Best New Books Across Technology, Politics & Current Events
Stay informed and challenge your perspective with the most impactful current events books dropping this summer. Covering the shifting tides of global politics, economic trends and pressing societal challenges, this genre offers hard-hitting investigations and sharp analyses from prominent journalists and thought leaders. Discover new releases from writers like Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and scientist Vaclav Smil. Because you demand timely and critical insights, our in-house editorial team breaks down high-priority pre-sales data and tracks breaking advance reviews, filtering them through expert librarian recommendations to hand-select the most definitive, conversation-starting books for your bold Reader Type.
August New Releases
Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit
by Sam Roberts
"Mordantly wonderful." - CARL HIAASEN
"I almost died laughing." - ROZ CHAST
"My own departure would not be so bad if only Mr. Roberts could write the obit!" - KAI BIRD
From celebrated New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts, the art of the obit: Who we remember, how we forget and where we find the true meaning in a life.
After nearly a decade behind the obituaries desk at the paper of record, Roberts knows obits aren't really about deaths. In fact, they usually only mention dying once. Over the course of the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written throughout his career, he has instead come to understand that they're about distilling an entire life lived-for someone whose name he may have learned that morning.
In Are They Dead Yet?, Roberts explores the major questions that arise from the task of producing a succinct yet record-defining account of a life. Who deserves an obituary, and how do we decide who gets one? How does an obituarist choose what to include and to omit? What happens when embarrassing information, like a crime, affair or wonky cause of death, makes itself known? What makes a legacy, a claim to fame? And what happens when that claim to fame, so important in death, isn't what mattered in life at all?
With wit, wisdom and behind-the-scenes intrigue, Roberts examines the practice of writing advance obituaries, of which there are more than 2,000 on hold and regularly updated at the New York Times, America's relationship to death in the wake of 9/11 and the pandemic, classic euphemistic language and more. Through it all, Roberts brings his humor, shrewdness and experience to prove what he has learned from a long career in death: There's no such thing as an ordinary life.
The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard
by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi
"Thrilling and intrepid. A beautiful tale of dramatic, wild landscapes and the entangled lives of snow leopards, their prey and the humans who share their terrain." – Andrea Wulf, bestselling author of The Invention of Nature
"By turns beautiful, terrible and encouraging." -- Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
The vivid account of a leading conservationist's efforts to find, study and protect snow leopards
Snow leopards have a special grip on the human imagination, a symbol of the mysteries that still exist on our planet. These elusive predators live solitary lives in the highest reaches of the Himalaya, moving along rock faces like smoke. They are also the flagship species of Himalayan conservation, key to preserving this austere, delicate ecosystem.
Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi is one of the world's leading snow leopard scientists. In The Ghost of the Mountains, he offers an evocative and personal account of his decades of work in this field, from his exhilarating adventures on the high peaks to his efforts to build a community-based, collaborative model for protecting the snow leopards and their remaining habitat. That habitat is increasingly under threat as encroaching development, ongoing armed conflict and rapidly intensifying climate change transform this region.
Thrilling, illuminating and filled with transportive storytelling, The Ghost of the Mountains reveals the challenges facing a beautiful, fragile ecosystem in the midst of a major transition. As Suryawanshi describes his crucial work as a conservationist in a rapidly changing world, he also conveys an infectious sense of wonder. For him, every snow leopard encounter is still a transcendent experience, offering a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.
Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir
by Kiyoshi Tanimoto - Koko Tanimoto Kondo - David Corn
A newly discovered firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath from one of the survivors, bringing unprecedented immediacy to our understanding of this world-changing event.
"A stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony." -- Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus
At approximately 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto was on the outskirts of Hiroshima when a flash in the sky signaled the birth of a horrifying new world. In an instant, tens of thousands of Hiroshima residents had been vaporized or crushed to death.
As Tanimoto, a 36-year-old Methodist minister, raced back to the city center in search of his wife and infant daughter, he encountered unimaginable devastation: structures leveled; fires everywhere; uncountable injured suffering from burns, broken bones and the effects of radiation. In the days, weeks and months that followed this unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, he invested body and soul in helping his living congregants obtain food, shelter and medical care, as well as identifying and burying with as much dignity as possible those who had perished. He dedicated himself to rebuilding not only his church but his city and his nation.
