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Nonfiction Views: This week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-02
Good evening, booklovers. Another busy week here, and so it’s straight to the new books:
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker. The Covid-19 pandemic was the most devastating natural event of the last century, killing more than 7 million people around the globe, straining the fabric of societies internationally, and shaking the foundations of the global economy. And yet, as horrifying as the experience was, Covid-19 was not actually “the Big One” — the dreaded potential pandemic that haunts the nightmares of epidemiologists and public health officials everywhere, and which will alter life across the world on every meaningful level unless we are ready to deal with it. Indeed, even as we learn to live with Covid-19 and continue to recover from its worst effects, the next pandemic is already lurking around the corner—and it may very well be worse. “A clear-eyed examination of pandemic fault lines and what must be done to fix them….Osterholm [and] Olshaker weave a tale that at time borders on horror, interspersing the gripping story of the fictional virus with historical accounts of global pandemics and the experience of preparation and mitigation. But the story never veers too far into darkness without returning practical advice.”— Kirkus (starred review)
Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet, by Stuart Gillespie. Food is life but our food system is killing us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose—to mass-produce cheap calories to prevent famine—it’s now generating obesity, ill-health and premature death. We need to transform it, into one that is capable of nourishing all eight billion of us and the planet we live on. In Food Fight, Stuart Gillespie reveals how the food system we once relied upon for global nutrition has warped into the very thing making us sick. From its origins in colonial plunder, through the last few decades of neoliberalism, the system now lies in the tight grip of a handful of powerful transnationals whose playbook is geared to profit at any cost. Both unflinching exposé and revolutionary call to arms, Food Fight shines a light inside the black box of politics and power and, crucially, maps a way towards a new system that gives us hope for a future of global health and justice. "From his years of experience working in international nutrition, Gillespie has on-the-ground knowledge of why and how global food systems lead to widespread hunger, obesity and environmental damage, and what needs to be done to make those systems healthier for all. He makes it clear that this food fight is crucial to take on."
— Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics
The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a Delicious Food Future for All of Us, by Adam Alexander. Meet these twenty-first century seed heroes, who are not only championing traditional varieties but also breeding delicious new ones that will help create a sustainable future for our planet.
We don’t all need to become backyard breeders or even, like the author, accidental ones. We don’t even need to eschew, as growers, the modern hybrid cultivars our seed catalogues are stuffed with or, as consumers, boycott those same uninspiring specimens that populate our supermarket shelves. Adam just wants that choice to be better informed and infinitely more diverse and enjoyable.
This story is a celebration of the locally and sustainably grown produce, whether traditional or innovative, that is at the heart of all our food cultures and empowers our rural communities and farmers. Adam believes these new varieties of fruits, vegetables and even grains will not just offer us all nutritious and delicious food but also be part of the solution to combating climate change and returning fertility to our soils and biodiversity to our land. "Educational, inspiring and motivational, The Accidental Seed Heroes illustrates how, as individual gardeners, we have a role to play in fostering both local and global resilience in the food supply system."—Sue Kent, TV presenter; author of Garden Notes
Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays, by Eric Foner. This collection of Foner’s recent reviews and commentaries demonstrates the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery, through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our current politics. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with crystalline prose. Foner takes up towering figures from Washington to Lincoln, Douglass, and Rosa Parks, pivotal events such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the fragility of constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, due process, and birthright citizenship, whether in times of war or peace. He also explores recent controversies over how to commemorate, and how to teach, our history. “Eric Foner's new collection is as fierce, brilliant, and insightful as all of his work. Unsentimental and clear-eyed, these essays are a reminder that even in bleak times, thinking about history can give us hope for the future.” — Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City
Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, by Beverly Daniel Tatum. Higher education is under assault from all sides. Scandals, protests, and dramatic resignations dominate the news cycle, and the pressure has grown so severe that the average tenure of university presidents has fallen to less than six years. Even so, Peril and Promise insists, American universities provide the solutions to the ignorance and division that plague our society—but only if wise, courageous leaders step up.
Blending insights from social science with many years of experience as a college president at Spelman and Mount Holyoke Colleges, Beverly Daniel Tatum celebrates the power of leadership to make higher education a force for good. Alongside an unflinching look at the financial challenges, political attacks, and social problems that besiege today’s college campuses, she offers real-life leadership examples of institutions that have overcome the steepest odds and produced real transformation in ideas, student bodies, and society at large.
