February 2026 list by Donalee Jacobs |
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Augustus
by Adrian Goldsworthy
In this definitive and critically acclaimed biography, eminent historian Adrian Goldsworthy illuminates the political and private lives of Rome's first emperor in more depth than ever before. Weaving together tales of military victories, political marriages, and senatorial power struggles, Goldsworthy portrays Augustus as he really was--at once noble and manipulative, giving and tyrannical, clever and cruel. Meticulously researched and approachably written, Augustus is the most detailed extant biography of Caesar Augustus, a man whose legacy continues on today.
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Bad Indians Book Club
by Patty Krawec
When a friend asked what books could help understand Indigenous lives, Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, gave them a list. The list became a book club and then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, and then this book. Bad Indians Book Club examines works written from the perspective of Bad Indians--marginalized writers whose refusal to comply with dominant narratives opens up new worlds. Interlacing chapters with short stories about Deer Woman, who is on her own journey to decide who she is, Krawec leads us into a place of wisdom and medicine where the stories of marginalized writers help us imagine other ways of seeing the world.
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The Cost of Quiet
by Colette Jane Fehr
In The Cost of Quiet, licensed marriage and family therapist Colette Jane Fehr shines a light on the epidemic of avoidant behavior and how to overcome it. Drawing from the latest attachment science and evidence-based therapies she's used to repair the bond between hundreds of couples, Fehr gives us the tools to approach those we love with openness, honesty, and vulnerability. The ultimate goal: a securely attached relationship that engages with conflict productively, and the confidence that comes from speaking up and being heard--because a good relationship is worth fighting for.
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Don't Tell the President
by Jean Becker
Don't Tell the President is a collection of the greatest tales of triumph and near-crisis in presidential advance. Behind every seamless campaign appearance and presidential affair lies the meticulous work of event planners and advance teams -- the professionals who transform political logistics into carefully choreographed performances. Here are illuminating first-hand accounts from dedicated employees who worked for every modern-day president from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, a few First Ladies, a few vice presidents, and a few wannabes. It is a memorable and at times laugh-out loud funny look at how many presidential events happen--and how many almost went awry.
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Empire of Madness
by Khameer Kidia
A physician and researcher, Dr. Khameer Kidia highlights the limitations of the Western mental health model by reporting from the front lines of mental health crises at home, in the clinic, and during a decade of fieldwork. Clear-eyed and openhearted, Kidia asks the nuanced questions unaddressed by our current mental health model: How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? With rigorous research, cutting analysis, and illuminating prose, Kidia invites us to reimagine mental health as a global idea where our wellbeing is mutual and everyone's voice -- patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers alike -- matters.
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Enough
by Oprah Winfrey
For her entire adult life, Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight. As her conversations with Dr. Ania Jastreboff from the Yale School of Medicine reveal, we've learned that having obesity is not a choice. It's a question of biology, created by our bodies' need to survive and the environment we created and now live in. And it's treatable. Dr. Jastreboff's research offers a new way forward, not only for obesity treatment, but also for overall health, with significant implications for the prevention and reversal of hundreds of related diseases.
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The Great Shadow
by Susan Wise Bauer
What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions? The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness--from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors.
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The Guy You Loved to Hate
by Spencer Pratt
In this explosive, wildly entertaining memoir, Spencer Pratt charts his rise and fall as America's most notorious reality TV villain on The Hills -- and how, from the ashes of the Pacific Palisades fires, he's finally ready for his redemption arc.
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Hated by All the Right People
by Jason Zengerle
A revelatory, jaw-dropping portrait of Tucker Carlson's career and story of reinvention: from insider to populist, from respectability to insanity, the story of how the right-wing media lost its mind. New York Magazine writer Jason Zengerle's eye-opening narrative follows Carlson's journey from gifted young intern at New Republic to his time on Fox News. In the tradition of Our Man and The Loudest Voice in the Room, Zengerle examines how Tucker Carlson's career offers a unique lens into the confusing, myopic, and evolution of American conservatism, its media presence and punditry, from the 1990s to the present.
