The Maverick Recommendations
Winter Book Releases 2025-2026
Discover books that challenge the norm and spark new ideas this winter. These reads for the Maverick Reader Type spark bold and unconventional, yet brilliant, conversations.
february Books:
Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
by Helen Zoe Veit
An eye-opening investigation into why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto
"Enlightening ... a rigorous and persuasive call for change." ―Publishers Weekly, Starred
"Upends our assumptions about the foods children can and will eat with gusto."―Bettina Elias Siegel, author of Kid Food
Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren't children incapable of liking "adult foods," and don't parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?
Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play
by Keza MacDonald
An exuberant, behind-the-scenes look at the designers and the company that brought us Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and so much more
"Keza MacDonald pulls back the curtain on the Nintendo dream factory." --Walt Williams, author of Significant Zero
What magical mushroom could have turned an unassuming playing card company into one of the dominant cultural forces of the twenty-first century?
In Super Nintendo, lifelong gamer and a renowned video games journalist Keza MacDonald traces Nintendo back to its quirky beginnings in 1889, illuminating its singular ethos, its endlessly innovative leaders and developers, its massive cultural impact, and, most of all, the video games themselves, which have inspired joy and creativity in millions.
Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon
by Toni Morrison - Claudia Brodsky - Claudia Brodsky
Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation's collective unconscious.
In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America's most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country's canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racialidentity--these "Africanist" presences are "the shadow that makes light possible," as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors' own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.
Get Home Safe: A Guide to Self-Defense and Building Our Collective Power
by Rana Abdelhamid
Grounded in her experience as a blackbelt, self-defense instructor, and globally recognized organizer, Rana Abdelhamid offers a bold, urgent roadmap to a safer world.
Abdelhamid wants every woman and survivor of gender-based violence to be able to defend themselves, and every community to build collective safety. What if we didn't accept that it's unsafe to walk home alone as a fact of life, but instead went out and created safe spaces for ourselves?
In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America's Caregiving Crisis
by Laura Mauldin
An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting reliance on the unpaid caregiving labor of spouses and intimate partners.
When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner's leukemia returned--and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, Laura found herself quietly and devastatingly transformed from romantic partner to unpaid, full-time caregiver, fighting to keep the woman she loved alive in a system designed to let them both fall through the cracks.
The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
by Susan Wise Bauer
"Written in lively, informative prose...The Great Shadow offers wide-ranging evidence of alternative frameworks for disease." --Science
"Allows readers to practically experience firsthand how humans have adapted to and dealt with disease throughout history...necessary and timely...engaging and entertaining. Highly recommended." ―Library Journal, starred
"[A] splendid examination...Deeply insightful if unsettling." ―Kirkus
Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle--the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?
One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate
by Ej Dickson
For fans of the witty and evocative writing of Anne Helen Petersen and Amanda Montell, a sharply clever exploration of what it means to be a "bad mom" by delving into the world of momfluencers, stage moms, trad wives, and more.
We all have an idea what it means to be a good mom: little screen time, kids hitting their milestones, endless patience and understanding, and self-sacrifice on behalf of one's children. But what does it mean to be a "bad mom" in modern society? Women as wide-ranging as Meghan Markle, Hannah Neelman (of Ballerina Farm), and anyone giving birth over forty, have been labeled "bad moms." In a world where the rules are constantly changing, it feels like women simply cannot win.
With this in mind, in her first book, Ej Dickson takes a sharp, provocative look at one of society's most polarizing labels: the "bad mom." What makes a mother "bad," and why? Through the lens of pop culture and American history, Ej Dickson explores how this trope has evolved--from Victorian "angels in the house" to the infamous Mommie Dearest, from Instagram influencers like EmRata and Mormon momfluencers to fictional icons like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Each chapter dives into a different archetype of so-called bad motherhood--like the Stage Mom, the Tiger Mom, the MILF, the MLM hun--challenging us to rethink our assumptions about femininity, parenting, and societal expectations. Drawing on insightful analysis and interviews, Dickson unpacks why our culture is obsessed with vilifying moms and how issues of race and class shape these narratives. Are bad moms truly "bad," or do they simply defy norms we don't fully understand--or fear?
january picks:
Life After Ambition: A Good Enough Memoir
by Amil Niazi
Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, Amil Niazi stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood, and life after ambition.
