Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts
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Sarah Thornton. Norton, $28.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-393-88102-8
In this fun and far-ranging account, sociologist Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World) explores the topic of women’s breasts from a female perspective—tying in multiple aesthetic, professional, and spiritual threads of analysis while eschewing the “male gaze.” Relating her own anecdotes on breastfeeding in the 1990s—when it still had a strongly taboo feeling, especially in public—and her postmastectomy mismatched synthetic breasts (nicknamed Bert and Ernie), she explains that losing her natural breasts for medical reasons inspired her to discover more about how other women (including trans women) relate to their tits. In sections covering the sex industry, breastfeeding, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and the body positivity movement, Thornton draws from informative, intimate conversations with experts. These include a wry, thoughtful plastic surgeon; sex workers who perform feats of asymmetric breast movement; cheerfully aging hippies who revel in the freedom of topless communal events; and Old Navy bra designers (the model who serves as the template for all the company’s bras has perfectly average breasts and a master’s degree in economics that helps her give market-oriented feedback). What emerges is an arresting look at how these subjects’ niche experiences have erased, in their own minds, any perception of breasts as merely “passive erotic playthings.” It’s an inviting and down-to-earth portrayal of women’s relationship with their bodies. (May)
Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
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Nellie Bowles. Thesis, $30 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-42014-0
The American progressive left has lost its mind, according to this thin debut. Bowles, staff writer for the Free Press, surveys the far left’s most criticized flash points and failures of the past four years, including violence in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, drug use in Los Angeles’s Echo Park Tent Community, and the rise and recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s anti–mass incarceration district attorney. Bowles concedes that “New Progressives” are well-meaning in their desire to battle bigotry and systemic violence, but criticizes their tactics, which she most successfully lampoons through personal recollections, like her mildly funny roast of an antiracist course she attended. Led by mostly white women instructors for mostly white women participants, the course serves as fodder for Bowles’s keen observation that critiques of “whiteness” have become just another outlet for white women’s “self-flagellation” over their bodies. Unfortunately, such perceptiveness is fleeting; by and large, the narrative has a feeling of incompleteness, as complicated subjects such as gender-affirming care for minors receive limited treatments so Bowles can quickly move on to easier, fringier targets, like nerdy Tumblr asexuals. Bowles glosses all these topics with the standard wokeness-gone-too-far veneer that originally made them go viral in right-wing media, while not adding much journalistic depth. The result is a toothless recap of anti-woke talking points. (May)
Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification
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Melissa Petro. Putnam, $29 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-71499-7
Journalist Petro debuts with an uneven exploration of shame that draws on her personal experience and interviews with women about their “self-conscious feelings and fears of inadequacy.” In 2010, Petro, who was then working as a teacher, came under fire from the New York City Department of Education for writing articles about having been a sex worker (she resigned in 2011). Using the “unrelenting humiliation” that followed as a springboard, she discusses how patriarchal society wields shame against girls and women. Among the topics covered are such conflicting messages as “be flirty, but not too flirty,” the stigmatization of sex work, and how the news media disempowers women with “deliberately irresponsible, undeniably wrong” coverage. As an example of the latter, she cites Amanda Knox, who was framed as a “character” in news stories about her 2007 murder trial and in movies “recreating how she might’ve committed the crime.” The second half of the book aims to teach women how to identify and overcome their shame. Unfortunately, Petro’s suggestions feel flimsy in the face of the structural issues she identifies, as when she encourages readers to “raise our own and each other’s critical awareness about the fact that” most household labor falls to women. While the interspersed bits of autobiography are vivid, the overall effect is unfocused. The result is an intriguing but undercooked analysis of a complex emotion. (Sept.)
This review has been updated for clarity.