Tanimoto went on to gain renown as one of the survivors featured in John Hersey's New Yorker piece and book, Hiroshima, which changed the American public's understanding of the event. But Tanimoto also wrote his own story. Hiroshima, 8:15 is Tanimoto's never-before-published firsthand account of the bombing of Hiroshima, written in the immediate aftermath, in his own words.
This singular memoir is both an invaluable addition to the historical record and an urgent eyewitness testimony of one of the most calamitous events to befall humanity. At a time when the threat of nuclear war still looms, Tanimoto's message of peace, and his vision of a better path forward for humankind, is of vital importance.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
by Jill Lepore
"Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of ... the Artificial State," writes Pulitzer-prize winner Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own 21st century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore's clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen's assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of "dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies and predictions" is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it's an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore's typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a "government without consent, even government without humans." It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty
by Stuart Firestein
A profound argument for science that embraces uncertainty and promotes possibility, creativity and the belief that we can shape, if not determine, our future.
"This wise book challenges everything we take for granted about thinking scientifically." -- Annie Duke, bestselling author of Thinking in Bets
The search for certainty is embedded deep in the mythos of science. Science is expected to provide definitive answers based on immutable and universal laws. In It Could Be Otherwise, however, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein challenges this idea, extending the reach of science beyond merely discerning what must be to encompassing what may yet be possible.
The classic view of science, Firestein argues, reduces the world to bland predictability and us to our fates. Instead, modern discoveries of deep uncertainty, even unknowability, in evolution, complexity, physics and all sciences, show that our actions are not strictly governed and that science is an agent of freedom.
In our contemporary age, suspicion of science and its certainties runs deep. It Could Be Otherwise argues that science isn't about deciphering what the universe has already determined; instead, science offers possibilities. It invites us not to be prisoners of destiny but navigators of our own futures.
Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home
by Peter Santenello
Come along with an adventurous and charismatic independent journalist (perhaps you're one of his 4 million subscribers on YouTube) on a journey through some of the very best of America, reminding us of all the reasons we've got to love this place and one another.
Have you ever swapped stories on a porch with Amish snowbirds in Florida? Searched for reindeer with the Siberian Yupik in Alaska? Been a guest on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou?
Peter Santenello hadn't either until, after years spent traveling through 85 countries and living abroad, he realized the most unfamiliar territory was often his own American backyard. And so, with a camera in hand and an open mind, he began visiting communities across the country, places that most of the media overlooks or misrepresents, from tiny towns in Appalachia to the streets of East L.A.
What began as curiosity became -- one story at a time -- an intimate, revealing portrait of America today. From road trips and chance encounters to dinners shared in locals' homes, Your Fellow Americans captures what makes this country so dynamic, so resilient, and most of all, so very human. Because what Peter discovered on his travels wasn't a nation torn in two. He found something more complex and more powerful: People who want to be seen, who are willing to listen and who still believe we're more alike than we are different.
With humor, exuberance and reverence for the human spirit, Your Fellow Americans is a celebration of the United States that exists far beyond the headlines -- and an invitation to sit down, open up and rediscover the soul of this place that we call home.
Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans
by Susan Eva O'Donovan
A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them -- and their hard-won political knowledge -- rightly at the center of the fight for freedom
The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again, or confined to the homes of abusive owners, constantly under surveillance and restriction. But if that were the whole picture, how would Black Southerners have organized into such a formidable force the moment war erupted?
With Moving Toward Freedom, eminent historian Susan Eva O'Donovan radically widens the lens to reveal a new landscape of the slaveholding South: one in which enslaved workers were not pinned in place but mobile, deployed as laborers -- and even as captains -- on steamboats and ferries, or as teamsters transporting staple crops across the expanding country, or as ladies' maids waiting on their mistresses on European vacations. While performing brutal and involuntary work, O'Donovan argues, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge that they would use to bring about their own liberation.
Piecing together an extraordinary archive of letters, travel passes, receipts and other documentation of lives in which literacy was illegal, O'Donovan allows her subjects to speak for themselves as they move through markets, jails, waterways, gold mines and foreign lands. In so doing, O'Donovan demonstrates that slavery's incredible profitability depended on a fundamentally unsustainable balance between commercial imperatives and slaveholders' drive for control, one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in using to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees.
Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent Into Total War
by James M Scott
At 9:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American bomber pierced the skies over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The single bomb it dropped unleashed an atomic hurricane that toppled homes, vaporized birds in flight and carbonized humans. Three days later, a second bomb flattened the port city of Nagasaki. In the span of a mere 75 hours, the United States, a nation once morally opposed to the bombing of civilians, killed 120,000 men, women and children, dooming tens of thousands more to agonizing death in the weeks and months ahead.
Empire of Ashes explores the final brutal months of the war in the Pacific, featuring the voices of never-before-heard victims of the atomic bombs. Through interviews with survivors and accounts gleaned from Japanese sources, New York Times best-selling author James M. Scott combines the attacks' heart-wrenching details with their causes and consequences, from debates within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Oakridge and Hanford to the fallout that would alter decades of life in Japan. Scott also delves into the political maneuvering in Washington and Tokyo between two seemingly unlikely leaders, President Harry S. Truman and Emperor Hirohito, that led to unprecedented violence and, eventually, surrender.
Scott grapples with questions that still haunt the detonation of the atomic bomb to this day: What justified the first and only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict? And how does a nation reconcile the pride of liberating millions, with its own unprecedented violence? With startling immediacy, Empire of Ashes illuminates the moral dilemma at the center of America's decision to inflict total war upon Japan.
July New Releases
Biological War: A Scenario
by Annie Jacobsen
One of People's 15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer
From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.
A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.
The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.
Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.
This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate
by Roopika Risam
AN NPR SUMMER READING PICK
"A powerful and thought-provoking deep history of data and power, essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world." --Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis
From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, a groundbreaking new lens on human history arguing that information has always been the seed of power, for readers of Nexus and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant.
As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 percent of the world's surface using censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who owed and who could be sacrificed. Today, we live in the third great era, when trading our information for access can feel harmless or inevitable - yet from targeted advertising to border policing and mass surveillance, data shapes the course of our lives.
With our earliest tools like ancient cave markings and knotted strings, to colonial record-keeping and the algorithmic state, Data Empire reveals how data has always been the seed of power: a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Empire was never just about weapons or ships. It was built on collecting information on us, to rule us. Both a sweeping history and a sharp critique, Data Empire is a call to recognize the power data holds--and to imagine what resistance looks like in an age defined by it. In looking at the history of data, readers will understand:
- Data made civilization possible: Long before algorithms and AI, systems of counting, recording and organizing information enabled everything from agriculture to taxation. The infrastructures of data are as old as cities themselves, and they are the precondition for large-scale human coordination.
- Every system of data is also a system of power: From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to colonial censuses to modern databases, data determines who is visible, who is legible and who can be governed.
- The modern data state was built in moments of crisis: In the twentieth century, governments became vast information-processing systems. What we now think of as "data" was created in response to economic collapse and geopolitical conflict.
- The "data" we know now is built on much older inequalities: Today's digital systems inherit the logics of earlier recordkeeping regimes, including those shaped by colonialism, racial classification and forms of government that extract from land and from populations. The biases we see in algorithms are not new but continuations of a long history.
- We are living through a transformation in who controls data--and therefore power: For most of history, data infrastructures were largely state-driven. Today, they are increasingly owned and operated by private corporations, even as they structure public life. This shift raises urgent questions about accountability, sovereignty and the future of public life.
Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America
by Kim Phillips-Fein
The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson's famous proclamation that "all men are created equal."
But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality itself. Again and again, influential Americans have asserted a fundamental inequality among human beings, arguing that the social, economic and racial hierarchies in which some groups of people rule over others are not only natural but good.
In Country of Lords acclaimed historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces this argument for inequality through six vivid archetypes. She discusses the natural aristocrats, such as John Adams, who feared the tumult of too much democracy; the social Darwinists, led by Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who blamed the poor for their own miseries; those who preached a gospel of production, including Henry Ford, who wanted an industrial hierarchy in which the "best" people ruled over compliant inferiors; utilitarian racists who advocated for eugenics and a racial hierarchy; meritocrats like Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein who described an economic caste system based on "intelligence" in his co-authored book, The Bell Curve; and most recently, technocrats who seem to see themselves as superior because they are closest to the machines destined to outstrip and supplant fallible flesh-and-blood humanity.
The anti-egalitarian lineage Phillips-Fein traces is both clear and deeply unsettling. It challenges readers to think about the fragility of the ideal of equality and to reckon with the disturbing arguments of those who have campaigned against it over the past two and a half centuries. Country of Lords is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the widening gap between the nation we claim to be and the nation we are becoming.
Hidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites
by Dino Martins
Welcome to the hidden, squirming world of parasites--some of the most misunderstood creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies).
"Astonishing, eye-opening and inspiring." -- Chloe Dalton, author of Raising Hare
There is the tapeworm, which can grow 120 feet in length within the gut of a whale; the tsetse fly, a notorious vector of disease that can pierce the skin even of crocodiles with its needle-like mouth; and the most universal symbol of parasitic behavior: the leech. Long villainized as, well, parasitic, these creatures are actually a vital part of every ecosystem--and Dr. Dino Martins, an award-winning entomologist and biologist from Kenya, has made it his life's mission to demystify these beguiling beings.
Hidden Creatures is a journey across the world ten times over--from Martins's home in the wilds of East Africa to the rainforests of Borneo to cities and backyards across the globe. Along the way we encounter brilliant and eccentric experts who join Martins on his adventures to investigate not only parasites but their hosts, from hyraxes and hippos to, of course, humans.
Immersive, driven by an utterly infectious curiosity, and sure to transform every reader's understanding of these organisms, Hidden Creatures has the magnetic force of a David Attenborough documentary and introduces a monumental, charming new voice in science writing.
How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
by Sophia Smith Galer
An urgent, globe-spanning exploration of languages at risk, from Kichwa to Ukrainian, that asks: What do we lose -- culturally, politically, and personally -- when a language is silenced?
"A vivid, hopeful portrait of how people around the world are staying connected to their linguistic roots."--Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the dinner table. Around the world, an unprecedented shift is drawing speakers toward national and global lingua francas. For some, that means losing the language of parents or grandparents; for many, it is a permanent farewell to systems that carry knowledge, culture, and belonging. With half of our 7,000 languages due to disappear this century, linguicide is one of the most pressing cultural emergencies of our age.
In How to Kill a Language, journalist Sophia Smith Galer travels across continents and generations to chart this phenomenon. In Ecuador, she sees firsthand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognized. And in Italy, she searches for her Nonna's dialët, which is vanishing from diaspora communities and Italy itself. But languages can also be reclaimed: We meet the Karuk tribe of California, pioneering a grassroots language immersion program, and the storytellers challenging the criminalization of Kurdish. And in her discussion of Hebrew, Smith Galer reckons with the unintended consequences of raising a language seemingly from the grave.
Part investigation, part travelogue from a disappearing world, How to Kill a Language exposes the true costs of this mass extinction event. Brought to life by vivid storytelling and Smith Galer's own experience with language loss, it's a fierce rallying cry for a multilingual future.
Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World
by Dan Werb
A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who've found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities--from award-winning writer and scientist Dan Werb
Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering throughout the day, and why we take such pains to fix lids to our garbage cans. But they are so much more than that, too: epidemic vectors, churners of soil, ecosystem evolvers, spiritual lodestars, and, sometimes, sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces with cruel intent. But beyond their quotidian impact on our lives, synanthropes have a critical part to play in how our communities are shaped and how sustainably they function. These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on our species' ongoing evolution; and recently, something essential has shifted with them.
We are in a fraught era of environmental disruption, habitat destruction, and human population expansion that is ravaging formerly wild and untouched habitats. That's caused us to become ever more inundated with synanthropes, which are bringing delight, chaos and danger to our doorstep. These species, so long dismissed, are forcing us to reckon with them--from the hundreds of thousands of raccoons in urban spaces that spread our refuse no matter how many "raccoon-proof" bags and bins we invent, to the invasive kudzu plants that grow a foot a day, enveloping houses, telephone poles, trees, and any other structures into their green abyss. Now, as urban spaces increasingly become wild spaces, we have a choice: continue to resist them by any means necessary, or take the opportunity to promote a more harmonious coexistence.
Through vivid storytelling, Our Wild Familiars brings to spectacular life the world's most successful synanthropes, from bats, raccoons, and crows, to some of its weirdest, including the Giant Pacific Octopus. Acting as a guide to the curious, Werb reveals how the cracks in our millennia-long efforts to shield ourselves against the outside world might just lead us to a new and necessary balance with nature--or to an ever more savage future.
The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet
by Jason Dove Mark
As the climate emergency worsens and biodiversity shrinks, we somehow get used to it. We struggle to remember what summers were like before the unrelenting heat, in those years before wildfires became an annual routine. We adapt, we normalize. Scientists call this "shifting baseline syndrome," and they warn that it's why we are increasingly sleepwalking toward disaster.
