June 2026 list by Donalee Jacobs |
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Advice No One Asked for
by Jenny Hagel
From the Emmy-nominated comedian comes this hilarious and practical collection of advice for how to live your best life in love, at work, and in comedy. Jenny is so obsessed with (addicted to?) offering unsolicited wisdom that she runs a sold-out live show in New York City called, appropriately, Jenny Hagel Gives Advice. With her debut essay collection, Hagel sets out to backseat drive for as many unwitting strangers as possible. The result is a heartfelt and funny journey through a list of life-changing recommendations, like: wear black when you travel, buy an analog watch, and just because you can go into the monkey enclosure while visiting Honduras doesn't mean that you should.
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America, U.S.A.
by Eddie S. Glaude
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history. Centered around the major celebrations of America's milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for a better future.
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American Rambler
by Isaac Fitzgerald
As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald was captivated by Johnny Appleseed, drawn to the legend by family ties and a shared restlessness to leave home and discover what lay beyond. In American Rambler, he sets out on a year-long journey to follow Appleseed's path from Massachusetts to Indiana. On this journey, Fitzgerald turns a childhood fascination into a profound reckoning of loss and grief, ritual and faith, and more. He camps in hostile environments, trespasses more than once, and is warmed by the generosity of strangers at every turn. A moving blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, American Rambler is an ode to the American heartland and a clear-eyed look at the myths at the core of American identity and history.
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Big Fan
by Michael Schur
New York Times bestselling authors Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski travel the world in a hilarious and heartwarming celebration of fans and the things they love: baseball, basketball, chess, darts, football, futbol, Indigenous North American stickball, pickleball, WWE, Taylor Swift, Star Wars, and more.
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The Breast Advice
by Dr. Elisa Port
Bringing in patients' wisdom together with her 25 years of experience as one of New York's most celebrated specialists, Mount Sinai's Chief of Breast Surgery Dr. Elisa Port has created a comprehensive guide to breast cancer risk, diagnosis, and treatment. Addressing: Lifestyle factors to prevent breast cancer; Risk assessment, screening, and testing--including the latest technology; Diagnosis--choosing a doctor, what to ask, how to manage hard news; Treatment--from radiation and chemotherapy to surgery and novel therapies. Also included are the top ten pieces of advice from patients who have been through it.
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Called by the Hills
by Anuradha Roy
When acclaimed novelist Anuradha Roy and her husband stumble upon a derelict cottage in the hill station of Ranikhet, they decide it is where they will live. As Roy tries to rebuild the cottage and create a garden, she encounters nature at its most fierce, beautiful, and vulnerable, and over twenty-five years bears witness to the destructive impact of global warming on the alpine ecosystem. What emerges is a tender and intimate portrait of her surroundings in which rugged nature, lovable dogs, and recalcitrant humans come together to captivating effect. Written with unsentimental clarity, humor, and poignancy, this is a story of profound transformations.
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Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
Zayd Ayers Dohrn parents were fugitives after a decade fighting the US government; his mother was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Dohrn's parents said his birth marked a clean break with violent revolutionary struggle, but in this explosive memoir, he discovers that story wasn't entirely true. Drawing on exclusive interviews, declassified FBI files, and long-hidden letters, photos, and diaries, Dohrn tells a new story of radical resistance. Reckoning with the emotional damage the Weathermen inflicted on their victims and their children, Dohrn's memoir explores the roots of radicalism and asks how a young person survives when the place they feel safest -- with their family -- also puts them in danger.
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The Echoing Universe
by Emma Chapman
Everything is sending out signals: the surface of the Moon, distant stars -- maybe even extraterrestrials. With radio waves, we can uncover what visible light cannot show us and peer into realms that are otherwise unreachable. Even the hostile surface of Venus, where high temperatures, lethal acid rain, and crushing pressure rapidly annihilate even the hardiest robotic probes, yields its secrets through radio observations. This exhilarating expedition is just the beginning as new and bigger radio telescopes come into play and propel our curiosity well beyond the edge of our galaxy.
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Freedom Round the Globe
by Sarah M. S. Pearsall
In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood. In each chapter, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence -- security, happiness, respect -- finding its spark in a far-flung place. In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history.
