This pragmatic debut from Tipler, a college admissions consultant, details how high schoolers can stand out during the college admissions process with strong personal and supplemental essays. The bulk of the guidance is devoted to crafting the personal essay, which Tipler suggests should present a narrative that ties the application together and focus on events from one’s high school years (“Admissions officers want to know about who you are now”). Describing how to tackle the most common supplemental essay topics, Tipler contends that “Why Our School essays” should explain why specific programs and opportunities make the university a good fit. Elsewhere, Tipler breaks down the application review process, noting that an admissions officer will read through one’s materials and then present them to the rest of the committee before the group votes on whether to admit the student. Exercises for brainstorming personal essay topics will help students get their creative juices flowing (one suggests choosing five words to describe oneself and recalling stories that demonstrate those qualities), and guidance on whether to discuss one’s racial background or use ChatGPT gives this an edge over older guides. (Tipler contends that though ChatGPT can be useful for generating ideas, no text should ever be copied directly from the site.) High schoolers will find this a boon. Agent: Karen Murgolo, Aevitas Creative Management. (June)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Vondriska, whose X account @MenWriteWomen skewers sexist literature, provides an irreverent guide purporting to help women authors emulate the misogynistic literary stylings that propel male writers to the top of bestseller lists. The “basic bro code for writing women” includes such tenets as “women are breasts” and “thou must never portray a woman as having both brains and beauty.” A breakdown of female stock characters used to “advance the story of the male hero” explains that secretaries should be oblivious to their own sexiness and that nagging wives should drive their husbands to drink. Lampooning the excuses male authors use to dismiss critics, Vondriska recommends that readers accused of writing flat female characters blame “where you grew up,” “what books you read as a child,” or “the character. They’re meant to be an asshole!” The mordant commentary bites, but exercises interspersed throughout come across as filler, as when Vondriska provides a “manly Madlib” prompting readers to supply sexually charged adjectives, as well as blank pages for writing an objectifying description of a woman’s corpse in the style of a male mystery writer. Still, it’s a raucous send-up of the male gaze. Agent: Justin Brouckaert, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Fortune journalist Kahn expounds in his shrewd first book on how AI is likely to change art, education, and the workplace. AI can serve as an educational resource for disadvantaged students who might not otherwise have access to help outside the classroom, Kahn contends, describing how the online education platform Khan Academy built an AI tutor designed to emulate the Socratic method. Kahn is levelheaded in his assessment of AI’s abilities and shortcomings, suggesting that while the software might assist artists with generating ideas (“The British crime novelist Ajay Chowdhury uses ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner”), it’s designed to conform to examples it has previously encountered and thus can’t produce anything novel without extensive human input. Addressing AI’s limitations in the design and implementation process is critical, Kahn argues. For instance, he details how algorithms built for identifying crime hot spots reflected racial biases in the data the programs were trained on and asserts that such software “must be engineered to explicitly compensate for past racism by specifying equality as a goal alongside predictive accuracy.” Striking a balance between bullishness and caution, Kahn sets out a helpful roadmap for harnessing the promise of AI while navigating its perils. The result is one of the more convincing assessments of how AI will transform society. Agent: Todd Shuster, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Insecure actor Ellis recounts amusing anecdotes from his “behaviorally challenged” childhood in this briskly funny debut memoir-in-essays. After posting an ode to his mischievous imaginary friend, Mikey, on Instagram at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ellis received a flood of responses, confirming his suspicion that “the most creative people on the planet probably all had imaginary friends growing up.” Using Mikey’s unconditional encouragement as a jumping-off point, Ellis shares freewheeling stories from his early life in the 1980s and ’90s, which saw his family move regularly across the South and Southwest due to his father’s Air Force career. He covers family road trips, the time he threw his Magic Johnson Converse sneakers in a rain gutter to prove they could “float like Jordans,” and an afternoon when Mikey encouraged him to ask his third grade homeroom teacher to be his girlfriend. Throughout, Ellis underlines how Mikey’s confidence helped him navigate an “uncontrollable and often unsafe” world, lending depth to an otherwise riotously funny series of self-reflections. Even readers unfamiliar with Ellis’s acting work will be delighted. Agent: Albert Lee, UTA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Finley, a stand-up comedian and assistant professor of Africana Studies at Pomona College, debuts with a nuanced and creative analysis of how Black women use sass as a means of “deflection and humanization.” Comprising rhetorical (appraisal, questioning, and provoking) and gestural components (eye-rolling, teeth-sucking, and finger-snapping), sass, which the author characterizes as “a dialogic, intelligible pattern of address... to an assumed superior in institutional or interpersonal settings,” pushes back against power structures and the pressures Black women receive to “stay in one’s place.” Among other topics, Finley analyzes how raunchy humor “functions in the framework of sass” to interrogate white patriarchy, citing a group of protestors who sang Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”—a “raunchy... Black feminist credo”—outside the White House following Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential defeat and how butch female comics use sass to “deal with their butchness onstage” and compel audiences to “expand their ideas of what Black womanhood means.” Mining a rich trove of examples, including the character Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley, singer Gladys Bentley, and contemporary figures including Michelle Obama and Jada Pinkett Smith, as well as her own experiences as a Black comedian, Finley provides an enlightening and rigorous examination of sass as a means of asserting one’s power in an oppressive world. It’s an insightful study of the politics of humor. