“Captivating glimpses of children’s lives.”

not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.

An unflinching self-portrait.

AMERICAN CHILDHOOD A Photographic History

Brewster, Todd

Scribner (320 pp.)

$36.00 | May 23, 2023

9781501124884

A photographic celebration of American childhood.

Culled from more than 2,000 images, this book by journalist and historian Brewster brings together more than 200 photographs from museum collections (Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, New York Historical Society), Getty images, flea markets, antiques stores, eBay, and his own family’s trove to tell a visual history of the life of American children. Spanning 250 years, the photos document children at home and school, sitting primly or playing exuberantly, dressed formally or in costume or play clothes. They range from babies to teenagers, a diverse assortment of youngsters: Black, White, Asian,

Native American, urban and rural. There’s a 12-year-old drummer boy who served in the Civil War and a 13-year-old Freedom Rider arrested in 1961. Brewster, who founded the Center for Oral History at West Point, dispenses with chronological or thematic organization in favor of juxtaposing pictures “simply because I liked how they looked or because together they delivered an ironic or telling message.” The result is like paging through an album from a sprawling, blended family. Brewster contextualizes the images in historical essays about childhood as well as about photography. “In the 1910s and 1920s,” he notes, “the camera becomes portable and we start to see the lives of children in their environments, and even in movement—playing, going to school, dancing, competing in sports.” These contrast with the solemn daguerreotypes and staid family portraits of earlier times. It’s amusing to see childhood photos of celebrities: 4-year-old Stephen King, Lucille Ball at 2, Thomas Edison at 5, and the future Lady Gaga at 4. Not surprisingly, there’s a photo of Shirley Temple. There’s also one of Truman Capote, smiling winningly, and another of Ernest Hemingway, at 12, writing during a fishing trip. Brewster argues that Americans invented childhood and, sadly, will oversee its demise due to insidious forces such as social media and school shootings. Childhood, he exults, is “the original adventure.”

Captivating glimpses of children’s lives.

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

Butcher, Barbara Simon & Schuster (288 pp.)

$28.99 | June 20, 2023

9781982179380

A sober, queer woman describes how becoming a New York City medicolegal examiner changed her life.

In the early 1990s, after a particularly devastating drunken night, Butcher decided to get sober. “Once I start something,” she writes, “I have to be good at it, so I threw myself heartfirst into AA.” To the author, this meant breaking up with her girlfriend, finding “a gay women’s meeting” where she celebrated 90 days without a drink, and attending a vocational training service that ultimately led her to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, where she was unexpectedly hired on the spot. What followed was a decadeslong career that included a wide variety of cases, including accidental deaths, gruesome murders perpetrated by serial killers, identifying the remains of bodies uncovered in the aftermath of 9/11, and suicides. “Some of the angriest suicides I saw took place at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Midtown Manhattan,” she writes. “Like the Golden Gate Bridge in the past or the Vessel in Hudson Yards today, it was a popular place to jump to your death.” Although Butcher loved her job, her constant exposure to humanity’s worst cruelties exacted an emotional toll that led to a post-retirement depression severe enough to require hospitalization and electroshock therapy. The author is a witty, gifted observer who approaches her own struggles with mental health with the same keenness and curiosity as she approaches the bodies she encounters on the job. However, while she never shies away from the gruesome details of corpses and crime scenes, she is less than forthcoming about her personal life, providing only brief glimpses into a history of “depression and suicidal tendencies” that began in her teen. This gap is noteworthy mostly because Butcher’s forays into memoir are heartbreakingly beautiful; their brevity leaves readers wanting more.

A gritty, humorous portrait of a strong woman who found sobriety while working with the dead.

A Renaissance Of Our Own

A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining

Cargle,

Rachel E. Ballantine (256 pp.)

$28.99 | May 16, 2023

9780593134733

A vulnerable look at one activist’s long journey of deconstruction, healing, and reimagining of the toxic societal structure meant to oppress marginalized identities.

In her debut book, Cargle—an activist, academic, antiracism educator, philanthropist, artist, writer, and entrepreneur—takes on a host of preconceived notions that make up the definition of success in the modern world, frameworks she knew could never align with her true self. Through an examination of her own journey from social media activist to the birth of her umbrella company, the Loveland Group, Cargle breaks down the countless “reimaginings” that led to the creation of her personal manifesto. Today, she writes, “reimagining the world is not just ideal but critical for our continued healing. Here we are, in a time when our goodness, our wellness, our livelihoods, are begging us to dream up bigger and bolder realities for ourselves and one another.” Exploring relationships, education, feminism, work, and self-care, Cargle emphasizes the necessity of unlearning the capitalistic system that has been structured to work against her—and against any person within a marginalized group. As a Black queer woman striving for “ease, abundance, and opportunity” in every aspect of life, she creates her own way of living that feeds her soul via a wide variety of personal and community projects. After laying out the framework of her own process of reimagining, Cargle then implores the reader to do the same by making their own manifesto that pulls from their value system. The author expertly strikes down the idea that one size fits all in a Whitewashed society and shows that, above all, marginalized groups yearn to live instead of simply survive. In her acknowledgements, the author thanks “my intellectual and literary elders and ancestors who tilled the ground for the blooming gardens of my generation,” including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin.

Cargle opens the door into a possibility-rich world of acceptance, accountability, and allyship.

Married to endurance athlete Tommy Rivers Puzey, Catudal, a freelance writer, omits his full name in her debut memoir, referring to him only as Rivs. The book begins when the author learned, at 13, that her father had terminal lung cancer. Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Catudal had been “taught that god was a merit-based interventionist—one who would save me from my mortal sins if only I did my part.” However, she writes, “the more I prayed, the worse he became.” After her father’s death, the author “boxed up faith, hope, and spirituality and labeled them with a strict note to self in the archives of my mind: Rotten. Do Not Touch.” Following this tragic story, Catudal focuses on her husband’s devastating 2020 illness and, relatedly, the life-affirming lessons she’s learned by virtue of pain. When Rivs, an accomplished runner who once finished the Boston Marathon in 2 hours, 18 minutes, “a qualifying standard for Olympic trials,” became sick, he refused to go to the hospital. Eventually, he spent more than three months in the ICU (he was in an induced coma for a month), where Catudal and their three daughters’ visits were severely limited due to Covid-19 restrictions. As Rivs battled lung cancer and

Catudal, Steph HarperOne (272 pp.)

$28.99 | May 30, 2023

9780063253131

During her husband’s near-fatal illness, the author reckons with faith, loss, and the meaning of existence.