Leisure Reading

"'An illuminating account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt's struggles with polio steeled him for the great struggles of the Depression and of World War II.'--Jon Meacham
'A valuable book for anyone who wants to know how adversity shapes character. By understanding how FDR became a deeper and more empathetic person, we can nurture those traits in ourselves and learn from the challenges we all face.'--Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci
In popular memory, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the quintessential political 'natural.' Born in 1882 to a wealthy, influential family and blessed with an abundance of charm and charisma, he seemed destined for high office. Yet for all his gifts, the young Roosevelt nonetheless lacked depth, empathy, and an ability to think strategically. Those qualities, so essential to his success as president, were skills he acquired during his seven-year journey through illness and recovery. Becoming FDR traces the riveting story of the struggle that forged Roosevelt's character and political ascent. Soon after contracting polio in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine, the former failed vice-presidential candidate was left paralyzed from the waist down. He spent much of the next decade trying to rehabilitate his body and adapt to the stark new reality of his life. By the time he reemerged on the national stage in 1928 as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York, his character and his abilities had been transformed. He had become compassionate and shrewd by necessity, tailoring his speeches to inspire listeners and to reach them through a new medium--radio. Suffering cemented his bond with those he once famously called 'the forgotten man.' Most crucially, he had discovered how to find hope in seemingly hopeless situation--a skill that he employed to motivate Americans through the Great Depression and World War II. The polio years were transformative, too, for the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, and for Eleanor herself, who became, at first reluctantly, her husband's surrogate at public events, and who grew to become a political and humanitarian force in her own right. Tracing the physical, political, and personal evolution of the iconic president, Becoming FDR shows how adversity can lead to greatness, and to the power to remake the world."

"The first wound for all of us who are classified as 'black' is empire. In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels. At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are 'the status quo's worst nightmare.' Dangarembga writes, 'our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains.'"

"2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist
2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee - Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)
Best-of Lists- Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) 25 Can't-Miss Books of 2019 (The Undefeated)
Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love-finding beauty and possibility in life-and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition. Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools. With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience."

"LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
A compelling memoir of social life in the queer underground of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles at a time when the manic frivolity of gay rights and bohemian creativity collided with the deadly reality of plague. DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild, eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the "subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto" ravished by AIDS in the 1980s. Includes an introduction by Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth--from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York--where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters, until AIDS threatened to destroy everything he lived for. In his introduction, award-winning essayist and novelist Alexander Chee notes, 'There's a strange love I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love what I lived through from a time that was as 'bad' as that? But as I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then it had the strength of something forged in fire.' Orloff looks past the politics of AIDS to the people on the ground, friends of his who did not survive AIDS' wrath--the boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks--remembering them not as victims, but as people who loved life, loved fun, and who were a part of the insane jigsaw of Orloff's friends. Disasterama showcases Orloff's wit and poignancy as he relays the true tale of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly disaster, and, struggled to keep the spirit of camp and radicalism alive, even as their friends lost their lives to the plague."

"'Powerful . . . a poetic meditation on how love or attempts at loving can drive us to madness.'--The Boston Globe   'We learn about the cracks in Felix's upbringing, the hurt from the breakup itself, and a pain that spans a lifetime, all through a sharp millennial voice.'--Time, 'Best Books of 2023 (So Far).' When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything--from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics--shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this exquisite and raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she'd left behind, using her childhood "dyscalculia"--a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math--as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain? Dyscalculia negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak, both romantic and familial."

"The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover," writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Barton on a whim accepted an English-teaching position in Japan. With the characteristic ambivalence of a twenty-one-year-old whose summer--and life--stretched out almost infinitely before her, she moved to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, unaware that this journey would come to define not only her career but her very understanding of her own identity. Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton's path to becoming a literary translator fluent in an incredibly difficult vernacular. From "min-min," the sound of air screaming, to "jin-jin," the sound of being touched for the first time, Barton analyzes these and countless other foreign sounds and phrases as a means of reflecting on various cultural attitudes, including the nuances of conformity and the challenges of being an outsider in what many consider a hermetically sealed society. In a tour-de-force of lyrical, playful prose, Barton recalls the stifling humidity that first greeted her on the island along with the incessant hum of peculiar new noises. As Barton taught English to inquisitive middle school children, she studied the basics of Japanese in an inverse way, beginning with simple nouns and phrases, such as "cat," "dog," and "Hello, my name is." But when it came to surrounding herself in the culture, simply mastering the basics wasn't enough. Japanese, Barton learned, has three scripts: the phonetic katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana) and kanji (characters of Chinese origin). Despite her months-long immersion in the language, a word would occasionally produce a sinking feeling and send her sifting through her dictionaries to find the exact meaning. But this is precisely how Barton has come to define language learning: "It is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling." Engaging and penetrating, Fifty Sounds chronicles everything from Barton's most hilarious misinterpretations to her new friends and lovers in Tokyo --and even the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's transformative philosophy. A classic in the making in the tradition of Anne Carson and Rachel Cusk, Fifty Sounds is a celebration of the empowering act of learning to communicate in any new language.

"*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
Winner of the Martin Cruz Smith Award (CALIBA) 2024 Council for Opportunity in Education National Book Club Selection
Longlisted for the Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award for First Year Experience 
An unflinching memoir and 'invaluable resource' (Kirkus) about navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina--offering both a riveting personal story and an examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. Alejandra Campoverdi has been a child on welfare, a White House aide to President Obama, a Harvard graduate, a gang member's girlfriend, and a candidate for U.S. Congress. She's ridden on Air Force One and in G-rides. She's been featured in Maxim magazine and had a double mastectomy. Living a life of contradictory extremes often comes with the territory when you're a "First and Only." It also comes at a price.   With candor and heart, Alejandra retraces her trajectory as a Mexican American woman raised by an immigrant single mother in Los Angeles. Foregoing the tidy bullet points of her resume and instead shining a light on the spaces between them, what emerges is a powerful testimony that shatters the one-dimensional glossy narrative we are often sold of what it takes to achieve the American Dream. In this timely and revealing reflection, Alejandra draws from her own experiences to name and frame the challenges First and Onlys often face, illuminating a road to truth, healing, and change in the process.   Part memoir, part manifesto, FIRST GEN is a story of generational inheritance, aspiration, and the true meaning of belonging--a gripping journey to 'reclaim the parts of ourselves we sacrificed in order to survive.'"

"The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage. Haben grew up spending summers with her family in the enchanting Eritrean city of Asmara. There, she discovered courage as she faced off against a bull she couldn't see, and found in herself an abiding strength as she absorbed her parents' harrowing experiences during Eritrea's thirty-year war with Ethiopia. Their refugee story inspired her to embark on a quest for knowledge, traveling the world in search of the secret to belonging. She explored numerous fascinating places, including Mali, where she helped build a school under the scorching Saharan sun. Her many adventures over the years range from the hair-raising to the hilarious. Haben defines disability as an opportunity for innovation. She learned non-visual techniques for everything from dancing salsa to handling an electric saw. She developed a text-to-braille communication system that created an exciting new way to connect with people. Haben pioneered her way through obstacles, graduated from Harvard Law, and now uses her talents to advocate for people with disabilities. Haben takes readers through a thrilling game of blind hide-and-seek in Louisiana, a treacherous climb up an iceberg in Alaska, and a magical moment with President Obama at The White House. Warm, funny, thoughtful, and uplifting, this captivating memoir is a testament to one woman's determination to find the keys to connection.
'This autobiography by a millennial Helen Keller teems with grace and grit.' -- O Magazine
'A profoundly important memoir.' -- The Times
As featured in The Wall Street Journal, People, and on The TODAY Show
A New York Times 'New & Noteworthy' Pick
An O Magazine 'Book of the Month' Pick
A Publishers Weekly Bestseller"

"A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this "raw and relatable memoir that challenges societal norms and expectations" (Linah Mohammad, NPR).
"A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart."--Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed
AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK * WINNER: The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the Stonewall Book Award, the Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Autostraddle, Book Riot, BookPage, Harper's Bazaar, Electric Lit, She Reads
When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?   From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.   This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life."

"Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as 'masterful' by Roxane Gay, 'incendiary' by the New York Times, and 'brilliant' by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he's sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing ​-- ​Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley ​-- ​the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, Paris Review, Mother Jones,The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books
Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography"

"A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman--through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be."

"NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST *
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK *
'A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister's murderer to justice years after the fact' (The Boston Globe), from 'one of Mexico's greatest living writers' (Jonathan Lethem).   'Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza's chronicle is both personal and political.'--The Washington Post
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads, Electric Lit
October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. 'My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,' she writes in her request to the attorney general, 'and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.' It's been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer is the account--and the outcome--of that quest . In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister's history, depicting everything from Liliana's early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence--handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana's loved ones--to document her sister's life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today."

"A collection of thirty heartfelt, witty, and hopeful thought pieces on the experience of growing up Asian American, for fans of Minor Feelings. There are 23 million people, representing more than twenty countries, each with unique languages, histories, and cultures, clumped under one banner: Asian American. Though their experiences are individual, certain commonalities appear. -The pressure to perform and the weight of the model minority myth. -The proximity to whiteness (for many) and the resulting privileges. -The desexualizing, exoticizing, and fetishizing of their bodies. -The microaggressions. -The erasure and overt racism. Through a series of essays, poems, and comics, thirty creators give voice to moments that defined them and shed light on the immense diversity and complexity of the Asian American identity. Edited by CAPE and with an introduction by renowned journalist SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America is a celebration of community, a call to action, and a road map for a brighter future. Featuring contributions from bestselling authors Melissa de la Cruz, Marie Lu, and Tanaïs; journalists Amna Nawaz, Edmund Lee, and Aisha Sultan; TV and film writers Teresa Hsiao, Heather Jeng Bladt, and Nathan Ramos-Park; and industry leaders Ellen K. Pao and Aneesh Raman, among many more."

"From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: 'With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief ... captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you'd rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie's words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided' (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father's death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.    Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page--and never without touches of rich, honest humor--Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father's death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he'd stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book--a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment--a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever--and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon."

"With humor and grace, the memoir of a first-generation Chinese American in New York City. Our Laundry, Our Town is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng's upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Back then, his family was one of the few immigrant Chinese families in a far-flung neighborhood in New York City. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese hand laundry. From behind the counter of his parents' laundry and within the confines of a household that was rooted in a different century and culture, he sought to reconcile this insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life that was all around them--from the faux martial arts of TV's Kung Fu to the burgeoning underworld of the punk rock scene. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the counterculture and civil rights movements. And by the 1980s, Flushing had become NYC's second Chinatown. But Eng remained one of the neighborhood's few Chinese citizens who did not speak fluent Chinese. Finding his way in the downtown theater and performance world of Manhattan, he discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder's foundational Americana drama, Our Town. This discovery became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China--his ancestral home in southern China--that led to writing and performing his successful autobiographical monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing. Learning to tell his own story on stages around the world was what proudly made him whole. As cities, classrooms, cultures, and communities the world over continue to re-examine the parameters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, Our Laundry, Our Town will reverberate with a broad readership."

"Pacifist Prophet recounts the untold history of peaceable Native Americans in the eighteenth century, as explored through the world of Papunhank (ca. 1705-75), a Munsee and Moravian prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat. Papunhank's life was dominated by a search for a peaceful homeland in Pennsylvania and the Ohio country amid the upheavals of the era between the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. His efforts paralleled other Indian quests for autonomy but with a crucial twist: he was a pacifist committed to using only nonviolent means. Such an approach countered the messages of other Native prophets and ran against the tide in an early American world increasingly wrecked with violence, racial hatred, and political turmoil. Nevertheless, Papunhank was not alone. He followed and contributed to a longer and wider indigenous peace tradition. Richard W. Pointer shows how Papunhank pushed beyond the pragmatic pacifism of other Indians and developed from indigenous and Christian influences a principled pacifism that became the driving force of his life and leadership. Hundreds of Native people embraced his call to be 'a great Lover of Peace' in their quests for home. Against formidable odds, Papunhank's prophetic message spoke boldly to Euro-American and Native centers of power and kept many Indians alive during a time when their very survival was constantly threatened. Papunhank's story sheds critical new light on the responses of some Munsees, Delawares, Mahicans, Nanticokes, and Conoys for whom the 'way of war' was no way at all."

"A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making--from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times * NPR * The Guardian * Marie Claire
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune's Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective--the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of "hope and change," and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day."

"A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the Season
The work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making. The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family. Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one's unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one's own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom."

"FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION
Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement--in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana--all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge whole from his odyssey within America's prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit, and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the U.S. and around the world. Arrested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Albert was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement by the warden. Without a shred of actual evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice that gave them life sentences in solitary. Decades passed before Albert gained a lawyer of consequence; even so, sixteen more years and multiple appeals were needed before he was finally released in February 2016. Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds."

"PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu
'This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.' --Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging."

"Who's really behind America's appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen--a queer, brown child of immigrants--reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what's on their plate--and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible."

"'An insightful, unflinching portrayal of the remarkable siblings who came closer to altering the course of American history than any other Indian leaders.'--Professor H.W. Brands, author of The Zealot and the Emancipator
The first biography of the great Shawnee leader to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But award-winning historian Peter Cozzens now shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader--admired by the same white Americans he opposed--it was Tenskwatawa, called the "Shawnee Prophet," who created a vital doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest. Detailed research of Native American society and customs provides a window into a world often erased from history books and reveals how both men came to power in different but no less important ways. Cozzens brings us to the forefront of the chaos and violence that characterized the young American Republic, when settlers spilled across the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the British in the War of Independence, disregarding their rightful Indian owners. Tecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat--the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the annals of America."

"Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides--after fourteen years of silence--to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person. Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. Unflinching and courageous, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships--a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions, push towards deeper understanding, and continue a necessary and long overdue conversation."

"Black women physicians' stories have gone untold for far too long, leaving gaping holes in American medical history, in women's history, and in black history. It's time to set the record straight No real account of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school. Brown champions these black women physicians, including the stories of: · Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated from medical school only fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and provided medical care for the newly freed slaves who had been neglected and exploited by the medical system. · Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to attend a previously white-only medical school in the Jim Crow South, where she was not allowed to eat lunch with her classmates or use the women's bathroom. Still, Dr. Irby Jones persisted and graduated from medical school, going on to directly inspire other black women to pursue medicine such as . . . · Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who, after meeting Dr. Irby Jones, changed her career ambitions from becoming a Dillard's salesclerk to becoming a doctor. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Elders as the US surgeon general, making her the first African American and second woman to hold this position. Brown tells the stories of these doctors from the perspective of a black woman in medicine. Her journey as a medical student already has parallels to those of black women who entered medicine generations before her. What she uncovers about these women's struggles, their need to work twice as hard and be twice as good, and their ultimate success serves as instruction and inspiration for new generations considering a career in medicine or science."

"One night in 2009, Tanya Frank finds her nineteen-year-old son, Zach--gentle and full of promise--in the grip of what the psychiatrists would label a psychotic break. Suddenly and inexplicably, Tanya is thrown into a parallel universe: Zach's world, where the phones are bugged, his friends have joined the Mafia, and helicopters are spying on his family. In the years following Zach's shifting psychiatric diagnoses, Tanya goes to war for her son, desperate to find the right answer, the right drug, the right doctor to bring him back to reality. She struggles to navigate archaic mental healthcare systems, first in California and then in her native London during lockdown. Meanwhile, the boy she raised--the chatty, precocious dog-lover, the teenager who spent summers surfing with his big brother, the UCLA student--suffers the effects of multiple hospitalizations, powerful drugs that blunt his emotions, therapies that don't work, and torturous nights on the streets. Holding on to startling moments of hope and seeking solace in nature and community, Tanya learns how to abandon her fears for the future and accept the mysteries of her son's altered states. With tenderness, lyricism, and generous candor, this compelling story conveys the power of a mother's love. Zig-Zag Boy is both a moving lamentation for things lost and a brave testament to the people we become in difficult circumstances."

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER We still have time to change the world. From climate activist Greta Thunberg, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late. In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Throughout, illuminating and often shocking grayscale charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations underscore their research and their arguments. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

"An impassioned generational perspective on why climate anxiety is completely natural and necessary, and how we can be stronger for it. Climate and environment-related fears and anxieties are on the rise everywhere, with few resources to address them. As with any type of stress, eco-anxiety can lead to paralysis, burnout and avoidance. In Generation Dread, Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these complicated feelings are a sign of our humanity, and acknowledging and valuing them is key to making it through present and future crises. This isn't a simple process, and it's not a level playing field when it comes to our vulnerability, she notes. However, with the worsening situation, we are all on the field--and unlocking deep stores of compassion and care is a crucial step in healing our relationship to the planet and each other. With openness and curiosity, Britt explores her own fears about starting a family when evidence of dangerous environmental shifts creates an especially bleak picture of what lies ahead. Weaving in • valuable insights from climate-aware therapists; • reflections on the emotional impact of ecological catastrophes; • critical perspectives on the role of race and privilege in this crisis; • ideas about the future of mental health innovation; • and creative coping strategies to foster connection, meaning and resilience, Generation Dread brilliantly illuminates how we can learn from the past, from our own emotions, and from each other to survive--and even thrive--in a changing world."

We are facing a species emergency. With every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced from the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we must do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. From Bangladesh to Sudan to the western United States, and in cities from Cardiff to New Orleans to Shanghai, the quadruple threat of drought, heat, wildfires and flooding will utterly reshape Earth's human geography in the coming decades.
In this rousing call to arms, Royal Society Science Book Prize-winning author Gaia Vince describes how we can plan for and manage this unavoidable climate migration while we restore the planet to a fully habitable state. The vital message of this book is that migration is not the problem - it's the solution. Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening data and original reporting, Vince shows how migration brings benefits not only to migrants themselves, but to host countries, many of which face demographic crises and labour shortages. As Vince describes, we will need to move northwards as a species, into the habitable fringes of Europe, Asia and Canada and the greening Arctic circle.

"An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit ("the voice of the resistance"--New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present--and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. These dispatches from the climate movement around the world feature the voices of organizers like Guam-based lawyer and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists like Dr. Jacquelyn Gill and Dr. Edward Carr; poets like Marshall Islands activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijner; and longtime organizers like The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz. Guided by Rebecca Solnit's typical clear-eyed wisdom and enriched by photographs and quotes, Not Too Late leads readers from discouragement to possibilities, from climate despair to climate hope."

"A new and urgently needed guide to making the American economy more competitive at a time when tech giants have amassed vast market power. The U.S. economy is growing less competitive. Large businesses increasingly profit by taking advantage of their customers and suppliers. These firms can also use sophisticated pricing algorithms and customer data to secure substantial and persistent advantages over smaller players. In our new Gilded Age, the likes of Google and Amazon fill the roles of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Jonathan Baker shows how business practices harming competition manage to go unchecked. The law has fallen behind technology, but that is not the only problem. Inspired by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and the "Chicago school," the Supreme Court has, since the Reagan years, steadily eroded the protections of antitrust. The Antitrust Paradigm demonstrates that Chicago-style reforms intended to unleash competitive enterprise have instead inflated market power, harming the welfare of workers and consumers, squelching innovation, and reducing overall economic growth. Baker identifies the errors in economic arguments for staying the course and advocates for a middle path between laissez-faire and forced deconcentration: the revival of pro-competitive economic regulation, of which antitrust has long been the backbone. Drawing on the latest in empirical and theoretical economics to defend the benefits of antitrust, Baker shows how enforcement and jurisprudence can be updated for the high-tech economy. His prescription is straightforward. The sooner courts and the antitrust enforcement agencies stop listening to the Chicago school and start paying attention to modern economics, the sooner Americans will reap the benefits of competition."

"AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * 
This fascinating deep dive into one of the most powerful and least understood American institutions--the Federal Reserve--is "a riveting narrative...[and] an invaluable guide to the monetary policy debates of the last few years" (Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance).
"The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing." -Kirkus
The marble halls of the Federal Reserve have always held secrets; for decades the Fed did the utmost to preserve its room to maneuver, operating behind the scenes as much as possible. Yet over the past two decades, this elite world of bankers and economists speaking a language that only monetary experts could understand has been forced to change its ways. Amid rising inequality, weakening global economic prospects, and a pandemic, the central bank has entered into a new era of transparency and activism that has changed its role in modern society in subtle but remarkable ways. Limitless tells the inside story of this deeply impactful transformation, and what it means for ordinary Americans. Focusing on characters such as the Fed chairman Jerome Powell; the Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles; Vice Chair Lael Brainard; the Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari; and the long-ago Fed Chair Marriner S. Eccles--and driven by the rising tension between Main Street and Wall Street--this is a page-turning account of the modern Fed's inner workings during a crucial inflection point in history."

"A comprehensive plan from two leading experts on how to fix America's outdated retirement system America's retirement system has serious problems. While it works well for some retirees, millions of others don't have the sound retirement they have worked decades to secure. Roughly 40 percent of today's $4 trillion federal budget is devoted to supporting retirees, which will grow to roughly half over the next decade--imperiling the sustainability of the whole system. The system is out of date. It reflects the America of a bygone age--an era in which company or union pensions provided middle-class families a decent standard of living in retirement. In America today, however, private pensions have mostly disappeared, Social Security is threatened to go insolvent, people are living longer, and health care costs continue to rise. Poorer retirees now must choose between buying enough to eat and their prescription drugs. In The Retirement Challenge, influential former White House economists Martin Neil Baily and Benjamin H. Harris explore America's outdated retirement system and explain how improving retirement requires changes by families, employers, and policymakers alike. Households need to save more, get smarter about their finances, and trade part of their 401(k) balances for insurance products. Companies need to take a more active role in their workers' retirements. And lawmakers need to amend the tax code, Social Security, and a host of other programs. Despite today's wide political divide, policymakers from both parties can come together around changes that will promote a stable retirement. This book shows that these changes do not represent a radical overhaul. If families, businesses, and policymakers do their part, everyone--current retirees and future generations--can enjoy a much more secure and prosperous retirement."

An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world's leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied "A magisterial history."--Paul Krugman Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia.Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

"Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022
Behavioral Scientist, Notable Books of 2022
The facts, not the fiction, of America's immigration experience. Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse--yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including: Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents - a pattern that has held for more than a century. Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest. Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population. Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born--the people politicians are trying to protect. Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the "golden era" of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided."

"#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine's award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation's founding and construction--and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander * Michelle Alexander * Carol Anderson * Joshua Bennett * Reginald Dwayne Betts * Jamelle Bouie * Anthea Butler * Matthew Desmond * Rita Dove * Camille T. Dungy * Cornelius Eady * Eve L. Ewing * Nikky Finney * Vievee Francis * Yaa Gyasi * Forrest Hamer * Terrance Hayes * Kimberly Annece Henderson * Jeneen Interlandi * Honorée Fanonne Jeffers * Barry Jenkins * Tyehimba Jess * Martha S. Jones * Robert Jones, Jr. * A. Van Jordan * Ibram X. Kendi * Eddie Kendricks * Yusef Komunyakaa * Kevin M. Kruse * Kiese Laymon * Trymaine Lee * Jasmine Mans * Terry McMillan * Tiya Miles * Wesley Morris * Khalil Gibran Muhammad * Lynn Nottage * ZZ Packer * Gregory Pardlo * Darryl Pinckney * Claudia Rankine * Jason Reynolds * Dorothy Roberts * Sonia Sanchez * Tim Seibles * Evie Shockley * Clint Smith * Danez Smith * Patricia Smith * Tracy K. Smith * Bryan Stevenson * Nafissa Thompson-Spires * Natasha Trethewey * Linda Villarosa * Jesmyn Ward"

"A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent.
One of the Best History Books of 2021 -- Smithsonian.
Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as 'Africans' and those called 'Europeans.' She gives equal attention to the most prominent figures--like Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence thought to have been born to a free African woman in a Roman village--and the untold stories--like the lives of dual-heritage families in Europe's coastal trading towns.   African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come."

"Completed in 1931, New York's Waldorf-Astoria towers over Park Avenue as an international landmark and a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture. A symbol of elegance and luxury, the hotel has hosted countless movie stars, business tycoons, and world leaders over the past ninety years.   American Hotel takes us behind the glittering image to reveal the full extent of the Waldorf's contribution toward shaping twentieth-century life and culture. Historian David Freeland examines the Waldorf from the opening of its first location in 1893 through its rise to a place of influence on the local, national, and international stage. Along the way, he explores how the hotel's mission to provide hospitality to a diverse range of guests was put to the test by events such as Prohibition, the anticommunist Red Scare, and civil rights struggles.    Alongside famous guests like Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and Eleanor Roosevelt, readers will meet the lesser-known men and women who made the Waldorf a leader in the hotel industry and a key setting for international events. American Hotel chronicles how institutions such as the Waldorf-Astoria played an essential role in New York's growth as a world capital."

"An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century."