In this inspiring manifesto, environmental advocate and longtime editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine Jason Dove Mark offers antidotes that everyone can use to resist ecological amnesia and make lasting progress to repair and revive a livable planet. He puts forth four simple but powerful rules for a life lived in communion with the Earth:
Go outside
Bear witness
Make a record
Pass it on
From the mountains of California to the lakes of Wisconsin and across the lush forests of his beloved Pacific Northwest, Mark shares moving examples of citizen scientists, birdwatchers, mountain climbers, and fishermen who are putting these remedies into practice. And he makes the case for easy, everyday practices that can help us "remember the earth" and support environmental conservation, restoration, and rewilding. The Earth Said Remember Me is a hopeful, achievable prescription for protecting the planet, one citizen at a time.
The Others: Ufos, Ai, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny
by D.W. Pasulka
UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny
Acclaimed author and religious studies scholar D. W. Pasulka uncovers a hidden history of alleged contact between human and nonhuman intelligences -- some framed as angels, others as UFOs/UAP -- interwoven with the rise of artificial intelligence and the dream of immortality. Pasulka examines the science of life extension and the beliefs of people who have experiences of UFOs. She unveils a hidden architecture of belief and influence--one in which human consciousness is being reimagined and extended.
Pasulka begins the book with a fascinating and unexpected historical origin story. In the early twentieth century, a censured Catholic visionary predicted that humanity would soon encounter a new form of intelligence -- one that would appear alien but was something far stranger. By the mid-twentieth century, other Catholic mystics and science fiction visionaries, like Arthur C. Clarke, echoed similar prophecies, naming the 21st century as the critical threshold ... and we are now at that unparalleled point in human history. It's time for The Others.
Drawing on first-person interviews, suppressed histories, and access to insiders in science and tech, The Others explores a startling new terrain: where the sacred meets the synthetic, and where the next phase of human evolution may already be underway.
Snake Men: Rebels, Reptiles, and the Race to Name the Creatures of Earth
by Zach St. George
Raymond Hoser is known as the Snakeman, a moniker he has zealously defended. As a day job, Hoser runs a business in Melbourne that offers several services. One service is snake removal, a common trade in Australia. Another is snake shows, most often performed at children's birthday parties.
But by the 2010s, Hoser had become famous around the world for an entirely different activity: his work as a taxonomist, a namer of new species. In a decade-long spree, Hoser had named thousands of new creatures, including more snakes than any other scientist. To some, Hoser's accomplishments were a scientific triumph. But others have accused Hoser of what they call "taxonomic vandalism," the results of which, they argue, could alter the very course of life on Earth.
Snake Men recounts this outrageous and humorous story, tracing the surprising intersection between taxonomists, the sober and serious class of scientists who have for centuries cooperated in a global effort to understand the order of life, and Raymond Hoser and other snake men. The results -- chaotic, mischievous, the stuff of legends -- hint at the rebellious impulse that lies coiled somewhere deep inside us all.
June New Releases
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Literary Hub
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind
Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family -- the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century's most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment and wasteful borrowing by governments.
With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system -- exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire's slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at "Jewish finance," a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century.
1873 is a bird's-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian's grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power.
Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess
by Ben Mezrich
"The best black-and-white drama this side of Chess on Broadway." - Vanity Fair
From the bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House comes the cinematic true story about the biggest scandal in modern chess.
In September 2022, the unthinkable happened: nineteen-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen in a stunning face-to-face match. Within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating -- a bombshell allegation that rocked the chess world. As the scandal spiraled, Chess.com, the dominant force in online chess, launched a high-stakes investigation igniting a global media firestorm.
But Checkmate is about more than a cheating scandal. It's the story of a teenager willing to risk everything to rise to the top; a reclusive genius suddenly fighting to protect his legacy; and a centuries-old game transforming into a billion-dollar industry fueled by streaming, sponsorships and Silicon Valley power players.
With exclusive access to the central figures, Ben Mezrich takes readers deep inside the weird, wild and cutthroat world of competitive chess, where genius meets ambition and every move could be your last.