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The Hero Next Door
by Martha Raddatz
The Hero Next Door offers portraits of servicemen and women who are every bit as inspiring as those of the Greatest Generation. Every one of them has shown awe-inspiring strength of character, creativity, and drive, faced daunting odds, and come out stronger. Life can turn on a moment, and who's to say what we'll do? That, we learn, is when you spot the real heroes: when no one is watching. Individually, their stories are deeply inspiring, Raddatz writes. Together, they offer something beyond inspiration: insight into what it means to live with a life-defining courage and sense of purpose.
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I Belong to Me
by Tia Levings
After years of abuse in a violent marriage and high-control religion, Tia Levings escaped with her children and thought the hardest was behind her. But leaving was just the beginning. With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year quest to psychological peace. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman who is able to tell her harrowing story without retraumatizing herself -- a woman who can reach back to help others claim what's theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn't get your present and future too. Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources, Tia Levings guides readers through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind, soul, and body after religious trauma -- so you can too.
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Ike and Winston
by Jonathan W. Jordan
From bestselling author Jonathan W. Jordan comes a riveting portrait of friendship, politics, and power at the highest stakes: the extraordinary bond between Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. Together they launched invasions, toppled tyrants, and shaped the world as the nations they served drifted apart. Through triumph and loss, they forged a remarkable friendship that weathered the decline of an empire and rise of a superpower. Told in rich and gripping detail, drawn from the words of the men themselves, Ike and Winston is a deeply human story of loyalty, leadership, and affection -- a kinship forged in war and nurtured in peace.
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The Impossible Factory
by Josh Dean
In 1938, Kelly Johnson got the idea for a small, agile, disruptive engineering shop -- one that could help America's war machine innovate more quickly. By 1943, Advanced Development Projects -- later nicknamed the Skunk Works -- was born. During Johnson's forty-seven years at Lockheed Martin, the Skunk Works developed at least half a dozen planes that would have been the capstone achievement of anyone else's career. But the planes were only part of Kelly Johnson's legacy. There was also his management style. Under him, the Skunk Works' structure -- flat management, no red tape, extraordinary speed -- quickly became the model for nurturing innovation, and eventually would fuel the nimble startups of Silicon Valley.
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The Jesus Discoveries
by Jeremiah J. Johnston
In an age of growing skepticism, many demand hard evidence before believing -- an “artifacts or it didn’t happen” attitude, especially toward Jesus and the Bible. Yet centuries of archaeological discoveries support the Bible: lost cities found, art rediscovered, documents retrieved. The skeptic asks, what about Jesus -- there's no actual evidence that He ever lived, right? Wrong. Jeremiah Johnston presents ten historic finds that corroborate the Bible’s claims about who Jesus was, His life, death, and how that wasn’t the end -- connecting His story with your story and revealing how it changes yours.
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The Land and Its People
by David Sedaris
In this collection, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a traveler, a brother, a lifelong friend. In The Land and Its People, he tries the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery, both succeeding and failing; confides in an ambivalent Duolingo bot; and adds to his Countries I Have Been To - riding a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buying a cassock in Vatican City, and going on safari in Kenya. Time takes its toll as he realizes how many are already gone. Bitten by a dog and insulted by a train passenger, he agrees, “Enough Is Enough,” yet life holds delight. Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open.
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Liar's Kingdom
by Andrew Weissmann
From legal analyst and veteran federal prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, an urgent summons to tackle political lies in America and prevent a figure like Donald Trump from rising again. Lies like “The 2020 election was a total FRAUD” sparked a historic insurrection, undermined faith in elections, and enabled unlawful actions and disregard of international rules. Other politicians flood the public square with falsehoods. Weissmann argues this stems from a flaw in America’s legal system -- one that can be fixed. Liar’s Kingdom is a playbook for stopping politicians like Trump and saving our democracy.
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The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel
by Douglas Brunt
From the author of The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel comes the hidden history of Emanuel Nobel, likely the wealthiest man in early twentieth-century Russia, whose legacy was erased after the Russian Revolution. He and his family built a petroleum behemoth surpassing Standard Oil. Though Alfred created the Nobel Prize, the more successful Nobels in Russia were forgotten. Working in the same oil fields was a young man who embraced Karl Marx and became Joseph Stalin. In Stalin’s crosshairs was Emanuel Nobel, who planned a life-or-death escape as the world turned upside down and his empire faced an uncertain fate.