"'The beauty and levity that Perry and Gabriele have captured in this book are what I think will help it to become a standard text for general audiences for years to come....The Bright Ages is a rare thing--a nuanced historical work that almost anyone can enjoy reading.'--Slate.
'Incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.' --The Boston Globe.
A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality--a brilliant reflection of humanity itself. The word 'medieval' conjures images of the 'Dark Ages'--centuries of ignorance, superstition, stasis, savagery, and poor hygiene. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors.  The Bright Ages takes us through ten centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them. We look with fresh eyes on the Fall of Rome, Charlemagne, the Vikings, the Crusades, and the Black Death, but also to the multi-religious experience of Iberia, the rise of Byzantium, and the genius of Hildegard and the power of queens. We begin under a blanket of golden stars constructed by an empress with Germanic, Roman, Spanish, Byzantine, and Christian bloodlines and end nearly 1,000 years later with the poet Dante--inspired by that same twinkling celestial canopy--writing an epic saga of heaven and hell that endures as a masterpiece of literature today.   The Bright Ages reminds us just how permeable our manmade borders have always been and of what possible worlds the past has always made available to us. The Middle Ages may have been a world "lit only by fire" but it was one whose torches illuminated the magnificent rose windows of cathedrals, even as they stoked the pyres of accused heretics.   The Bright Ages contains an 8-page color insert."

"Winner of the DAR Excellence in American History Book Award
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
'Cogent, lucid, and concise...indispensable guide to the creation of the cabinet. With her groundbreaking study, we can now have a much greater appreciation of...one of the major legacies of George Washington's enlightened statecraft.' --Ron Chernow, author of Washington: A Life
The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet--the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government? On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries--Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph--for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges--and finding congressional help lacking--Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. In the early days, the cabinet served at the president's pleasure. Washington tinkered with its structure throughout his administration, at times calling regular meetings, at other times preferring written advice and individual discussions. Lindsay M. Chervinsky reveals the far-reaching consequences of Washington's choice. The tensions in the cabinet between Hamilton and Jefferson heightened partisanship and contributed to the development of the first party system. And as Washington faced an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, he came to treat the cabinet as a private advisory body to summon as needed, greatly expanding the role of the president and the executive branch."

"A New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize
Named a best book of the year by The Guardian
'Enthralling. Harrowing. Heartbreaking. And utterly redemptive. Lindsey Fitzharris hit this one out of the park.' --Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War's injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery. From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: humankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits. The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror."

"Who set the mysterious fire that burned down much of New York City shortly after the British took the city during the Revolutionary War? New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown's forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground. This is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

"In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews--pillars of an embattled community--invested their fortunes in France's cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country's army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt--the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers--McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of 'invading' France's cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind--many ultimately donated to the French state--were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them."

"Juneteenth has been touted as a national day celebrating the end of slavery. Observances from coast to coast have turned this event into part of the national conversation about race, slavery, and how Americans understand, acknowledge, and explain what has been called the national "original sin." But, why Juneteenth? Where did this celebration--which promises to become a national holiday--come from? What is the origin story? What are the facts, and legends, around this important day in the nation's history? This is the first scholarly book to delve into the history behind Juneteenth. Using decades of research in archives around the nation, this book helps separate myth from reality and tells the story behind the celebration in a way that provides new understanding and appreciation for the event. This book will captivate people interested in the history of emancipation and African American history but also those interested in Civil War and Texas history. As the United States continues to wrestle with race relations and the meaning of full equality, Juneteenth promises to become an important expression of that equality--an Independence Day celebration in its own right, a couple of weeks in advance of the traditional July 4th Holiday. This book will be a welcome addition to classrooms, book clubs and general readers interested in this once obscure regional event now destined for the national spotlight."

"WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE
A prize-winning historian's 'effervescent' (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism
'High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen's all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.'--Financial Times
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud--a memoir about his son's death from cancer--but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red, about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close."

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Churchill and Napoleon. The last king of America, George III, has been ridiculed as a complete disaster who frittered away the colonies and went mad in his old age. The truth is much more nuanced and fascinating--and will completely change the way readers and historians view his reign and legacy. Most Americans dismiss George III as a buffoon--a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities. The best-known modern interpretation of him is Jonathan Groff's preening, spitting, and pompous take in Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway masterpiece. But this deeply unflattering characterization is rooted in the prejudiced and brilliantly persuasive opinions of eighteenth-century revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who needed to make the king appear evil in order to achieve their own political aims. After combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of never-before-published correspondence, award-winning historian Andrew Roberts has uncovered the truth: George III was in fact a wise, humane, and even enlightened monarch who was beset by talented enemies, debilitating mental illness, incompetent ministers, and disastrous luck. In The Last King of America, Roberts paints a deft and nuanced portrait of the much-maligned monarch and outlines his accomplishments, which have been almost universally forgotten. Two hundred and forty-five years after the end of George III's American rule, it is time for Americans to look back on their last king with greater understanding: to see him as he was and to come to terms with the last time they were ruled by a monarch."

"New York Times Bestseller The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as "his" slave. In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North. Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day--among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again--this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher. With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story--one that would challenge the nation's core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all--one that challenges us even now".

"The history of New York City's urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city's geographic edges--the coastlines and waterways--and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it."

"Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed--herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s--forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story.Reworking the traditional "Alamo" framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself.In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing."

"An accusation of attempted murder rudely interrupted Mary Arnold's dalliances with working men and her extensive shopping sprees. When her husband Benedict fell deathly ill and then asserted she had tried to kill him with poison, the result was a dramatic petition for divorce. The case before the Rhode Island General Assembly and its tumultuous aftermath, during which Benedict died, made Mary a cause célèbre in Newport through the winter of 1738 and 1739. Elaine Forman Crane invites readers into the salacious domestic life of Mary and Benedict Arnold and reveals the seamy side of colonial Newport. The surprise of The Poison Plot, however, is not the outrageous acts of Mary or the peculiar fact that attempted murder was not a convictable offense in Rhode Island. As Crane shows with style, Mary?s case was remarkable precisely because adultery, criminality and theft, and even spousal homicide were well known in the New England colonies. Assumptions of Puritan propriety are overturned by the facts of rough and tumble life in a port city: money was to be made, pleasure was to be had, and if marriage became an obstacle to those pursuits a woman had means to set things right. The Poison Plot is an intimate drama constructed from historical documents and informed by Crane?s deep knowledge of elite and common life in Newport. Her keen eye for telling details and her sense of story bring Mary, Benedict, and a host of other characters?including her partner in adultery, Walter Motley, and John Tweedy the apothecary who sold Mary toxic drugs?to life in the homes, streets, and shops of the port city. The result is a vivid tale that will change minds about life in supposedly prim and proper New England."

"'An engrossing look at the human side of Benjamin Franklin . . . Using a post-feminist lens that's critical of gender essentialism, Stuart rescues these women from obscurity . . . This is a terrific read- poignant, provocative, and probing.' -Library Journal, Starred Review
A vivid portrait of the women who loved, nurtured, and defended America's famous scientist and founding father. Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin-the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era-but not about his love life. Poor Richard's Women reveals the long-neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England. Weaving detailed historical research with emotional intensity and personal testimony, Nancy Rubin Stuart traces Deborah's life and those of Ben's other romantic attachments through their personal correspondence. We are introduced to Margaret Stevenson, the widowed landlady who managed Ben's life in London; Catherine Ray, the 23-year-old New Englander with whom he traveled overnight and later exchanged passionate letters; Madame Brillon, the beautiful French musician who flirted shamelessly with him, and the witty Madame Helvetius, who befriended the philosophes of pre-Revolutionary France and brought Ben to his knees. What emerges from Stuart's pen is a colorful and poignant portrait of women in the age of revolution. Set two centuries before the rise of feminism, Poor Richard's Women depicts the feisty, often-forgotten women dear to Ben's heart who, despite obstacles, achieved an independence rarely enjoyed by their peers in that era."

"In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude. Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression. Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York."

"Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story.In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the "First Thanksgiving." The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war--tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving."

"'Inspiring. Exhilarating. Astonishing. An epic tale of brotherhood, ingenuity, and survival.' -Heather Dune Macadam, International Bestselling author of 999- The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz
Told through meticulous interviews with his son, this is an extraordinary memoir of endurance, faith, and a unique skill that kept three brothers together-and alive-during the darkest times of World War II.
'A truly extraordinary book.' -Damien Lewis, #1 international bestselling author
Harry Lenga was born to a family of Chassidic Jews in Kozhnitz, Poland. The proud sons of a watchmaker, Harry and his two brothers, Mailekh and Moishe, studied their father's trade at a young age. Upon the German invasion of Poland, when the Lenga family was upended, Harry and his brothers never anticipated that the tools acquired from their father would be the key to their survival. Under the most devastating conditions imaginable-with death always imminent-fixing watches for the Germans in the ghettos and brutal slave labor camps of occupied Poland and Austria bought their lives over and over again. From Wolanow and Starachowice to Auschwitz and Ebensee, Harry, Mailekh, and Moishe endured, bartered, worked, prayed, and lived to see liberation. Derived from more than a decade of interviews with Harry Lenga, conducted by his own son Scott and others, The Watchmakers is Harry's heartening and unflinchingly honest first-person account of his childhood, the lessons learned from his own father, his harrowing tribulations, and his inspiring life before, during, and after the war. It is a singular and vital story, told from one generation to the next-and a profoundly moving tribute to brotherhood, fatherhood, family, and faith.
'Deeply moving.' -Jesse Kellerman, bestselling author
'Vivid and compelling.' -Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Ordinary Men
2022 National Jewish Book Award Finalist"

"Yang Jisheng's The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality."

"WALL STREET JOURNAL BOOK OF THE MONTH
'This is the incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain's most secretive special-forces unit--but whose story has gone untold until now.' --Wall Street Journal
'Brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees--a top-secret band of brothers--who waged war on Hitler.'--Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The Longest Winter and The Liberator
The incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain's most secretive special-forces unit--but whose story has gone untold until now. June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes--their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad. Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp--the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis."
'Garrett's detective work is stunning, and her storytelling is masterful. This is an original account of Jewish rescue, resistance, and revenge.'--Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine and National Book Award finalist Hitler's Furies"

"Instant New York Times Bestseller
'Inspiration leaps off the pages from Jerry Saltz's new book on creativity. . . . This book is for the artist or non-artist, for the person who gets plain English, for the person who understands that practical talk can coax out the mystical messages that lie underneath.' --Steve Martin
Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world's most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds. From the first sparks of inspiration--and how to pursue them without giving in to self-doubt--Saltz offers invaluable insight into what really matters to emerging artists: originality, persistence, a balance between knowledge and intuition, and that most precious of qualities, self-belief. Brimming with rules, prompts, and practical tips, How to Be an Artist gives artists new ways to break through creative blocks, get the most from materials, navigate career challenges, and above all find joy in the work. Teeming with full-color artwork from visionaries ancient and modern, this beautiful and useful book will help artists of all kinds--painters, photographers, writers, performers--realize their dreams."

"Packed with professional tips and interviews with leading graphic novelists, this is the ultimate guide on how to create a graphic novel. How to Draw a Graphic Novel is structured as a series of short art courses that combine technical advice with creative inspiration. Written by graphic novel producer Balthazar Pagani, the book includes lessons in how to construct a narrative, develop characters, design settings, as well as the basics of printing, binding and digital file set-up. Each lesson is supported by striking illustrations by graphic novel artist Marco Maraggi, and professional artworking tips are delivered in the style of a graphic novel by renowned Italian cartoonist and comics lecturer Otto Gabos. The book also includes biographies of and interviews with cult creators who share insights into their working process as well as work from their sketchbooks. Featuring reproductions and a recommended reading list of famous graphic novels and comic books past and present, this is the ideal workbook for all aspiring graphic novelists."

"NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND THE ECONOMIST
'Life Is Hard is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.' --The New York Times Book Review
There is no cure for the human condition: life is hard. But Kieran Setiya believes philosophy can help. He offers us a map for navigating rough terrain, from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world.  In this profound and personal book, Setiya shows how the tools of philosophy can help us find our way. Drawing on ancient and modern philosophy as well as fiction, history, memoir, film, comedy, social science, and stories from Setiya's own experience, Life Is Hard is a book for this moment--a work of solace and compassion. Warm, accessible, and good-humored, this book is about making the best of a bad lot. It offers guidance for coping with pain and making new friends, for grieving the lost and failing with grace, for confronting injustice and searching for meaning in life. Countering pop psychologists and online influencers who admonish us to "find our bliss" and "live our best lives," Setiya acknowledges that the best is often out of reach. Instead, he asks how we can weather life's adversities, finding hope and living well when life is hard."

"Bursting with passion and humor, The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate is a treasure trove for allies to the LGBTQ+ communities. This fully revised second edition includes: The most current information on identities and LGBTQ+ language Tips for respectfully sharing, gathering, and using pronouns LGBTQ+ etiquette, including common language bloopers toavoid Tools for navigating difficult conversations Best practices for creating LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces Appropriate actions to take after messing up Techniques for self-care and sustainable allyship The Savvy Ally is a vital resource for teachers, mental health professionals, healthcare providers, college professors, faith leaders, family members, and friends who want to support and advocate for the LGBTQ+ people in their lives and help make the world a safer, more inclusive place. This informative, encouraging, and easy-to-understand guidebook will jump-start even the most tentative ally. 100% of the royalties from the first year of sales of this 2nd edition will be donated to nonprofit organizations working to build a safer and more inclusive world for LGBTQ+ people."

