Best of
United-States

2021

Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs


David Philipps - 2021
    But within the platoon a different war raged. Even as Alpha’s chief, Eddie Gallagher, was being honored by the Navy for his leadership, several of his men were preparing to report him for war crimes, alleging that he’d stabbed a prisoner in cold blood and taken lethal sniper shots at unarmed civilians.Many young SEALs regarded Gallagher as the ideal special operations commando. Trained as a sniper, a medic, and an explosives expert, he was considered a battle-tested leader. But in the heat of combat, some in his platoon saw a darker figure—a man who appeared to be coming unhinged after multiple deployments in America’s forever wars. Their excitement to work with a tough, experienced chief soon gave way to a grim suspicion that his thirst for blood seemed to know no bounds and a belief that his unpredictability was as dangerous as the enemy. In riveting detail, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent David Philipps reveals the story of a group of special operators caught in a moral crucible—should they uphold their oath and turn in their chief, or honor the SEALs’ unwritten code of silence? It is also a larger story of how the SEAL Teams drifted off course after 9/11, and of the “pirate” subculture that festered within their ranks—a secret brotherhood that, in a time of endless war with few clear victories, made the act of killing itself the paramount goal. The investigation and trial following Alpha’s deployment—and Gallagher’s ultimate acquittal on the most serious charges—would pit SEAL against SEAL, set the Navy brass on a collision course with President Donald Trump, and turn Gallagher into a political litmus test in a hotly polarized America. A page-turning tale of battle, honor, and betrayal, Alpha is a remarkable exposé of the fault lines fracturing a country that has been at war for a generation and counting.

The Trespasser


Jennifer Spredemann - 2021
    But when a storm forces them to turn in to an abandoned home in a small Amish community, Kayla must come to terms with her past disappointments and her distrust in God. Amish widower Silas Miller has always dreamed of owning his own property. So when Minister Yoder vacates his home and moves out of state, Silas is thrilled to be caretaker for the Yoder homestead. When a trespasser finds shelter in the Yoders' house, Silas allows her to stay temporarily. Then Silas learns a secret that will not only rock his world, but challenge life as he knows it. Will he listen to God's still small voice even if he's asked to give up his dream?

The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America


Adam Serwer - 2021
    But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump's victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump's rise--including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer's writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn't happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible. Without acknowledging and confronting these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to another ambitious demagogue.

frank: sonnets


Diane Seuss - 2021
    These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of “beauty or relief.” Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and—in a word—frank.

The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783


Joseph J. Ellis - 2021
    Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis—one of our most celebrated scholars of American history—throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with “surprising relevance” (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.Taking us from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the “band of brothers”; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master.Countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding—slavery and the Native American dilemma—problematic at best.Written with the vivid and muscular prose for which Ellis is known, and with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era. A landmark work of narrative history, it challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.

The Trees


Percival Everett - 2021
    When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo


Mansoor Adayfi - 2021
    He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Guantánamo Bay, where he spent the next 14 years as Detainee #441.Don't Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, advocate, and historian. While at Guantánamo, he wrote a series of manuscripts he sent as letters to his attorneys, which he then transformed into this vital chronicle, in collaboration with award-winning writer Antonio Aiello. With unexpected warmth and empathy, Mansoor unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, he also tells Guantánamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people—detainees and guards alike—who lived there with him. Twenty years after 9/11, Guantánamo remains open, and at a moment of due reckoning, Mansoor Adayfi helps us understand what actually happened there—both the horror and the beauty—a stunning record of an experience we cannot afford to forget.

The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice


Scott Ellsworth - 2021
    Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors' offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air.Over the course of less than twenty-four hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa's infamous "Black Wall Street" was wiped off the map--and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than fifty years. But there were some secrets that would not die.A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa Race Massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most importantly, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.Both a forgotten chronicle from the nation's past, and a story ripped from today's headlines, The Ground Breaking is a page-turning reflection on how we, as Americans, must wrestle with the parts of our history that have been buried for far too long.

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump


Spencer Ackerman - 2021
    In addition to multiple ground wars, it has pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance, as well as detaining people indefinitely and torturing them. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized, paranoid feature of American politics and security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home. A politically divided country turned the War on Terror into a cultural and then tribal struggle, first on the ideological fringes and ultimately expanding to conquer the Republican Party, often with the timid acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today's nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era.Reign of Terror will show how these policies created a foundation for American authoritarianism and, though it is not a book about Donald Trump, it will provide a critical explanation of his rise to power and the sources of his political strength. It will show that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. That mistake turns out to have been portentous. By the end of his tenure, the war metastasized into a broader and bitter culture struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it.A union of journalism and intellectual history, Reign of Terror will be a pathbreaking and definitive book with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on its civic life.

To the River's End: A Novel of the American Frontier


William W. Johnstone - 2021
    This is an unforgettable journey into the untamed American frontier. Where nature is cruel, violence lurks behind every tree, and where only the strongest of the strong survive. This is a story of America. TO THE RIVER’S END Luke Ransom was just eighteen years old when he answered an ad in a St. Louis newspaper that would change his life forever. The American Fur Company needed one-hundred enterprising men to travel up the Missouri River—the longest in North America—all the way to its source. They would hunt and trap furs for one, two, or three years. Along the way, they would face unimaginable hardships: grueling weather, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion, and hostile attacks by the Blackfeet and Arikara. Luke Ransom was one of the brave men chosen for the job—and one of the few to survive . . . Five years later, Luke is a seasoned trapper and hunter, a master of his trade. The year is 1833, and the American Fur Company is sending him to the now-famous Rendezvous at Green River. For Luke, it may be his last job for the company. After facing death countless times, he is ready to strike out on his own. But when he encounters a fellow trapper under attack by Indians, his life takes an unexpected turn. A new friendship is forged in blood. And a dangerous new journey begins...

