Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

A KITCHEN IN ITALY de Mimi Thorisson

With recipes for antipasti, primi, secondi, and dulci, A KITCHEN IN ITALY brings Mimi’s Italian secrets to your dinner table.

A KITCHEN IN ITALY:
A Year of Family Meals and Celebrations from Our Home
by Mimi Thorisson
Clarkson Potter, October 2025

Mimi Thorisson first captivated readers with her family’s idyllic lifestyle in the French countryside before turning to the rich culinary treasures of Italian regional cuisine in Old World Italian. Now that she has found a true home in Italy, Mimi is back with a new Italian cookbook sharing how she cooks and eats in her Italian home.

Allow Mimi’s cooking to transport you to Italy, with 100 simple yet elegant dishes that celebrate the seasons. The recipes collected here are Mimi’s favorites, the staple dishes that she enjoys at home with her family and friends. In the spring, she loves Risi e Bisi, a brothy, risotto-like Venetian dish served in every home and restaurant when peas are in season. At the end of a long week, she turns to Involtini de Pollo, a comforting stuffed chicken served with a parmesan cream sauce. And there’s no better way to use up abundant summer zucchini than in Spaghetti alla Nerano, a dish that encapsulates the beautiful simplicity of Italian cooking.

Mimi Thorisson is a French cook and writer living with her family between Médoc, France and Turin, Italy. She is the author of A Kitchen in France, French Country Cooking, and Old World Italian, and she runs the award-winning food blog Manger, which documents her cooking adventures in Médoc and around Italy.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.

MOTHER MEDIA de Hannah Zeavin

An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

MOTHER MEDIA:
Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century
by Hannah Zeavin
MIT Press, April 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, MOTHER MEDIA tells the story of how our contemporary understanding of what a mother is came to be and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth century pediatric, psychological, educational, industrial, and economic norms around mediated mothering and technologized parenting. The book charts the crisis of the family across the twentieth century and the many ingenious attempts to remediate nursemaid and mother via speculative technologies and screen media.

Growing out of her previous award-winning book The Distance Cure, which considered technologized care, the book lays bare the contradictions of techno-parenting and how it relates to conceptions of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. The author offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (for example, Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (for example, the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined. Ultimately, Zeavin grapples with a simple contradiction: technology is seen and judged as harmful in domestic and educational spaces, even as it is a saving grace in the unending labor of raising a family.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Bookforum, Dissent, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and beyond. Zeavin was a recipient of a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for an essay about the children of psychoanalysis, “Composite Case.” She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).

HOW TO BE GOOD AT LIFE de Ben Meer

From the creator of “System Sunday,” one of the fastest-growing personal development newsletters, HOW TO BE GOOD AT LIFE is an approach to living intentionally using systems thinking.

HOW TO BE GOOD AT LIFE
by Ben Meer
Avery, Spring 2027
(via Writers House)

Author Ben Meer discovered the power of systems when he was struggling to find direction and purpose after business school. He’d succeeded academically but in areas like relationships and fitness, he was a mess. He did take something valuable away from a one-credit course in Operations, though; he learned how a single root cause could generate an array of problems across seemingly unrelated areas. He learned how fixing the right thing could fix nearly anything, and this insight changed his life.

Named “The Systems Guy” by Forbes, Meer writes at the intersection of systems, technology, and conscious living. He has 1.82M+ social media followers and has been recognized as the #4 ranked creator on LinkedIn worldwide and #1 for personal growth.

Ben Meer writes about technology, systems thinking, and conscious living. Tired of non-actionable life advice, Ben started System Sunday to teach people how to use tech-enabled and data-driven systems to accelerate personal growth.

RADICAL DOUBT de Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar

The neuroscience-backed guide to making tough decisions in a complex world.

RADICAL DOUBT:
The Secrets to Choosing Wisely
by Dr. Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar
Diversion Books, Summer 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Everywhere from school to work we’re focused on “getting the right answer”. But as we take on more complex tasks in leadership and management, we’re faced with ever more uncertainty about what the “right answer” looks like. There are competing priorities, ethics, and values, and conflicting interpretations. Applying the simple frameworks most decision-making books tout just doesn’t work.

Dr. Parmar has spent his entire career researching these types of problems – the ones that cause dread, anxiety, and panic – bringing together a mix of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and moral philosophy (ethics), to turn doubt from an Achilles Heel into a superpower. It’s what separates the captain from the four-star general, the middle manager from the CEO, and by the end of the book you’ll have the blueprint to go from cold sweats to confidence in the face of doubt.

Dr. Parmar is the Shannon G. Smith Bicentennial Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He was named one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 in the world and has won several awards for his teaching and research. Parmar’s scholarship has been published in leading journals such as Organization Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Studies, Business & Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics. He has co-authored two academic books on stakeholder theory. He is a fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics and the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.