Laws regarding classroom science curricula are examined in Alexander and Harold Gouzoules’s deft history book The Hundred Years’ Trial. The Gouzouleses’ scientific and legal expertise informs this fascinating history, which moves... Read More

Kathleen B. Casey’s cultural survey "The Things She Carried" examines purses, pocketbooks, and handbags not through a fashion lens, but as “fraught but vital object[s]” with fascinating histories. The book’s evocative case... Read More

"High Desert Blood" covers the 1980 New Mexico prison riot and two brothers with the unfortunate luck of getting caught in the middle. After a failed arson attempt in service of his father’s insurance fraud scheme, Gary Williams... Read More

Poetry must come from somewhere that is more than the sum of family, race, education, history, culture, gender, pain, and passion. Every poet, of course, draws on as much, but why is it that so many Black women poets’ where-from place... Read More

No American education should be considered complete without a visceral understanding of plantation life for teenage Black girls in the slavery centuries before the Civil War, when molestation and sexual trauma were so routine that... Read More

A riveting story set in the hemispheric crossroads between Panama and Colombia, journalist Belén Fernández’s "The Darién Gap" reports on the inhospitable journey migrants and refuge seekers endure for a chance at a better life in... Read More

In "Law and Order Leviathan", David Garland advocates for a holistic approach to understanding and fixing American penal policy. Garland begins his measured and stinging analysis of American penal policy with an overview of the police... Read More

The place bears play in American culture is given a scholarly growl in Daniel Horowitz’s "Bear With Me", which dissects the nation’s affection for, fear of, and ill-advised anthropomorphization of bears of all varieties. This is a... Read More