New Nonfiction February 2026 |
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Notes on Being a Man
by Scott Galloway
Bestselling author, NYU professor, and cohost of the Pivot podcast, Scott Galloway offers a path forward for men and parents of boys--
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The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by John U. Bacon
Published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking, bestselling author John U. Bacon's (The Great Halifax Explosion) suspenseful latest explores the maritime disaster's cause and aftermath and includes interviews with the victims' families. For fans of: The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger.
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Mind Your Gut: The Science-Based, Whole-Body Guide to Living Well with Ibs
by Kate Scarlata
IBS affects 45 million Americans; it's also a tricky disease-hard to diagnose, miserable to live with. With the advent of the low FODMAP diet, nutrition is one of the primary treatments--but most folks don't know how to connect the dots between our brain and our gut health. Enter world renowned digestive health specialist and registered dietitian Kate Scarlata, and prominent GI psychologist Dr. Megan Riehl; their Mind Your Gut: The Whole Body Guide to Managing IBS provides a comprehensive, holistic approach to IBS. Offering everything from rom science based nutritional interventions, targeted mind gut behavioral strategies (body relaxation methods to stress management skills), as well as key yoga poses to mitigate symptoms, and natural supplements, Mind Your Gut combines diet and behavioral interventions for a full toolbox of therapeutic options for your IBS--
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Think Like a Chef, 25th Anniversary Edition
by Tom Colicchio
Chef, restaurateur, and television personality Tom Colicchio celebrates the 25th anniversary of his first cookbook with a stunning anniversary edition featuring a new author's note A groundbreaking volume when it was first published in 2000, Think Like a Chef is the perfect manual for a new generation of culinary professionals and passionate cooks everywhere. In this beloved classic, Tom uses simple steps to deconstruct a chef's creative process, making restaurant-style meals easily accessible to any home cook. Think Like a Chef starts with the essential techniques that form the basis of any chef's repertoire: roasting, braising, sautéing, and making stocks and sauces. Tom introduces building-block ingredients, like roasted tomatoes and braised artichokes, and shows how to use them in a variety of ways, from an easy vinaigrette to a caramelized tomato tart. In a section called Trilogies, Tom combines three basic ingredients to present several recipes, with one dish that's quick and other dishes that are increasingly more involved. As he says, Juxtaposed in interesting ways, these ingredients prove that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, and you'll agree once you've tasted the Ragout of Asparagus, Morels, and Ramps or the Baked Free-Form 'Ravioli'--both dishes made with the same trilogy of ingredients. The final section of the book offers simple recipes--from Zucchini with Lemon Thyme to Roasted Endive with Whole Spices to Boulangerie Potatoes--for components that can be used in endless combinations. Illustrated with glorious photographs, Think Like a Chef offers a master class from one of America's most celebrated chefs.
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Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
by Jacob Soboroff
MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff's urgent and affecting chronicle of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires blends personal reflections (Soboroff's childhood home was destroyed) with accounts from meteorologists, firefighters, politicians, and area residents. For fans of: Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson.
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The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History
by Vanessa S. Williamson
Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that these battles, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, have largely revolved around one issue-taxes. In The Price of Democracy, Vanessa S. Williamson challenges the myth that Americans are instinctively anti-tax, revealing that fights over taxes have always been proxies for deeper conflicts over who is included in We the People. Poorer people have repeatedly built movements that sought to tax all Americans to create a more equal and democratic nation. Wealthy people have responded by constraining the power to tax and stifling democracy through voting restrictions, gerrymandering, and violence. Yet as hard as anti-tax crusaders have fought to create an America that redistributes not from rich to poor, but from non-white people to rich white people, the battle rages on. The Price of Democracy uncovers how fights for fiscal fairness have defined American history, delivering a powerful message to the present: that taxes are the public's most powerful weapon in the fight for a real democracy-- Provided by publisher.
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Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love: A Cookbook
by Samin Nosrat
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat--and one of America's most beloved chefs and teachers--125 meticulously tested, flavor-forward, soul-nourishing recipes that bring joy and a sense of communion A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER, BON APP TIT, WASHINGTON POST, SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY With all the generosity of spirit that has endeared her to millions of fans, Samin Nosrat offers more than 125 of her favorite recipes--simply put, the things she most loves to cook for herself and for friends--and infuses them with all the beauty and care you would expect from the person Alice Waters called America's next great cooking teacher. As Samin says, Recipes, like rituals, endure because they're passed down to us--whether by ancestors, neighbors, friends, strangers on the internet, or me to you. A written recipe is just a shimmering decoy for the true inheritance: the thread of connection that cooking it will unspool. Good Things is an essential, joyful guide to cooking and living, whether you're looking for a comforting tomato soup to console a struggling friend, seeking a deeper sense of connection in your life, or hosting a dinner for ten in your too-small dining room. Here you'll find go-to recipes for ricotta custard pancakes, a showstopping roast chicken burnished with saffron, a crunchy, tingly Calabrian chili crisp, super-chewy sky-high focaccia, and a decades-in-the-making, childhood-evoking yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Along the way, you'll also find plenty of tips, techniques, and lessons, from how to buy olive oil (check the harvest date) to when to splurge (salad dressing is where you want to use your best ingredients) to the best uses for your pressure cooker (chicken stock and dulce de leche, naturally). Good Things captures, with Samin's trademark blend of warmth, creativity, and precision, what has made cooking such an important source of delight and comfort in her life.
