HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER, debut procedural with heart and edge

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER
REBECCA PHILIPSON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This fresh debut thriller finds a Scotland Yard detective trying to find the author of a self-help book that promises quite literally to teach readers how to get away with murder, which seems to have inspired London's newest murderer.

Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen has been on leave for six months, recovering from a breakdown she suffered at work, but when a fourteen-year-old girl is murdered in a local park, Sam jumps at the chance to return to the job and prove that she's still got what it takes to be the Yard's most successful homicide detective. One of the cases only leads is a copy of a self-help book found in the victim's backpack called How To Get Away With Murder by a man named Denver Brady.

Brady claims to be the most successful serial killer of our time, which is why no one's ever heard of him. Chapter by chapter, he details his methodology and his past victims, and as Sam's investigation progresses and the details of the book go viral, Sam begins to suspect that there’s more to the author than what he’s revealed. But in order to find a killer and get justice for young Charlotte, Sam must learn to trust her instincts once again, before Denver Brady—or someone else—really does get away with murder.

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My Review: I'm going to get the mean bit over: thriller it ain't. Procedural plus PTSD it is. But that's on the publisher, not the author. The author, whose debut it is, did a decent job with the story, but needs some time to sand smoother edges onto her storytelling...quit hinting, either say or or skip it. And certainly cut it out after maybe twice, really that's where it stops being hinting and becomes annoying nudging.

So that's why it's a four-star read. I think as a debut, the ending crafted by Author Philipson is complex enough to show this is a very, very promising debut indeed. The story of a book within a book, a book by a mysterious author purporting to be a confession to his murders, and a clue in the murder of an obscenely young woman, can feel, well, artificial but Author Philipson dodged that trap deftly by interweaving Sam's...that's DI Samantha Hansen on introduction, Sam thereafter...recent issues around mental health into the investigation. It was quite well done. A detective who's a reader, who's been famed for her command of detail and pattern-matching, is suddenly fuzzy and afraid of the details she battened on becoming too triggering. It slows her down and speed is of the essence, does this portend her new future? Can she be successful in this new, possibly permanent, slow mode?

Questions that I suspect anyone who has had an external event alter their affect in the world can relate to.

On we go through a constructed maze, fair-play clues concealed well enough to make them niggle at the edges of awareness, and that ending I've already praised cause experienced mystery readers like me to pause and doff our invisible caps to Author Philipson. Her editor had a very good touch, I can't see obvious editorial alterations. I suspect the trainees Sam's lumbered with were once a lot more like props because they're not as well-rounded as they will be in future. (Do posh English people really join the police as often as they do in fiction?) I think a loot of the humor in the book is going to be a barrier for US readers. Or maybe not, now that I've typed the sentence...lots more of us are tuned in to UK slang and humor. It was fun to get chuckles in surprising places.

In my never-humble opinion, this is an auspicious debut. It portends an interesting writer's arrival onto a scene that's always stuffed with talent that goes nowhere fast for lack of that little spark, that addictive personal edge, that hooks the ma'at seeking series mystery addict coming back for more.

I think Author Philipson has that. Come find out if you agree.

THE DIRECTOR, living life through extraordinary times demands a lot from an artist

THE DIRECTOR
DANIEL KEHLMANN (tr. Ross Benjamin)
Summit Books/S&S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2026 International Booker Prize longlistee! Shortlist announced Tuesday, 31 March 2026.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

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My Review: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) lived an unlucky life. He was trapped in his native Europe for each of the World Wars fought there. His work...impressive stuff...is almost totally forgotten outside the small world of cinéastes. (Do you know anyone, apart from me, who's seen The Threepenny Opera and/or L'Atlantide?) We're treated here to a deep fictional dive into his inner workings. Given that he already knew Nazism was wrong, bad, and evil, and was trying to escape its miasma, his decision to collaborate with Goebbels in the propaganda machine seems inexcusable. In fact it was never forgiven. Not even his German-language film The Last Act (The Last Ten Days in English) bought him back his prior-to-collaboration esteem in spite of its honest treatment of Hitler's insanity at the end of the war.

What price security. It cost this security-seeker very dear. His only son was swallowed by the Hitler Youth because his father returned to see if he could care for his ailing mother. He is examined in this novel as only fiction is capable of examining an inner life. It's not the justifications and self-delusion that a memoir could bring to the table. It's the decisions he made writ plain and unadorned with the inevitable dishonesty of making excuses.

Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director.

I don't think a man who could meet with and work for Nazis could've brought himself to conjure those honest, self-deprecating words.

