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New Nonfiction October 2026 |
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The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
by Gil Durán
This transfixing debut from journalist Dur n investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration...It's an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance. When Silicon Valley says it is ''moving fast and breaking things, '' the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Dur n reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule. Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Dur n traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles--Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk--and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media. The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley's war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco's weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Dur n exposes how the world's richest men are building a new political order. The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it's an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Dur n insists there is still time to fight back--if we act now.
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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.
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Nobody Broke Your Heart: An Intimate Biography of Elliott Smith
by Jamie Fisher
The first all-encompassing biography of Elliott Smith, offering an intimate portrait of his life and musical legacy with brand-new interviews, lyrics, and correspondence from the people closest to him, many speaking for the first time Nobody Broke Your Heart is a tender, nuanced narrative of Elliott Smith, one of the most influential and tragic musicians of the 1990s, whose records are deeply beloved to this day, written by New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker-published author Jamie Fisher. Starting with his childhood in Texas, following him through his making as an artist in Portland and New York, and reckoning honestly with his unmaking in Los Angeles, Fisher has used never-before-seen archival evidence (unheard recordings, draft lyrics, photos, and correspondence) alongside extensive interviews with friends, family, girlfriends, and collaborators to shed light on the real Elliott Smith, in all his complexity. Vividly animating Elliott's world and analyzing his work and legacy in loving depth, Nobody Broke Your Heart is an essential book for anyone who loves Elliott Smith and his music--and anyone who's loved someone grappling with addiction and mental illness.
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The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
by Cal Flyn
A lyrical exploration of the world's wildest, most forbiddingly remote places--and the humans who have always been there, by the best non-fiction writer of her generation, according to The Times From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wildernesses make up some of the world's more alluring natural landscapes. But what is a wilderness, really? It is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these pristine places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans. But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands--the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world--she finds that such truly untouched lands don't exist: Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds running off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks. The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds--deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts--asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.
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Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis's Trans Pioneer
by Julie Kliegman
Not to be missed. --Stephanie Howes, Booklist (starred review)A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Summer 2026The candid, definitive biography of professional tennis's first openly transgender player, Ren e Richards, featuring never-before-seen archival photos and untold stories nearly lost to history, until now.Fifty years ago, tennis player Ren e Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women's draw of the 1977 US Open--marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Ren e eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.Finding Ren e Richards chronicles Richards's extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Ren e remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested--and condemned--than ever before.Finding Ren e Richards includes a 20-page photo insert featuring never-before-seen archival images.
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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
by Jill Lepore
Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity. --Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget.
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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 reviewA 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.--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 landscapesA 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 BirdsBefore 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?
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The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men
by Jon Ronson
From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed comes a darkly comic trip to the furthest reaches of the masculinity crisis His only child is lured to a mysterious castle in the forests of New England late one night, sending Jon Ronson on an extraordinary adventure into a dark world of unmoored men desperately searching for purpose and control--whatever the cost. With zero warning, the crisis of masculinity and its bizarre, wrecking-ball manifestations had crashed into Jon's life. As his investigation deepens, urgent questions come to light: What exactly is Princessing? Why did a lawn care influencer dress as a baby in front of billions of online viewers? How did a paid-up member of the Skeptic Society derail his life in the name of a warped vision of chivalry? And, more pressingly, why are two recently released murderers on their way to pay Jon a visit? In our rapidly changing society, many men have become detached from reality; some are behaving like separatists, while others have fallen deep down ideological rabbit holes. Is this a complete fracturing of society, a new era of disinhibition where anything goes? Drawing on his trademark brand of humor, psychological insight, and unrivaled prescience, The Castle marks Jon Ronson's long-awaited return to the written page in his darkest and most insightful book yet--one where he throws open the doors to the Castle and reveals a new lost generation of men.
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Changing Gender
by Susan Stryker
From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself. That gender is a hotly contested topic becomes ever clearer as antigender ideology continues to be mobilized by the far right and transgender people's lives are increasingly targeted. But what are we talking about when we talk about gender? Where did the concept itself come from, and where might it go? In Changing Gender, the leading trans scholar Susan Stryker invites readers to ride along on her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the gender concept's roots in grammar and tells the story of how it transformed into a battleground of the culture wars. From the origins of Yankee Doodle to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, from nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, Stryker finds surprising places to tune in to the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies. Poignant and deeply researched, lyrical and authoritative, Changing Gender is a book for our fraught time, exposing limiting assumptions about gender across the political spectrum and imagining what life might look like if some of those limitations were lifted. Ultimately, Stryker argues, to change gender is to change what it means to be human--and to change reality itself.