"A Living Now Book Awards Gold Medalist, Social Activism/Charity
A practical, shame-free guide for navigating conversations across our differences at a time of rapid social change. In the current period of social and political unrest, conversations about identity are becoming more frequent and more difficult. On subjects like critical race theory, gender equity in the workplace, and LGBTQ-inclusive classrooms, many of us are understandably fearful of saying the wrong thing. That fear can sometimes prevent us from speaking up at all, depriving people from marginalized groups of support and stalling progress toward a more just and inclusive society. Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, are here to show potential allies that these conversations don't have to be so overwhelming. Through stories drawn from contexts as varied as social media posts, dinner party conversations, and workplace disputes, they offer seven user-friendly principles that teach skills such as how to avoid common conversational pitfalls, engage in respectful disagreement, offer authentic apologies, and better support people in our lives who experience bias. Research-backed, accessible, and uplifting, Say the Right Thing charts a pathway out of cancel culture toward more meaningful and empathetic dialogue on issues of identity. It also gives us the practical tools to do good in our spheres of influence. Whether managing diverse teams at work, navigating issues of inclusion at college, or challenging biased comments at a family barbecue, Yoshino and Glasgow help us move from unconsciously hurting people to consciously helping them."

"Named one of 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 by Thinkers50
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller
"...this guide provides readers with much more than just early careers advice; it can help everyone from interns to CEOs." -- a Financial Times top title
You've landed a job. Now what? No one tells you how to navigate your first day in a new role. No one tells you how to take ownership, manage expectations, or handle workplace politics. No one tells you how to get promoted. The answers to these professional unknowns lie in the unspoken rules--the certain ways of doing things that managers expect but don't explain and that top performers do but don't realize. The problem is, these rules aren't taught in school. Instead, they get passed down over dinner or from mentor to mentee, making for an unlevel playing field, with the insiders getting ahead and the outsiders stumbling along through trial and error. Until now. In this practical guide, Gorick Ng, a first-generation college student and Harvard career adviser, demystifies the unspoken rules of work. Ng distills the wisdom he has gathered from over five hundred interviews with professionals across industries and job types about the biggest mistakes people make at work. Loaded with frameworks, checklists, and talking points, the book provides concrete strategies you can apply immediately to your own situation and will help you navigate inevitable questions, such as: How do I manage my time in the face of conflicting priorities? How do I build relationships when I'm working remotely? How do I ask for help without looking incompetent or lazy? The Unspoken Rules is the only book you need to perform your best, stand out from your peers, and set yourself up for a fulfilling career."

"An essential guide to cultivating joy in your professional and personal writing
Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a painful chore. Writing with Pleasure empowers academic, professional, and creative writers to reframe their negative emotions about writing and reclaim their positive ones. By learning how to cast light on the shadows, you will soon find yourself bringing passion and pleasure to everything you write. Acclaimed international writing expert Helen Sword invites you to step into your "WriteSPACE"--a space of pleasurable writing that is socially balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively challenging, and emotionally uplifting. Sword weaves together cutting-edge findings in the sciences and social sciences with compelling narratives gathered from nearly six hundred faculty members and graduate students from across the disciplines and around the world. She provides research-based principles, hands-on strategies, and creative "pleasure prompts" designed to help you ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your writing practice. Whether you're writing a scholarly article, an administrative email, or a love letter, this book will inspire you to find delight in even the most mundane writing tasks and a richer, deeper pleasure in those you already enjoy. Exuberantly illustrated by prizewinning graphic memoirist Selina Tusitala Marsh, Writing with Pleasure is an indispensable resource for academics, students, professionals, and anyone for whom writing has come to feel like a burden rather than a joy."

"How you can enrich your life by becoming a more skillful and engaged reader of literature We are what we read, according to Robert DiYanni. Reading may delight us or move us; we may read for instruction or inspiration. But more than this, in reading we discover ourselves. We gain access to the lives of others, explore the limitless possibilities of human existence, develop our understanding of the world around us, and find respite from the hectic demands of everyday life. In You Are What You Read, DiYanni provides a practical guide that shows how we can increase the benefits and pleasures of literature by becoming more skillful and engaged readers. DiYanni suggests that we attend first to what authors say and the way in which they say it, rather than rushing to decide what they mean. He considers the various forms of literature, from the essay to the novel, the short story to the poem, demonstrating rewarding approaches to each in sample readings of classic works. Through a series of illuminating oppositions, he explores the paradoxical pleasures of reading: solitary versus social reading, submitting to or resisting the author, reading inwardly or outwardly, and more. DiYanni closes with nine recommended reading practices, thoughts on the different experiences of print and digital reading, and advice on what to read and why. Written in a clear, inviting, and natural style, You Are What You Read is an essential guide for all who want to enrich their reading--and their life."

"Maybe you've been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well enough to get your daily business done, or you're an expert with a red pen who never omits a comma or misplaces a modifier, you must have noticed that there are some thingsabout this language that are just weird.Perhaps you're reading a book and stop to puzzle over absurd spelling rules (Why are there so many ways to say '-gh'?), or you hear someone talking and get stuck on an expression (Why do we say "How dare you" but not "How try you"?), or your kid quizzes you on homework (Why is it "eleven and twelve"instead of "oneteen and twoteen"?). Suddenly you ask yourself, "Wait, why do we do it this way?" You think about it, try to explain it, and keep running into walls. It doesn't conform to logic. It doesn't work the way you'd expect it to. There doesn't seem to be any rule at all.There might not be a logical explanation, but there will be an explanation, and this book is here to help.In Highly Irregular, Arika Okrent answers these questions and many more. Along the way she tells the story of the many influences - from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers - that made our language the way it is today. Both an entertaining send-up of linguistic oddities and a deeply researched history of English, Highly Irregular is essential reading for anyone who has paused to wonder about our marvelous mess of a language."

"Forget the language instinct--this is the story of how we make up language as we go. ; Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing capacity--and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn't about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for "blue" changes what we see. In the end they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination."

"Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns along with their majors; corporate conferences print name tags with space to add pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are, however, nothing new. Pioneering linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, noting that Shakespeare used singular-they; women invoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women's rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she); and people have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie, for centuries. Based on Baron's own empirical research, What's Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played--and continue to play--in establishing both our rights and our identities. It is an essential work in understanding how twenty-first-century culture has evolved."

"The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies.
Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet's origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been "invented" as an object of scholarship."

"A novel account of the evolution of language and the cognitive capacities on which language depends. In From Signal to Symbol, Ronald Planer and Kim Sterelny propose a novel theory of language- that modern language is the product of a long series of increasingly rich protolanguages evolving over the last two million years. Arguing that language and cognition coevolved, they give a central role to archaeological evidence and attempt to infer cognitive capacities on the basis of that evidence, which they link in turn to communicative capacities. Countering other accounts, which move directly from archaeological traces to language, Planer and Sterelny show that rudimentary forms of many of the elements on which language depends can be found in the great apes and were part of the equipment of the earliest species in our lineage. After outlining the constraints a theory of the evolution of language should satisfy and filling in the details of their model, they take up the evolution of words, composite utterances, and hierarchical structure. They consider the transition from a predominantly gestural to a predominantly vocal form of language and discuss the economic and social factors that led to language. Finally, they evaluate their theory in terms of the constraints previously laid out."

"The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture--from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire   "The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful."--Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)   ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Spin The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists--nearly all of them people of color from some of America's most overlooked communities--pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country's youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language. And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard--and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop's rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen.    In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City's other boroughs, and beyond--from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.   Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop's infancy, Edward "Duke Bootee" Fletcher describing the origins of "The Message," DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A's breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recalling his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music.   The Come Up is an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world--and an essential contribution to music history."

"Ride along with choreographer Allison Orr and her civic collaborators as they reflect on their dances togetherIn 2001, Allison Orr made a dance with 13 City of Austin firefighters. Over the next 20 years, her unique practice of collaborating with city employees flowered into civic storytelling through movement at public pools, tableaus of power line workers shimmying up 40' poles in front of 5000 people, and intricate choreography of trash trucks on a misty tarmac. Part memoir, part guide, the artist reflects on her major collaborations and shares interviews with people she's made dances with over the past two decades. Power line workers, sanitation workers, and firefighters reflect on their memories of performing with Forklift and the lasting impact those dances made. Alongside larger conversations in the arts, Orr offers a look at how to create community-based art projects, how the creative process can bring people together to address civic issues, and the beauty of choreographing the day to day. An appendix and online companion include budget information, full cast and crew lists, participant survey results, and more."

"The triumphant story of how an all-Black Broadway cast and crew changed musical theatre--and the world--forever.
'This musical introduced Black excellence to the Great White Way. Broadway was forever changed and we, who stand on the shoulders of our brilliant ancestors, are charged with the very often elusive task of carrying that torch into our present.'--Billy Porter, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning actor
If Hamilton, Rent, or West Side Story captured your heart, you'll love this in-depth look into the rise of the 1921 Broadway hit, Shuffle Along, the first all-Black musical to succeed on Broadway. No one was sure if America was ready for a show featuring nuanced, thoughtful portrayals of Black characters--and the potential fallout was terrifying. But from the first jazzy, syncopated beats of composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, New York audiences fell head over heels. Footnotes is the story of how Sissle and Blake, along with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, overcame poverty, racism, and violence to harness the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and produce a runaway Broadway hit that launched the careers of many of the twentieth century's most beloved Black performers. Born in the shadow of slavery and establishing their careers at a time of increasing demands for racial justice and representation for people of color, they broke down innumerable barriers between Black and white communities at a crucial point in our history. Author and pop culture expert Caseen Gaines leads readers through the glitz and glamour of New York City during the Roaring Twenties to reveal the revolutionary impact one show had on generations of Americans, and how its legacy continues to resonate today.
Praise for Footnotes:
'A major contribution to culture.'--Brian Jay Jones, New York Times bestselling author of Jim Henson: The Biography
'With meticulous research and smooth storytelling, Caseen Gaines significantly deepens our understanding of one of the key cultural events that launched the Harlem Renaissance.'--A Lelia Bundles, New York Times bestselling author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
'Absorbing...'--The Wall Street Journal"

"'The most sensational, perpetual teenager in the world.' --Jim Henson
'To know him was to love him, and we do.' --Mark Hamill
Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo. Hunt also acted, directed and mentored the next generation of performers. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in that he crammed them all into only 40 years.  Richard Hunt was just 18 years old when he joined Jim Henson's company, where his edgy humor quickly helped launch the Muppets into international stardom. Hunt lived large, savoring life's delights, amassing a vivid, disparate community of friends. Even when the AIDS epidemic wrought its devastation, claiming the love of Hunt's life and threatening his own life, he showed an extraordinary sense of resilience, openness and joy. Hunt's story exemplifies how to follow your passion, foster your talents, adapt to life's surprises, genuinely connect with everyone from glitzy celebrities to gruff cab drivers - and have a hell of a lot of fun along the way."

"A sweeping, genre-bending 'masterpiece' (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity--from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé
'Gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance.'--Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
'I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.' Inspired by these few words, spoken by Josephine Baker at the 1963 March on Washington, MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines--whether it's the twenty-seven seconds in 'Gimme Shelter' in which Merry Clayton wails the words 'rape, murder,' a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt--has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib's own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Touching on Michael Jackson, Patti LaBelle, Billy Dee Williams, the Wu-Tan Clan, Dave Chappelle, and more, Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space--from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Rolling Stone, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, She Reads, BookRiot, BookPage, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, LitHub, Library Journal, Booklist"

"Based on ground-breaking research, Musical Emotions Explained takes a close look at how music expresses and arouses emotions, and how it becomes an object of aesthetic judgments. Within the book, Juslin demonstrates how psychological mechanisms from our ancient past engage with meanings in music at multiple levels of the brain to evoke a broad variety of affective states - from startle responses to profound aesthetic emotions, and explores why thesemechanisms respond to music? Written by one of the leading researchers in the field, the book is richly illustrated with music examples from everyday life, and explains with both clarity and rigour themanifold ways in which music may engage our emotions, in a style sufficiently engaging for lay readers, yet comprehensive and novel enough for specialists."

"A passionate and moving tribute to the captivating power of dance, not just as an art form but as a language that transcends barriers" "[A] smart, bracing book of reflection, analysis, memoir and history."--Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal
"A veritable master class."--Anne Doventry, Booklist
"Mindy Aloff, a journalist, an essayist, and a dance critic, analyzes dance as the ultimate expression of human energy and feeling. From her personal anecdotes, her engaging collection of stories about dance from around the world, or her description of the captivating photograph by Helen Levitt of two children dancing, which she sees as one embodiment of the mystery and joy that dancing can evoke, Aloff's exploration of the aesthetic, social, and spiritual impacts of dance will prove spellbinding.   Aloff takes us on a journey through various forms of dance--rituals, religious observances, storytelling, musical interpretations--to show why dance matters to human beings. Interlaced with personal experiences, this book builds on analysis to reveal the intimate relationship we have with dance--personal, spiritual, soul-searching, medicinal, and entertaining. The ideas speak to both specialist and general readers."