“With American higher education under assault, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum has written a timely and critically important book. Peril and Promise details the challenges facing American colleges and universities and, with clarity and wisdom, she offers a brilliant roadmap to secure the future of America’s crown jewel. A must read for current leaders of colleges/universities and for those who aspire to lead. And an extraordinary resource for anyone who cares about American higher education!”— Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again
To Be Young, Gifted and Black, by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason. When Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s eldest daughter, Isata, made her solo debut at the BBC Proms in 2023, she could not have been prouder. Watching years of hard work transform into a transcendent performance was profoundly moving, both as music-lover and parent.
All fractured when her younger daughter turned to her in tears a few days later, having read online abuse about her sister. Isata, it was declared, did not deserve to be there. How do you prepare your child for the fact that no matter their talent, technique or dedication, they will be told they do not belong?
Through conversations with her extraordinarily gifted family, Kanneh-Mason explores what it’s like to come of age in these turbulent times, when Black artistic self-expression is so often met with disparagement and abuse online – and offers a hopeful, powerful way through.
The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live, by Alan Lightman and Martin Rees. In an age of rapid scientific discovery and technological advancement, it’s understandable that many feel uneasy about the future. While we might have confidence in these new developments when we go to the hospital for a medical procedure, fly in an airplane, or take an elevator to the top floor of a building, the motivations and lives of scientists themselves feel shrouded from public view. There is a growing sense that scientists are not to be trusted—that they may be guided by political or financial interests, or beholden to governments, or state institutions.
This growing mistrust of scientists is an urgent problem. With the onset of climate change, the imminent threats of pandemic or nuclear war, and rapid acceleration in the fields of artificial intelligence and DNA sequencing, innovations in science have the potential to change the world. It’s crucial that we not only gain a better understanding of science as a field, but also reestablish trust with its practitioners.
The Shape of Wonder guides us through the fascinating lives and minds of scientists around the world and throughout time, from a young theoretical physicist who works as a research assistant professor at the University of Washington and rock climbs in their free time; to German physicist Werner Heisenberg in his early life, when he was a student of music and philosophy; to Govind Swarup, an Indian astronomer whose work on radio telescopes was profoundly important. We get an inside peek at what makes scientists tick—their daily lives, passions, and concerns about the societies they live in.
Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today. "Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother...Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President, by Eden Collinsworth. Born dirt-poor in an obscure Ohio settlement, Victoria Woodhull was the daughter of an illiterate mother entranced by the fad of Mesmerism—a therapeutic pseudoscience—and a swindler father whose cons exploited his two daughters. It was through her mother, though, that Woodhull familiarized herself with the supernatural realm, earning a degree of fame as a clairvoyant and her first taste of financial success. Woodhull’s life would continue to turn on its axis and then turn again.
Despite a deeply troubled first marriage at the age of fourteen, countless attempts by the press to discredit her, and a wrongful jail sentence, Woodhull thrived through sheer determination and the strength of her bond with her sister Tennie. She co-founded a successful stock brokerage on Wall Street, launched a newspaper, and became the first woman to run for president. Hers was a rags-to-riches story that saw her cross paths with Karl Marx, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass. In an era when women’s rights were circumscribed, and the idea of leaving a marriage was taboo, she broke the rules to carve out a path of her own. “Collinsworth deftly weaves in the political, economic, social, and moral ethos of the nineteenth century as she tells the fascinating story of a remarkable woman.” —Booklist starred review
Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World, by Toby Stuart. Why does an authentic Rembrandt fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that price? What makes a restaurant “hot,” a neighborhood “up-and-coming,” or a technology “the next big thing”? Why do people often choose the same seats in recurrent office meetings? Who is most likely to interrupt someone else mid-sentence? Why do big name lawyers earn so much? Why are health disparities so pronounced? And why, when someone gets a bit ahead in life, does the small advantage so often compound?
The answer to all these questions is social status—invisible hierarchies that influence every aspect of our lives, from our health to our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the tastes and preferences we form. Without it, we’d be lost and paralyzed when faced with even the simplest decisions. But it comes at a steep cost: status works as a powerful amplifier, turning small initial advantages into insurmountable leads. Inequality is baked into its core.
Through compelling examples from business, economics, literature, art, fashion, and beyond, Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit. "A fascinating exploration of status, and how small advantages end up compounding into vast inequalities. Anointed exposes the hidden hierarchies that govern everything from cultural fads to billion-dollar corporate mergers."—Jonah Berger, bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst
The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, by Christine Webb. Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But is this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence.
Harvard primatologist Christine Webb has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves. "A glorious upending of the pervasive cultural, psychological, and biological myth of human exceptionalism. Instead of a loss for the human species, Christine Webb’s beautiful book offers a gift: the re-enchantment of our connection with the earth and all of life. Here is a path to the reclamation of wonder, awe, and our deepest, most authentic intelligence."—Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted and Crow Planet
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