I'm new to Kehlmann's work. This kind of spotlight is not flattering to its object. It can easily become a hatchet-job or hagiography; each is distorted and ultimately dishonest. In Author Kehlmann's choice of fictionalizing events and people very close to precisely aligned with the historical record, he puts the dishonesty and ambiguity on whom it belongs: Pabst. It's just...disturbing, and in a way a biography, a memoir would not be because Author Kehlmann clearly knows the facts and has an opinion yet makes us, the audience, take in our responses without the comfort of distancing our responses.

Would any one of the readers of this book behaved differently than Pabst? The fictional framing strips away the fig-leaf of "objectivity" so we must sit in the decisive moments with Pabst. Are you sure your illusion of yourself as a resister is accurate? Are you sure your judgment of what you'll need to give up is accurate? Are you sure you can be in, but not of, the system you scorn and abhor?

Translator Ross Benjamin did a good enough job rendering the read into English that I was a bit surprised to realize it was a translation. That is, to me, a very high compliment, or intended as one at least. It is a feat of writing to fictionalize someone who's famous (if you know who he is) in the light that emphasizes who he was; an equal feat to take that unusual choice to a very high level of craft in a different language. Kudos to both artists for a job well done.

Why, if I'm praising this work so highly and with such fervor, am I not offering all five stars? Because at no time was I transported into a different awareness, a space of timeless immanence such as I was by Evil Genius or The Remembered Soldier. It's all too rare, that removal from mundanity, so this is not a knock on the quality of the read. I'm impressed and I'm edified and I'm involved by this novel. It's at the top of the literary heap. It deserves its International Booker nomination. I'm not going to put in my pantheon but I'm going to urge it on you as a fascinating, timely, well-crafted story.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT, debut novel of queer loving and grieving and connecting

THE DISAPPOINTMENT
SCOTT BROKER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly-dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’'s own life.

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My Review: Why do we accept the cultural pressure to seek only peak experiences? Why accept that added burden on mere humans who are not capable of providing The Pinnacle all the time? Even most of the time. Often any of the time. But they're what we got, they're flawed and imperfect and a lot of trouble.

And so, being human, are we.

Among the smartest things my stepmother ever said to me was "romance is sweet and fun, but relationships are about farts and morning breath." Yuh-huh. If somene's not farting or blowing morning breath at you, they're dying. And I don't mean metaphorically.

Longing for perfection is a curse that takes us out of the tangible and plentiful joys of the moments of our lives. I'm a little salty about the chatbot illusion of intelligence and emotional personhood because it's a complete and utter lie. It reinforces the same thing Jack and Randy are battling in this story. They plan a "getaway" from their lives, a chance to decompress and reconnect with themselves and each other...but that assumes they're not connected and not always compressed, a fallacy that modern culture just *loooves* to sell you.

Verb selected very much advisedly.

It's discovering that feat of misdirection and manipulation that I found in the core of this read. Jack and Randy have bought the cultural crap. They're drifting apart because they've fallen for the illusion and can't find each other in the haze of it. Their griefs...Randy's mother's death, Jack's sense of himself as a failure...aren't the kind you can choose not to process. What The Disappointment does is set the stage for a wacky road trip to nowhere, delivers just that, and has its men lead us into themselves...without miring us in Interiority, in Reflection, in Contemplation. All those are terrific when those emotional registers are the ones you're in the mood for. That was not me at the moment I read this story. As a result I battened on the absurdism of these two in their shared moment of crises (plural deliberate, as is the separateness it implies) being enacted before me. Author Broker invokes Samuel Beckett in the text, appropriate as Jack is mourning his failed life as a playwright and who else would he invoke without lèse-majesté; he's making you think in absurd, if not surreal, terms as love molds itself around their griefs.

Because they share a grief: "My skin hugs closer to my bones, then shivers like a sheet of aluminum when he speaks," can not be spoken of someone one does not have a powerful connection to. Even when the World is doing its usual indifferent thing, even when you're gripped by desire (for someone else), even when you're wild with jealousy over trifles, this kind of connection isn't escapable. You can choose to sever it in practice but it survives, it mutates into...I don't know the word, is there one for a state of interconnection deeper than friendship but tinged with the sadness of dead lust?

Randy and Jack are looking into that nameless abyss. It's led them to a flowering of sexual awareness of each other. Is that going to last? (Scruff might play a big role in this.) I don't think I've read a more surprising, more enlivening, more vigorously honestly grounded, story of the insanely complex world of long-term couplehood.

What I loved was tinged with a little sense of déja-vu, as a lot of the story is assembled from the stuff of life. It can't be avoided and remain an honest tale of how we navigate life. The very end of the book is an "incantation with no resolve"—a resolutionless invitation to go on when you can't go on.

I'll go on.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, Dr. Spock has a LOT to answer for

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
HELEN ZOE VEIT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An eye-opening investigation into why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren’t children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don’t parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?

But Americans in the past didn’t think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky shows how fussy eating came to define "children’s food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today.

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My Review: I wasn't a picky eater because I was raised by parents who loved food. I'm so grateful to them for the lesson they each taught: "try it, if you don't like it you don't have to finish it."

I'm also old. This message was more common among the Depression-era denizens who raised me than postwar-boom kids who raised the picky eaters we're discussing in this book.

As "experts" got hold of the conversation around food (author's scare quotes), the wheels came off. We know from decades of research findings being reported and then challenged, the "experts" (remember, not my scare quotes!) have been tarred by the backlash that keeps growing against expertise in general. It feels kind of justified to me, in this case, because there are no real reasons that the advice the "experts" gave should have been heeded as none of them made any sense at all. But, well, expertise needs to be respected. It's the world now that does NOT respect expertise that's in terrible trouble.

Author Veit has researched the question "is a generation of US-born kids pickier in their food choices than earlier generations?" and presented findings and posited reasons for the findings. It is a fascinating topic. The sources are broad-based and wide-ranging; cited in line which I appreciate; and to the extent I randomly sampled credible. What they aren't, and what the book itself isn't, is prescriptive. Nowhere in the text is there a solution to a problem identified. It was not promised, it was not suggested in the research sources to be intended; I bring it up because I don't want to give the impression there is anywhere anything about addressing the behavior being studied.

I get the impression that the title led previous readers down that garden path. Don't be one of them! I'm interested in the subject of picky eating because it seems so absurd to allow it. I was glad to read Author Veit's study because I feel much less...superior...about the realities of the issue. I think there's a lot of value in this lens on our present social moment's roots and results. I felt there was genuine curiosity, a real "I need to know" on the author's part, and I resonated with that feeling. It gave me a four-star reading experience. I was impressed with her research, her cogitations on the research, and convinced by her conclusions based on them. I was perhaps less drawn in than I might have been by the shifts I felt between the presentation of her digests of research and the chattier tone of her presentation of her conclusions drawn from it...this was more like feeling some charming cocktail-party acquaintance was suddenly taking me into the lecture hall.

Entirely irrelevant to the value I received from the read. It was a factor that impacted me on a reading-pleasure level alone. You might feel entirely differently. I hope you will get the book to find out for yourself.

RISE AND RESIST: How to Reclaim Workplace Equity and Justice, resistance needs many fronts to be effective

RISE AND RESIST: How to Reclaim Workplace Equity and Justice
JANICE GASSAM ASARE, PhD
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 all editions, preorder now for delivery on 24 February 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This powerful guide draws on strategies from Black resistance movements and merges historical wisdom with modern technology to combat the DEI backlash and build sustainable workplace equity in today’s hostile climate.

As the unprecedented backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion intensifies—with corporations dismantling initiatives, lawmakers passing anti-DEI legislation, and post–George Floyd promises abandoned—this tactical handbook arms advocates with revolutionary resistance strategies drawn from Black historical movements.

Dr. Janice Gassam Asare transforms centuries of Black resistance wisdom—from Underground Railroad networks to civil rights organizing tactics—into modern resistance plans, wielding ethical AI as a force multiplier to create sustainable change that outlasts corporate whims and political cycles.

Each chapter grounds modern workplace tactics in revolutionary approaches of more than twenty prominent Black historical figures, including the following:

Ida B. Wells—Documentation techniques for workplace injustice inspired by her work
Ella Baker and Fred Hampton—Coalition-building methods from the American civil rights movement
Toni Morrison and Angela Davis—Narrative control strategies drawn from their celebrated writing

Whether you’re a DEI practitioner navigating corporate pushback, an employee experiencing equity rollbacks, or a leader committed to sustainable inclusion, this handbook provides battle-tested strategies for preserving workplace equity—even in hostile environments.

This isn’t just about surviving the backlash. It’s about reimagining workplaces where everyone thrives.

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My Review: A hybrid how-to, why-to, and pep talk by an organzational psychology graduate with a track record:

Dr. Janice Gassam Asare is a journalist, speaker, trainer, consultant, and podcaster whose Forbes articles have garnered over 9 million views. Her writing appears in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, and Fast Company, and she reaches over 170,000 followers across social platforms. A LinkedIn Top Voice in Racial Equity, Dr. Asare creates courses for LinkedIn Learning and Udemy Business. She holds a doctorate in applied organizational psychology and previously served as an assistant professor of management at Sacred Heart University before focusing on her consultancy. She delivers approximately fifty speaking and training engagements annually, helping organizations create more equitable workplaces.

