she wanted; the bad marriage she fought like hell to keep; all the ways others questioned her identity or choices and she let it slide to keep the peace; her silence when requested; her body when desired--none of it worked. None of it protected her the way it was advertised to.
Nolan noticed the same was true for the women around her and the women in history she read about. Across time and location, they were raised to be agreeable and "good." Hyper-visible as sexual objects but invisible as full people. Living in a physical world created by men for men. Taking on the ultimate role of birth-giver and caretaker, yet seeing it remain an unsung act, even as it's a God-like endeavor. Only in midlife did Nolan begin to realize she was capable of living outside these cages of conditioning so slyly insidious that they're nearly invisible.
Good Woman elegantly probes the knotty conditions themselves, the costs of adhering to them, and what happens when one refuses to comply. The twelve stunning and unforgettable essays blend memoir, reportage, and history to create a collection that is alternately bold, brash, and explosive ... and ravishingly tender, sensual, and joyous. Nolan takes aim at big and old ideas, and she does not miss. Hers is a testimony to witness and to savor.
Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom
by Camonghne Felix
In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal.
"In these fierce yet tender pages, Camonghne Felix reveals how imagination can become a form of governance--an instrument for creating a world rooted in care, community, and radical possibility."--Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow
Over the past decade, Camonghne Felix has been at the center of American politics, working in strategy, communications, and as a speechwriter. Throughout it all, she has maintained her unwavering belief in language's foundational revolutionary potential, outside of its deployment for legislative and political ends. In this groundbreaking work of nonfiction, she argues that Black radical poetic traditions model an ethical code and overcome entrenched structures of patriarchy and paternalism, inventing a new form that examines the historical and legislative, and the personal and poetic.
Felix draws on stories from her life in campaigns and the decisions she has had to make: preparing speeches for candidates, responding to harassment, recruiting staff. She recounts her moving personal history--accompanying her mother, a lawyer, to court, and her father, a participant in the Grenadian revolution of 1983, to protests--as well as her coming-of-age being schooled in a wider tradition of Black radical thinkers, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Audre Lorde.
Through rupture, rhythm, and a refusal of politics as usual, Let the Poets Govern encourages us to hold ourselves to the standards of our highest ideals and embraces our shared humanity.
Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness
by Kathryn Paige Harden
A daring and intimate exploration of how genetics complicates our ideas about blame, punishment, and moral responsibility, from acclaimed psychologist and author of The Genetic Lottery Kathryn Paige Harden.
"An extraordinary book, the very best of science writing, because it is about not just science--it is memoir, history, bleeding-edge genetics, and a completely original take on original sin."--Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
As one of the world's leading scientists examining how our DNA shapes differences in temperament, temptation, and behavior, Kathryn Paige Harden has seen firsthand how we continue to struggle--in public and in our most private relationships--with the ancient tensions between nature and nurture, freedom and constraint, the desire to punish and the longing to forgive.
In Original Sin, she weaves together insights from her own experience as a daughter, mother, wife, and scientist with cutting-edge research in genetics and psychology to grapple with some of the most important questions in modern life: How do we take responsibility for the people we become, knowing how we are shaped by both biology and experience? How should we respond when people hurt each other--or themselves? And has science made guilt obsolete?
Navigating the psychological and biological terrain of addiction, antisocial behavior, and violence, Harden confronts the disorienting ways science unsettles our understanding of wrongdoing and choice. In doing so, she asks us not to absolve but to reckon differently with notions of fairness and blame. A revelatory inquiry into the uneasy space where human behavior meets inherited biology, Original Sin challenges us to imagine a more humane vision of accountability--for ourselves and for one another.
Related: Your reading list doesn't have to stop here. You may also enjoy action/adventure novels and thrillers featured in our Stunt Double recommendations, or you might like non-fiction books about sports and recreation from our Game Day Hero selections.