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Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War II
by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
From the bestselling author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man and Enigma: The Battle for the Code, the story of unsung American heroism in World War II's maritime epic in the Arctic. No campaign during World War II contained more spinetingling drama, outstanding courage, and heartbreaking tragedy than the Arctic convoys. Yet they--and the multifaceted battle of the Arctic that had to be fought to get them through to Russia--remain one of the war's most under-celebrated feats. As this book's title implies, Battle of the Arctic tells a unique story. For much of the conflict was complicated by terrific storms, snow, ice, fog, whales and Arctic mirages, so that what is chronicled at times sounds like a cross between the nightmarish torment experienced by both Shackleton in his ship Endurance and Scott of the Antarctic, and an Arctic version of Robinson Crusoe. The action unfolded as Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on their countries' promise to take arms to Russia notwithstanding the German attempts to hunt them in their aircraft, U-boats and surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. When ships were attacked and went down in seas so cold that a man could die after just five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic. Men perished one by one in lifeboats and as castaways on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears. Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in Russian hospitals so primitive that amputations were carried out without anaesthetics. Other survivors, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD and the gulag as well as famine and prostitution. Using new material unearthed in American, British, Russian and German archives, as well as Polish, Norwegian, French and Dutch sources, and a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore can at last shine a revealing light on this extraordinary tale that oscillates between the sailors' eye view on the front line, and the controversies that infuriated world leaders.
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Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic
by Kenneth R. Rosen
Journalist Kenneth R. Rosen's compelling debut blends science writing, travelogue, and geopolitical analysis to detail how the Arctic could become the site of a new cold war, with Russia, China, and America all vying for control of the complex region. Try this next: So You Want to Own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump by Elizabeth Buchanan.
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Mexico: A 500-Year History
by Paul Gillingham
A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2025From acclaimed and prize-winning historian Paul Gillingham, a rich and vibrant history of one of the world's most diverse, politically ground-breaking, and influential of countriesAt the beginning of his masterful work of scholarship and narration, Paul Gillingham writes, from its outset Mexico was more profoundly, globally hybrid than anywhere else in the prior history of the world. Over the ensuing five centuries, Mexicans have prefigured and shaped the course of human lives across the globe.Gillingham begins in 1511 with the dramatic shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in the far south of Mexico. Ten years later Hern n Cort s led an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels to seize the legendary island city of Tenochtitl n, the center of Montezuma's empire, the largest in the Americas. The capture of the future Mexico City was, more than an extraordinary military event, the collision of two long-separated worlds, radically different in everything from biota to urban planning. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate, and a city larger and more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen. Mexicans discovered horses, wheels, and lethal germs, sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that wiped out a majority of the pre-existing population and led to a unique recombination of European and indigenous cultures. The industrial mining of Mexico's silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world. Mexico's independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821 led to a calamitous mid-century war with the United States and one of the first great social revolutions that brought peace for Mexicans throughout many of the global horrors of the 20th century, before the country itself collapsed into the violence of the cartels and a refugee crisis in the 2000s.The history of Mexico has been, Gillingham shows, one of suffering empire but also of overcoming. Through it all the country set new standards for inclusivity, for progressive social policies, for artistic expression, for adroitly balancing dictatorship and democracy. While racial divides endured, so too did indigenous peoples, who enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. Mexico was among the first countries to abolish slavery in 1829, and Mexicans elected North America's first Black president, Vicente Guerrero, its only indigenous president, Benito Ju rez, and its only woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.
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Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life
by Laura E. Knouse
Imagine an ADHD toolkit filled with tried-and-true skills that empower you to be more focused and productive--and to hack daily life so your strengths can shine. That's exactly what expert therapist Laura E. Knouse and preeminent authority Russell A. Barkley offer in this friendly guide. In short, engaging chapters, you get a menu of science-based strategies and resources for getting organized, completing tasks from start to finish, managing time, regulating your emotions and impulses, and addressing common relationship problems faced by adults with ADHD. Drs. Knouse and Barkley share ideas you can use every day, complete with checklists, self-coaching tips, helpful links, and downloadable forms.
