California—land of golden dreams, proud melting pot, home to both the poor and the unimaginably rich—is an amalgam. Her complexities are captured in the essays of Freeman’s: California, which reaches across time and cultures to... Read More

A neighborhood in the East Bronx is the subject of "Parkchester", a fascinating study by former Parkchesterite Jeffrey S. Gurock. Built by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1940, Parkchester at first served as an idyllic alternative... Read More

In Mark Barr’s engrossing historical novel "Watershed", personal and social changes lead to tension in a rural Tennessee town where a post-Depression federal dam project brings work, strangers, and electricity to the region. Claire is... Read More

Calvin Bledsoe is middle-aged, glum, and in dire need of a shakeup. Saddled with a strict Calvinist upbringing thanks to his celebrity mother, he’s freshly divorced and stuck writing a blog for a pellet stove company in small-town... Read More

Competent strategic thinkers are exceptions to the rule and rare in the business world, writes executive coach Greg Githens. Aiming to change that, his new, comprehensive playbook "How to Think Strategically" is excellent and insightful,... Read More

Containing summer friendships, whispered secrets, and a dark, hidden truth, Felicity McLean’s "The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone" is poignant and jarring. Cordelia, Hannah, and Ruth Van Apfel’s disappearances sear through the palpable... Read More

As satisfying as it is suspenseful, Natalie Murray’s "Emmie and the Tudor King" presents itself as a young adult romance and tiptoes into mystery and action genres, too. When eighteen-year-old Emmeline Grace is assigned to write a... Read More

Daniel Pauly’s "Vanishing Fish" is an important collection of essays that evaluates the far-reaching effects of global fisheries. Assembling into one volume the numerous pieces he wrote over a twenty-plus year period, Pauly—a... Read More