Edda L. Fields-Black’s Combee is the kind of history book that reshapes how you understand a figure you thought you already knew. Harriet Tubman occupies a fixed place in American memory: conductor of the Underground Railroad, liberator of enslaved people, icon of courage. But Fields-Black, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, pulls back the curtain…
David Szalay’s Flesh is the kind of novel that earns its accolades through restraint rather than spectacle. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, this sixth novel from the British-Canadian author tracks the life of Istvan, a Hungarian teenager who grows into a man of considerable wealth and power, yet never quite escapes the gravitational pull…
Floyd Cooper’s Juneteenth for Mazie is a warm and beautifully illustrated picture book that introduces young readers to one of American history’s most important — and until recently most underrecognized — holidays. Cooper, whose distinctive oil-erasure illustration technique has won him multiple Coretta Scott King honors, brings both visual richness and genuine emotional depth to…
Remarkable Minds: 17 More Women Who Changed Science and the World by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson is a compelling and inspiring collection of profiles that restores seventeen brilliant women scientists to their rightful place in the history of discovery. About the Book Stephanie Sammartino McPherson’s follow-up to her earlier collection of women in science profiles brings…
Adam Silvera’s debut novel More Happy Than Not announces a major new voice in Young Adult fiction — a book that takes on grief, identity, memory, and the particular anguish of being gay in a neighborhood where that is not safe, and does so with a structural audacity that distinguishes it from its more conventional…
Summary Yoon Ha Lee’s Dragon Pearl is a middle-grade space opera grounded in Korean mythology, published in 2019 as the launch title of Rick Riordan Presents, the Disney-Hyperion imprint designed to bring mythology-based adventure fiction from a range of cultural traditions to young readers. The book follows Min, a thirteen-year-old fox spirit living on a…
History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera is a striking and emotionally devastating young adult novel about grief, first love, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive loss. About the Book Adam Silvera’s second novel opens with a death: Griffin has just learned that his first love, Theo, has drowned in Santa…
Summary Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X is a verse novel set in Harlem, told in the voice of Xiomara Batista, a sixteen-year-old Dominican-American girl who is large, loud on the inside, and almost entirely silent on the outside. Xiomara lives in a household governed by her mother’s devout Catholicism and by the unspoken rule that…
Humility Is the New Smart by Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig is a compelling business book that argues the human qualities most threatened by artificial intelligence—curiosity, openness, and deep listening—are precisely the ones organizations need to cultivate. About the Book Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig begin from a premise that is both counterintuitive and…
Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams’s Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results is an ambitious synthesis — twenty-five years of research, practice, and refinement distilled into a comprehensive model of leadership development that manages to be both academically rigorous and practically applicable. This is a serious book for…
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