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The Everest Mystery: Sandy Irvine, George Mallory, and the Truth Still Buried on Everest
by Julie Summers
Reanimated by recent physical evidence of Irvine's death, Summers, granddaughter of Irvine's beloved sister, Evelyn, and Hemmleb, whose own 1999 Everest expedition found Mallory's body on the mountain, lay out in utterly captivating detail the successes and failures that had preceded the 1924 expedition...everyone will be riveted by the personalities, the constraints of their era, and the courage and ingenuity they ultimately brought to it, whether or not they succeeded. --Booklist (starred)gripping...The authors vividly describe the world of early Everest expeditions long before commercialization, when climbers were as much explorers and documentarians as athletes...Recommended for those with an interest in exploration history, as well as those drawn to enduring historical mysteries. --Library JournalThe unsolved mysteries of George Mallory, Sandy Irvine, and their legendary 1924 Everest expeditionThere is no mystery more compelling in the history of mountaineering than the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Over 100 years after they were last seen 'going strong for the top, ' the question of exactly what happened to them on that fateful day has not been answered. George Mallory's frozen remains were discovered in 1999. But in September 2024, a climber found an old boot lying out in the open on the Central Rongbuk Glacier on Mount Everest, several miles from where Mallory lay. The boot contained a foot, and a sock bearing a nametape spelled out in red: A.C. IRVINE. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit--becoming the first to do so--or did they perish while ascending? What happened to the camera that Irvine may have carried, which would have documented their climb? Written by Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine's great-niece, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world's leading authority on the Mallory and Irvine Everest expedition, The Everest Mystery explores the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories about what happened to them so close to the summit of Mount Everest. Above all, it restores Sandy Irvine to his rightful place in the great mystery of Everest 1924.
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Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir
by Kiyoshi Tanimoto
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 thirty-six-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.
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Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
by Emily Wilson
An enthralling and profoundly relevant book. --Salman RushdieI adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature. --Madeline MillerFrom the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.
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I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World
by Sarah Wilson
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Wilson comes a deeply moving, wise guide to finding joy and meaning in a world that seems to be falling apart It's hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong . . . that life has become precariously off-balance. We are hit hourly with headlines about catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record heat waves, collapsing democracies, AI and nuclear threat, rising economic inequality, widespread unrest, and more. In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson argues we are undergoing what every complex civilization before us has--systemic collapse. So how do we continue to live as sensitive humans amidst such a tumultuous shift? What does life look like when the systems we rely on deteriorate? Should we be having kids? How do we make financial decisions? Should we be prepping? And, most importantly, how do we avoid succumbing to doom and despair? In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson delves into these pressing questions. Drawing on many years of research and wisdom gained from more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists, and spiritual leaders, Wilson takes readers on an intimate journey as she lays out a path for living fully, meaningfully, and beautifully through these troubled times. Our predicament, she argues, is ultimately an urgent call to us all to relish what is valuable to us--to eat the stars--and to return to our humanity once again. I Eat the Stars empowers readers to move beyond panic, doom, and despair. With her warm, incisively intelligent, wise, and down-to-earth voice, Wilson creates a space for readers to confront their fears and anxieties about an uncertain future, guiding them toward one rooted in truth, hope, justice, creativity, community, and to step up as warriors and meet the moment. We are in what we were warned about for decades. But from a crisis comes stunning possibility.
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Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Created Europe
by Robert Winder
Setting off in the dramatic mountain landscape where this story begins, acclaimed historian Robert Winder traces the rivers’ journeys from their increasingly fragile glacial sources, revealing in shimmering detail their impact on Europe’s rich history as they flow toward the sea.
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The Wound Is Where the Light Enters: A Memoir of Resilience
by Chris Young
The inspiring memoir of a brilliant young man who, sentenced to life in prison, refused to surrender his future--a story so powerful that it transformed even the judge who handed down the sentence. If our world were more just, Chris Young would have been crossing a stage at college graduation at the age of 22. Instead, he was marched into a maximum-security federal prison, facing life under mandatory drug sentencing laws. Like far too many young Black men from his neighborhood in Clarksville, Tennessee, this was where his story was supposed to end. But one day in the prison library, a book caught his eye: an encyclopedia. As he began to turn the pages, Chris felt himself transported. Knowledge became a portal. He began to confront the nihilism around him, the trauma of his past, and the cruelty of a system determined to confine him. From the library, his cell, and even solitary confinement, Chris built an education from scratch, studying philosophy, art, anthropology, history, physics, and politics. He learned to analyze the stock market and taught himself how to code without a computer. He trained his mind--and refused to let prison dictate the limits of his imagination. At his sentencing hearing, Chris gave such a moving speech that the judge resigned from his lifetime appointment to the bench and fought to free him. Started in solitary confinement and finished beyond bars, The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is a powerful meditation on choice, consequence, and human potential, told through the story of a man who was never given a chance--and who fought until, at last, he was. Amazon Best Book of the Month Summer 2026: Most Anticipated List for Zibby's Highlights.
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The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn
by Dave Zirin
A biography of iconic radical historian Howard Zinn, examining his life and work as a progressive icon and thought leader through the story of the times that shaped him as well as the United States of America. From The Nation magazine columnist and New York Times bestselling author Dave Zirin, The People's Historian is a deeply researched biography of Howard Zinn, the beloved author of the classic national bestseller with more than four million copies sold, A People's History of the United States. The People's Historian shows Zinn's presence on the great canvases of the 20th century: from the Depression to World War II to the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam all the way until his death in 2010. With intimately researched stories from Zinn's life and career, such as the way Atlanta's small Spelman College, where Zinn taught as a young professor, helped launch the Civil Rights Movement, Zinn's work traveling to Hanoi to engineer the release of POWs, and his continuing influence in the emerging Democratic Socialist movement, The People's Historian explores Zinn's past while also demonstrating how his 75 years of political engagement with the social struggles of his time informs our perilous present. With input from family and access to Zinn's personal papers, The People's Historian paints a picture of the man behind A People's History, examining his work and legacy in the broader context of the United States.
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Morton Grove Public Library
6140 Lincoln Ave
Morton Grove, Illinois 60053
(847) 965-4220www.mgpl.org |
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