New Book Releases | December 2
A plastic doll, an increasingly plastic planet, the definition of progress, and the importance of self-care—this week's books cover a lot of ground (in some ways literally).
Diving into this week's new releases, we find a professor's thorough and thoughtful examination of the impact of plastics on our individual health, our communities, and the natural environment—and a journalist uncovering the untold history of an iconic toy made from plastic. The founder of The Self Care Suite, a digital wellness community for Black women, pours her expertise into a book that serves as both a guide and a journal. We conclude with a geographer who takes an interdisciplinary approach—drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy, and, indeed, geography in his first book—to argue for a new definition of progress.
Barbieland: The Unauthorized History by Tarpley Hitt, published by One Signal Publishers
The secret history of Barbie and what Mattel has done to keep her on top.
For nearly seven decades, Mattel billed Barbie as the first adult doll—a revolutionary alternative to the baby dolls before her, which had treated little girls as future mothers rather than future women. But Barbie was no original. She was a knockoff: a nearly identical copy of a German doll now erased from the narrative in favor of Mattel’s preferred version of history. It was Barbie’s first secret but far from her last.
In Barbieland, journalist and The Drift editor Tarpley Hitt exposes the long-hidden backstory of the world’s most famous doll. After snuffing out her predecessor, Barbie climbed to the throne of global girlhood and stayed there, fending off rivals with a mix of strategic marketing, government influence, ruthless litigation, and covert tactics worthy of a classic spy novel.
This lively, authoritative ride through the underbelly of American business pulls back the curtain on the corporate titans, cultural influencers, and toyland rivals who shaped this icon’s world—from flawed founder Ruth Handler to convicted Wall Street fraudster (and improbable Barbie savior) Michael Milken to the Bratz doll empire, which once put the brand on life support.
Along the way, Hitt delves into the stories of the eccentrics and autocrats who brought Barbie to life through sheer force of will: a pair of ex-Nazi toymakers, a toy mogul friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s, a swinging missile designer turned Barbie executive married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Mattel’s mid-century Freudian marketeer, who saw the doll as a psychosexual skeleton key to controlling the American mind.
Through investigative reporting, global archival research, and interviews with key players from across the Barbie extended universe, Barbieland lays bare the unseen—and so often absurd—work that made Mattel a multibillion-dollar business and turned Barbie into an institution: a symbol as synonymous with American soft power as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s french fries.
Bloom How You Must: A Black Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Generational Healing by Tara Pringle Jefferson, published by Amistad
A self-empowering wellness guide that celebrates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women.
Self-care isn’t a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy “girls’ trips” to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.
Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.
Picture Toni Morrison’s overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.
Recall Audre Lord’s enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.
Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:
- Research from leading wellness experts
- Interviews with women aged 19–99
- Stories of personal experience
- Overviews and explanations of each component of self-care
- Dedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapter
- Exercises to put wellness into practice
- Easy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars
With its diversity of insights, practical skills, and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don’t know where to begin, giving them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives.
The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late by Judith Enck with Adam Mahoney, published by The New Press
A powerful investigation into plastic’s impact on human health and the environment, and how we can fight back.
Plastic is everywhere—wrapped around our food, stitched into our clothes, even coursing through our veins. Once a marvel of modern science, plastic has become so inextricably woven into our lives that imagining a world without it can seem impossible. Over the last seventy-five years, plastic has cradled our planet in a synthetic embrace.
The Problem with Plastic critically examines the paradox of this material, first celebrated for its innovations and now recognized for its devastating environmental and public health impacts. With clarity and urgency, the book reveals how plastic pollution contributes to poisoned oceans, polluted air, a warming planet, and overwhelming waste, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities who bear the brunt of petrochemical pollution.
Revealing the alarming extent of microplastics infiltrating both the natural world and the human body, this compelling narrative challenges the illusion that recycling alone will save us. It unpacks the mechanisms of environmental racism and the deceptive greenwashing strategies used by the plastics industry to maintain the status quo.
More than a critique, The Problem with Plastic emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy. It higlights powerful stories of frontline resistance in places like Louisiana, Texas, and Appalachia, and equips readers with practical tools—including a “Household Waste Audit” to track and reduce plastic consumption, as well as model policy guides for driving legislative change.
Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately empowering, The Problem with Plastic reminds us: plastic is a problem—but together, we can be the solution.
Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It by Samuel Miller McDonald, published by St. Martin's Press
For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future.
Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.
But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’—existence on a planet in crisis.
In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating their destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.
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The Porchlight staff members choosing new books each week are Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabriella Cisneros and Dylan Schleicher.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are from the publisher.