Dinner with an Astronaut: Serving Space Stories: Past, Present and Future
by Leroy Chiao - Victoria Bruce
The inspiring journey of Leroy Chiao, one of the first Asian American astronauts in history, illuminating his remarkable path into space and the fascinating history of rocketry and space travel from its very beginnings
Imagine if you could sit down and enjoy a meal with an astronaut. What questions would you ask? What could you learn after a few courses? Leroy Chiao invites you as his guest for Dinner with an Astronaut, an insightful and witty deep dive into the world's most unexplored realm: the cosmos.
At just 30 years old, Leroy was selected by NASA as one of twenty-three members of the thirteenth astronaut group. As the first full Chinese heritage professional astronaut, he flew four space missions: the Space Shuttle, Soyuz, ISS and on spacewalks in both U.S. and Russian spacesuits, and served as the commander of the International Space Station.
Using his unique perspective from flying with fellow American, Japanese and Russian professionals, Leroy now answers your burning universe-spanning questions, such as:
- What is the new space race and who are the next generation of competitors?
- What is NASA working on these days?
- What feelings did you experience looking out at Earth from space?
- What does the future of space exploration look like?
- Will we ever make it to Mars?
Sharing the wonders of space with those of us on Earth, Leroy details his astronaut training and otherworldly spaceflights. Gorgeously luminary and deeply profound, Dinner with an Astronaut invites readers to join Leroy Chiao and take a seat at the table, for fans of Scott Kelly, Chris Hadfield, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and for anyone who's been obsessed with the Artemis II moon mission.
How to Not Die in Prison: A Survival Guide
by Taylor Sheridan - Tom Nelson
The debut book from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, creator of Landman and cocreator of Yellowstone--a no-bullsh*t, darkly funny survival guide to life inside a maximum-security prison, cowritten with prison-hardened ex-con Tom Nelson.
So, you f*cked up. Can't talk your way out of it, buy your way out of it or beg your way out of it. You are going to prison. You will be living under a set of rules made up by men who have demonstrated to society that they need a big ol' time out. There is no book of these rules. Nobody will tell them to you. But when you break one -- boy, will you know it. For the newbie, the fish, the fresh meat, this book is your survival guide. How to mind your business without becoming a target. When to walk away. When to stand your ground.
This is how you don't die. Follow the advice in this book, and you just might make it out alive.
Leave the Lights on: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species
by Elizabeth Dunn - Jiaying Zhao
"Who knew that saving the world could be so much fun?" -- Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
What if the most effective ways to fight climate change made you happy? Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behavior scientist Jiaying Zhao challenge everything we think we know about sustainable living. While most climate advice demands self-denial -- eat less, travel less, want less -- this groundbreaking book offers a counterintuitive truth: you can make your life better while saving our species at the same time. The authors reveal how tweaking everyday decisions around food, travel, housing and shopping can nudge us toward a tipping point of mass action, without tipping us into burnout.
You will discover that:
- Joy is a powerful climate strategy. When you enjoy the changes you're making, you're more likely to stick with them -- and spread them.
- You don't have to go vegan or give up flying. Smart substitutions (chicken over beef, carry-on over checked bags) make a real dent in emissions with less personal friction.
- Small talk matters. Normalizing climate conversations with friends and family helps shift social norms and catalyzes cultural change.
- Give yourself permission to leave the lights on. Focus on higher-impact actions instead of smaller interventions.
Leave the Lights On is a bold invitation to reimagine climate action not as a burden but as an opportunity to build a brighter future -- without guilt, without gloom and without giving up the things that make life worth living. With warmth, clarity and a refreshingly optimistic voice, Zhao and Dunn reframe what it means to "do your part." Because sustainability doesn't lie in doing everything, it lies in doing something, joyfully.
Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting
by David Bockino
Named one of the most anticipated nonfiction books of 2026 by The New York Times Book Review
The definitive, colorful history of American sports betting that challenges the dialogue around one of our country's fastest growing (and most controversial) industries.
Taking readers on a rollicking journey through the history of American sports betting, Over/Under proposes a fascinating and unexpected theory: What if sports betting isn't just a result of the multibillion-dollar American sports industry, but rather the primary reason for it? An essential catalyst for nearly 200 years of sports fandom and obsession?
The narrative starts in mid-19th century New York City, as a new sport called baseball lures bettors out of shadowy gambling halls and into the fresh air. The story then heads to Churchill Downs and Augusta National Golf Club where sports betting dresses up in fancy outfits, to Chicago and Minneapolis where sports betting meets the Mafia and gets some structure, and to Las Vegas and the Caribbean where sports betting makes some people very rich.
