Black students and their white teacher brave persecution in Wilfred Lupano’s moving, enlightening graphic novel "Surrounded". In 1832, Prudence Crandall’s decision to admit Black girls to her Connecticut boarding school draws the ire... Read More

Nathalie Cooke’s culinary history text "Tastes and Traditions" explores menus as strategic documents—much more than simple bills of fare. Menus, it says, do not always present their wares in a straightforward way; some go off the... Read More

A decadent horror story (for the oyster) narrated with awe and gusto, Andreas Ammer’s "Portrait of an Oyster" is must for all who find their joy on the half shell. Once “a cheap form of nourishment” twice consumed to near... Read More

Julie Brill’s family memoir "Hidden in Plain Sight" is about her Holocaust-survivor father and her experiences learning about his life. Brill’s father was young when the Nazis attacked Belgrade. He survived the war on a farm outside... Read More

A forensic reconstruction of the life of North Korea’s founding dictator, Kim Il-sung, Fyodor Tertitskiy’s "Accidental Tyrant" covers the regime that has dominated North Korea for seventy-nine years. A man of many names, the... Read More

An enchanting photograph of an Indigenous girl centers Martha A. Sandweiss’s history book "The Girl in the Middle", a tale of westward expansion. In 1868, Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner arranged the peace commissioners of... Read More

The compelling biography of a woman who escaped a totalitarian government, "To the Midnight Sun" celebrates a grandmother’s legacy. Stephen Saletan’s raw family biography-cum-memoir "To the Midnight Sun" centers his grandmother, who... Read More

Viewing movements toward women’s equality through the lens of riding horses, Eliza McGraw’s "Astride" is a charming history book. At the turn of the twentieth century, just as horse-riding began to go out of fashion for society men,... Read More