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Christians should center God in their marriages to forge stronger and holier bonds with their partners, according to this optimistic guide from Living the Sweet Wife blogger Damon (Together with Christ). She explains how pride and selfishness prevent partners from “seeking God’s goodness.” Instead, she encourages husbands and wives to “model sacrificial submission” to each other in the same way the church is said to submit to Christ. For the author, this means readily confessing one’s sins, asking for and offering forgiveness, and prioritizing the relationship over one’s individual comfort. While Damon provides reflection questions and sample prayers, much of her advice is easier said than done—readers may struggle, for instance, to understand what it looks like to forgo the “desire to put ourselves first and control outcomes” in favor of “the desire to make God great in our lives.” Still, the central notion of a marriage rooted in sacrifice is lucidly constructed, and Damon’s lighthearted candor about how her own relationship has sometimes fallen short (“Is it possible to fold laundry in a threatening way? If so, I’m pretty sure I’ve done it”) will endear her to readers. Christians looking to build more durable, faithful marriages will find inspiration here. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pardoe (IQ Unknown), chair of the Deep Tech Innovation Centre at the University of Warwick, delivers a scattered exploration of AI’s role in the workplace. The technology will likely transform nearly every industry, he contends, noting that it’s already being used to detect fraud in the finance sector and to make personalized recommendations in online retail. Pardoe ostensibly aims his guidance at young people considering a career in AI, for whom he describes how to position oneself for various roles (“To be a successful data scientist, it is important to have a strong foundation in mathematics, statistics, and computer science”). However, his rundown of how to incorporate AI into business operations appears geared toward executives and managers, recommending that they “adopt a portfolio approach” to introducing the technology by pursuing projects in multiple departments simultaneously to increase the likelihood one will pan out. Additionally, Pardoe’s overview of how AI works will be familiar to anyone with a basic understanding of the technology. This struggles to find a new angle on a much discussed topic. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this confused debut collection, Yong, a former beauty editor at Allure magazine, sends mixed messages about the societal premium placed on good looks. A sharp critic of beauty culture, Yong laments in “No Fun in the Fun House” how Dove’s ostensibly progressive ads suggesting “you’re beautiful as you are” reinforce the notion that one’s appearance is “the central defining characteristic of our identity.” However, Yong espouses that same outlook later in the essay, writing that “beauty is... how I play with identity, how I visually communicate who I am.” This contradiction is indicative of Yong’s unsuccessful efforts to redeem the social obsession with beauty while recognizing its harms. In “No Gore, No Gorgeous,” she recounts the painful procedures she’s undertaken to change her looks (including a wince-inducing description of a botched bikini wax), but appears to regard the discomfort they caused as the price one pays for glamour. Attempting to reconcile such incongruities, Yong asserts that “a pleasant experience with beauty is possible when you engage with it on your own terms,” but this pat explanation fails to acknowledge the ways in which notions of what constitutes beauty are reliant on social and aesthetic values that individuals have little power to change. Candid but conflicted, this will leave readers scratching their heads. Agent: Kate Childs, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist Tóibín (Long Island) serves up a loving tribute to Baldwin in this incisive critical study. Placing Baldwin in conversation with other authors, Tóibín compares Baldwin’s and James Joyce’s first novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, respectively), arguing that in both the authors present “versions of themselves as young men dealing with family” and their ambivalent relationships with religion. Baldwin “had it in for easy and fixed categories,” Tóibín contends, tracing how characters in Another Country chafe against the constraints of racial and masculine norms. Tóibín suggests that the novel’s imagining of a hypothetical place “where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color nor of male or female” constitutes Baldwin’s idea of liberation. Elsewhere, Tóibín likens the muted romance between the gay émigré protagonists of Giovanni’s Room to his own flings with men while living in Barcelona in the 1970s, suggesting that both attest to how a lack of spaces accepting of gay people can constrain the flourishing of love. These astute essays are doubly rewarding, shedding light on Baldwin’s profound visions of freedom while offering insight into how Tóibín reads and thinks about fiction. The result is a testament to the talents of both writers. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink

This sweeping account from Pulitzer winner Taylor (American Republics) examines the Civil War in a wider North American context. America’s conflict forms the backbone of Taylor’s narrative—he moves through the war’s epochal events with striking conciseness—while his explorations of developments in Canada and Mexico reveal how the fates of all three nations were intertwined. After Mexico’s defeat in the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War, the country was “bitterly divided” between conservative and liberal factions and defenseless against regular incursions by American raiders. Meanwhile, Canadian leaders worked to bridge divisions between Francophone and Anglophone states in hopes of forming a confederation—eventually established in 1867—that would be “better prepared to resist American invasion,” a perceived likelihood at the time. Strife on the continent heightened further with the French invasion of Mexico in 1862 and the 1864 elections, which were riven with tension in all three countries, especially in Mexico, where the French held votes structured to prove that Mexicans welcomed French rule. Taylor trenchantly observes that the situation in Mexico further spurred America’s Unionists, who feared similar European incursion into their own divided country. He also provides fresh analysis of Mexican and Canadian leaders Benito Juárez and John A. Macdonald, liberals whom he credits with holding their countries together in the face of out of control conservative revanchism. This penetrating study is a must for Civil War history buffs. (May)

Reviewed on 05/24/2024 | Details & Permalink