14 Buzzing New Nonfiction Books Spring 2024

“Burn Book is the breezy memoir of a highflying journalist who, at 61, is still on top of her game... Swisher intersperses brief recountings of well-trodden tech-industry lore with tidbits of gossip, behind-the-scenes backstories and zesty one-liners." – Will Oremus, The Washington Post

"McQuade is a calm, assured voice of reason in the current polarized, often ugly political environment... Her new book is an effort to spark a national conversation, civil in tone, that just might help in the fight to preserve America’s system of government. Its goal is not to browbeat those who may be inadvertently spreading disinformation but to explain how lies and falsehoods are threatening the nation’s most valued principles." – Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press

"Ford’s story, for many Americans, began and ended on the day of her testimony: the day when she shared details of an attack at a house party in 1982—an assault committed, she alleged, by Brett Kava­naugh, then a Supreme Court nominee. The memoir corrects the story by expanding it, placing the testimony in the broader context of Ford’s life and detailing what came later. And it rescues its author, in the process, from the confines of iconography." – Megan Garber, The Atlantic

"Persuasive... Slade’s book gives a granular sense of just how hard it is for business owners, particularly those in manufacturing, to do the right thing by their workers in America today. It also conveys just how meaningful and rewarding building a truly ethical business can be... potent and timely." – Nick Romeo, The Washington Post

"Lively... Nolan’s book joins the ranks of Steven Greenhouse’s 'Beaten Down, Worked Up' and Jane McAlevey’s 'A Collective Bargain' in making a rousing case for a robust labor movement. 'The Hammer' aims to show that unions are the best way to combat economic inequality, give disenfranchised people genuine political power and counter the allure of the far right among the working class." – Willa Glickman, The New York Times

"An important addition to the canon of nonfiction books about an institution encrusted in myths created by movies, television, novels, hostile intelligence services and, occasionally, the agency itself. This book, written with Wyndham Wood, is filled with adventures and operations whose details, somewhat to my astonishment, have escaped the gimlet eyes of the censors at the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board..." – Tim Weiner, The Washington Post

"Progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of creative destruction, but the process can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation... This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America. This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage..." – Paul Krugman, The New York Times

"The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature." – Tope Folarin, The New York Times

"Marie illuminates the history of MLMs and the way they operate today. She also details how some cultlike companies exploit legal loopholes and deploy extensive lobbying in order to remain in business. But the more perplexing mystery... has less to do with how the companies are allowed to continue recruiting than it does with how people at this late date are still willing to be recruited. It’s a question Marie wrestles with throughout the book." – Joe Berkowitz, Fast Company

"Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover may have dominated the news cycle for months, but as Zoe Schiffer’s new book Extremely Hardcore proves, there’s still a lot more to learn. Schiffer meticulously details the chaos before and after Musk’s much-covered coup, surfacing new details of the takeover... based on interviews with more than 60 employees and 'hundreds of pages of internal memos, whistleblower complaints, and court documents...'" – Emily Shugerman, The Daily Beast