"Ordinary people can perform acts of astonishing selflessness, sometimes even putting their lives on the line. A pregnant woman saw a dorsal fin and blood in the water--and dove right in to pull her wounded husband to safety. Remarkably, some even leap into action to save complete strangers: one New York man jumped onto the subway tracks to rescue a boy who had fallen into the path of an oncoming train. Such behavior is not uniquely human. Researchers have found that mother rodents are highly motivated to bring newborn pups--not just their own--back to safety. What do these stories have in common, and what do they reveal about the instinct to protect others? In The Altruistic Urge, Stephanie D. Preston explores how and why we developed a surprisingly powerful drive to help the vulnerable. She argues that the neural and psychological mechanisms that evolved to safeguard offspring also motivate people to save strangers in need of immediate aid. Eye-catching dramatic rescues bear a striking similarity to how other mammals retrieve their young and help explain more mundane forms of support like donating money. Merging extensive interdisciplinary research that spans psychology, neuroscience, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology, Preston develops a groundbreaking model of altruistic responses. Her theory accounts for extraordinary feats of bravery, all-too-common apathy, and everything in between--and it can also be deployed to craft more effective appeals to assist those in need."

"An engrossing origin story for the personal computer--showing how the Apple II's software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists' plaything to essential home appliance.   Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.   The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn't found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple's founders, or the way it set the stage for the company's multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers--it's about the rise of everyday users.   Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists' microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu--and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II."

"'Poignant....important and illuminating.'--The New York Times Book Review
'Groundbreaking.'--Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy
From one of the world's leading experts on unconscious racial bias come stories, science, and strategies to address one of the central controversies of our time How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society--in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving."

"Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
An engaging and imaginative tour through the fundamental mathematical concepts--from arithmetic to infinity--that form the building blocks of our universe. Our universe has multiple origin stories, from religious creation myths to the Big Bang of scientists. But if we leave those behind and start from nothing--no matter, no cosmos, not even empty space--could we create a universe using only math? Irreverent, richly illustrated, and boundlessly creative, The Big Bang of Numbers invites us to try. In this new mathematical origin story, mathematician and novelist Manil Suri creates a natural progression of ideas needed to design our world, starting with numbers and continuing through geometry, algebra, and beyond. He reveals the secret lives of real and imaginary numbers, teaches them to play abstract games with real-world applications, discovers unexpected patterns that connect humble lifeforms to enormous galaxies, and explores mathematical underpinnings for randomness and beauty. With evocative examples ranging from multidimensional crochet to the Mona Lisa's asymmetrical smile, as well as ingenious storytelling that helps illuminate complex concepts like infinity and relativity, The Big Bang of Numbers charts a playful, inventive course to existence. Mathematics, Suri shows, might best be understood not as something we invent to explain Nature, but as the source of all creation, whose directives Nature tries to obey as best she can. Offering both striking new perspectives for math aficionados and an accessible introduction for anyone daunted by calculation, The Big Bang of Numbers proves that we can all fall in love with math."

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Most appealing... technical accuracy and lightness of tone... Impeccable."--Wall Street Journal "A porthole into another world."--Scientific American "Brings science dissemination to a new level."--Science The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality.   Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables.    No one else could so smoothly guide readers toward grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.

From the acclaimed author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space--an authoritative and accessible guide to the most alluring and challenging phenomena of contemporary science. "[Levin will] take you on a safe black hole trip, an exciting travel story enjoyed from your chair's event horizon." --Boston Globe         Through her writing, astrophysicist Janna Levin has focused on making the science she studies not just comprehensible but also, and perhaps more important, intriguing to the nonscientist. In this book, she helps us to understand and find delight in the black hole--perhaps the most opaque theoretical construct ever imagined by physicists--illustrated with original artwork by American painter and photographer Lia Halloran. Levin takes us on an evocative exploration of black holes, provoking us to imagine the visceral experience of a black hole encounter. She reveals the influence of black holes as they populate the universe, sculpt galaxies, and even infuse the whole expanse of reality that we inhabit. Lively, engaging, and utterly unique, Black Hole Survival Guide is not just informative--it is, as well, a wonderful read from first to last.

National Book Award finalist Breathless tells the story of the worldwide scientific race to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic--a "luminous, passionate account of the defining crisis of our time." (The New York Times). Breathless is a "gripping" (The Atlantic) but "clear-eyed analysis" (Time) of SARs-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a "forever virus," destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape. Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that: -Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming -Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that "the next big one" would be caused by a changeable new virus--very possibly a coronavirus--but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons -The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed -And much more Written by "one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades" (Chicago Tribune), This "compelling and terrifying" (The New York Times) account is an unparalleled look inside the frantic international race to understand and control SARS-CoV-2--and what it might mean for the next potential global health crisis.

Winner of the 2023 Nautilus Book Award in the category of Animals & Nature The surprising, fascinating, and remarkable ways that animals use creativity to thrive in their habitats Most of us view animals through a very narrow lens, seeing only bits and pieces of beings that seem mostly peripheral to our lives. However, whether animals are building a shelter, seducing a mate, or inventing a new game, animals' creative choices affect their social, cultural, and environmental worlds. The Creative Lives of Animals offers readers intimate glimpses of creativity in the lives of animals, from elephants to alligators to ants. Drawing on a growing body of scientific research, Carol Gigliotti unpacks examples of creativity demonstrated by animals through the lens of the creative process, an important component of creative behavior, and offers new thinking on animal intelligence, emotion, and self-awareness. With examples of the elaborate dams built by beavers or the lavishly decorated bowers of bowerbirds, Gigliotti provides a new perspective on animals as agents in their own lives, as valuable contributors to their world and ours, and as guides in understanding how creativity may contribute to conserving the natural world. Presenting a powerful argument for the importance of recognizing animals as individuals and as creators of a healthy, biodiverse world, this book offers insights into both the established and emerging questions about the creativity of animals.

Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have--older than language. In Dark and Magical Places, Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes the brain regions that orient us in space and the specialized neurons that do it. Place cells. Grid cells. He examines how the brain plans routes, recognizes landmarks, and makes sure we leave a room through a door instead of trying to leave through a painting. From the secrets of supernavigators like the indigenous hunters of the Bolivian rainforest to the confusing environments inhabited by people with place blindness, Kemp charts the myriad ways in which we find our way and explains the cutting-edge neuroscience behind them. How did Neanderthals navigate? Why do even seasoned hikers stray from the trail? What spatial skills do we inherit from our parents? How can smartphones and our reliance on GPS devices impact our brains? In engaging, engrossing language, Kemp unravels the mysteries of navigating and links the brain's complex functions to the effects that diseases like Alzheimer's, types of amnesia, and traumatic brain injuries have on our perception of the world around us. A book for anyone who has ever felt compelled to venture off the beaten path, Dark and Magical Places is a stirring reminder of the beauty in losing yourself to your surroundings. And the beauty in understanding how our brains can guide us home.

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos--and a call for a more liberatory practice of science. Winner of the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology Winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science Winner of the 2022 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award A Finalist for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A Smithsonian Magazine Best Science Book of 2021 A Symmetry Magazine Top 10 Physics Book of 2021 An Entropy Magazine Best Nonfiction Book of 2020-2021   A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A Booklist Top 10 Sci-Tech Book of the Year  In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter--along with a perspective informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.  One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages.  Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

A celebrated mathematician explores how math helps us make sense of the unpredictable We would like to believe we can know things for certain. We want to be able to figure out who will win an election, if the stock market will crash, or if a suspect definitely committed a crime. But the odds are not in our favor. Life is full of uncertainty --- indeed, scientific advances indicate that the universe might be fundamentally inexact --- and humans are terrible at guessing. When asked to predict the outcome of a chance event, we are almost always wrong. Thankfully, there is hope. As award-winning mathematician Ian Stewart reveals, over the course of history, mathematics has given us some of the tools we need to better manage the uncertainty that pervades our lives. From forecasting, to medical research, to figuring out how to win Let's Make a Deal, Do Dice Play God? is a surprising and satisfying tour of what we can know, and what we never will.

Make. More. Future. Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it's revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing--and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses. Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do--but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo. Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted--and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book's imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future. The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.

How do cats land on their feet? Discover how this question stumped brilliant minds and how its answer helped solve other seemingly impossible puzzles   The question of how falling cats land on their feet has long intrigued humans. In this playful and eye‑opening history, physicist and cat parent Gregory Gbur explores how attempts to understand the cat‑righting reflex have provided crucial insights into puzzles in mathematics, geophysics, neuroscience, and human space exploration.   The result is an engaging tumble through physics, physiology, photography, and robotics to uncover, through scientific debate, the secret of the acrobatic performance known as cat‑turning, the cat flip, and the cat twist. Readers learn the solution but also discover that the finer details still inspire heated arguments. As with other cat behavior, the more we investigate, the more surprises we discover.

"'The rabbit hole gets wrestled here. An old school saying applies: the more you know, the more you don't know. Dance along this read into the unknown and find out that this book may be the best ever answer to 'What is soul?' --Chuck D, rapper and co-founder of Public Enemy
*Starred Reviews* from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly!
Named a Best Book of 2021 by Library Journal, Kirkus, and symmetry Magazine
In this important guide to science and society, a cosmologist argues that physics must embrace the excluded, listen to the unheard, and be unafraid of being wrong.   Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream -- to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics."

The history of particle physics, the hunt for the most elusive particle, and the fundamental questions the search has inspired How did physicists combine talent and technology to discover the Higgs boson, the last piece in our inventory of the subatomic world? How did the Higgs change our understanding of the universe? And now, nearly a decade after its detection, what comes next? Answering these questions, Ivo van Vulpen--a CERN particle physicist and member of the team behind the detection--invites us on a journey to the frontiers of our knowledge.   Enjoy Van Vulpen's accessible explanation of the history of particle physics and of concepts like quantum mechanics and relativity, and ponder his inquiries regarding the search for new particles (to explain dark matter), a new force (to combine the existing fundamental forces), and new phenomena (undiscovered dimensions of space). This is a lively account of work at the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, with inspiring personal reflections on humanity's discoveries deeper and deeper into the world of the very small.

How magicians exploit the natural functioning of our brains to astonish and amaze us How do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains. We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Camí and Luis Martínez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention--making us look but not see--and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories. The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully "hack" our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine.

Advances in medicine have made possible better treatments for widespread, familiar human illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet there are thousands of much less common diseases, most of genetic origin, each classed as "rare" because it afflicts only a small number of people.These patient groups were long ignored by a pharmaceutical industry that judged them too small to provide a return on the investment needed to develop an effective remedy. Yet these "orphaned" diseases collectively caused misery and expense, often far greater than did more common ailments, for tensof millions of individuals and their families.Forty years ago, a revolution that transformed the prospects of patients with rare diseases was lit by three sparks. The passage of the 1983 U.S. Orphan Drug Act resulted from public pressure brought by rare disease patients, their families, and advocates. The AIDS epidemic triggered additionalactivism, compounded when patients with the rare disease hemophilia became HIV-positive after infusion of tainted blood products. And the third spark was the emergence in the early 1980s of biotechnology companies like Genentech, Amgen, and Biogen employing then-new genetic engineering instead ofconventional approaches to pharmaceutical development. Soon after, Genzyme became the first company to develop a treatment for a rare genetic disorder, Gaucher disease, which would come to transform the industry.Jim Geraghty has been a passionate participant in the orphan drug revolution since its inception - a leader in the field as a strategy consultant, biotechnology executive, and venture entrepreneur. His book is in part a history, with eyewitness accounts of advances as they occurred and portraits ofthe pioneering scientists and physicians, tireless activists, and visionary business leaders who made the revolution happen. And it tells deeply personal stories of patients and parents willing to risk new, untried therapies. But Geraghty also uses his exceptional experience and vantage point tolook forward to the immense promise of the newest technologies like gene therapy and gene editing for the treatment of patients today and tomorrow. He concludes with thoughtful consideration of important questions. Why do drugs to treat orphan diseases cost so much? How can we ensure they areaffordable? How can their effectiveness be responsibly assessed? And how can access to them be expanded internationally? This book graphically and poignantly illustrates how far an important healthcare revolution has come and reminds us that if not nurtured, it could end before its immense promisehas been fulfilled.

