Book Reviews

Abortion & Reproductive Justice

• Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair | 5/21/23
• Jane Against the World: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Reproductive Rights by Karen Blumenthal | 1/22/23
• The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diane Greene Foster | 11/6/22
• Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America by Lauren Rankin | 8/7/22
• Reproductive Justice: An Introduction by Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger | 5/8/22
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts | 3/13/22
• The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler | 2/13/22
• Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights by Katha Pollitt | 9/19/21

Anti-Imperialism

• Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad | 9/1/25
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman | Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media by Michael Parenti | 9/16/24
• Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara | 10/7/24

Antiracism

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson | 1/7/24
• Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell | 3/5/23
• How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi | 10/17/21
• How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (And Don’t) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford | 8/8/21
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi | 2/14/21

Astronomy

• The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque | 11/28/21
• Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan | 1/10/21
• Cosmos by Carl Sagan | 8/9/20

Atheism

• Hi, I’m an Atheist!: What That Means and How to Talk About It with Others by David G. McAfee | 8/21/23
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris | 6/21/20
• Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide by Richard Dawkins | 11/10/19
• Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God by Armin Navabi | 3/3/19
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett | 12/23/18
• Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris | 7/1/18
• God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens | 5/6/18
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins | 10/15/17

Christian Apologetics

• The Causes and Cure of Unbelief by N. J. Laforêt | 4/5/20
• The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller | 9/1/19
• The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief by James Spiegel | 10/7/18
• The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God by Lee Strobel | 2/25/18
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins | 7/30/17

Christian History

• The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr | 3/20/22
• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels | 5/2/21
• How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart Ehrman | 12/20/20
• Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehrman | 6/7/20
• Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman | 12/8/19

Christian Nationalism

• Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next by Bradley Onishi | 6/11/23
• American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom by Andrew Seidel | 10/23/22
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez | 9/25/22
• Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War by James Risen and Judy Thomas | 7/31/22
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart | 9/20/20
• The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American by Andrew Seidel | 1/19/20

Evolution

• The A B C of Evolution by Joseph McCabe | 4/12/20
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins | 2/23/20
• Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul by Kenneth Miller | 3/31/19
• Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne | 8/19/18

Feminism

• Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong | 11/18/24
• Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis | 5/28/23
• Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo | 12/18/22
• White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad | 12/4/22
• Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall | 5/30/21

Human Evolution

• Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins by Lee Berger and John Hawks | 11/14/23
• Human Evolution: A Brief Insight by Bernard Wood and A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier | 2/20/22
• The Piltdown Men by Ronald Millar | 11/14/21
• A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution by Jeremy DeSilva | 5/16/21
• Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes | 3/14/21
• The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: And Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution by Ian Tattersall | 5/24/20
• Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall | 5/3/20
• The Jesuit and the Skull: Tielhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man by Amir D. Aczel | 11/15/20
• Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human History by Lee Berger and John Hawks | 2/2/20
• Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson | 10/13/19

Human History

• Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell | 3/22/20
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari | 6/16/19

Humanism

• For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan | 6/27/21

Language and Writing

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser | 9/3/23

LGBTQ+

• Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers | 10/8/23
• The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice is Justice for All by Shon Faye | 3/26/23
• Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw | 1/29/23

Palestine

• Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman | 1/26/25
• Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics  by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick | Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom by Rebecca Ruth Gould | The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi | 7/6/24
• Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze | 2/18/24
• Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean | 12/21/23

Physics

• A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking | 4/24/22
• Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking | 1/27/19

Politics

• The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller | 7/9/23

Religious Texts

• The Bible | 1/5/20
• Luther’s Small Catechism | 10/22/17

Science History

• A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks”  by Clifford Conner | 1/16/23
• Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World by David Hutchings and James Ungureanu | 8/28/22
• Eureka! The Birth of Science by Andrew Gregory | 8/14/22
• Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson | 6/5/22
• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh | 4/24/22
• God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam | 12/26/21
• Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science—from the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi | 9/5/21

Social Issues

• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color | 8/17/25
• White Magic by Elissa Washuta | 10/31/21
• Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman | 7/25/21
• The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | 3/28/21
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan | 10/25/20