A sprawling saga that takes the reader from the origins of hip-hop in the South Bronx to evolution of one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) hip-hop groups of all-time, S.H. Fernando Jr. chronicles the rise and slow demise of The Wu-Tang Clan in well over 400 pages of…

A brilliant, dense, and hugely informative book on everything and anything I’ve ever wanted to know about economics in today’s complex world. I’ve only read a handful of economics books in the past — many of them written by “liberal” economists like Paul Krugman and the like — but this…

A brutal, devastating account of the lives of one extended family in Southwestern Pennsylvania who got caught up in the world of Fracking and suffered devastating personal consequences because of it. I lived in Phoenixville, Pa. (45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia) from 2009–2018 and was a Philadelphia Inquirer subscriber during…

A truly wonderful story about three of the most famous people many of us have never heard of: the mother’s of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. Dr. Tubbs does a fantastic job here of interweaving the lives of the three Mother’s (Alberta, Berdis, and Louise), their…

Part memoir, part history, and part analysis of how far we have come and how far we have to go in the field of heart health, Dr. Jauhar’s focuses Heart: A History on his experiences in the field of Cardiology, his family struggles with cardiovascular disease, and the incredible stories…

Since I am a bit obsessive with anything and everything organized and put in its proper place, this book about the history of alphabetical order — really the history of organization, if you will — was right up my alley. Flanders has quite the gem here, replete with a very…

A sweeping, page-turning, epic of a book, Radden Keefe somehow manages to follow up Say Nothing — his other sweeping page-turner from 2019 about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland — with this densely-packed, cannot-put-it-down investigation into the Sackler empire and the opioid crisis they created in America in the 90’s…

Drinking is awesome! Drinking is fun! Drinking is … what we have been doing for thousands and thousands of years and we can’t stop, won’t stop, SHOULDN’T stop doing it! It turns out that we humans really, really, REALLY love drinking, and we not only do it because it’s fun…

An excellent book by an excellent writer, The Rise of the New Puritans is Rothman’s conservative takedown of the new-age Progressive: stodgy, serious, like-minded, inflexible, strict, and “committed to waging war on decadence, frivolity, and pleasure for its own sake”. Rothman goes back to real Puritan times here, and compares…