October 2025 Staff PicksLike this list

18 items

• Bad Company

  Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream /

  Greenwell, Megan,

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  Reporter Greenwell became interested in private equity after such a firm bought the failing online sports magazine she wrote for and quickly mismanaged it into the ground. A fundamental difference between private equity and publicly traded companies…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Baldwin

  a Love Story

  Boggs, Nicholas, 1973-

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  Don't let the page count of this, the first biography of James Baldwin in three decades, scare you off. Using original research, archival material, and interviews, Nicholas Boggs, who co-edited the 2018 edition of Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Brittle Age

  Di Pietrantonio, Donatella,

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  Lucia lives in a rural, mountainous area of Italy. She's divorced, and her daughter Amanda has returned to the nest from college in Milan when the pandemic struck, but something else has been disturbing her. She barely leaves her room. Lucia grew up…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Careless People

  a Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

  Wynn-Williams, Sarah,

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  Wynn-Williams dishes the dirt accumulated in the six years she worked as director of global public policy at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, exposing a corporate culture in which growing the company trumps basic humanity. A lawyer from New Zealand who…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Dark Renaissance

  the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival

  Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943-

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  Greenblatt, author of the Pulitzer-winning Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare among other books, returns with a consistently interesting mix of history and biography. This book's focus is on Christopher Marlowe, the rebellious…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Famous Last Words

  a Novel

  McAllister, Gillian,

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  The protagonist in a thriller novel is traditionally either the victim or the hard-headed detective trying to get to the bottom of the story. In Famous Last Words, the protagonist, Camilla, is neither of those things. Instead she's the besotted wife…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Flower Traveled in My Blood

  the Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

  Cohen Gilliland, Haley, 1989-

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  Gilliland, a journalist who spent several years as the Argentina correspondent for The Economist, offers readers harrowing, rigorously researched, and absorbing reportage on the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose pregnant daughters and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Humanish

  What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize /|cJustin Gregg

  Gregg, Justin,

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  Science writer Gregg explores the unexpected role anthropomorphism - the propensity to see humanity in anything and everything - plays in a broad range of topics like artificial intelligence, racism, religion, ableism, and neuroscience. He also…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Influencers

  a Novel

  McLemore, Anna-Marie,

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  Everyone knows "Mother May I" Iverson, the mom blogger turned social media mogul who has made a killing profiting off the lives of her five daughters. Her viewers watched the girls grow up and were there every step of the way, from potty training to…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Lonely Crowds

  a Novel

  Wambugu, Stephanie,

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  Wambugu's captivating debut is an elegantly observant novel centered on an intense friendship that explores themes of artistic ambition, class and identity. Ruth, the daughter of working-class Kenyan immigrants, is immediately fascinated with…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Lucky Day

  Tingle, Chuck,

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  A plane crash. An exploding manhole cover. A killer monkey escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo. All of these events have a low probability of happening, but what if they all happened on the same day at the same time? This is the premise of Chuck Tingle's…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Marriage at Sea

  a True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

  Elmhirst, Sophie,

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  On the morning of March 3, 1973, drifting peacefully in the Pacific on their beloved yacht, Maralyn and Maurice Bailey are jolted by a sound like a gunshot. They are horrified to discover that a dying whale has struck the ship, creating a lethal…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Phoenix Pencil Company

  a Novel

  King, Allison,

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  In this epic yet intimate tale of family, Monica Tsai is a reclusive college freshman heavily involved in EMBRS, a journaling/social media project run by one of her professors when two pivotal things happen: her beloved grandmother, Yun, is…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Replaceable You

  Adventures in Human Anatomy

  Roach, Mary,

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  With her newest offering, New York Times best selling author Roach continues to write highly accessible and humorous popular science. This time around we learn about the parts of the human body that are replaceable, including topics such as…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Ripeness

  a Novel

  Moss, Sarah,

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  70-something Edith lives a liberated, post-divorce life in rural Ireland, but even after living there for years she feels like something of an outsider. The daughter of an English farmer and a French Jewish mother (most of whose family were sent to…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Sweet Heat

  a Novel

  Babalola, Bolu,

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  Picking up three years after Babalola's Honey & Spice, Sweet Heat reunites us with Kiki and Malakai but not as the affectionate couple we were first introduced to. They've since broken up and seem to have gone separate ways. Kiki is now working…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Things in Nature Merely Grow

  Li, Yiyun, 1972-

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  Author Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, a past One Book One Chicago selection) and her husband live with tragedy that boggles the mind. Her son Vincent committed suicide as a teenager. Then, six years later, her only other child, her son James,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• You Weren't Meant to Be Human

  White, Andrew Joseph,

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  Crane is in the service of aliens. He does the dark and bloody tasks they give him without question or complaint. The grotesque organisms manifest as a mass of writhing bugs and require regular fresh meat. Crane owes them so much, they saved him and…Read moreRead more of this annotation