Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

LEARNER de Trevor Ragan

You only need one skill to survive a rapidly changing world—the ability to learn new ones.

LEARNER:
How To Get Better at Getting Better
by Trevor Ragan
with Samantha Rose
W.W. Norton, Fall 2027
(via David Black Literary)

Trevor Ragan, Founder of The Learner Lab, has spent years extensively engaging with experts on a multitude of topics. Through his natural curiosity, he’s uncovered how we learn, what gets in our way, and how we can get better at it. The result? Three key takeaways.

— Learning itself is a skill—which means we can get better at it.
— Getting better at learning will benefit anyone in any environment.
— Learning is the answer to mostly everything.

Having hosted over a thousand workshops, from Fortune-500 companies to universities to prisons, his extensive research has turned complex conversations with psychologists and neuroscientists into simple, actionable steps. The tactics he teaches are broadly applicable.

Through LEARNER, Ragan shares his message with the wider world for the first time. Accessible in tone, vivid in anecdote, and exhilarating in its wisdom, LEARNER fits perfectly into an immensely popular space in the book market. Learner speaks to readers hungry to improve themselves with generous energy and a holistic approach to the art of learning.

Trevor Ragan is the founder of The Learner Lab—an educational website designed to unpack and share the science of learning and development. He spends his time with thought leaders and researchers from the worlds of psychology and developmental science, consumes their research, connects the dots, and shares it with anyone that will listen. He’s worked with professional, college, and olympic sports teams, Fortune 50 companies, prisons, and in hundreds of schools across the country. These workshops are designed to help people understand and apply important principles of development, in order to become better, more resilient learners.

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY d’Eric Himmel

Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.

THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY:
Artists & Naturalists, 1700–1900
by Eric Himmel
Abrams, April 2026

With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that’s not in the art history books, and a story about science that’s missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redouté, Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.

An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.

Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature’s great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word “biodiversity” existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin’s lyrical evocation of nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.”

The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.

This art first appeared in vividly illustrated books that, in a world without photography or film, offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to the extraordinary men and women who created these books. They focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in tropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, and dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.

After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet, as the natural history books in the world’s great libraries were digitized and made available to all.

Chronicling the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world, The Art of Biodiversity is a must-have for historians of science, collectors of botanical and zoological art, and anyone captivated by the enduring beauty of the living world.

“Dazzling . . . A natural history page-turner.”―KIRKUS

“The art and design of natural science is brought to the forefront in Eric Himmel’s elegantly written, illustrated, and designed The Art of Biodiversity.”―PRINT

“To turn each page is to be transported. Eric Himmel does something strange and wonderful, alchemizing image and insight into a supremely vivid guided tour of the art of nature, and the nature of art. A book as beautiful as it is fascinating.”―JASON ROBERTS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World

Over a 40-year publishing career at Abrams, Eric Himmel acquired and edited hundreds of books in the arts and sciences. He was a coauthor of The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2017). The son of photographers Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, Eric is an author and sculptor living in New York City.

WE WILL NEVER DIE de Tom Reiss

The epic, untold story of how some of the biggest names on Broadway and in Hollywood fought fascism, opened America’s eyes to the Holocaust, and forced the government to take action—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Black Count.

WE WILL NEVER DIE:
How a Defiant Band of Writers, Filmmakers, Musicians, and Movie Stars Inspired the Greatest Rescue Effort of World War II
by Tom Reiss
Crown, April 2027

In September 1941, a screenwriter sat in the bar of the “21” Club as two men with foreign accents told him a story full of twists and turns that took several rounds to grasp: secret rendezvous, encounters with the Gestapo, and midnight journeys down the Danube ferrying Jews out of Nazi territory. The men weren’t selling him material for a screenplay. They wanted him to help them save Europe’s Jews from total annihilation.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Reiss brings to life the relentless quest of Ben Hecht, the top screenwriter of Golden Age Hollywood, to shine a spotlight into the darkness. Reiss follows Hecht’s journey from the studio backlots of Los Angeles to the theaters and nightclubs of Manhattan, rallying to his cause, among others, the Marx Brothers, Kurt Weill, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the stars of Casablanca. They toured Hecht’s pageant We Will Never Die across the country in 1943, awakening Americans to the ongoing tragedy, and exposed a shadowy government conspiracy to block Holocaust rescue, forcing President Roosevelt to make a momentous decision.

Sweeping in historical scope, full of heart, passion, and boundless determination, We Will Never Die captures a nation at a crossroads—as art, fame, and political power collided in the face of unthinkable catastrophe. When America’s dream factory confronted the world’s darkest nightmare, one man harnessed the power of creative imagination to defy brutality and indifference.

Tom Reiss is the PEN Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Black Count and The Orientalist, both New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into more than thirty languages. His work explores the hidden intersections of politics, identity, and storytelling across cultures and centuries. Reiss’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS de Jori Lewis

From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS:
On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime
by Jori Lewis
The New Press, November 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of plants and animals, we may more deeply understand how we create home.

For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize), Lewis splits her time between Chicago, Illinois, and Senegal.

FEMINISM VS. FASCISM de Mona Eltahawy

In the spirit of On Tyranny, a ten-point plan for how feminist principles can be harnessed to combat totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism.

FEMINISM VS. FASCISM:
Ten Tactics to Topple Tyrants
by Mona Eltahawy
Mariner/HarperCollins US, February 2027

Far-right authoritarians have been rising to power around the world. Each election won and each rung of power snatched from the people is a sobering reminder of what’s at stake when dangerous ambition and aspirational tyranny get real.

Solutions that stick have been fleeting, despite the growing outrage and protests.

Feminist author, activist, and noted firebrand Mona Eltahawy makes a strident case for a new approach. She argues ten feminist practices as an unstoppable force against fascism because, where fascism benefits and empowers the few, feminism frees everybody. Feminist-inspired principles like “Be savage and dangerous » and “Target all tyrants,” in fact, have constantly nudged us towards a freer world. Now laying out these principles as an actionable ten-point plan, Eltahawy empowers a new generation of citizens and reignites action in those whose fury has felt aimless.

Pocket-sized and ready to return to again and again, FEMINISM VS. FASCISM offers a new way to fight.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls took her disruption worldwide. Eltahawy’s essays and op-eds have been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), and The New York Times, and she has appeared as a guest commentator on the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al Jazeera, NPR and dozens of other television and radio networks. She writes the newsletter FEMINIST GIANT, which has more than 23,000 subscribers in 172 countries.