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New Nonfiction January 2026 |
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Click on the title to check availability, and to log in and place holds online. To place holds by phone, please call us at (708) 366-5205. |
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Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster by Jacob SoboroffA revelatory and searingly immediate report from the frontlines of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles. Jacob Soboroff grew up in the Palisades. He spent weeks reporting for MS Now on the front line of the blaze. He appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze. No story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him. For Soboroff, questions remained after the fires were controlled: what had he just witnessed? How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? This set Soboroff off on months of reporting--with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, meteorologists and more. Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it.
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Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic by Kenneth R. RosenA gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting that reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new cold war. The fastest-warming place on earth, the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. In Polar War, Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict.
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The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory by Elizabeth Chamblee BurchSelling the Dream meets Empire of Pain in this shocking, never-told-before story of three women caught in a web of telemarketing scammers, shady doctors, and profit-hungry lawyers who turned fears surrounding a faulty medical device affecting millions of women into a goldmine. The Pain Brokers, by law professor Elizabeth Burch, is a damning investigation of a scheme made possible by a medical and legal complex that too often views women's bodies as cash machines and fails to take their pain seriously. As Burch unfurls each level to the scheme, we meet an enthralling cast of characters, but at the center are three women whose lives were upended by the very procedure they were told would save them. A page-turning, urgently necessary work of public service journalism, not only a chilling exposé of a legal system gone awry, but a wake-up call to the ways in which it harms those it is meant to help.
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Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future by Caitlin VincentBlunt, irreverent, and at times wittily subversive, Opera Wars spotlights opera's colorful and sometimes warring personalities, increasingly fierce controversies over content, and the battles being waged for its economic future. Drawing on interviews with dozens of opera insiders, Caitlin Vincent deftly unravels cliches and presumptions. She never shrinks from depicting the industry's top-to-bottom messiness and its stubborn resistance to change. Yet, like a lover who can't quite break away, she always comes back to her veneration for the artform and in these pages stirringly evokes those moments on stage that can be counted on to make ardent fans of the most skeptical.
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The Snakes That Ate Florida: Reporting, Essays, and Criticism by Ian FrazierThis collection of pieces consists of features and reportage for The New Yorker as well as work published in the last year―showcases the wide-ranging play of Frazier’s imagination. Astute and engaged, he is the supreme chronicler of the everyday, a kind of social and political anthropologist.
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Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises by Katie BennerA riveting investigation into a school, a scam, and a notorious college admissions scandal that exposes the inequalities and racial segregation of American education, from two award-winning New York Times journalists. T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100 percent college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League university in the country. T.M. Landry was said to be minting prodigies, and the prodigies were often black. How did the school do it? It didn't: It was a scam, pulled off with fake transcripts and personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse, Landry's success concealed a nightmare of alleged abuse and coercion. In a yearslong investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the lives of the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why black teens were pressured to trade in racial stereotypes of hardship for opportunity. Gripping and illuminating, Miracle Children argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system but that it played by the rules--that its deceptions and abuses were the outcome of segregated schools, inequitable education, and the belief that elite colleges are the nation's last path to life-changing economic opportunity.
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