Biographer Sebba (Ethel Rosenberg) offers a nuanced and unsettling exploration of the role music played at Auschwitz. The camp’s all-female orchestra was the pet project of brutal camp leader Maria Mandl, who thought it would lend her “gravitas” in the eyes of Nazi higher-ups. From early 1943 to late 1944, the orchestra grew to over 40 members under the fierce and controversial leadership of conductor and internee Alma Rosé, a famous violinist (and Gustav Mahler’s niece) who expanded it to fit as many Jewish women as possible, pushing against orders to keep it majority non-Jewish. In Sebba’s telling, Rosé was a lonely, angry, and complex figure who would scream at musicians for a false note and stay up all night writing out music from memory. While she could be cruel, acceptance into her orchestra meant salvation from the gas chambers. The book quickly dispatches any romantic notion that music somehow transcended the camp’s horrors—quite the opposite, as the musicians had to play cheery marches while fellow prisoners hobbled off to horrific, often fatal working conditions (“madhouse music... a damned rhythm of fear,” one survivor called it) and play the classics for SS guards who used music to “recharge emotionally” (noted one musician, “One moment they want Schumann’s Träumerei, the next moment they are putting people in the fire”). It’s a chilling account of the sublime being twisted to inhumane ends. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Washington Post staff writer Davenport (The Space Barons) offers a captivating, fast-paced account of the ambitions and rivalries of the billionaires and superpowers driving modern space exploration. Opening with the successful 2024 launch and landing of SpaceX’s Starship, the “most powerful rocket ever assembled,” Davenport follows the manic progress toward deep space exploration, largely led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin as they battle over billion-dollar contracts from NASA, as well as by an increasingly competitive China. Well sourced with a surprising level of access to major players like Musk, the book’s fly-on-the-wall perspective contrasts the American organizations’ divergent managerial styles: SpaceX’s no-sleep, breakneck speed; Blue Origin’s “homey, comfortable vibe”; and NASA’s conservative caution. These distinctions provide insight into the tensions behind historic achievements, such as experienced astronauts’ skepticism about flying SpaceX’s Dragon capsule without a stick (“like flying an iPhone”); they also help explain ongoing failures, like Blue Origin’s frequent trailing behind SpaceX’s innovation. Among the narrative’s many amusing behind-the-scenes anecdotes are a Blue Origin senior vice president who consoles disappointed employees after the loss of a lunar lander contract by playing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” and Musk’s relentless “string of insults” aimed at Bezos. It makes for a revealing glimpse into the egomaniacal antics, stagnant bureaucracy, and awe-inspiring advancement that define the new space age. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) offers a scintillating account of a 1928 expedition to the Himalayan plateau undertaken by Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, the two eldest sons of Theodore Roosevelt. Their goal was to find and shoot a panda, a creature so rarely sighted that many thought it to be a myth. The brothers, Holt writes, hoped to achieve the status of world-famous explorers and thus escape the shadow of their big-game-hunting father, whose taxidermied kills filled America’s natural history museums. Among their party was Herbert Stevens, a British biologist “incapable of being in a hurry”; Suydam Cutting, a friend of Ted’s with comically little experience to recommend him for the journey; and 19-year-old Tai Jack Young, an NYU student of Chinese heritage who came on board as an interpreter but was overwhelmed by the plethora of local dialects. The team was unprepared as well for the dangerous weather conditions, and their survival ended up depending upon local guides, often women, with “superior knowledge of the mountains, superlative endurance,” and the skill to fend off bandits. After five months of trekking, the group found and killed their gentle, slow-moving prey, but, as Holt shows through her vivid, layered narrative, the experience filled them with a mounting horror and dramatically changed their attitudes toward ecological conservation. Readers will relish this graceful combination of enlightening research and propulsive action. (July)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this loving tribute, Hischak (Parts & Labor), director and curator of the Edward Gorey House, does not attempt a comprehensive catalog of the artist’s work. Hischak largely sidesteps Gorey’s career as a professional illustrator of other people’s books, a lucrative day job that allowed him the freedom to pursue his own strange obsessions. Instead, he presents Gorey as a “laudable model of how an artist maintains the equilibrium of creating highly successful commercial work while constantly producing unconventional works,” and features mainly the latter. These include masterpieces like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book in which 26 children die in increasingly terrible ways, which, though now a classic, was considered unmarketable and incomprehensible when it was first published in 1963. While also incorporating some straightforward biography—Gorey’s childhood was itinerant and somewhat troubled—this survey, playful to its core, does more showing than telling, excavating the artist beneath the commercial powerhouse with lovely reproductions of his early strange tales for children, pieces of personal ephemera like his collection of ticket stubs from the New York City Ballet (of which he was a devotee), and notes on his style of dress (“beatnik dandy,” a biographer once termed it). It’s an inventive and intimate retrospective of the most hallucinatory parts of a surreal body of work. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Contos, founder of Teach Us Consent, examines in her potent debut how the patriarchy has normalized prizing men’s desire above women’s autonomy. In the author’s view, dominant social narratives—that men should always be “up for sex” and are unable to control themselves; that women are responsible for not “tempting” men—have taught “entitled opportunists” that they have an implicit right to women’s bodies and that violating consent in small ways is acceptable. Such beliefs, she argues, cause girls to become resigned to bad sexual experiences and shape notions of sex as a matter of conquest rather than mutual exploration. Noting that consent education for men aged 18 or older doesn’t seem to change behavior, Contos calls for earlier interventions that center empathy for women. She also encourages informal forms of collective accountability, calling on friend groups to confront offenders and women to refuse to go to fraternities where a rape occurred. While those familiar with the concept of consent culture won’t find much that’s new, the first-person testimonials from victims of sexual assault that Contos intersperses throughout are powerful. It’s a solid assessment of a pernicious social problem with some valuable suggestions for reform. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this intriguing study, political economist Garland (The Peculiar Institution) tries to reconcile why it is that though American crime rates have steadily decreased since the 1980s, the public demand for “law and order” has made a resurgence in the past few years. Garland takes as a starting point the peculiarity of America’s response to Covid-19—he notes that among developed nations, only the U.S. experienced increased rates of accidents and spikes in violent crime during the pandemic. He also notes that despite the popular support of the George Floyd protests, a pro-police backlash and crime scare followed in subsequent years. These factors lead Garland toward a structural explanation of a unique American system of economic racism. In his view, the economic structure, with its limited opportunities for the poor, is arranged such that, relative to the rest of the developed world, “extraordinary levels of lethal violence” and criminality are indeed “a feature of life” for people of color. (Something leftists would do well not to deny, he argues.) One example of how this structure is maintained is the country’s unrivaled access to firearms. Through comparative examples to France, Canada, and other countries, he persuasively makes his case for America’s violent exceptionalism. The result is a striking challenge to both conservative and liberal perspectives on crime and policing. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Legal scholar Starkey (In Defense of Uncle Tom) delves into the Supreme Court’s role in enabling American racism in this searing survey that paints the court as complicit in centuries of discrimination. Though the Reconstruction amendments—the 13th, 14th and 15th, which Starkey labels “the constitutional Trinity”—should have yielded real freedom for Black Americans, they didn’t, and Starkey points to Supreme Court decisions as the main reason why, contending that the judicial branch, more so than the executive or legislative branches, was the federal government’s “most indispensable ally of caste preservationism.” The court’s post-Reconstruction backlash began with the unanimous 1880 decision Rives v. Virginia, which held that even if Black defendants were indicted and tried by whites-only juries, and even if the county where they stood trial had never had any Black jurors, those facts alone would not amount to an equal protection violation; instead, proof must be provided to show that a discriminatory result was intentional—a requirement not included in the Trinity, and which had lasting impacts. Other examples range from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, which approved “separate but equal” facilities based on race, to 2013’s Shelby v. Holder majority opinion, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Vividly narrated and astute, this is a damning reassessment of the judicial branch’s civil rights legacy. (June)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this gruesome look at the dark underbelly of London, historian Gray (Nether World) surveys nefarious events from 1750 to the beginning of WWII. As the capital of a vast global empire, the city increased in population nearly tenfold over this period, leading to an expansive urban underworld. In pithy prose, Gray examines everything from cholera epidemics to gaudy street fashions (like the ostentatiously dressed “macaronis” of the 1760s). A chapter on crime recounts the 18th-century hanging of a nobleman who had shot a servant; the grim handiwork of Jack the Ripper; and the dark undertakings of the real-life murderous maid who inspired Bleak House. A section on the supernatural covers the accidental shooting of a man dressed in white who was mistaken for a ghost, as well as the sojourn in London of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, who claimed to be in contact with spirits. Tales of vice and iniquity include the story of an 18th-century prostitute who accidentally murdered a client seeking autoerotic asphyxiation, and a final chapter on grinding poverty and disasters discusses alcoholism and workhouses. The author has a keen eye for a quirky factoid and undertakes deep archival research that brings new perspective to some well-known stories. Strikingly illustrated throughout with contemporaneous etchings and engravings, this makes for a gloriously grisly mood board. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kelly, who runs a TikTok account under the same name, debuts with a nonstop, eye-popping panorama of famous and influential individuals who each changed the world, or their perception of it, through their use of drugs. Some used them for pain relief, like George Washington, who took a spoonful of opium every night to ease the ache of his ill-fitting wooden teeth; others for a mix of pain and pleasure, among them Queen Victoria, who championed chloroform to relieve the pain of childbirth and loved a cocaine-laced wine called Vin Mariani so much that she once submitted an anonymous review to a newspaper. (The author goes on to tag her as “the most notorious drug kingpin of all time” for her role in Britain’s opium-peddling in China.) Other political figures making big decisions while under the influence range from Pharaoh Ramses II, who was entombed with a jar of cannabis, to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was unwittingly dosed with LSD by the CIA while at Harvard, and a trigger-happy Richard Nixon (“Whenever he got intoxicated, his go-to move was to order a nuclear strike ”). Besides serving up a multitude of entertaining stories, Kelly provides genuine food for thought about the medical and spiritual applications of psychedelics. Brimming with enthusiasm for history’s nooks and crannies, this charms. (July)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this collection of his New Yorker dispatches from Afghanistan, Anderson (The Fall of Baghdad) narrates in vivid detail how America’s longest war became a bloody quagmire. His pieces cover the conflict’s 20-year arc, beginning with the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban by a coalition of warlords backed by American forces. Painting their downfall as less of a rupture than a reconfiguration of power, he profiles cagey warlords and ragged militiamen who abruptly switched sides and cut murky deals that allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership to escape to Pakistan. His reporting from later years finds him embedded with American military units fighting a revived Taliban insurgency. It’s a depressing grind of patrols, IED attacks, and brusque searches that alienated villagers—some of whom had lost family to American air strikes and firepower—all to prop up an unpopular, kleptocratic Afghan government. The final chapters cover the Taliban’s 2021 reconquest of Afghanistan, when Taliban leaders insist to Western donor agencies that they will respects women’s rights, only to reimpose a harsh fundamentalism that banned women from school, work, and eventually from even talking outside their homes. Anderson’s pieces are a triumph of high-wire journalism—often taking him into hair-raising action—that also offer a capacious, resonant panorama of Afghan society. The result is a captivating account of a military march of folly that ably dissects its many tragic delusions. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink