Bookshelf

(University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

According to the publisher, this book highlights “the critical role of Midwestern farmers in the creation of the American century,” and that Simons “explores how, after decades of slipping to the margins of an urbanizing economy, these farmers assumed renewed strategic and cultural importance as they produced essential sustenance for overseas troops and food rations for a domestic population.”

(Veritas Resurgence Publishing, 2024).

First, the author asks, “What motivates a man to betray a friend? And not just any friend but the Son of God?” Then he goes on to imagine the answers not found in the Bible. This fictional “autobiography” imagines how Judas would have told his story, from his childhood under Roman occupation to his suicide on a tree outside Jerusalem as Jesus, the one he betrayed, died on another tree for the sins of all mankind.

(Next Chapter Press, 2025). 

Led by a tortoise named Tuck, a group of animals living in a lakeside Florida park confront such challenges as helping one another through a hurricane, organizing a surprise party, and even solving a mystery. This collection of seven stories for young readers helps impart social values in a fun, sometimes quirky, but always collaborative way.

(St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

In 2020, Congress voted to rename nine military installations that honored Confederate leaders who had waged war in the name of maintaining a slave republic. Five years later, the Trump administration reversed course, reinstating the original names. This book by two members of the Naming Commission tells the stories of the 10 American heroes whose names they had selected.

(Cambridge University Press, 2025).

According to the publisher, “Beyond Coercion offers a new perspective on mechanisms of social control practiced by authoritarian regimes. Focusing on the Chinese state, Alexsia T. Chan presents an original theory and concept of political atomization, which explains how the state maintains social control and entrenches structural inequality.

(MIT Press, 2025).

An associate professor of computer science at the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab, the author argues that robotics design has historically reinforced white supremacist and patriarchal systems of power. In this book, he explores what roboticists might do to subvert rather than reinforce those trends.

(Columbia University Press, 2025).

Bob Pigott has called New York City home since 1959. By trade, he is an attorney who served as section chief and bureau chief of the New York Attorney General’s Charities Bureau. He’s also a history buff. When reading a biography, he finds himself especially curious about one aspect of the subjects’ life — their first trip to New York City. What did they want to see? Where did they stay? What were their impressions?

(Sundress Publications, 2025).

The publisher provides this description: “Tales from Manila Ave. traces the joys and struggles of Filipino immigrants as they navigate life and ponder identity outside their motherland. Through touching reflections on community and memory, Patrick Joseph Caoile’s debut collection takes an honest yet playful look into the intricacies of longing and belonging. Tenants gather to swap meals and stories, workers strive to prove their worth, sons and daughters revisit their relationships with faith, patriotism, and their own parents. These connections span generations, and in crossing both time and distance, urge us to observe what is lost or changed in the translation.

(Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, 2025).

In a world where despotic sorcerers use their magic to control and intimidate, young Fiora Barrowling finds herself embroiled in the human resistance movement after a fateful encounter. At the resistance academy, she learns to fight and struggles with belonging, all while contending with a possible infiltrator leaking information to the sorcerers. Kirkus describes the book as “breathless” and “a lightning blast of futuristic fantasy.”

(self-published, 2025).

The author asks readers to ponder several questions:

Does your organization feel like it’s running but not really going anywhere?

Have you experienced any of the following: strategic plans that sit untouched in binders; an overflowing calendar yet a sense of an unaccomplished mission; a passionate team that burns out faster than it can recover; fundraising that looks good on paper, but with an impact that feels ... shallow?