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New Nonfiction and Biography June 2025 |
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Everything is Tuberculosis: the History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection
by John Green
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile.
In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry's story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world--and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
-- Provided by publisher
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Scorched Earth: a Global History of World War II
by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order.
In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe. The war was sparked by German and Japanese invasions that threatened the old powers' dominance, not by Allied opposition to fascism.
The Allies achieved victory not through pluck and democratic idealism but through savage firebombing raids on civilian targets and the slaughter of millions of Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as hyper-militarized new imperial powers, each laying claim to former Axis holdings across the globe before turning on one another and triggering a forever war.
Dramatically rendered and persuasively argued, Scorched Earth shows that World War II was the culmination of centuries of colonial violence and ushered in a new era of imperial struggle.
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Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
by Bridget Read
A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing, from the shadowy cabals at the top to the strivers at the bottom, whose deferred dreams churn a massive money-making scam that has remade American society.
Multilevel marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the ultimate business opportunity: the chance to be your own boss. In exchange for peddling their wares, they offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and--most precious of all--financial freedom. If, that is, you're willing to shell out for expensive products, recruit everyone you know to buy them, and make them recruit everyone they know to do the same--thus creating the 'multiple levels' of multilevel marketing, or MLM.
Despite overwhelming evidence that multilevel marketing causes most of its participants to lose their money, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes, the industry's dubious origins, inextricably tied to well-known ideological figures like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. Behind the scenes of American life, MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, teachers, nurses--anyone who has been left behind by inequality.
In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny post-war California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the suburbs of Michigan and North Carolina, where MLM bought its political protection, to the stadium-sized conventions where top sellers today preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has been endorsed by multiple American presidents, has its own Congressional caucus, and enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffet, and Donald Trump.
Along the way, Read delves into the heartbreaking stories of those enmeshed in the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn. A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism's stealthiest PR campaign: a cunning right-wing political project that has shaped nearly everything about how we live.
-- Provided by publisher.
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Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
For Readers of Rebecca Traister, Jia Tolentino, and Roxane Gay From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other-and themselves-with disastrous consequences What happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.
Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and "riot girrrl" feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more.
And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren't. Gilbert tracks many of the period's dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.
Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.
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John & Paul: a Love Story in Songs
by Ian Leslie
John Lennon and Paul McCartney knew each other for twenty-three years, from 1957 to 1980. This book is the myth-shattering biography of a relationship that changed the cultural history of the world. The Beatles shook the world to its core in the 1960's and, to this day, new generations continue to fall in love with their songs and their story. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the dynamic between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Few other musical partnerships have been rooted in such a deep, intense and complicated personal relationship. John and Paul's relationship was defined by its complexity: compulsive, tender and tempestuous; full of longing, riven by jealousy. Like the band, their relationship was always in motion, never in equilibrium for long.
John & Paul traces its twists and turns and reveals how these shifts manifested themselves in the music. The two of them shared a private language, rooted in the stories, comedy and songs they both loved as teenagers, and later, in the lyrics of Beatles songs. In John & Paul, acclaimed writer Ian Leslie uses the songs they wrote to trace the shared journey of these two compelling men before, during, and after The Beatles.
Drawing on recently released footage and recordings, Leslie offers us an intimate and insightful new look at two of the greatest icons in music history, and rich insights into the nature of creativity, collaboration, and human intimacy.
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Patriot: a Memoir
by Alexei Navalny
A political freedom fighter who paid the ultimate price for his convictions recounts his political career, the many attempts on his life and the lives of the people closest to him and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.
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Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend
by Jason Bailey
More than a decade after his sudden passing, James Gandolfini still exerts a powerful pull on television and film enthusiasts around the world. His charismatic portrayal of complex, flawed, but always human men illuminated the contradictions in all of us, as well as our potential for grace, and the power of love and family.
Bailey traces his rise from bit parts to character roles he enlivened with menace and vulnerability, to Tony Soprano, the breakout role that would make him a legend, and onto a post-Sopranos career in which he continued to challenge himself and his audience.
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