We are now in the window of summer when publishing—especially prescriptive nonfiction publishing—slows down for about a month before an onslaught of big book releases in September. Because it is a slow time for new releases, we are cheating a little this week and highlighting books that were released earlier this month that we failed to cover upon their publication, but are excited to dive deeper into over the remainder of the summer. 

All four of the following titles hit local bookshop shelves and online ratailers in July. Interested in buying multiple copies for your team, book club, or employee resource group? Follow the links below or give us a call to purchase the books, or check out our services for bulk book buyers to learn more about how we can help.

Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.

Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America by Kim Phillips-Fein, published by W. W. Norton & Company

A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.

The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson’s famous proclamation that “all men are created equal.”

But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality itself. Again and again, influential Americans have asserted a fundamental inequality among human beings, arguing that the social, economic, and racial hierarchies in which some groups of people rule over others are not only natural but good.

In Country of Lords acclaimed historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces this argument for inequality through six vivid archetypes. She discusses the natural aristocrats, such as John Adams, who feared the tumult of too much democracy; the social Darwinists, led by Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who blamed the poor for their own miseries; those who preached a gospel of production, including Henry Ford, who wanted an industrial hierarchy in which the “best” people ruled over compliant inferiors; utilitarian racists who advocated for eugenics and a racial hierarchy; meritocrats like Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein who described an economic caste system based on “intelligence” in his co-authored book, The Bell Curve; and most recently, technocrats who seem to see themselves as superior because they are closest to the machines destined to outstrip and supplant fallible flesh-and-blood humanity.

The anti-egalitarian lineage Phillips-Fein traces is both clear and deeply unsettling. It challenges readers to think about the fragility of the ideal of equality and to reckon with the disturbing arguments of those who have campaigned against it over the past two and a half centuries. Country of Lords is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the widening gap between the nation we claim to be and the nation we are becoming.

Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists' Adventures into the Unknown by Roberta Kwok, published by Sourcebooks

The real story of science isn't a triumphant breakthrough. It's messy, mysterious, and deeply human.

In Lost in Curiosity, award-winning journalist Roberta Kwok pulls back the curtain on what scientific discovery actually looks like...Not a Eureka moment, but a fraught, often chaotic pursuit of truth.

Chronicling researchers' struggles and hopes in the field and lab, Kwok documents it all: fending off relentless snowfall on a remote Greenland glacier, desperately searching for an elusive frog in the rainforests of Borneo, and scrambling to capture fleeting signals of a faraway moon outside our solar system. These are the untold stories of devoted young scientists and restless minds who are chasing nature's riddles, without knowing what they'll uncover.

Through vivid reporting and moments of unexpected emotion, Kwok reveals the inner lives of researchers who care profoundly about understanding our world and saving what's left of it. From enigmatic fossils and mind-bending physics to the puzzling behavior of wild animals, Lost in Curiosity is a journey through the questions that keep scientists up at night―and the sometimes strange, always illuminating paths they take to answer them.

Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World by Dan Werb, published by Crown

A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who’ve found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities—from award-winning writer and scientist Dan Werb.

Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering throughout the day, and why we take such pains to fix lids to our garbage cans. But they are so much more than that, too: epidemic vectors, churners of soil, ecosystem evolvers, spiritual lodestars, and, sometimes, sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces with cruel intent. But beyond their quotidian impact on our lives, synanthropes have a critical part to play in how our communities are shaped and how sustainably they function. These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet’s future, and a key influence on our species’ ongoing evolution; and recently, something essential has shifted with them.

We are in a fraught era of environmental disruption, habitat destruction, and human population expansion that is ravaging formerly wild and untouched habitats. That’s caused us to become ever more inundated with synanthropes, which are bringing delight, chaos and danger to our doorstep. These species, so long dismissed, are forcing us to reckon with them—from the hundreds of thousands of raccoons in urban spaces that spread our refuse no matter how many "raccoon-proof" bags and bins we invent, to the invasive kudzu plants that grow a foot a day, enveloping houses, telephone poles, trees, and any other structures into their green abyss. Now, as urban spaces increasingly become wild spaces, we have a choice: continue to resist them by any means necessary, or take the opportunity to promote a more harmonious coexistence.

Through vivid storytelling, Our Wild Familiars brings to spectacular life the world’s most successful synanthropes, from bats, raccoons, and crows, to some of its weirdest, including the Giant Pacific Octopus. Acting as a guide to the curious, Werb reveals how the cracks in our millennia-long efforts to shield ourselves against the outside world might just lead us to a new and necessary balance with nature—or to an ever more savage future.

Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife by Imogen Willetts, published by Grove Press

From the glamorous depravity of Studio 54 to the underground cabarets of Weimar Berlin, from Georgian London’s gaudy pleasure gardens to the birth of techno in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched history charting four centuries of nightlife, showing the fascinating evolution of how humans have gone out after dark.

There is a specific energy to it. Cafes and shops close their shutters. Darkness descends. “The air begins to tingle,” wrote John Dos Passos of twenties New York. “It’s tonight if you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, that the train of magical events will begin.”

Nightlife, as defined by party historian Imogen Willetts, is “a commercial and secular environment designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night.” Up All Night traces its history back to a surprising starting point: seventeenth-century Japan, in a remote party destination built outside the shogun’s capital. Nightlife has been at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression ever since, making cities famous, nurturing iconic countercultures, and growing into a multibillion-dollar industry, yet its sweeping history has been left largely untold.

Up All Night is the story of the good nights and the great ones. How did jazz develop in the dancehalls of turn-of-the-century New Orleans? What was it like to party in 1920s Paris? Why were we so obsessed with the messy chaos of the early aughts LA scene? And what, in our increasingly online lives, are we missing when we pass up the chance of a big night out? Join party historian Imogen Willetts for a guided tour behind the velvet rope of history’s wildest nights out.