The invention of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology gave scientists, for the first time, a genuinely practical tool for editing the human germline — making heritable changes to human DNA that would be passed to future generations. Paul Knoepfler’s GMO Sapiens: The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies arrived at precisely the moment this possibility moved from…
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and published in English by New Directions in 2020, arrives like a force that does not ask permission before it enters. The novel opens with a body: the Witch, a mysterious figure in the rural Veracruz village of La Matosa, has been found face-down…
Heretics! The Wondrous Beginnings of Modern Philosophy by Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler is a compelling and beautifully illustrated graphic narrative that brings the revolutionary thinkers of the seventeenth century to vivid, irreverent life. About the Book Steven Nadler is one of the foremost historians of early modern philosophy, best known for his magisterial biography…
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team is one of the most illuminating works on Soviet political history in years — a study of the men who surrounded Stalin from the 1920s through his death in 1953, the inner circle that ran the Soviet state and survived, most of them, while millions did not. Fitzpatrick, one of…
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land arrived in 2018 from Chelsea Green Publishing and immediately occupied a category of its own. Leah Penniman, co-founder and co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, wrote a book that is simultaneously a technical farming manual and an act of…
The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon is an exhilarating, intellectually ambitious young adult novel that unfolds over a single day in New York City as two teenagers fall in love against the backdrop of an impending deportation — a book that asks the biggest questions about fate, choice, and what connects us…
Jennifer Teege did not know, until she was in her late thirties, that her grandfather was Amon Göth — the SS commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, the man depicted in Schindler’s List as a monster who shot prisoners from his villa balcony for sport. The discovery, made when she stumbled upon a library book…
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford is a fascinating journey through human genetics that upends myths about race, ancestry, and identity while celebrating the staggering complexity of our shared history. About the Book Adam Rutherford’s book begins with a deceptively simple premise: what can our DNA actually tell us about…
Summary Wil Haygood’s I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 arrives as both a centennial celebration and a serious cultural reckoning. Published in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, the book surveys the full arc of the Harlem Renaissance, from its earliest stirrings in the 1910s through its peak vitality in the 1920s and…
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier is a compact and transformative guide to becoming a better leader by learning to ask better questions — a book that challenges the assumption that good managers give answers, and argues convincingly that the seven right questions can change how you work, how you lead, and how you…
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