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How Great Ideas Happen
by George Newman
Cognitive scientist George Newman draws on cutting-edge research to show that creativity isn't magic, it's method. The most successful innovators don't wait to be struck by brilliance; their creative process is more like archeology. As keen-eyed explorers, they scan the terrain, dig with intention, and, with a little luck, find gold. With vivid examples from the arts, science, and business, Newman shows how creativity often comes from discovering what was already there. By revealing the hidden steps behind breakthrough success, How Great Ideas Happen uncovers a repeatable method that anyone can follow.
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How to Be a Rich Old Lady
by Amanda Holden
A life-changing path to the financial freedom we all deserve: How to Be a Rich Old Lady is filled with humor, heart, and real-world perspective. Amanda Holden spent years working in investment management, where she saw exactly who gets access to the power, ease, and opportunity money can bring--and it wasn't people like her friends. So, Amanda left her finance job to launch Invested Development, a financial education company where she has taught more than twenty-five thousand students how to invest. Here, all her expertise is packed into a guide that reads like a text from your smartest friend.
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How to Live a Meaningful Life
by Bill Burnett
Bestselling authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the visionaries behind Stanford's Life Design Lab, take on the most profound design problem of all: how to make a life rich with meaning and purpose. They present the latest research on what makes life worth living, showing us how to bring wonder, coherence, flow, and community into our everyday experiences. Instead of cramming more into an already packed life, they give us the steps we need to extract more out of it, moment by moment.
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Neptune's Fortune
by Julian Sancton
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over 1 billion dollars in gold and silver--and one man's obsessive quest to find it. Roger Dooley wasn't looking for the San Jose, but an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the ship, which had sunk during battle. Neptune's Fortune plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. This tale of temerity and treasure is a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.
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The Pain Brokers
by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
For decades, television has blared a familiar refrain: 'If you or a loved one has been injured by X product...' But behind those ads are elaborate scams revictimize that the injured. Why else would thousands of women take out loans and fly to south Florida to have their pelvic mesh surgically removed at a chiropractor's clinic? As Burch unfurls each level to the scheme, we meet an enthralling cast of characters, from a world class scam artist who reaped millions of dollars at a south Florida call center, to the power lawyer who defended Big Pharma but became an unlikely hero, and to a newly minted small-town Arkansas attorney who advocated for the unseen and unheard.
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Palace of Deception
by Darrin Lunde
Palace of Deception uncovers the complicated legacy of three iconic figures of the American Museum: explorer Roy Chapman Andrews; Carl Akeley, pioneering taxidermist; and Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum's president. Darrin Lunde tells the story of the American Museum's foundational years, recreating some of the most celebrated, globe-trotting journeys from natural history's heyday. It also traces the larger, racially infused milieu that underwrote the golden age of exploration, uncovering the simmering anxieties about race behind the era's greatest adventures. It is a legacy that still haunts natural history institutions today.
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The Revolutionists
by Jason Burke
In the 1970s, a wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews, The Revolutionists provides an account of a period which definitively shaped today's world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution.
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Serving Up Scripture
by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Using the metaphor of cooking, Serving Up Scripture explains how the reader (or interpreter) of Scripture can make solid meals (trustworthy, insightful interpretations) from the ingredients (chapters and verses) in the Bible, putting the biblical text back into the hands of anyone who's ever felt it's been abused or its message mischaracterized.
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Shattered Lands
by Sam Dalrymple
A Financial Times, NPR, and BBC History Best Book of the Year. As recently as 1928, a vast swath of Asia was bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known as the "Indian Empire" or, more simply, as the Raj. It was the British Empire's crown jewel, home to a quarter of the world's population. In the span of just fifty years, that empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving it into twelve modern nations, including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but also Burma, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. In vivid and compulsively readable prose, Sam Dalrymple presents, for the first time, the story of how the Indian Empire was unmade.
