1. William Schwartz’s review of The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp (Viking). “The United States government has long asserted that the Taliban actually funded itself via opium. This explanation was necessary not only to justify America’s continuing operations in Afghanistan, but also to explain why opium distribution began surging worldwide in the aughts. These events, officials claim, directly led to the opioid epidemic in America, a scourge for which we have many theoretical explanations and few concrete ones. Where, if not the Taliban, was the raw material for all these drugs coming from? From us, it appears.”


2. Holly Smith’s review of Circle of Days: A Novel by Ken Follett (Grand Central Publishing). “As in the aforementioned (and wonderfully entertaining) Kingsbridge books, Follett concerns himself in Circle of Days almost solely with action. Characters with names like Oft, Neen, Ag, Wun, Dee, Han, and Stam populate his Late Neolithic setting, an era when the Iron Age was still centuries away and syllables were scarce. Nobody evolves — bad guys stay bad, good guys stay good, hot women stay hot — but they’re fun to watch. (Listening to them is another matter; more on that in a moment.)”


3. “An Interview with Robin Allison Davis” by Alexa Blanchard. “After my cancer diagnoses, I felt it could be helpful to tell my story — an ‘American in Paris’ story by a Black woman where things don’t turn out according to plan. Black women are getting diagnosed with breast cancer at an alarming rate — and are the most likely to die from it. My book was important to me on two fronts. If I could inspire just one person to take their health seriously or to move abroad or even stay abroad when things don’t come out picture-perfect, that would make me happy.”


4. Randy Cepuch’s review of Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It by Jane Leavy (Grand Central Publishing). “The quest for those fractional advantages has dramatically changed the game over the past two decades and ended more than a few players’ careers. Pitchers, for example, are taught how to throw faster and harder, but at the cost of rarely completing nine innings and too often having to go under the knife to repair overtaxed arms. (In 2024, nearly 40 percent of big-league pitchers were candidates for ‘Tommy John’ surgery. Some, including Shohei Ohtani, have had it more than once.)”


5. Daniel de Visé’s review of A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap by Rob Reiner with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer (Gallery Books). “In fact, the jokes in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ weren’t really jokes. The humor was deadpan, and I suppose it was subtle, although I can’t imagine not laughing at it. Perhaps you needed some working knowledge of Yoko and the Beatles to find something funny in the overreaching band girlfriend who mispronounces ‘Dolby.’ Maybe only Yardbirds fans got the merciless British Invasion parody ‘Gimme Some Money’ and spotted the Jeff Beck pageboy mop atop Nigel Tufnel’s head. And maybe you had to be in a band yourself to grasp the ignominy of taking second billing to a puppet show on an amusement-park stage.”

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