First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships
and Heartbreak
Lisa A. Phillips
Rowman & Littlefield, 2025, $26.95
Coming of age, navigating the budding desire for intimacy, has never been simple. Today’s young, though they may have more information, have whole new sources of anxiety—social media, post-pandemic struggles—and whole new conversations going on about consent, gender fluidity and how to adult in a world gone rather mad. SUNY New Paltz professor and award-winning journalist Phillips, author of Unrequited: Women and Romantic Obsession combines deep reflection with rigorous reporting to craft an honest, empathetic handbook for parents who want to balance safety with respect for the journey.
Performance Anxiety
Jonathan Lerner
Resource Publications, 2024, $16
In 1964, the US was trembling on the brink of upheaval, and Hudson-based author and budding radical Lerner was trembling on the brink of adulthood—16 years old, about to face his mother’s death, decades away from fully reckoning with his queer identity. His memoir poignantly reconstructs the yearnings of early adolescence and the simmering of the early civil rights movement, employing hindsight like a jeweler’s loupe in considering the facets and intersections that shaped him. The reader may find him hard on himself, but is very unlikely to find him dull.
How the Web Won: The Inside Story of How a Motley Crew of Outsiders Hijacked the Information Superhighway and Struck a Blow for Human Freedom
Ken McCarthy
System Press, 2024, $19.95
In the early 1990s, Tivoli resident Ken McCarthy was part of a small group that drove the internet’s transformation into its current, advertising-funded free-for-all, winning out against the forces who’d have preferred it to stay niche and nonprofit and others who wanted to monopolize it as their private profitable niche, and he makes a strong case for why that outcome—no matter how annoying those pop-ups may get—was the best-case scenario. How it all went down is an epic tale, well and conversationally told, offering deep-but-accessible insight into the evolution of our information superhighway.
What Is Your BS? Exploring Belief Systems Through Hypnosis and NLP
Peter Blum
EnTranceWays, 2024, $21.95
It’s a core truth: Wherever you go, there you are, complete with the beliefs that frame your experiences in helpful or unhelpful ways. Woodstock-based hypnotherapist Blum uses an extensive toolkit that he has been refining and using for decades to help people get themselves unstuck, whether the goal is to break a simple bad habit, achieve a better golf swing, or free themselves from existential dread. Packed with anecdotes from his clinical work that illustrate technique, this is a book that demystifies the process of change for seekers and helpers alike.
The True Story of Murder Cafe: How One Family’s Plunge into Mystery Dinner Theater Made the World a Better Place
Frank Marquette
Troy Book Makers, 2024, $20
Marquette was already a middle-aged dad, living in New Mexico, when he decided to obey his strong urge to dabble in theater. That initial dabbling led him to murder mystery dinner theater and the creation of Murder Cafe, which had 11 good years in Vegas before he and wife Kristen brought the show home to his native Hudson Valley and built his current troupe. In 26 years, they’ve amazed and delighted around 100,000 people; the story of how it all went down is delightful in its own right.
This article appears in February 2025.