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Strangers
by Belle Burden
In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was -- someone nicknamed Belle the Good -- gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love.
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Super Nintendo
by Keza MacDonald
A lifelong gamer and renowned video games journalist, Keza MacDonald digs down to Nintendo's experimental roots, tracking the company's rise with each new revolutionary product. She draws on private interviews with icons like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, who continues to leave his stamp on the company, and takes readers on a trip to the secretive Nintendo HQ--making her one of the few Western journalists to have set foot inside the building. Along the way, MacDonald uncovers the driving force behind these creative triumphs: a willingness to take risks and place long-term success over short-term profits.
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Two Women Living Together
by Kim Hana
The big-hearted, bestselling South Korean memoir by two best friends who decide to grow old together under one roof. When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence and the freedom of living alone. But in their forties they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Hana and Sunwoo made the decision to live together--not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. Together they navigate the challenges and comforts of cohabiting in midlife, the growing pains of interdependence and the rewards of compromise when you've grown set in your ways.
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Undimmed
by Cecily Mak
When Cecily Mak took a break from drinking, the response she often got was 'Oh, I didn't know you had a problem'. A problem? She was not an addict, or even committing to sobriety. She had simply realized that alcohol helped her avoid difficult feelings and dimmed the good parts of her life along with the bad. She wanted to live her life with clarity, not avoid it. While leaving her unwanted habits behind, Mak developed the Eight Awarenesses--a set of principles we can use for inspiration and guidance on the path to embodying a clear life. Each one is an invitation to explore a deeper understanding of ourselves and our choices.
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Who's Watching Shorty?
by Reshona Landfair
Reshona Landfair -- known as Jane Doe when she testified at the trial that led to R. Kelly's convictions -- was a 14-year-old-girl left unprotected by family, music business executives, social services, and law enforcement. Finally ready to recount, in her own words, what was it like to be a young teenager, caught up in his orbit, Landfair reveals why she believed he loved her, despite how badly he treated her? A deeply personal and ultimately empowering memoir, Who's Watching Shorty? is more than a story of bravery; it's a hard-hitting reminder to always look after those you love.
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Why We Click
by Kate Murphy
Interpersonal synchrony is the seemingly magical, yet now scientifically documented, tendency of human beings to fall into rhythm and find resonance with one another. Interweaving science, philosophy, literature, history, business management theory, pop-culture, and plenty of relatable, real world examples, Why We Click explains why being in sync, in tune, in step, and on the same wavelength are more than just turns of phrase. From the bedroom to the boardroom and beyond, Murphy reveals how our instinct to sync with others drives much of our behavior and how our deepest desires--to be known, admired, loved, and connected--are so often thwarted in modern life.
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Wild Fictions
by Amitav Ghosh
Wild Fictions brings together twenty-five years of Amitav Ghosh's writing on literature and language, climate change and the environment, travel, and historical lives. Taken together, Ghosh's essays form a constellation of the themes central to his fiction and nonfiction over the past two decades: imperialism and decolonization, climate change, and the stories of ordinary individuals making lives amid these historical forces. Throughout, the spirit of these pieces reflects what Ghosh calls his xenophilia -- an affinity for strangers -- and a wish to reclaim a cosmopolitanism that flourished in the Global South before it was interrupted by colonialism.
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Work in Progress
by James Martin
In this humorous memoir, bestselling author and podcast host of The Spiritual Life, Father James Martin tells the story of a busboy, dishwasher, caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller, and corporate tool and, finally, a Jesuit priest. This coming-of-age story set in the 1960s and 1970s, is a spiritual memoir from a different angle ... told 'slant' as Emily Dickinson might say. Each chapter features memories and milestones throughout Father Martin's young life. Work in Progress teaches us important life lessons such as: work hard, be on time, don't be mean, forgive frequently, ask if you don't know something, don't misuse power, pay attention to those who are struggling, listen and, above all, be kind.
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