The new year can be a clean slate, giving us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves as someone who reads more. While we’re trying to predict what this year will bring, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: there are some great books coming out this year. Diving into microhistory, nonfiction books that seek to address larger questions by diligently focusing on a narrow or “micro” subject, can help cut through the noise. They can be a fun and easy way to become an at-home expert while checking at least one thing off your resolutions list.
Below I’ve compiled a collection of 10 upcoming microhistories that I’m most looking forward to in order of publication.
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Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation
edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman and Susan Tacent
University of Minnesota Press, January 2025
(Tags: Environment)
Creature Needs is described by its publisher as a “polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat loss” from more than three dozen contributors, ranging from poets to scientific researchers. The book itself is not even 200 pages and is split into six parts, each of which represents a basic need: air, food, water, shelter, and so on. There are very few books that combine work across literary genres while focusing on a simple message: We must save our one and only precious Earth.
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
by Nicholas Carr
W. W. Norton, January 2025
(Tags: Technology)
This book might finally convince you to stay off social media—or at least get the apps off your phone. Nicholas Carr, author of the 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, introduces a new generation of readers to an old problem: technology is weird, pretty bad, and it doesn’t always go according to plan. From simple messaging apps to generative artificial intelligence, Carr explains how the recent “superbloom” of technology presents serious downsides to our basic communication skills and ability to understand one another. We were never meant to live in online comment sections. In under 300 pages, Carr promises to bring readers along into the murky waters of our ever expanding technological landscape.
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
by Alexander Clapp
Little, Brown, February 2025
(Tags: Garbage)
You may have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a loose raft of tens of thousands of tons of plastic debris. But do you know what happens to batteries, clothes or even food when you throw them in the trash? Author Alexander Clapp traveled across continents, jungles and trash heaps to bring to life the real, multi-billion-dollar story of what happens to our garbage. Introducing readers to people like recycling gangsters and whistleblowers, Clapp presents a frank, and frankly gross, examination of who is making money off what we throw away. He has too many journalism awards to list in his bio, so I’m optimistic this 400-page microhistory will be fun, funky and, of course, leave no dumpster undived.
Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
by Carl Zimmer
Dutton, February 2025
(Tags: Air)
Each day, you inhale 2,000 gallons of air! That’s one astonishing fact that gets weaved through Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne, which is described by its publisher as “an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.” This book promises to ask and answer questions such as: How do you conduct experiments on air quality, and how was Amelia Earhart involved? From airborne espionage and bioweapons to our latest understanding of COVID, Zimmer aims to lead readers on an exciting, surprising and eye-opening journey into the atmosphere.
The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution
by Joyce E. Chaplin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2025
(Tags: Benjamin Franklin)
We all know Benjamin Franklin invented many devices we still use today, but this book focuses on just one, the Franklin stove, and why he hoped it would change our understanding of the environment forever. Pardon the pun, but Franklin seems to have seen the forest through the trees here: he was concerned about the ever-expanding deforestation he was witnessing and wanted to adjust the flow of heat and air in our homes in the hopes of understanding more about our atmosphere. In over 400 pages, the book looks to be a fascinating and scholastic collection of research and hypotheses from a Harvard professor of early American history.
A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19
by Edna Bonhomme
Atria/One Signal Publishers, March 2025
(Tags: Pandemics)
While the urge to hide under the covers persists, it is time we expand our understanding of major illnesses to prepare for the future and this seems to be the book to do it. Edna Bonhomme follows the policy highs and lows that changed the course of six devastating diseases: cholera, HIV/AIDS, the 1918 flu, sleeping sickness, Ebola and COVID. Bonhomme seems to cover the hidden and obvious ways these pandemics exacerbated existing social ails, embedded discrimination tactics and long-held biases across these diseases. Described by its publisher as a “literary account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease,” this more than 300-page book looks like it will have us sitting up, masking up and planning ahead.
Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World
by Stephen S. Hall
Grand Central Publishing, April 2025
(Tags: Snakes)
Simply put, if you have never understood Indiana Jones’s phobia or are currently chatting about snake safety in your local Facebook group, this might just be the book for you. As the publisher notes, snakes have been praised and feared for millennia, but few books attempt to combine the breadth of the ecological, cultural and historical importance of these animals for the at-home reptile admirer. The early rave reviews from best-selling animal-loving authors such as Leila Philip (author of Beaverland) and Sy Montgomery (author of The Soul of the Octopus) make me think this might be the next favorite among my fellow nature nonfiction readers.
Earthly Materials: Journeys through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations
by Cutter Wood
Mariner Books, April 2025
(Tags: Bodily Excretions)
I’m so excited to tell everyone I know all the disgusting facts I expect to learn from this book. The publisher explains “whether it is blowing its nose, mopping sweat from its brow, or excusing itself to the restroom, the human organism is essentially porous,” which is hysterical, disturbing and fundamentally true. With nearly 400 pages broken into 13 chapters, this book isn’t for the squeamish. Hopefully for the rest of us, we’ll find out where all the urine in major cities goes and what mucus has to do with our understanding of natural selection, among other freaky facts. I hope this book leads readers like a modern Ms. Frizzle shrinking us down to check out our glands, organs and membranes all the while enjoying some scientifically backed poop jokes.
The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions
by Ersilia Vaudo. Translated by Vanessa Di Stefano
W.W. Norton, April 2025
(Tags: Astrophysics)
The best microhistories take a ginormous subject and seamlessly boil it down to a few key points, either points in time or points of interest. In this book, Ersilia Vaudo aims to take the entire field of astrophysics and bring our attention to five incredible discoveries. In “poetic prose,” Vaudo brings readers from Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of gravity to Edwin Hubble’s revelation that our universe is expanding—even including the antiparticles physicists are still not sure about. Physics can be a knotty subject that many find hard to wrap their head around, but this book might finally do just that in a breezy 200 or so pages.
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
by Katie Goh
Tin House, May 2025
(Tags: Oranges)
This book sounds like it perfectly sums up the best parts of a great microhistory: a niche topic you’ve always loved (everyone loves oranges, from emperors to school children) written by a relatively new and talented writer (the publisher copy says she grew up “queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland” I personally can’t wait to hear her take on food and culture). Described by its publisher as a book with both “research and a meditative, deeply moving encounter with the orange and the self.” This is the book I’m most looking forward to shaking me out of my winter shivers and bringing me back to springtime sweetness with some citrus and adventure.
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