In this memoir that highlights the challenges and rewards of training at an older age, the author emphasizes throughout that perseverance and adaptability are essential to progress. Here, Weiss looks back on his eventful athletic journey: from tentative first races—including an early, stinging DNF (Did Not Finish) that fueled his later determination—to completing a half-marathon […]
Many kids (and adults) understandably love aquatic mammals. Delaunay presents them from the inside out, in well-organized chapters with short paragraphs covering sleep habits, habitats and migration, reproduction, and diet. Several sections are devoted to these creatures’ social structures and communication, both complex enough that scientists believe cetaceans have their own group cultures. A chapter […]
Assassin Erica Banks returns to New Orleans to execute a series of high-profile hits contracted by a Cuban drug ring. Banks is a highly experienced professional, and at first, the murders leave law enforcement baffled. Lawyer Harry Barnes, a fixer who doesn’t always stick to the right side of the law, gets involved when an […]
In her debut memoir, transgender influencer, actor, and author Rose memorializes events and details during a particularly difficult decade of discovery and desire. Writing with flair and panache, she effortlessly escorts readers across frenetic pages of Grindr app conversation extracts, text exchanges, thoughts about identity (“when does my gender stop being a “gotcha!!!”), and the […]
This literary pas de deux from the veteran author and Pulitzer winner Butler is ostensibly set in Paris in 2020. That’s where novelist Amanda Duval and literary scholar Howard Blevins had hoped to revisit the places they first met in 1968—before they married, divorced, and remarried back in the U.S. But with Covid forcing everyone […]
Referred to as “the mother” and “the son,” these two people—like characters in Family Meal (2023) and Memorial (2020)—are equipped with the psychological tools needed to repair a wounded relationship but are almost entirely uncertain how to employ them. Truculent and alcoholic, he’s an English tutor in Tokyo but lately he’s been “forgetting his words.” […]
Matthews revisits themes from his earlier biography, Bobby Kennedy: Raging Spirit (2017), condensing them into 10 brief “lessons” meant to show why RFK’s character and ideals remain relevant in a fractured America. The narrative, barely 90 pages, padded with generous white space and followed by a lengthy appendix of Kennedy’s speeches, reads like a quick-to-market […]
Ruby considers herself lucky to be a housemaid for Lumaria’s royal family. After the parents she doesn’t remember were killed in a short but deadly war with neighboring Castella, a kind stranger placed Ruby in the care of Mellie, who was the royal family’s cook. Ruby grew up in the castle, befriended handsome Rowan, one of […]
“Triangles are everything,” Parker writes in the introduction, “and everything is triangles.” The following 10 chapters bear titles like “Going the Distance,” “Getting Triggy With It,” and “Making Waves.” Within his exploratory and everyday applications of triangles, the author describes rounding corners on a racetrack (“the bike did lean just over 45° from vertical. Which […]
Happy families are truly not all alike: “every family is unique, particularly in the United States,” due to “varying family compositions and the ethnic mixture” of the population. Currie-McGhee uses this broad diversity to explain that “statistical averages” are not the same as being “typical.” She provides relevant quotations from and brief portraits of members […]