This is her bio from the publisher.

By bringing together the tried-and-true techniques of past Black resistance and inclusion heroes in one book, Author Janice Gassam Asare taps into the most important asset in her field's arsenal: direct experience of success. As a field of psychological practice, organizational psychology has been evolving since its creation in the 1880s from industrial-worker adjustments...research that centered interest by management in reduction of expensive turnover hiring, problematic labor relations, etc., to the current efforts centering the needs of workers to experience their workplaces as safe, fair places where baseline survival is no longer the main focus of employment.

No wonder capitalists hate it.

Focusing on resistance to abusive practices involves learning what you need to know about behaviors, about what organizations will require in the way of proof of claimed harm, and why your voice should be raised in self-defense.

It's a solid, compact, effective read for anyone concerned about the way a workplace can...and should...function to better all within it.

I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right, organizations always protect orthodoxy

I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right
MATT KAPLAN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An energetic and impassioned work of popular science about scientists who have had to fight for their revolutionary ideas to be accepted—from Darwin to Pasteur to modern day Nobel Prize winners.

For two decades, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He’s seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the behavior of the research community, and how support can be withheld for those who don’t conform or have the right connections. In this passionately argued and entertaining book, Kaplan narrates the history of the 19th century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that Childbed fever—a devastating infection that only struck women who had recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands. Semmelweis was met with overwhelming hostility by those offended at the notion that doctors were at fault, and is a prime example of how the scientific community often fights new ideas, even when the facts are staring them in the face.

In entertaining prose, Kaplan reveals scientific cases past and present to make his case. Some are familiar, like Galileo being threatened with torture and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó being fired when on the brink of discovering how to wield mRNA–a finding that proved pivotal for the creation of the Covid-19 vaccine. Others less so, like researchers silenced for raising safety concerns about new drugs, and biologists ridiculed for revealing major flaws in the way rodent research is conducted. Kaplan shows how the scientific community can work faster and better by making reasonably small changes to the forces that shape it.

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My Review: I'm not often surprised by the organization of non-fiction, at least not in a positive way. In the case of this book, I expected it to be split into chapters, perhaps chronologically presented, by the scientist under discussion. Instead I got a very effective, more fluidly narrative, organization by...umm...style of heresy, shall we say.

Because that's really what this book traces. Heresy, thank you Wikipedia, is "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, particularly the accepted beliefs or religious law of a religious organization." Any organized field of study with a governing body, a code of ethics, and professional credentialing requirements from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) to the American Medical Association (AMA) has orthodoxies, has institutional biases, has entrenched powers in the field that do not welcome viewpoints or research findings or demonstrations that question or...horripilation!...disprove their beliefs. It's human nature.

Yet there will always be the mavericks who try to do exactly that. The professional trouble they face is in direct proportion to their success in the challenge. Often they're treated as whistleblowers. It is an ugly truth of human nature that the powerful protect themselves before all other considerations, and science is a human endeavor that attracts lots of money so it behaves this way in spades.

It's more notable in the sciences because they each and all depend for their existence, let alone progress, on the people who live out the Asimov-attributed quote: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” (though the attribution seems to be spurious)".

I myownself am most personally impacted by the work done by maverick genius Katalin Karikó (featured in this book), whose mRNA discoveries led to the creation of COVID vaccines of enormous effectiveness. I live among smokers, old people, and the enfeebled. I got COVID several times, and unlike over fifty of the people in my facility who died, was never even hospitalized. I was miserably sick once, mildly ill once, and would never have known it was more than a mild cold twice had I not taken a home test which would never have existed before her work made it conceivable). You better believe I get my flu and COVID vaccines annually, and they would not have existed had a heretical voice in medical research not refused to be silenced.

Read this fascinating work celebrating the contrarians, the heretics, the whistleblowers who disrupt the cozy, never-change, "shut up and calculate" hierarchies inherent in institutional science. (And all other fields, of course.) Read it because you benefit from their work; read it because they're interesting people; read it because your culture would not *exist* without them.

But read it mostly because it's really very good. It's a job of writing that, on its own merits, I'd give four and a half stars to; the extra half-star is my acknowledgement of how very, very urgently we need mavericks and contrarians when we are facing multiple existential challenges and crises that science has both created and is uniquely able to solve...only not with the orthodox thinking that got us here.

Preorders are being taken. Ask your library to get copies. But pay attention to message and delivery!