Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in July. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s Overdrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate” by Michael Grunwald (Jul 1)
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems. In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done — and trying to do it. Continue reading “Nonfiction Roundup: July 2025”
Why I Picked It: “Pathemata” arrives as a companion to “Bluets” (2009), an astonishing work of prose poetry of which I’ve memorized whole passages (speaking more to the way Nelson writes — with stunning precision; straight to the heart — than to my memory). In “Bluets,” Nelson lifts up the color blue as a lens, muse, mirror. In a similar fashion, “Pathemata” makes chronic pain its precious subject.
Recommended For: Anyone who is familiar with pain, especially pain that doesn’t go away, that demands an answer. Anyone who still visits early memories of the COVID-19 pandemic with a feeling of grief and fascination.
Summer has officially begun! This month’s LibraryReads brings new books to check out. Some of the favorites books by library staff from around the country include a new Maggie Stiefvater, some romance, a thriller or two, and a new book by this year’s One Read runner-up, Nicki Erlick. Read on to learn about these and more!
“The Listeners” by Maggie Stiefvater
Joan is the manager of a resort hotel in West Virginia. Life is good until the U.S. is pulled into WWII and the hotel’s only guests are detained Axis diplomats. While Joan is very good at keeping secrets, this adds strain on the staff. Readers who adored Stiefvater’s YA books will welcome this historical fiction that reads like a classic spy thriller.
~Kimberly McGee, Lake Travis Community Library, Austin, TX Continue reading “June 2025 LibraryReads”
Posted on Friday, June 20, 2025 by The Biblio-Buckaroo
100 years ago, two of the top 10 most popular names in the United States were Doris and Donald. My grandmother was named Doris and the current U.S. president is a Donald. In 2024, Olivia and Liam topped the list. Times and tastes change but what does it matter? What is in a name?
Florence Knapp’s book, “The Names,” begins with a mother heading to the registry office to register her baby. She must decide upon his name. What follows is three different storylines based on what his life might have been depending on the name she chose. How will her son be treated if he is named Gordon or Julian or Bear? How will it affect his future or people’s perception of him? What burden would he carry if he is named after his abusive father, Gordon? Publishers Weekly says, “Readers won’t be able to stop talking about this intelligent exploration of a single choice’s long tail of repercussions.” Continue reading “What’s in a Name?”
Written by Kat Stone Underwood and Lauren Williams, One Read co-chairs.
This year’s One Read selection, Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” follows an extraordinary succession of inhabitants of a single house in the woods of New England, exploring the many ways we’re connected to our environment and to one another across time, language and space. This work of historical fiction narrowly beat out Nikki Erlick’s work of magical realism, “The Measure,” in a public vote.
The remaining eight titles considered by our reading panel examine survival of all kinds, from processing grief and escaping abuse to thriving in spite of oppression and being alien in a human world. Continue reading “Literary Links: One Read Finalists 2025”
Below I’m highlighting some nonfiction books coming out in June. All of the mentioned titles are available to put on hold in our catalog and will also be made available via the library’s Overdrive website on the day of publication in eBook and downloadable audiobook format (as available). For a more extensive list of new nonfiction books coming out this month, check our online catalog.
Top Picks
“The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp” by Lynne Olson (Jun 3)
Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, “Lilac Girls.” Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80 percent of its inmates were political prisoners, among them a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance. Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, these women joined forces to defy their German captors and keep one another alive. The sisterhood’s members, amid unimaginable terror and brutality, subverted Germany’s war effort by refusing to do assigned work. They risked death for any infraction, but that did not stop them from defying their SS tormentors at every turn — even staging a satirical musical revue about the horrors of the camp. After the war, when many in France wanted to focus only on the future, the women from Ravensbrück refused to allow their achievements, needs, and sacrifices to be erased. They banded together once more, first to support one another in healing their bodies and minds and then to continue their crusade for freedom and justice — an effort that would have repercussions for their country and the world into the 21st century. Continue reading “Nonfiction Roundup: June 2025”
Last month on Friday, April 18, author Min Jin Lee took the stage at Jesse Auditorium as keynote speaker of the 2025 Unbound Book Festival. Her speech, and the conversation that followed between Lee and fellow novelist Crystal Hana Kim, opened up depths of compassion and wisdom that served as welcome refuge for readers that evening. (A writeup from the Missourian has the highlights, and an interview from Vox magazine has the backstory.)
Min Jin Lee, joined by Crystal Hana Kim, answers an audience question after her keynote speech at the Unbound Book Festival on April 18, 2025.
I was excited to be in the audience, having read “Pachinko” years ago — an experience that left me with an aching heart and baffled curiosity about the kind of writer who could craft a story so enormous (in scope) that somehow registered on a molecular level (in feeling). And I get it now. It takes a writer like Min Jin Lee: rigorous, reverent; insatiable in research and courageous in art. Someone willing to walk the dark alleys of history in hopes that one will take her home, and patient enough to show us the way.
The month of May brings fresh flowers and fresh books! LibraryReads are the top 10 books selected by library staff across the country each month, and this time around we have horror, thrillers, romance and more. Read on to discover a new favorite!
“The Missing Half” by Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester
Nic has been messed up since her older sister went missing. Enter Jenna, who is searching for connections between her sister’s disappearance and Nic’s. They decide to work together to uncover what happened, but the deeper they get the harder it becomes. A twist ending completely turns the tables on this tightly written thriller.
~Kimberly McGee, Lake Travis Community Library, Austin, TX Continue reading “May 2025 LibraryReads”
