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Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a white mother and black father, says on this week’s podcast that he had always “very much bought into — and really believed in — the American racial binary that says a drop of black blood makes a person black.” Williams’s new book, “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race,” was inspired by the birth of his daughter, an event, he says, that “made me rethink the way we box each other into categories. And it made me wonder what it means if I’m a black person that can have a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned daughter. What does blackness mean? What does whiteness mean, if she can be 20 percent sub-Saharan African? I wrote the book because my belief in the racial fiction kind of fell apart in that hospital room.”

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Stephen Kinzer visits the podcast this week to discuss his new book, “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control,” which details a range of mind-control experiments conducted during the Cold War. “I think I stumbled on the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century,” Kinzer says of Gottlieb. “I really have not recovered from what I learned in writing this book. I’m still shaken by it. I’m still trying to come to grips with it. It is the most extreme story I’ve ever come across in the United States.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about the books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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