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On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - A Personal History
by Josiah Hesse
One part Educated, one part rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy, On Fire for God explores the ways evangelical Christianity has preyed upon its followers while galvanizing them into the political force known today as the Christian right. Of all the books I've read about young people devastated by the fundamentalist religion they've grown up with, this one stands out.-- Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Evangelicals Exvangelical journalist Josiah Hesse grew up in the stifling working-class town of Mason City, Iowa, raised in the institutions of fundamentalist Christianity: a toxic mixture of schools, ministries, and religious camps that taught creationism, instilled sexual shame, and foretold horrific tales of the rapture. In the churches where he worshipped, pastors siphoned their flocks' wealth while preaching a doctrine of prosperity. Meanwhile, as economic struggles grew in the community, Hesse's fellow believers lambasted organized labor and shunned the social safety net, becoming an army for God against the evils of progressivism. Only upon escaping Iowa in search of something more would he consider the possibility that the world wasn't about to end and that he was woefully unprepared for a future he'd never believed would arrive. Written in vivid prose, On Fire for God is both an unflinching memoir of religious trauma and survival and a stirring examination of the emotional, political, and sociological effects of the Christian right. Returning to his hometown in search of answers about his upbringing and the political forces at work in the region, Hesse calls into question prevailing theories about the disappearing working class that point to opioids, automation, or globalism as the culprits. His story of awakening and escape exposes how conservative Christian con men have, over generations, trapped working-class believers in an isolated bubble of racism, xenophobia, and self-imposed martyrdom, while stripping communities like his of their wealth and self-esteem. In On Fire for God, Hesse plumbs the depths of his own experience to illuminate, with deep feeling and piercing immediacy, what he describes as the socioeconomic tragedy of the American working class.
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Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China
by Jung Chang
In this follow-up to Chang's Wild Swans, Deng Xiaoping opened the door of Communist China, and Jung--twenty-six years old and unstoppably curious, despite years of brainwashing--seized the propitious moment and became one of the first Chinese to leave the tightly sealed country and come to the West. [This memoir] chronicles her journey and that of her family, along with that of China, as it rose from a decrepit and isolated state to a world power challenging American dominance. During those decades, although she lives in the West, Jung's life intertwines with her native land in unexpected ways, a rare relationship made more complex because all her books are banned there. Her family story mirrors the ups and downs of China's transformation, right up to today, as it enters another watershed. Chairman Xi Jinping's attempt to return China to the anti-American Maoist past has a devastating impact on Jung's life: she is unable to go to her mother's deathbed--
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The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire
by Mustafa Aksakal
A new history that tells the story of how European imperial ambitions destroyed the Ottoman Empire during the Great War and created a divided and unstable Middle East The Ottoman Empire's collapse at the end of the First World War is often treated as a foregone conclusion. It was only a matter of time, the story goes, before the so-called Sick Man of Europe succumbed to its ailments--incompetent management, nationalism, and ethnic and religious conflict. In The War That Made the Middle East, Mustafa Aksakal overturns this conventional narrative. He describes how European imperial ambitions and the Ottoman commitment to saving its empire at any cost--including the destruction of the Armenian community and the deaths of more than a million Ottoman troops and other civilians--led to the empire's violent partition and created a politically unstable Middle East. The War That Made the Middle East shows that, until 1914, the Ottoman Empire was a viable multiethnic, multireligious state, and that relations between the Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine were relatively stable. When war broke out, the Ottoman government sought an alliance with the Entente but was rejected because of British and French designs on the Eastern Mediterranean. After the Ottomans entered the fight on the side of Germany and were defeated, Britain and France seized Ottoman lands, and new national elites in former Ottoman territories claimed their own states. The region was renamed the Middle East, erasing a robust and modernizing 600-year-old empire. A sweeping narrative of war, great power politics, and ordinary people caught up in the devastation, The War That Made the Middle East offers new insights about the Great War and its profound and lasting consequences.
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Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-The-Pooh
by Gyles Brandreth
For the 100th anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh, Gyles Brandreth chronicles the writing of this beloved classic and the life of its creator, A. A. Milne. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear tells the remarkable story of A A Milne, a playwright, a bestselling crime writer, poet, polemicist, humorist, and the man who created Winnie-the-Pooh. Gyles Brandreth explores Winnie-the-Pooh, a bear beloved by millions: his genesis, his life across a hundred years, his special philosophy, and the reasons for his worldwide popularity. Brandreth's book is also the intimate biography of three generations of the fascinating and troubled Milne family, which knew fame and fortune, despising both for a time, but a family that ultimately found a profound reason to be grateful for the riches Pooh brought them. With an extraordinary cast list that includes Elizabeth II and Walt Disney, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear moves from idyllic childhood games in the English countryside to New York in the 1930s and the love affairs, litigation, and heartrending family rifts that touched the life of one of Britain's most brilliant writers and his most famous creation.
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The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
by Siddharth Kara
A book of great importance and one that will likely become a classic. - New York Times Book ReviewOne of The New York Times' 100 Most Notable Books of 2025 A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2025A New Yorker Essential Read From the Pulitzer Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives Perfect for fans of David Grann's The Wager and The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa's Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning care) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery. When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship's owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes. The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo? What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England's highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in historysparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States. The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon
by Doug Woodham
The first biography in more than a quarter century--based on more than 100 interviews--adds significant new information to the story both of Jean-Michel Basquiat's life and to the extraordinary journey of his art.
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Contact your librarian for more great books! |
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