Publishing at a time of constitutional crisis at the federal level, Marcus Alexander Gadson’s book "Sedition" takes an in-depth look at how earlier violent crises played a key part in shaping and altering the constitutions of... Read More

A fascinating history of the nineteenth-century frenzy surrounding an exotic flower, "The Lost Orchid" is about Victorian imperialism, ecological devastation, and climate change. The “Queen of the Orchids” is rare and beautiful, with... Read More

Mary Noé’s keyhole true crime book The Man Who Shot J.P. Morgan is about false identities, radical politics, and the prewar tensions of the early twentieth-century US. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1906, Leone Krembs... Read More

Swift and concise, the biography "Out of the Tub" reintroduces William Howard Taft as a president worth celebrating. Carol A. Josel’s "Out of the Tub" is a compact yet revelatory biography of William Howard Taft, the only president of... Read More

"One of the Few" is a reflective and revealing pilot’s memoir about combat missions during the Vietnam War. Fighter pilot Robert Graham’s military memoir "One of the Few" recounts his service in Vietnam. After enlisting when he was... Read More

Black students and their white teacher brave persecution in Wilfred Lupano’s moving, enlightening graphic novel "Surrounded". In 1832, Prudence Crandall’s decision to admit Black girls to her Connecticut boarding school draws the ire... Read More

Nathalie Cooke’s culinary history text "Tastes and Traditions" explores menus as strategic documents—much more than simple bills of fare. Menus, it says, do not always present their wares in a straightforward way; some go off the... Read More

A decadent horror story (for the oyster) narrated with awe and gusto, Andreas Ammer’s "Portrait of an Oyster" is must for all who find their joy on the half shell. Once “a cheap form of nourishment” twice consumed to near... Read More