Along the way, the story rolls out a cast of colorful characters: hustlers, wise guys, moguls, opportunists, grifters, touts. A parade of personalities, year after year, all trying to make a quick buck. Because isn't that the whole point?
Written for those eager to explore the history of a recently-legalized industry -- one that's been described both as a financial bonanza and an impending disaster -- Over/Under is poised to become the definitive history of a controversial industry in the midst of incredible, yet uncertain, growth.
Speed: How It Explains the World
by Vaclav Smil
A data-driven, scientific account of our need for speed, exploring a wide range of topics including evolution, transportation and technology
In a world obsessed with efficiency, perhaps nothing is valued as highly as being fast. Some of our greatest achievements include building planes that break the sound barrier and creating computers that process data at the touch of a button. With signature clarity, Smil offers accessible explanations of every major speed category, from wind erosion to hunting cheetahs, from Boeing 747s to America's war time industrial mobilization to the speed of global energy decarbonization.
But as Smil argues in this paradigm-shifting book, speed isn't just a metric to optimize. In Speed, Smil expands on our traditional, human-centric understanding of speed to explore phenomena of space and time, evolution and human achievement. What was the speed of planet formation? Of the development of different life forms? What happened in the collision of humans and the limits of natural speed, and what has emerged from our incessant desire to push those boundaries?
Lauded for his "compelling, fascinating, realistic" (Steven Pinker) portraits of the modern world, Smil knows that we can't, won't and shouldn't abandon our collective need for speed. But as good devotees of speed's eminence, we must understand it, its value and its cost. Rich in historical and contemporary data, the latest work by Smil is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary guidebook for science readers living in the fast lane.
The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness
by Andrew Moore
"An exemplary work of environmental journalism." ― Kirkus, starred review
A fresh and fascinating portrait of the eastern wilds, The Beasts of the East is a celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S. Discover an astonishingly abundant landscape that was once the center of American wildness before its despoliation and a revelatory journey through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves and other creatures to their native landscapes
"A REVELATION. Andrew Moore recreates a lost world of not long ago, when the eastern part of North America was wild, when there were elk in Illinois, bison in Indiana, and much of Ohio and Michigan were covered by swamps. This book is both an elegy for what we've lost over the last few centuries of so-called human progress, and a clarion call for conservation, rewilding and finding wonder in those pockets of history that still remain." ―STEVE BRUSATTE, author of The Rise and Reign of the Mammals and The Story of Birds
Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden -- towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.
Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina's coastal marshes and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster but not without controversy.
In The Beasts of the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists and nature lovers as they confront herculean challenges: How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness?
The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building
by Brian Jay Jones
An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories and surprising facts; a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans and how it has endured.
The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret past, one rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps and charming "fairy doors" that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years.
Spanning three centuries of American history, the book focuses on iconic and notable names and personalities from the past -- from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan -- as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the narratives of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions.
The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.
The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery
by Kaitlyn Tiffany
The untold story of the women who debunked the Warren Report -- a riveting history of obsession, heartbreak and the myth of the great American century
"An extraordinary account of a relentless search for truth." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Kaitlyn Tiffany masterfully unspools a hidden history of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath." -- Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls and The Sisterhood
In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. A scattered group of Americans had pointed to major problems with the report prepared by President Johnson's handpicked Warren Commission. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government's work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one.
Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as "scavengers" and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in The Housewives Underground, Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory. Field hosted screenings of the Zapruder film and raised money to pursue new leads. Martin traveled frequently to Dallas, enlisted her children to help interview witnesses and irritated J. Edgar Hoover with her "antagonistic" attitude toward the FBI.
And at the center of the story is Sylvia Meagher, a born-and-raised New Yorker, who was devoted to the ballet and the Mets, cultivated fierce friendships and firm grudges and dedicated 25 years to her conviction that the whole truth of JFK's assassination had not been told.
Painstakingly researched and engrossing, The Housewives Underground takes readers back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, a time when Americans' belief in their government was eroding, introducing readers to the so-called housewives who asked the first, hardest questions about one of the most shocking events in American history.
Related: Craving high-stakes thrills or sports narratives? Head over to our reading lists for Stunt Doubles or Game Day Heroes. In case you missed it, catch up on our Spring 2026 Maverick New Releases for more great titles to add to your TBR.