New & Recommended Nonfiction

There is a downside to the excessive promotion of positive thinking and Ehrenreich takes you on an intellectual tour of it. Despite being a glass-half-full type, I really enjoyed reading about the history and consequences of this cultural ideology. It’s not a promotion of negativity, but a call for realistic assessments and critical thinking. —Nici Smith

“Good writing,” Gladwell says in his preface, “does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.” What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the indefatigable curiosity and unwavering chutzpah that have made Malcolm Gladwell one of today’s most important writers. Like Oliver Sacks before him, Gladwell has a knack for zeroing in on the emblematic elements of life that tell so much more about the human condition than they initially belie. —R.M.

While the number of books about food is increasing exponentially, this one is something special. Foer looks our meat-eating practices straight in the eye, refusing to camouflage eating animals as anything other than what it is. It’s refreshing to read an honest and bold take on our eating habits that insists we maintain the link between animals and meat, even as it lays out why we feel compelled not to do so. I predict this will become a must-read in the conscious-eating canon. —K.M.S.

Pultizer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon has done it again, but this time it is not through fictional prose. Instead, Chabon has turned his writing eye inward, and we are given a series of often self- deprecating, but beautifully honest, linked personal essays that have us wincing, grinning, tearing, and yes, occasional cheering at Chabon’s own reflections of fatherhood, partnership, and what it means to look backward, while also knowing there is so much ahead. Using everything from his own family history to his quirky observations on everyday items, Chabon constantly draws himself back to the theme of having the never-ending but all-important responsibility of trying to hand down life-learned wisdom to his four children, while simultaneously making sure he is leaving them the room to find things out for themselves. —S.M.C.