The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life
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Nathalie A. Cabrol. Scribner, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-1-6680-4668-5
This stimulating survey from Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, details how she and other scientists search the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. Cabrol offers insight into what kinds of planets are most likely to harbor life by outlining theories for how life emerged on Earth, with some scientists claiming that the first organisms developed from alternating periods of dryness and wetness around volcanic hot springs, while others believe that reactions among RNA molecules in ice constitute a more likely genesis. Elsewhere, Cabrol notes that one study has detected phosphine, a compound “only produced by life on Earth,” in Venus’s atmosphere, and that geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus suggest the planet has a mantle composed of water. Cabrol has a talent for making technical research accessible for general readers and serves up a bounty of fascinating trivia, pointing out that “rogue planets” wander the universe after getting “ejected from their parent systems” and that the exoplanet 55 Cancri e has a 2,700ºC surface “where gases behave almost like liquids.” Amateur astronomers will be spellbound. Photos. (Aug.)
The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
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Thomas Fuller. Doubleday, $28 (256p) ISBN 978-0-385-54987-5
New York Times reporter Fuller debuts with a stirring account of how the football team from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside rocketed to a state championship in 2022. The start of the 2021 season looked inauspicious for the Riverside Cubs, who were out of shape from the pandemic and fresh off eight consecutive losing seasons. The Cubs surprised even themselves by winning their first game in a 68–0 blowout against a hearing school. The victory was no fluke; the Cubs went undefeated before losing the championship game 74–22 against Los Angeles’s Faith Baptist Contenders. The loss steeled the Cubs’ determination, and they racked up another undefeated run during their 2022 season, culminating in a rousing 80–26 championship victory against Faith Baptist that Fuller recounts in breathless detail. The heart of the uplifting story lies in Fuller’s moving portraits of the student athletes. For instance, he describes how a running back attended school while living out of his father’s car and how a wide receiver almost quit the game after playing on a Pop Warner team where he was berated by his coach for not following instructions he couldn’t hear. It adds up to an immensely satisfying underdog story. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence
Sara Imari Walker. Riverhead, $29 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-19189-7
What is life and how does one recognize it? asks Walker, an astrobiology professor at Arizona State University, in her bold debut. Defining life is a deceptively tricky endeavor, she argues, noting that the claim popular in scientific circles that “life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution” would mean that worker bees aren’t alive because they can’t reproduce. Instead of bickering over definitions, Walker argues it would be more productive to come up with a test for what constitutes life. To that end, she outlines the “assembly theory” she helped develop, which posits that measuring how many “steps” it took to construct an entity, from atoms on up, determines whether it is alive. (Things that require 15 or more steps should be considered living, according to Walker.) Walker contends that, among other applications, the theory provides a falsifiable means of determining whether an alien object is “alive,” even if that alien bears little resemblance to life on Earth. Walker’s philosophical perspective challenges prevailing understandings of basic scientific concepts (she contends that electrons don’t have mass, charge, and spin so much as those properties “describe how electrons interact with certain measurement devices”), and the bracingly original assembly theory leads to some staggering conclusions (“Being alive is not a binary, it is a spectrum”). This has the potential to be a game changer. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Aug.)
Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir
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Lola Milholland. Spiegel & Grau, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-954118-57-7
Milholland examines her love of communal living in this colorful debut. Milholland’s childhood home in Portland, Ore.—nicknamed “the Holman House” after the street where it sat—felt like it belonged not only to her and her unmarried parents, but to the exchange students, travelers, researchers, and poets the family hosted. At Amherst College, Milholland sought similar community, regularly cooking vegetarian meals for 20 people in her dorm’s communal kitchen, though she noticed early on that her peers “didn’t have a shared commitment to one another or the place.” While studying in Japan in her early 20s, Milholland traded a host family who let her live quietly on the top floor of their home for one that cooked and ate together, discussing their meals and teaching her Japanese in the process. After college, Milholland longed for the comforts of the Holman House, so she returned to Portland and lived there with her brother. Even as the Great Recession and Covid-19 tested the siblings’ commitment to group living, they hosted a Thai cook, a hippie couple, a mushroom forager, and others. Supplementing the narrative with recipes sourced from friends and former roommates, Milholland paints an inviting portrait of life lived in the company of others. Readers will walk away feeling nourished. (Aug.)
Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake
Komail Aijazuddin. Abrams, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4197-7384-6
In this sterling debut, painter Aijazuddin combines blazing wit with heartbreaking candor as he recounts his path toward self-acceptance as a gay Pakistani. Growing up in 1990s Lahore, Aijazuddin took an early shine to musicals, Disney princesses, and Barbie dolls, all while battling schoolyard insults about his weight and resulting “moon-tits.” As he realized he was gay, experimenting sexually with a friend and growing close with another closeted teen, Aijazuddin dreamed of escaping to comparatively liberal North America. Much of the memoir sees him ping-ponging between Pakistan, Canada, and the U.S.: he attended college in Montreal shortly after 9/11, where he faced xenophobia and struggled to come out of the closet, then returned to Pakistan, where his shame compounded. After obtaining a U.S. visa in 2015, he moved to New York City, where a series of relationships helped him learn to “stop loving in the shadows.” Aijazuddin’s prose is playful but sincere, marrying quips (“I was always a bird of paradise in a nest of sparrows”) with powerful insights (“Hyphens are the price of my admission through the gates of the American dream”). The result is a stirring account of coming-of-age and coming out. Agent: Sam Chidley, Karpfinger Agency. (Aug.)
Correction: A previous version of this review misspelled the author’s last name.
Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor
Anne Kim. New Press, $28.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-62097-781-1
Corporations are taking advantage of sclerotic government to skim money off anti-poverty initiatives, according to this stinging exposé. Lawyer and journalist Kim (Abandoned) probes a raft of ill-designed and poorly supervised federal and state programs that are run or mediated by private businesses that jack up prices and deliver substandard services. They include tax preparers that charge low-income taxpayers exorbitant fees to calculate the tax credits they are due, private prisons that charge inmates hundreds of dollars per day for their accommodations, slumlords who make a mint off of low-income housing vouchers, food service companies that sell junk food to kids in school cafeterias, and dental clinic franchises that squeeze profits out of Medicaid reimbursements by subjecting poor kids to painful and unnecessary treatments. (Kim spotlights one three-year-old who was subjected to 17 root canals and caps on his baby teeth.) Kim finds plenty of culprits to blame beyond the sleazy corporations: conservatives who insist that business does everything better than government, politicians on the right and the left who cut sweetheart deals with capitalist cronies, a Congress that lurches from one ungainly social-service scheme to the next. Kim’s writing is sharp-eyed and two-fisted—“The goal should be to expunge the parasitic industries dragging down U.S. antipoverty efforts”—as she untangles these knots of incompetence and fraud. It’s an electrifying unmasking of appalling violations of public trust. (May)
Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents
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Robert Schmuhl. Liveright, $32 (352p) ISBN 978-1-324-09342-8
Historian Schmuhl (The Glory and the Burden) takes a novel approach to exploring mid-20th-century diplomatic relations between America and Britain in this winning history of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s many visits with presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. These frequent, weeks-long stays are without historical parallel, especially the 113 total number of days Churchill and FDR spent under the same roof. Schmuhl tracks how Churchill’s relentless but charming advocacy for America to align itself with British interests forged intimate, if complicated, friendships between the leaders that brought the two nations together into a “special relationship” (a phrase coined by Churchill, which he was also relentless in promulgating). The character portraits Schmuhl draws are vivid and transfixing as the leaders by turns cozy up and butt heads, especially FDR and Churchill, whom Schmuhl describes as each “a star of brightness which needed its own unimpeded orbit.” Both were storytellers (Churchill’s daughter Mary observed that this quality made FDR a perplexing combo of fun and tedious: “I must confess he makes me laugh & he rather bores me”), and Schmuhl effectively shows how yarn-spinning between friends and political myth-making blurred together in their relationship (both men particularly enjoyed recounting an anecdote about how FDR burst in on Churchill in the bath to tell him he’d come up with a name for the “United Nations”). WWII history buffs will be delighted. (July)