One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Books of 2022 A gripping narrative of a fearless paleontologist, the founding of America's most loved museums, and the race to find the largest dinosaurs on record. In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York's struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum's success, and intrepid Kansas-born fossil hunter Barnum Brown. When Brown unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness, forever changing the world of paleontology, Osborn sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. With four-foot-long jaws capable of crushing the bones of its prey and hips that powered the animal to run at speeds of 25 miles per hour, the T. Rex suggests a prehistoric ecosystem more complex than anyone imagined. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past and wonder at the mysteries of its disappearance, Brown and Osborn together turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture. Vivid and engaging, The Monster's Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the unforgiving badlands of the American West to the penthouses of Manhattan. With a wide-ranging cast of robber barons, eugenicists, and opportunistic cowboys, New York Times best-selling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it.

The instant New York Times bestseller By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really "normal" when it comes to health? Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of "normal" as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today's culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society--and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté's most ambitious and urgent book yet.

A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they're angry? You can't very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven't been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness.   In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem. He and his colleagues have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like fleeing a predator or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what studying emotions and related internal brain states in animals can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there's a link between aggression and mental illness.   Full of fascinating stories, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions-and explains why we have them at all.

An engrossing and revealing study of why we deem certain animals "pests" and others not--from cats to rats, elephants to pigeons--and what this tells us about our own perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as well as our place in the natural world A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don't expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It's no longer an animal. It's a pest. At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It's not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It's about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It's a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest In many cases, it's entirely a question of perspective. Bethany Brookshire's deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves. 

"Have you ever sat and watched a plant? The very idea itself might seem strange. We like to watch things that move, that do something. But in fact, plants are doing a great deal too - plants behave, as animals do - they are just doing it on a very different timescale. They cannot move about freely like animals do, so they grow into space instead and make new chemicals to interact with the species around them. Not only that, but what causes them to do these things, what drives this behaviour, is far more similar than we humans, with our speedy, animal-centric perceptions, have always assumed. If we learn to look differently, we might be amazed at what we find. We are dismantling the traditional hierarchies of nature: we are becoming increasingly aware of the interior lives of other species and how much we share with them. We are also coming to understand that there are many more ways to be intelligent than we have previously believed. We can't see ourselves as the only, privileged intelligent life on Earth any more. And if we are to save the global biome, we must not. PLANTA SAPIENS opens up the plant kingdom like never before and will transform how you view other forms of life, to see plants as allies in tackling global problems rather than as mere resources; as teachers from whom we can learn about our own minds"

Discover the extraordinary role of plants in modern forensics, from their use as evidence in the trials of high profile murderers such as Ted Bundy to high value botanical trafficking and poaching.We are all familliar with the role of blood splatters or fingerprints in solving crimes, from stories in the media of DNA testing or other biological evidence being used as the clinching evidence to incriminate a killer. This book lifts the lid on the equally important evidence from plants at acrime scene, from the incriminating presence of freshwater plants in the lungs of a drowning victim, to rare botanical poisons in the evening gin and tonic, to exotic trafficked flowers and drugs.In Planting Clues, David Gibson explores how plants can help to solve crimes, as well as how plant crimes are themselves solved. He discusses the botanical evidence that proved important in bringing a number of high-profile murderers such as Ian Huntley (the 2002 Shoham Murders), and Bruno Hauptman(the 1932 Baby Lindbergh kidnapping) to trial, from leaf fragments and wood anatomy to pollen and spores. Throughout he traces the evolution of forensic botany, and shares the fascinating stories that advanced its progress.

From the shell wars of hermit crabs to little blue penguins spying on potential rivals, power struggles in the animal kingdom are as diverse as they are fascinating, and this book illuminates their surprising range and connections.   The quest for power in animals is so much richer, so much more nuanced than who wins what knock-down, drag-out fight. Indeed, power struggles among animals often look more like an opera than a boxing match. Tracing the path to power for over thirty different species on six continents, writer and behavioral ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin takes us on a journey around the globe, shepherded by leading researchers who have discovered that in everything from hyenas to dolphins, bonobos to field mice, cichlid fish to cuttlefish, copperhead snakes to ravens, and meerkats to mongooses, power revolves around spying, deception, manipulation, forming and breaking up alliances, complex assessments of potential opponents, building social networks, and more. Power pervades every aspect of the social life of animals: what they eat, where they eat, where they live, whom they mate with, how many offspring they produce, whom they join forces with, and whom they work to depose. In some species, power can even change an animal's sex. Nor are humans invulnerable to this magnificently intricate melodrama: Dugatkin's tales of the researchers studying power in animals are full of unexpected pitfalls, twists and turns, serendipity, and the pure joy of scientific discovery.

"A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read
A compelling and accessible new perspective on the modern science of psychology, based on one of Yale's most popular courses of all time How does the brain--a three-pound wrinkly mass--give rise to intelligence and conscious experience? Was Freud right that we are all plagued by forbidden sexual desires? What is the function of emotions such as disgust, gratitude, and shame? Renowned psychologist Paul Bloom answers these questions and many more in Psych, his riveting new book about the science of the mind. Psych is an expert and passionate guide to the most intimate aspects of our nature, serving up the equivalent of a serious university course while being funny, engaging, and full of memorable anecdotes. But Psych is much more than a comprehensive overview of the field of psychology. Bloom reveals what psychology can tell us about the most pressing moral and political issues of our time--including belief in conspiracy theories, the role of genes in explaining human differences, and the nature of prejudice and hatred. Bloom also shows how psychology can give us practical insights into important issues--from the treatment of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety to the best way to lead happy and fulfilling lives. Psych is an engrossing guide to the most important topic there is: it is the story of us."

"A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind
A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick
'Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and Psychonauts is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the nineteen-fifties and sixties.'--Clare Bucknell, New Yorker
'Captivating. . . . A welcome reconsideration of the role drugs play in life, medicine, and science.'--Publishers Weekly
Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.   But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear.   From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture."

A fascinating exploration of the natural history of scent and human perceptions of fragrance from the viewpoint of plant and pollinator Plants have long harnessed the chemical characteristics of aromatic compounds to shape the world around them. Frankincense resin from the genus Boswellia seals injured tissues and protects trees from invading pathogens. Jasmine produces a molecule called linalool that attracts pollinating moths with its flowery scent. Tobacco uses a similarly sweet-smelling compound called benzyl acetone to attract pollinators. Only recently in the evolutionary history of plants, however, have humans learned to co-opt their fragrances to seduce, heal, protect, and alter moods themselves.   In this wide-ranging and accessible new book, biologist-turned-perfumer Elise Vernon Pearlstine turns our human-centered perception of fragrance on its head and investigates plants' evolutionary reasons for creating aromatic molecules. Delving into themes of spirituality, wealth, power, addiction, royalty, fantasy, and more, Pearlstine uncovers the natural history of aromatic substances and their intersection with human culture and civilization.

A doctor's personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine's failure to understand pain has made care less effective In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn't. He weaves a provocative history from the Renaissance, when pain transformed into a medical issue, through the racial legacy of pain tolerance, to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science. The conclusion is clear: only by reckoning with both pain's complicated history and its biology can today's doctors adequately treat their patients' suffering. Trenchant and deeply felt, The Song of Our Scars is an indictment of a broken system and a plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body.   

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize! Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more! In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene "blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner" (Oprah Daily). Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves--hearts, blood, brains--are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them "cells." The discovery of cells--and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem--announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia--all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies. Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee's own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate--a masterpiece on what it means to be human. "In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes" (The New Yorker).

There are various arguments for the metaphysical impossibility of time travel. Is it impossible because objects could then be in two places at once? Or is it impossible because some objects could bring about their own existence? In this book, Nikk Effingham contends that no such argument issound and that time travel is metaphysically possible. His main focus is on the Grandfather Paradox: the position that time travel is impossible because someone could not go back in time and kill their own grandfather before he met their grandmother. In such a case, Effingham argues that the timetraveller would have the ability to do the impossible (so they could kill their grandfather) even though those impossibilities will never come about (so they won't kill their grandfather). He then explores the ramifications of this view, discussing issues in probability and decision theory. The bookends by laying out the dangers of time travel and why, even though no time machines currently exist, we should pay extra special care ensuring that nothing, no matter how small or microscopic, ever travels in time.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION** **LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS FOR EXCELLENCE** **WINNER OF THE 2022 POZ AWARD FOR BEST IN LITERATURE** "An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class...readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddled times: a clear lens through which to see the world." --Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

A revelatory tale of how the human brain develops, from conception to birth and beyond By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg's fertilization through each step of a human brain's development in the womb--and even a little beyond. As pioneering experimental neurobiologist W. A. Harris guides you through the process of how the brain is built, he takes up the biggest questions that scientists have asked about the developing brain, describing many of the thrilling discoveries that were foundational to our current understanding. He weaves in a remarkable evolutionary story that begins billions of years ago in the Proterozoic eon, when multicellular animals first emerged from single-cell organisms, and reveals how the growth of a fetal brain over nine months reflects the brain's evolution through the ages. Our brains have much in common with those of other animals, and Harris offers an illuminating look at how comparative animal studies have been crucial to understanding what makes a human brain human. An unforgettable chronicle of one of nature's greatest achievements, Zero to Birth describes how the brain's incredible feat of orchestrated growth ensures that every brain is unique, and how breakthroughs at the frontiers of science are helping us to decode many traits that only reveal themselves later in life.

From hidden connections in big data to bots spreading fake news, journalism is increasingly computer-generated. An expert in computer science and media explains the present and future of a world in which news is created by algorithm. Amid the push for self-driving cars and the roboticization of industrial economies, automation has proven one of the biggest news stories of our time. Yet the wide-scale automation of the news itself has largely escaped attention. In this lively exposé of that rapidly shifting terrain, Nicholas Diakopoulos focuses on the people who tell the stories-increasingly with the help of computer algorithms that are fundamentally changing the creation, dissemination, and reception of the news. Diakopoulos reveals how machine learning and data mining have transformed investigative journalism. Newsbots converse with social media audiences, distributing stories and receiving feedback. Online media has become a platform for A/B testing of content, helping journalists to better understand what moves audiences. Algorithms can even draft certain kinds of stories. These techniques enable media organizations to take advantage of experiments and economies of scale, enhancing the sustainability of the fourth estate. But they also place pressure on editorial decision-making, because they allow journalists to produce more stories, sometimes better ones, but rarely both. Automating the News responds to hype and fears surrounding journalistic algorithms by exploring the human influence embedded in automation. Though the effects of automation are deep, Diakopoulos shows that journalists are at little risk of being displaced. With algorithms at their fingertips, they may work differently and tell different stories than they otherwise would, but their values remain the driving force behind the news. The human-algorithm hybrid thus emerges as the latest embodiment of an age-old tension between commercial imperatives and journalistic principles.

"A NONAME BOOK CLUB PICK  
Named a Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of 2021"   
"Becoming Abolitionists is ultimately about the importance of asking questions and our ability to create answers. And in the end, Purnell makes it clear that abolition is a labor of love--one that we can accomplish together if only we decide to." --Nia Evans, Boston Review
For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.   In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings.   Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place. "

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same."--Time James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?   One of the Best Books of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune * One of Esquire's Best Biographies of All Time * Winner of the Stowe Prize * Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice   "Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again."--James Baldwin   Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America's ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin's "after times," argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement's call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.   In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography--drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews--with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism's continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

"A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee. Alexander Chee, an essayist of "virtuosity and power" (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year."

"In her introduction to this year's The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections "contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience." Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors' unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives--and the others featured in this anthology--celebrate the endurance of the human spirit. The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro * Jillian Barnet * Sylvie Baumgartel * Eric Borsuk * Chris Dennis * Xujun Eberlein * Sandra Hager Eliason * George Estreich * Merrill Joan Gerber * Debra Gwartney * Edward Hoagland * Laura Kipnis * Phillip Lopate * Celeste Marcus * Sam Meekings * Sigrid Nunez * Kathryn Schulz * Anthony Siegel * Scott Spencer * Angelique Stevens * David Treuer"

A provocative, eye-opening, and original book on the science of sexuality beyond gender from an internationally bestselling pop-psychologist Despite all the welcome changes that have happened in our culture and laws over the past few decades in regards to sexuality, the subject remains one of the most influential but least understood aspects of our lives. For psychologist and bestselling author Julia Shaw, this is both professional and personal--Shaw studies the science of sexuality and she herself is proudly and vocally bisexual. It's an admission, she writes, that usually causes people's pupils to dilate, their cheeks to flush, and their questions to start flowing. Ask people to name famous bisexual actors, politicians, writers, or scientists, and they draw a blank. Despite statistics that show bisexuality is more common than homosexuality, bisexuality is often invisible. In BI: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw probes the science and culture of attraction beyond the binary. From the invention of heterosexuality to the history of the Kinsey scale, as well as asylum seekers trying to defend their bisexuality in a court of law, there is so much more to explore than most have ever realized. Drawing on her own original research--and her own experiences--this is a personal and scientific manifesto; it's an exploration of the complexities of the human sexual experience and a declaration of love and respect for the nonconformists among us.

A renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed--and the barriers they faced--in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

How to co-create-and why- the emergence of media co-creation as a concept and as a practice grounded in equity and justice. Co-creation is everywhere- It's how the internet was built; it generated massive prehistoric rock carvings; it powered the development of vaccines for COVID-19 in record time. Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for-and profit from-collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human-AI partnerships. Why co-create-and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organization, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. The idea of "collective intelligence" is not new, and has been applied to such disparate phenomena as decision making by consensus and hived insects. Collective wisdom goes further. With conceptual explanation and practical examples, this book shows that co-creation only becomes wise when it is grounded in equity and justice.

"Conspirituality takes a deep dive into the troubling phenomenon of influencers who have curdled New Age spirituality and wellness with the politics of paranoia--peddling vaccine misinformation, tales of child trafficking, and wild conspiracy theories.   In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a disturbing social media trend emerged: a large number of yoga instructors and alt-health influencers were posting stories about a secretive global cabal bent on controlling the world's population with a genocidal vaccine. Instagram feeds that had been serving up green smoothie recipes and Mary Oliver poems became firehoses of Fox News links, memes from 4chan, and prophecies of global transformation. Since May 2020, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker have used their Conspirituality podcast to expose countless facets of the intersection of alt-health practitioners with far-right conspiracy trolls. Now this expansive and revelatory book unpacks the follies, frauds, cons and cults that dominate the New Age and wellness spheres and betray the trust of people who seek genuine relief in this uncertain age. With analytical rigor and irreverent humor, Conspirituality offers an antidote to our times, helping readers recognize wellness grifts, engage with loved ones who've fallen under the influence, and counter lies and distortions with insight and empathy."

Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls "a defining idea of the twentieth century." Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years--from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques--have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions--did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work today?--revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies--money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance--like so much about money--is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money.

"A wake-up call for America to create a new framework for democratizing data. Public data are foundational to our democratic system. People need consistently high-quality information from trustworthy sources. In the new economy, wealth is generated by access to data; government's job is to democratize the data playing field. Yet data produced by the American government are getting worse and costing more. In Democratizing Our Data, Julia Lane argues that good data are essential for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system. Lane argues that we must rethink ways to democratize data; there are successful models to follow and new legislation that can help effect change. The private sector's data revolution--which creates new types of data and new measurements to build machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms--can be mirrored by a public sector data revolution characterized by attention to counting all who should be counted, measuring what should be measured, and protecting privacy and confidentiality. Just as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook have led the world in the use of data for profit, the United States can show the world how to produce data for the public good.   Lane calls for a more automated, transparent, and accountable framework for creating high-quality public data that would empower citizens and inspire the workforce that serves them. And she outlines an organizational model that has the potential to make data more accessible and useful. As she says, failure to act threatens our democracy."

An original defense of the unique value of voting in a democracy Voting is only one of the many ways that citizens can participate in public decision making, so why does it occupy such a central place in the democratic imagination? In Election Day, political theorist Emilee Booth Chapman provides an original answer to that question, showing precisely what is so special about how we vote in today's democracies. By presenting a holistic account of popular voting practices and where they fit into complex democratic systems, she defends popular attitudes toward voting against radical critics and offers much-needed guidance for voting reform. Elections embody a distinctive constellation of democratic values and perform essential functions in democratic communities. Election day dramatizes the nature of democracy as a collective and individual undertaking, makes equal citizenship and individual dignity concrete and transparent, and socializes citizens into their roles as equal political agents. Chapman shows that fully realizing these ends depends not only on the widespread opportunity to vote but also on consistently high levels of actual turnout, and that citizens' experiences of voting matters as much as the formal properties of a voting system. And these insights are also essential for crafting and evaluating electoral reform proposals. By rethinking what citizens experience when they go to the polls, Election Day recovers the full value of democratic voting today.

A sweeping and eye-opening study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local government in four working-class US cities that passionately argues for reinvestment in people-centered leadership and offers "a welcome reminder of what government can accomplish if given the chance" (San Francisco Chronicle). Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their politics. Mostly, their governments are just broke. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take. In this "astute and powerful vision for improving America" (Publishers Weekly), urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places. But this book is not a eulogy or a lament. Instead, Anderson travels to four blue-collar communities that are poor, broke, and progressing. Networks of leaders and residents in these places are facing down some of the hardest challenges in American poverty today. In Stockton, California, locals are finding ways, beyond the police department, to reduce gun violence and treat the trauma it leaves behind. In Josephine County, Oregon, community leaders have enacted new taxes to support basic services in a rural area with fiercely anti-government politics. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, leaders are figuring out how to improve job security and wages in an era of backbreaking poverty for the working class. And a social movement in Detroit, Michigan, is pioneering ways to stabilize low-income housing after a wave of foreclosures and housing loss. Our smallest governments shape people's safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments have no longer just reflected inequality--they have helped drive it. But it doesn't have to be that way. Anderson shows that "if we learn to save our towns, we will also be learning to save ourselves" (The New York Times Book Review).

Latinos across the United States are redefining identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many-Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns-are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented. No longer. In this empowering cross-country travelogue, journalist and activist Paola Ramos embarks on a journey to find the communities of people defining the controversial term, "Latinx." She introduces us to the indigenous Oaxacans who rebuilt the main street in a post-industrial town in upstate New York, the "Las Poderosas" who fight for reproductive rights in Texas, the musicians in Milwaukee whose beats reassure others of their belonging, as well as drag queens, environmental activists, farmworkers, and the migrants detained at our border. Drawing on intensive field research as well as her own personal story, Ramos chronicles how "Latinx" has given rise to a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinos unseen in this country for decades. A vital and inspiring work of reportage, Finding Latinx calls on all of us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latino and what it means to be American. The first step towards change, writes Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are.

"From Chinatown to Every Town explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, sociologist Zai Liang specifically examines how the expansion and growing popularity of Chinese restaurants has shifted settlement to more rural and faraway areas. Liang's study demonstrates that key players such as employment agencies, Chinatown buses, and restaurant supply shops facilitate the spatial dispersion of immigrants while simultaneously maintaining vital links between Chinatown in Manhattan and new immigrant destinations."

"Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics'Circle Award for Criticism
By one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, this investigation into state violence and mourning gives voice to the political experience of collective pain. Grieving is a hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together literary theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped her country. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience. She states: “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”
“A lucid, poignant collection of essays and poetry.... deeply hopeful, ultimately love letters to writing itself, and to the power of language to overcome the silence that impunity imposes.” —New York Times Book Review'
For all the losses tallied, the pieces are imbued with optimism and an activist's passion for reshaping the world.'—The New Yorker"

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING "A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it's possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling." --Associated Press  A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, "one of the leading lights of the modern American essay." --Financial Times "My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts," Eula Biss writes, "the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after." Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges--in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences--she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who "advances from all sides, like a chess player," Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, "In what have we invested?"

WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE; FINALIST FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS PRIZE; A BCALA 2023 HONOR NONFICTION AWARD WINNER. A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy--from his family's roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing--telling the story of how one man's tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. "It is a testament to the power of His Name Is George Floyd that the book's most vital moments come not after Floyd's death, but in its intimate, unvarnished and scrupulous account of his life . . . Impressive." --New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) "Since we know George Floyd's death with tragic clarity, we must know Floyd's America--and life--with tragic clarity. Essential for our times." --Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist   "A much-needed portrait of the life, times, and martyrdom of George Floyd, a chronicle of the racial awakening sparked by his brutal and untimely death, and an essential work of history I hope everyone will read." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, awakening millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his face was painted onto countless murals and his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life.   His Name Is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston's housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country's enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd's family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction--putting today's inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd's closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd's America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women." --Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of  How to Be an Antiracist, in The Atlantic "One of the most important books of the current moment."--Time   "A rousing call to action... It should be required reading for everyone."--Gabrielle Union, author of We're Going to Need More Wine A potent and electrifying critique of today's feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in black feminism Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others? In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.

This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America--and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.   Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize  Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism  A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 

"Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing. In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. These groups not only apply different meanings to indigeneity, but they also develop different strategies for asserting and maintaining Native identities in an urban space inundated with false memories and fake icons of "Indian-ness." Jacobs shows that "Indianness" is a highly contested phenomenon among these two groups: some are accused of being "wannabes" who merely "play Indian," while others are accused of being exclusionary and "policing the boundaries of Indianness." Taken together, the interconnected stories of relocators and reclaimers expose the struggles of Indigenous and Indigenous-identified participants in urban pan-Indian communities. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality offers a complicated portrait of who can rightfully claim and enact American Indian identities and what that tells us about how race is "made" today."

Disinformation is as old as humanity. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of this new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt left out by modernism. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we all know about Trump. In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle. Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Mohamed bin Salman to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea - a scheme that became the model for their interference with the 2016 presidential election. An urgent book for our times, Information Wars stresses that we must find a way to combat this ever growing threat to democracy.

"'[Smith's] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America's social systems." --TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 "While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was 'once necessary' that now 'appears inessential . . .'" --O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 "Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human." --John Powers, Fresh Air A New York Times Bestseller. Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity."

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into it As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

"A treasure trove" -- Thomas B. Edsall, The New York Times"Trenchant and groundbreaking work" -- Molly Ball, TIME Magazine"A joy to read. . . A tour de force" -- Eric Kaufmann, University of LondonHow do societies respond to great demographic change? This question lingers over the contemporary politics of the United States and other countries where persistent immigration has altered populations and may soon produce a majority minority milestone, where the original ethnic or religious majorityloses its numerical advantage to one or more foreign-origin minority groups. Until now, most of our knowledge about largescale responses to demographic change has been based on studies of individual people's reactions, which tend to be instinctively defensive and intolerant. We know little about whyand how these habits are sometimes tempered to promote more successful coexistence.To anticipate and inform future responses to demographic change, Justin Gest looks to the past. In Majority Minority, Gest includes historical analysis and interview-based fieldwork inside six of the world's few societies that have already experienced a majority minority transition to understandwhat factors produce different social outcomes. Gest concludes that, rather than yield to people's prejudices, states hold great power to shape public responses and perceptions of demographic change through political institutions and the rhetoric of leaders. Through subsequent survey research, Gestalso identifies novel ways that leaders can leverage nationalist sentiment to reduce the appeal of nativism--by framing immigration and demographic change in terms of the national interest. Grounded in rich narratives and novel survey findings, Majority Minority reveals that this contentiousmilestone and its accompanying identity politics are ultimately subject to unifying or divisive governance.

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards "A smart and accessible cultural history."-Los Angeles Times "A fantastic examination of what became the mall ... envision[ing] a more meaningful public afterlife for our shopping centers."-Vulture A portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America's most iconic institutions, from an author who "might be the most influential design critic writing now" (LARB). Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated? In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

"A leading expert provides an engaging firsthand portrait of American Judaism today American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. Like other religions in the United States, it has witnessed a decline in the number of participants over the past forty years, and many who remain active struggle to reconcile their hallowed traditions with new perspectives--from feminism and the LGBTQ movement to "do-it-yourself religion" and personally defined spirituality. Taking a fresh look at American Judaism today, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. Which observances still resonate, and which ones have been given new meaning? What options are available for seekers or those dissatisfied with conventional forms of Judaism? And how are synagogues responding? Wertheimer provides new and often-surprising answers to these questions by drawing on a wide range of sources, including survey data, visits to countless synagogues, and revealing interviews with more than two hundred rabbis and other informed observers. He finds that the majority of American Jews still identify with their faith but often practice it on their own terms. Meanwhile, gender barriers are loosening within religiously traditional communities, while some of the most progressive sectors are reappropriating long-discarded practices. Other recent developments include "start-ups" led by charismatic young rabbis, the explosive growth of Orthodox "outreach," and unconventional worship experiences often geared toward millennials. Wertheimer captures the remarkable, if at times jarring, tableaux on display when American Jews practice their religion, while also revealing possibilities for significant renewal in American Judaism. What emerges is a quintessentially American story of rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation."

An in-depth look at the many ways immigration has redefined modern America The impact of immigrants over the past half century has become so much a part of everyday life in the United States that we sometimes fail to see it. This deeply researched book by one of America's leading immigration scholars tells the story of how immigrants are fundamentally changing this country. An astonishing number of immigrants and their children--nearly eighty-six million people--now live in the United States. Together, they have transformed the American experience in profound and far-reaching ways that go to the heart of the country's identity and institutions. Unprecedented in scope, One Quarter of the Nation traces how immigration has reconfigured America's racial order--and, importantly, how Americans perceive race--and played a pivotal role in reshaping electoral politics and party alignments. It discusses how immigrants have rejuvenated our urban centers as well as some far-flung rural communities, and examines how they have strengthened the economy, fueling the growth of old industries and spurring the formation of new ones. This wide-ranging book demonstrates how immigration has touched virtually every facet of American culture, from the music we dance to and the food we eat to the films we watch and books we read. One Quarter of the Nation opens a new chapter in our understanding of immigration. While many books look at how America changed immigrants, this one examines how they changed America. It reminds us that immigration has long been a part of American society, and shows how immigrants and their families continue to redefine who we are as a nation.