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Lost Worlds
by Patrick Wyman
Lost Worlds convinces us of the value of slowing down to recognize the diversity of the human past, while pressing against any direction or pattern behind its complexity. Patrick Wyman offers a new look at humanity’s deep past, focusing on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age, when social hierarchies, cities, and the written word emerged. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world was transformed. Wyman argues this was not inevitable, but the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today. Combining science with storytelling, Lost Worlds explores how societies rose, adapted, and fell across thousands of years.
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Love, Me
by Tiffany D. Cross
Love, Me is a timely affirmation for Black women in a world that has undervalued them for centuries -- both political and personal. Black women are fighting for the respect we are due as our history is whitewashed and our contribution downplayed. Cross brings to life the souls of Black women, showing how we preserve ourselves, our culture, and civilization, and inviting us to go from hopeless to hopeful, secure the love we deserve, and repair our personhood and society. With a blend of humor, pathos, and hard-hitting cultural analysis, Cross tackles issues like race, relationships, sex, family, economics, health, labor, and love. By bringing Black women to the forefront, she honors not just her story, but our story.
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Migrant Heart
by Reyna Grande
An ambitious memoir in essays by Reyna Grande that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the journey of healing after survival. Grande turns her gaze inward to explore the scars left by migration and the work of stitching herself back together, living between two nations, languages, and identities. From violence in Iguala, Mexico, to a family vacation in Europe, she uncovers truths about survival. Migrant Heart is a powerful testament to Grande as a storyteller and cultural witness, expanding our understanding of life across borders and the power of finding one’s voice.
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Mother Tongue
by Sara Novic
The author of True Biz retraces her path out of the hearing world and into the deaf community in this emotionally rich memoir. Sara Novic’s early years were steeped in music and a desire to fit in, but after failing a hearing test, she hid her deafness until seeking out the deaf community and American Sign Language. Now a mother of two sons -- one hearing, one deaf -- she reflects on raising children within the deaf world while cultivating a life between two worlds. Interwoven with her story is a portrait of America, the deaf and disabled communities’ survival, and the need to recognize difference as a source of opportunity to build something new.
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Never Settle
by Attia Qureshi
The definitive guide to transforming everyday interactions into wins from negotiation experts. Our lives are full of constant negotiation, but too many of us struggle to get what we deserve. In Never Settle, Attia Qureshi and John Richardson move beyond basic theory to help you negotiate with confidence and achieve results. Drawing from experience and FBI negotiation tactics, they offer actionable strategies, exercises, and techniques to build trust, get more through a strategic no, and craft win-win outcomes -- equipping you to unlock the best deal without settling.
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The New Fatherhood
by Kevin Maguire
A manual that directly speaks to what it means to be a dad today, exploring modern interpretations and diverse perspectives of fatherhood. Fatherhood will change you, and while it can’t be under your control, it can be under your influence. The old rules -- protect, provide, preside -- are no longer fit, as today’s dads question their role at home, work, and in society. Drawing on The New Fatherhood newsletter, Kevin Maguire transforms interviews, creative minds, and research into an updated system for modern dads, with personal stories, perspectives, frameworks, habits, and techniques for even the most turbulent moments.
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Prayer in Motion
by Jennifer Tucker
Your body was marvelously made, created for purpose, and designed for good things. But it also holds trauma, carries stress, and knows limitations. In Prayer in Motion, Jennifer Tucker offers a way to pray with your whole self that connects you back to God and the body He gave you.
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Relegated
by Todd Smith
For fans of Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham, this travel memoir follows a middle-aged Midwesterner on a journey through the United Kingdom and English football. Todd Smith, who grew up around soccer but struggled in his professional life, often felt like he had been relegated.
In Relegated, he embarks on a trip of personal and professional discovery, visiting clubs from the best to the most forgotten, meeting supporters who show him a deeper love of the sport. He learns how communities rally around a club and how football can bond people together. A heartwarming account with pints, meat pies, and team scarves, it is the story of a man transforming himself while discovering the meaning of English football.
