Two books published in the summer of 2025 address the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. The higher profile belongs to Christine Brennan, a national sports columnist at “USA Today,” whose “On Her Game,” narrates Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA with vigor and detail. Howard Megdal’s “Becoming Caitlin Clark,” by contrast, assesses Clark’s rise from manifold perspectives, explaining its controversies with sensitivity and insight.
If you want to understand the details of these ideologies and how their adherents have translated ideas into policy, you would do well to read independent scholar Laura Field’s book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.”
In “Warm Summers and Cold Winters,” Steven P. Gietschier tells the story of Charley and Bill DeWitt, owners of the perennial American League losers, the St. Louis Browns, who, in 1950, decided to hire a psychologist and hypnotist named Dr. David Tracy to help some of the players get over their “inferiority complex.”
A.M. Gittlitz’s “Metropolitans” tells an alternative history of the New York Mets through the lens of class struggle. Extensive and educational, entertaining and exasperating, it employs the team as a vehicle of left-wing politics, while prodding at the cultural conservatism associated with the national pastime.
The online haters celebrating what they gleefully consider its downfall simplify the matter in the way such misogynists always do: “Supergirl” 2026, in their view, is simply a bad film. The problem with this perspective is that “Supergirl” 2026 is not a bad film.
I am the same age as Jayne Kennedy, and her memoir does a wonderful job of recreating how exciting a time it was if—to paraphrase singer and pianist Nina Simone—one were young, ambitious, and Black.
Fox News Channel’s political anchor Bret Baier’s new book, “The Case for America,” is just in time for the 250th anniversary season. It feels a bit hasty in its composition, which gives a reader the sense that it was a book aimed at a ready market: people who want a book that is positive about the United States at this particularly divisive juncture, when many think the country is on the verge of its third political divorce.
Other books examine the same subject, though none are quite the same sort of synthesis this book is, a massive history that reads a bit like a massive novel. Indeed, as the accumulation of detailed narrative mounts, the reader finds it more unreal and unfocused, as if, as George Orwell said, in Asia, the closer and more finely tuned the view, the vaguer it gets.
It can be argued that Superman is a fascist symbol, or that he is a reworking of Jesus Christ or the American tall-tale hero, that he embodies the myth of the American Century, the Age of the American, or that he symbolizes the hegemony of American overreach and dominance. He is the quintessential American and the ugly American in the world of the right and the left.
Journalist Sam Tanenhaus has provided a warts-and-all look at the most consequential figure of modern conservatism who never held office. Despite its doorstop-worthy length, Tanenhaus’s book offers a masterful example of how to capture a man and his era.