Building off her wildly popular viral essays "Losing My Ambition" and "The Mindfuck of Mid-Life," Amil Niazi explores what life looks like "post-ambition." With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how it intersects with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of Millennials. And--most importantly--now that she is done with ambition: what happens next?
On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us
by Partha Dasgupta
From the man that the New York Times calls "the most important person you've never heard of," renowned Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, comes a paradigm shifting treatise, asking a simple yet profound question--what if we put a value on nature, just as we put a value on everything else?
For just about everything of value in life, there is an economic model. If it matters to us, we have found a way to put a dollar amount on it--to quantify its importance in our lives and society. These models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. And yet for as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture; they fail to account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. Indeed, for centuries we have been using nature as if it were limitless, but more than ever, we are recognizing that our demands on the natural world are unsustainable.
99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them
by Ashely Alker
An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor.
Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death escapologist--or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work outwitting the end has uniquely prepared her to write this book.
A Black Queer History of the United States
by C Riley Snorton - Darius Bost
The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day
Gender and sexual expression have always been part of the Black freedom struggle
In this latest book in Beacon's award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States.
Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual scandal.
Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
by Jacob Soboroff
A revelatory and searingly immediate report from the frontlines of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the MS NOW reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.
On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. "Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating," his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind the home where he and his pregnant wife were living. "Really bad." An attached photo showed a huge black plume rising from behind the house, an umbrella of smoke towering over everything they owned. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief.
"I should go. I grew up in the Palisades."
Soon he was on the front line of the blaze--his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, met with displaced residents and workers, and pressed Governor Gavin Newsom in an interview on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad--the trauma of family separation at the border, the displacement of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of order in Haiti--could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground.
When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy
by Beronda L Montgomery
This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees.
The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.
Why We Drink Too Much: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture
by Knowles Charles Knowles Charles
We drink it, celebrate with it, and barely question it--but what is alcohol really doing to us?
Drinking alcohol can be fun; its chemical effects on our brain are fundamentally pleasurable, and it can have social benefits. Alcohol may also help us forget the worries in our lives and temporarily overcome psychological barriers to human interaction.
December Picks:
Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic
by Neil Shea
A sweeping exploration of the Arctic--and how it's being transformed by climate change--from National Geographic writer Neil Shea
As warming reshapes our planet, the Arctic--a region that once seemed unchangeable, beyond the reach of modern problems--is quickly coming undone. While the old cold world can still be glimpsed in the movements of caribou, the hidden lives of wolves, and the hunting skill of an Iñupiaq elder, look closer and you'll find a new Arctic appearing in its place.
In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace, and Revolution
by David S Brown
From acclaimed historian and author of the "marvelous" (The New York Times Book Review) The Last American Aristocrat comes a captivating new biography of Teddy Roosevelt, exploring the life of America's 26th president and his pivotal role in shaping the dawn of the American Century.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of America's most fascinating presidents--a complex man both publicly and privately. In this sweeping biography, historian David S. Brown takes us on an electrifying journey through Theodore Roosevelt's life--from his privileged New York upbringing to his transformative presidency that reshaped America's role on the global stage.
In the Arena vividly brings Roosevelt to life as a man of striking contradictions: a rugged outdoorsman with a love for books, a war hero who earned a Nobel Peace Prize, and a larger-than-life figure whose energy seemed boundless. Through compelling storytelling and meticulous research, Brown explores the pivotal moments that forged Roosevelt's indomitable spirit, from battling childhood asthma to witnessing the deaths of both his mother and his wife on the same day, to wrangling cattle in the West and preserving 150 million acres of national land.
The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age
by Alex Wellerstein
"I thought I knew the story but learned much that I didn't know. Outstanding!"-- Richard Rhodes
"This is historical research at its best." -- Dan Carlin
President Truman's choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if Truman's actual decision wasn't what everyone thinks it was?
The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or instead, use the atom bomb in the hope of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils.
But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened.
Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It
by Samuel Miller McDonald
For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future
Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet's 4.5-billion-year history.