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Stephen Sondheim
by Daniel Okrent
A look at the inner world of Stephen Sondheim, a towering figure in American musical theater known for Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods. In this biography, Daniel Okrent follows his upbringing, his life-changing relationship with Oscar Hammerstein II, and his rise as a lyricist and composer. Drawing on correspondence, interviews, and Sondheim’s oral history, Okrent reveals his emotional life, self-confidence, and alcoholism, including a crucial aspect of a letter from his mother. He shows a life defined by two arcs: movement from alienation to connection, and from ambivalence to resolution.
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The Theater
by James Verini
In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, a terse and piercing look at a critical episode in the Ukraine War, from the award-winning author of They Will Have to Die Now. In March of 2022, three weeks after invading Ukraine, Russian forces bombed the shelter housed in the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater, in the city of Mariupol. The bombing stands, to this day, as the single worst act of mass civilian killing of the war. This book tells the story of the group of ordinary Ukrainians--workers, teachers, actors--who built that shelter, giving succor to thousands of their country people, before it was destroyed. Their audacity and humor and humanity in the midst of the siege of Mariupol, against impossible odds, will leave readers inspired, amused, and devastated.
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A Time to Gather
by Bruce Feiler
Bruce Feiler, a decoder of human connection, chronicles the rise of new rituals and a road map for restoring togetherness. Humans have long used ritual to connect, yet birth rituals, marriage, and burial have declined.
Feiler travels the world, attending rituals in sixteen countries -- from the Vatican to Bali to Ireland. He discovers a ritual renaissance, as people reimagine ways to gather around life, love, health, and family, forging communities. Drawing on stories and a database of ideas, A Time to Gather is a guide to modern ritual and an invitation to reconnect and rejoice together.
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Trudeau & Doonesbury
by Joshua Kendall
A biography of Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, based on archival sources and interviews. Drawing on interviews with Trudeau, friends, and journalists, Trudeau & Doonesbury serves as a history of the last 50 years of American life and Trudeau’s career. Joshua Kendall traces Trudeau’s life from boyhood to Yale, where he began the strip, and shows how Doonesbury, appearing nationwide since 1970, reflected events from Watergate to Vietnam. For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has driven the national conversation, capturing American politics and culture, making this a compelling biography of the individual and the times he chronicled.
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Ugly
by Stephanie Fairyington
A tender account of queer motherhood and life on the margins as a self-described ugly woman. Ugly is a word that can kill a woman’s self-esteem, as women are shaped by edicts about how they should look, behave, and think, and to defy the pretty imperative is to experience invisibility. Stephanie Fairyington, watching her daughter wrestle with beauty standards, unpacks her own ugly self-perception from childhood. Though her daughter fits beauty ideals, Fairyington confronts insecurities as a nonbiological mother and wounds from being treated differently.
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Walk
by Courtney Conley
A guide to walking to increase your health, longevity, and overall wellbeing. Walking is about more than counting steps -- it’s about enriching your life. Your walking speed, foot health, and cadence can predict health, reduce pain, and improve longevity, and the optimal steps are fewer than 10,000. Dr. Courtney Conley and Dr. Milica McDowell show that walking is as important as sleep and breathing -- a vital sign -- and restore it as a key pillar of health. With research, self-assessments, tips, and programs, Walk is a guide to optimizing wellness.
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We Are the Answer
by Timothy J. Heaphy
An essential guidebook from Tim Heaphy, lead investigator into Charlottesville and January 6, offering ideas for preserving democracy and countering political violence. He outlines the action we can take to combat tensions, lawlessness, and dysfunction in America, identifying structural barriers in a broken political system.
Heaphy argues we can’t rely on officials or outside sources to mend what’s broken -- there is no cavalry coming; we are the cavalry. He urges ways to promote community over division and provides a hopeful guide for how we can heal our communities.
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What's Going Right
by Paul Conti
A mental health guide from Dr. Paul Conti, offering a approach to optimizing mental health and a joyful life. With more adults living with mental illness, Conti asks what’s going right, pointing to our often overlooked generative drive -- the factor that helps us solve problems, help others, and feel connected. With a straightforward method used on patients and clients, including the Function of Self, self-inquiry, curiosity, and rewiring life narratives, What’s Going Right offers a way toward happiness and an onramp from what keeps us stuck.
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