"A Best Book of 2023 From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, "a strikingly fresh cultural critic" (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society--state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women's rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy--alongside more individually personalized matters: can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting? In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication's "Work Friend" columnist, she reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gay's best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics--politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more--with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay's devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent."

"How small-town America's surprising success reshapes our understanding of the nation's urban-rural divide, offering 'the most balanced and broadest-ranging look at the topic' (Tyler Cowen, George Mason University).  
The Next Big Idea Club 2023 Must Read Book
We are frequently told rural America is in crisis. According to many journalists, academics, and politicians, our small towns have been hollowed out by lost jobs, and residents have turned to opioids and right-wing extremism to cope with their pain and resentment. In fact, many rural towns are thriving. Commentators have fixated on the steep decline of one region--Appalachia--and overlooked the millions of rural Americans who are succeeding in the heartland.   In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reveals that rural America has not been left behind the rest of the nation but instead is surprisingly successful. Drawing on deep research, including data and in-depth interviews, she traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures, including homeownership, income, and employment. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. Looking everywhere from Missouri to Minnesota to her hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania, Currid-Halkett ultimately reveals that the nation is less fractured by geography than many believe.   This is an urgent appeal for Americans to reconnect across a rural-urban divide that isn't so wide after all."

One ofTIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. Longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize. "[Mark] Gevisser is clear-eyed and wise enough to have a sharp sense of how tough the struggle has been, and how hard it will be now for those who have not succeeded in finding shelter from prejudice." --Colm Tóibín,The Guardian A groundbreaking look at how the issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today More than seven years in the making, Mark Gevisser'sThe Pink Line: Journeys Across the World'sQueer Frontiersis an exploration of how the conversation around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide--and describe--the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition are celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. As new globalized queer identities are adopted by people across the world--thanks to the digital revolution--fresh culture wars have emerged. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the globe, and he takes readers to its frontiers. Between sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he's encountered along the Pink Line, Gevisser offers sharp analytical chapters exploring identity politics, religion, gender ideology, capitalism, human rights, moral panics, geopolitics, and what he calls "the new transgender culture wars." His subjects include a Ugandan refugee in flight to Canada, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, a lesbian couple campaigning for marriage equality in Mexico, genderqueer high schoolers coming of age in Michigan, a gay Israeli-Palestinian couple searching for common ground, and a community of kothis--"women's hearts in men's bodies"--who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. What results is a moving and multifaceted picture of the world today, and the queer people defining it. Eye-opening, heartfelt, expertly researched, and compellingly narrated,The Pink Line is a monumental--and urgent--journey of unprecedented scope into twenty-first-century identity, seen through the border posts along the world's new LGBTQ+ frontiers.

"#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a 'provocative and compelling' (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Oprah Daily, Time, The Star Tribune, Vulture, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Public Library, Esquire, California Review of Books, She Reads, Library Journal
'Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.'--The New Yorker
Longlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award *
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?    In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.   Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom."

Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers? environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this ?weak recycling waste regime,? Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston?s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

An exploration of the scale, practical reality, and future implications of the growing integration of biodiversity conservation with global security concerns   "Offers a thorough overview of an aspect of conservation that has become increasingly important but often unfortunately fails to make the nightly news."--Well-Read Naturalist   Debates regarding environmental security risks have generally focused on climate change and geopolitical water conflicts. Biodiversity conservation, however, is increasingly identified as a critical contributor to national and global security. The illegal wildlife trade is often articulated as a driver of biodiversity losses, and as a source of finance for organized crime networks, armed groups, and even terrorist networks. Conservationists, international organizations, and national governments have raised concerns about "convergence" of wildlife trafficking with other serious offenses, including theft, fraud, corruption, drugs and human trafficking, counterfeiting, firearms smuggling, and money laundering.   In Security and Conservation, Rosaleen Duffy examines the scale, practical reality, and future implications of the growing integration of biodiversity conservation with global security concerns. Duffy takes a political ecology approach to develop a deeper understanding of how and why wildlife conservation turned toward security‑oriented approaches to tackle the illegal wildlife trade.

We live in the age of the individual. Every day, we're bombarded with depictions of the beautiful, successful, slim, socially conscious, and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self, and we berate ourselves when we don't measure up. This model of the perfect self and the impossibly high standards it sets can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy, and unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Journalist and novelist Will Storr began to wonder about this perfect self that torments so many of us: Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? To answer these questions, Storr takes the reader on a journey from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the "selfie" generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualism in which we live now. Selfie tells the epic tale of the person we all know so intimately--because it's us.

From an award-winning journalist, a searing exposé of the effects of the mass incarceration crisis on families -- including the 2.7 million American children who have a parent locked up. In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist Sylvia A. Harvey follows the fears, challenges, and small victories of three families struggling to live within the confines of a brutal system. In Florida, a young father tries to maintain a relationship with his daughter despite a sentence of life without parole. In Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has led to the increased incarceration of women, many of whom are white, one mother fights for custody of her children. In Mississippi, a wife steels herself for her husband's thirty-ninth year in prison and does her best to keep their sons close. Through these stories, Harvey reveals a shadow system of laws and regulations enacted to dehumanize the incarcerated and profit off their families -- from mandatory sentencing laws, to restrictions on prison visitation, to astronomical charges for brief phone calls. The Shadow System is an eye-opening account of the way incarceration has impacted generations of American families; it delivers a galvanizing clarion call to fix this broken system.

One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year  * A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist * A New York Times Notable Book  A timely exploration of what Shakespeare's plays reveal about our divided land. "In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life." --The Guardian (London)   The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes--presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike--have turned to Shakespeare's works to explore the nation's fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.  From Abraham Lincoln's and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth's, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South--and thus of America--by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." --Isabel Wilkerson An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.   A Recommended Read from: The New Yorker * The New York Times * TIME * Oprah Daily * USA Today * Vulture * Essence * Esquire * W Magazine * Atlanta Journal-Constitution * PopSugar * Book Riot * Chicago Review of Books * Electric Literature * Lit Hub 

Winner of the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future. The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.   In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present.   There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.

""Subtly altered how I see the world." -Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
"Status and Culture consistently posits theories I'd never previously considered that instantly feel obvious." -Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties
"Why are you the way that you are? Status and Culture explains nearly everything about the things you choose to be-and how the society we live in takes shape in the process." -B.J. Novak, writer and actor
Solving the long-standing mysteries of culture-from the origin of our tastes and identities, to the perpetual cycles of fashions and fads-through a careful exploration of the fundamental human desire for status All humans share a need to secure their social standing, and this universal motivation structures our behavior, forms our tastes, determines how we live, and ultimately shapes who we are. We can use status, then, to explain why some things become "cool," how stylistic innovations arise, and why there are constant changes in clothing, music, food, sports, slang, travel, hairstyles, and even dog breeds. In Status and Culture, W. David Marx weaves together the wisdom from history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, literary theory, art history, media studies, and neuroscience to demonstrate exactly how individual status seeking creates our cultural ecosystem. Marx examines three fundamental questions- Why do individuals cluster around arbitrary behaviors and take deep meaning from them? How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities emerge? Why do we change behaviors over time and why do some behaviors stick around? The answers then provide new perspectives for understanding the seeming "weightlessness" of internet culture. Status and Culture is a book that will appeal to business people, students, creators, and anyone who has ever wondered why things become popular, why their own preferences change over time, and how identity plays out in contemporary society. Readers of this book will walk away with deep and lasting knowledge of the often secret rules of how culture really works."

Tricia Jenkins and Tom Secker deliver a highly original exploration of how the government-entertainment complex has influenced the world's most popular movie genre--superhero films. Superheroes, Movies, and the State sets a new standard for exploring the government-Hollywood relationship as it persuasively documents the critical role different government agencies have played in shaping characters, stories, and even the ideas behind the hottest entertainment products. Jenkins and Secker cover a wide range of US government and quasi-governmental agencies who act to influence the content of superhero movies, including the Department of Defense, the National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange and, to a lesser extent, the FBI and the CIA. Superheroes, Movies, and the State deploys a thematic framework to analyze how five of the key themes of our time--militarism, political radicalism and subversion, the exploration of space, the role of science and technology, and representation and identity--manifest in the superhero genre, and the role of the government in molding narratives around these topics. The book includes interviews with both producers and influencer insiders and covers a wide range of superhero products, from 1970s TV shows up to the most recent movie and TV releases, including the first major analysis of the hit Amazon show The Boys. In addition, it is the first deep exploration of NASA's Hollywood office and the first detailed account of the role of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which has worked on thousands of products since its creation in 2008 but is little known outside of the industry. Superheroes, Movies, and the State offers an innovative blend of research methods and interpretive frameworks, combining both production histories and deep readings of superhero texts to clearly reveal how the government-entertainment complex works in the world of blockbuster cinema to shape public perceptions of the United States, war, science, and much, much more.

A TIMES AND OBSERVER HIGHLIGHT FOR 2022 'An empowering story of human ingenuity' Economist 'Full of curious facts' The Times 'Gripping and fascinating' Mail on Sunday 'The obvious beauty of This Mortal Coil is that in being a history of death, it is also a history of life, and a brilliant, fascinating one at that' Scotsman ___________ Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where in many countries excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why have the reasons we die changed so much? How is it that a century ago people died mainly from infectious disease, while today the leading causes of death in industrialised nations are heart disease and stroke? And what do changing causes of death reveal about how previous generations have lived? University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening portrait of death throughout history, looking at particular causes - from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet - who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them. Along the way we hear about the long and torturous story of the discovery of vitamin C and its role in preventing scurvy; the Irish immigrant who opened the first washhouse for the poor of Liverpool, and in so doing educated the public on the importance of cleanliness in combating disease; and the Church of England curate who, finding his new church equipped with a telephone, started the Samaritans to assist those in emotional distress. This Mortal Coil is a thrilling story of growing medical knowledge and social organisation, of achievement and, looking to the future, of promise.

"A comprehensive assessment of real gun reform legislation with recommendations for better design, implementation and enforcement A month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, New York State passed, with record speed, the first and most comprehensive state post-Sandy Hook gun control law. In The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation, James B. Jacobs and Zoe Fuhr ask whether the 2013 SAFE Act ?hailed by Governor Andrew Cuomo as ?the nation?s toughest gun control law? ? has lived up to its promise. Jacobs and Fuhr illuminate the gap between gun control on the books and gun control in action. They argue that, to be effective, gun controls must be capable of implementation and enforcement. This requires realistic design, administrative and enforcement capacity and commitment and ongoing political and fiscal support. They show that while the SAFE Act was good symbolic politics, most of its provisions were not effectively implemented or, if implemented, not enforced. Gun control in a society awash with guns poses an immense regulatory challenge. The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation takes a tough-minded look at the technological, administrative, fiscal and local political impediments to effectively keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous persons and eliminating some types of guns altogether."

From the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries, an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America. When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war--from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens?   Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed.   This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay's powerful series of reckonings with some of our country's thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation. "Karla's book sheds light on people's personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be heard."--Selena Gomez FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD AWARD * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL, AND TIME Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell.  So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants--and to find the hidden key to her own.    Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented--and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the singular, effervescent characters across the nation often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.    In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.    In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller "This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that." --Ezra Klein An Oxford philosopher makes the case for "longtermism" -- that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity's written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more -- or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today.   In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it's not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human.   If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren's grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.

An insightful and probing exploration of the contradiction between humans' enormous capacity for hatred and their evolutionary development as a social speciesWhy We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race,sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, prominent philosopher Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory. He finds the secret to this paradox in ourtribal evolutionary past, when we moved ten thousand years ago from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists--a shift that paved the way for modern civilization. Simply put, as Ruse paraphrases, "our modern skulls house Stone Age minds."Combining rigorous argument with an engaging and accessible style, Ruse makes frequent use of historical examples, examining the history of two World Wars, and the U.S. offensive against Iraq. He also gives many pertinent and up-to-date examples of prejudice, including the significance of Brexitand the systemic racism that lead to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ruse pays special attention to egregious cases of hatred, such as the treatment of Jews by the Third Reich, and to pressing contemporary issues, including the status of women. Ruse concludes with constructive suggestions forways in which we might reconcile the contradictory aspects of our nature.Why We Hate will be of interest and value to a wide range of readers interested in the role of human nature in current events, as well as to readers interested in philosophy, the life sciences, social sciences (especially anthropology and archaeology), and beyond.