“I ain’t ready to go anywhere,” writes Osbourne in the opening pages of his new memoir. “It’s good being alive. I like it. I want to be here with my family.” Given the context—Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, two weeks after the publisher announced the news of this book—it’s undeniably sad. But the rest of the text sees the Black Sabbath singer confronting the health struggles of his last years with dark humor and something approaching grace. The memoir begins in 2018; he wrote an earlier one, I Am Ozzy, in 2010. He tells of a staph infection he suffered that proved to be the start of a long, painful battle with various illnesses—soon after, he contracted a flu, which morphed into pneumonia. A spinal injury caused by a fall followed, causing him to undergo a series of surgeries and leaving him struggling with intense pain. And then there was his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the treatment of which was complicated by his longtime struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Osbourne peppers the chronicle of his final years with anecdotes from his past, growing up in Birmingham, England, and playing with—and then being fired from—Black Sabbath, and some of his most well-known antics (yes, he does address biting the heads off of a dove and a bat). He writes candidly and regretfully about the time he viciously attacked his wife, Sharon—the book is in many ways a love letter to her and his children. The memoir showcases Osbourne’s wit and charm; it’s rambling and disorganized, but so was he. It functions as both a farewell and a confession, and fans will likely find much to admire in this account. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”

High school sophomore Libby Dawson lives by herself in an Ashton, Ohio, apartment. Her mother stays with a rich boyfriend (who’s unaware she has a daughter) and gives Libby just enough money to survive. While perusing her favorite thrift store with best friend Toni Moore, Libby scores a retro tote-bag-sized denim purse. It’s big enough to carry quite a lot; the only problem is that things she puts in the purse often disappear. They pop up again eventually, as do items she’s never seen before, like a perfume bottle and an old photograph. Curious, Libby tries identifying a girl in the photo and discovers she’s been missing for 20 years. As the purse continues providing clues, Libby digs deeper and soon suspects that someone in Ashton has made sure this girl disappeared. Is Libby now putting herself in danger? Baer’s supernatural premise kicks off an absorbing whodunit and enhances the narrative’s sense of melodrama. (The purse stirs up problems in Libby’s personal life as it vanishes her homework and angers people when some items that disappear aren’t hers.) Libby is a dynamic, sympathetic protagonist; her callous mother treats her like an inconvenience, but she tells no one, not even Toni, that she’s living alone. The teen immerses herself in a sublime mystery that complements, without overshadowing, her own story. She impressively researches, does the footwork, and identifies a suspect or two, as the missing girl seemingly finds a way to communicate with Libby via objects that suddenly appear in the purse. While it’s true that Libby is mature and responsible, she also struggles with self-esteem, and it’s genuinely rewarding to see her build up her confidence (“My same old Libby. I liked the sound of that”) as the tautly-written tale rolls along.

This an exploration of why the “crackin’ breakin’ shakin’ sounds,” as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics—and fans—focus on. Making well-argued points that sometimes get lost in academic prose, Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various components—vocals, guitar, harmonica—that enhance the picture. He quotes Richard Manuel of the Band dismissing Dylan’s guitar work—“he’s a strummer”—and notes blues purists copping an attitude about his singular harmonica styles. The author occasionally references French postmodern structuralists, though his New Criticism forebears seem equally applicable to his approach, which often includes note-by-note analyses of the changes in different performances and recordings. (He also references Quora posts and other Dylan fanboy message boards in the course of these obsessive travels.) Luckily, he includes links to the snatches of songs he writes about, which should make it easier for the lay reader to follow along at home. To demonstrate the inseparability of sound and sense, Rings quotes the original notation, “Words-Music,” that Dylan used as he typed out “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in a borrowed Greenwich Village apartment, refuting the urban legend that the original draft was intended to be a poem. Liner notes are not Nobel-worthy. “Dylan’s idiosyncratic sounds are not incidental to his art, a troublesome husk we can discard once we have extracted his celebrated words,” the author writes. “Rather, his art lives in the noisy encounter between words and music.”

As the story opens, famed political philosopher Karl Marx is aboard a ship on his way to the New World. He’s fleeing a crowd of creditors, and he’s hoping for more in America than just an escape: “If the reports about the gold in California are only half true,” he writes in a letter to his wife, “I am confident I will be coming home to you and the girls as a new man, able to pay our debts and erase the shame of poverty.” Marx’s landfall is less pleasant than he had hoped; he gets mocked, tossed overboard, and stuck in deep river mud, and he’s being followed by Prussian agents of King Frederick William IV who are intent upon rifling through his papers in search of his notorious Manifesto and amusingly relay the great man’s misadventures (“We have seen nearly every day,” they breathlessly report, “how Marx drinks the local rotgut whiskey to the point of extreme gesloshment”). Marx is befriended by a teenager named Sixto, another renegade running from his past, and the two commence a series of escapades against the backdrop of 1849 California and the madness of the Gold Rush. “It seemed like half the human race was hellbent on striking it rich,” thinks Sixto, not yet aware of the crushing irony of this observation in the company of the author of The Communist Manifesto. As Carlson expertly guides his narrative to the possibility of a socialist republic in Gold Rush California, he misses no opportunities for sly humor or surprisingly touching scenes between Marx and young Sixto. The book’s irresistible comedy is reinforced by all of the letters Carlson includes from the people who are disappointed in poor, harried Marx, including his partner, Engels, and his wife, Jenny (“Don’t bother to defend the indefensible,” she writes to him. “Our marriage is, as you might put it, a dialectical wreck”).

The author opens her rabble-rousing new book at full throttle, describing the current world as “a hell-hole, slaughterhouse, and never-ending Auschwitz from the perspective of nonhumans” filled with “millions of little Hitlers, wantonly splattering blood, asserting unfettered dominance, desperately clinging to the theory that ‘might makes right,’ and deluding themselves into believing humans are the anointed ones.” This is strong stuff—necessarily so, since Laws is here proposing an entirely new set of governing principles deeply rooted in the ethos of the animal rights movement and dedicated to addressing the practical issues of free will, agency, and collective good. She points out that the world’s natural resources are dwindling due to human activities such as deforestation, grazing, and urban sprawl, with the obvious observation that this is a concern to all living beings on the planet, whether they are aware of it or not. The author describes the role of animal “advocates” who act as decision-makers in the “omniocracy” she proposes, humans who “become collectors of interest, seekers, investigators, and scouts, always open to further inquiry and passionate about evidence.” Laws is tremendously passionate and convincing about all of this; she lays out a program that certainly seems workable—in the likely impossible event that the international community would ever adopt it. “All oppression is woven together like a patchwork quilt,” she writes, making an argument that will fall on deaf ears, even though she’s entirely right; the system Laws envisions would benefit humans every bit as much as it would all of humanity’s countless victims. She movingly asks her readers to take down the artificial barriers they’ve erected to this kind of thinking and allow all other living things to “join the human on the elite side of the divide”; one can only pray she changes some minds.