The Vacation


M.M. Chouinard - 2021
    But they’re each hiding something:Rose hopes the pretty house overlooking the sea is just the break her family needs. But as she gazes at the water and remembers her own childhood, she is utterly terrified.Brandon knows his wife Rose has barely forgiven him for his affair. He’s started drinking again, a road that led him to disaster once before.Brianna, Rose’s sister-in-law, is recovering from her fifth miscarriage, and when she looks at her adorable niece, she can’t help but see the daughter she deserves.Then three-year-old Lily disappears from her bed in the villa. Isolated in what should have been paradise, it quickly becomes clear that one of them took her.As one by one their secrets are uncovered, who will be destroyed next?A completely addictive thriller about every parent’s worst nightmare that will keep you guessing into the early hours of the morning. Perfect for fans of The Guest List, One by One and The Sister-in-Law.

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis


Serhii Plokhy - 2021
    To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis.Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons.More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction.Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City


Rosa Brooks - 2021
    A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law's troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world--and whether that world can be changed. In 2015, against the advice of everyone she knew, she applied to become a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department.Then as now, police violence was constantly in the news. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum, protests wracked America's cities, and each day brought more stories of cruel, corrupt cops, police violence, and the racial disparities that mar our criminal justice system. Lines were being drawn, and people were taking sides. But as Brooks made her way through the police academy and began work as a patrol officer in the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the nation's capital, she found a reality far more complex than the headlines suggested.In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing. From street shootings and domestic violence calls to the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential inauguration, Brooks presents a revelatory account of what it's like inside the blue wall of silence. She issues an urgent call for new laws and institutions, and argues that in a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology, a truly transformative approach to policing requires us to move beyond sound bites, slogans, and stereotypes. An explosive and groundbreaking investigation, Tangled Up in Blue complicates matters rather than simplifies them, and gives pause both to those who think police can do no wrong--and those who think they can do no right.

Dragon Mates: The Complete Dragons of Charok Series Box Set


Meg Ripley - 2021
    Brimming with fiery passion, sassy psychics, witches, fae, and adorable dragon babies guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings, Dragon Mates will set your heart ablaze for hours on end.Holden’s MateHumans prove to be odd creatures, but one blue-eyed psychic compels me in ways I’ve never experienced.I can barely keep my inner dragon in check when she’s near.But will my unfathomable secret keep us apart?Xander’s MateI need a mate to help me raise my charge: a baby dragon princess.And I know Summer is most definitely that woman.If we’re destined to be together, can we learn to overcome our differences?Beau’s MateI know it’s best for little Elliot, but I’m not sure I’m ready to find a mate.Especially a human one.Until I meet a sexy redhead who’s just as stubborn as I am.With this sassy witch and my hard-headed dragon, it all comes down to a battle of will.Julian’s MateAfter spending so much time with her back on Charok, I know my mate is nowhere on Earth.But when I come face to face with her again, it’s like a dream come true.Until we find out a powerful demon has slipped into the living realm on Earth along with her.Dragon’s Royal GuardA portal ripped open, thrusting me into a strange new world. And then I met her.Royal Dragon’s ProtectorI’ve been pulled from my home planet, forced to acclimate to this foreign world.But now I’m being pulled to Nora.Royal Dragon DaddyI never expected to be a single dad. Nor did I think I’d ever find a mate willing to raise another woman’s baby.Until I met Aurora.Royal Dragon’s WitchThe powerful, unyielding attraction I feel toward a certain mysterious beauty has my dragon reeling to claim what’s his.But she’s my mortal enemy.★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “A super-sized paranormal romance collection! Steamy and romantic, with adventure and great characters..” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “You will fall for these shifters and want one for yourself.” WARNING! Steamy shifter love scenes inside! Readers 18+ only. Dragon Mates packs Meg Ripley’s bestselling Daddy Dragon Guardians and Shifters Between Worlds series into one riveting anthology..

Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers


Robert L. Woodson Sr. - 2021
    According to the new radical orthodoxy, the United States was founded as a racist nation—and everything that has happened throughout our history must be viewed through the lens of the systemic oppression of black people. Rejecting this false narrative, a collection of the most prominent and respected black scholars and thinkers has come together to correct the record and tell the true story of black Americans in all its complexity, diversity of experience, and poignancy.  Collectively, they paint a vivid picture of black people living the grand American experience, however bumpy the road may be along the way. But rather than a people apart, blacks are woven into the united whole that makes this nation unique in history.  Featuring Essays by:  John Sibley Butler Jason D. Hill Colman Cruz Hughes John McWhorter Clarence Page Wilfred Reilly Shelby Steele Carol M. Swain Dean Nelson Charles Love Rev. Corey Brook Stephen L. Harris Harold A. Black Stephanie Deutsch Yaya J. Fanusie Ian Rowe John Wood, Jr. Joshua Mitchell Robert Cherry Rev. DeForest Black Soaries, Jr.

Knitted and Knifed


Tracey Drew - 2021
    A smarter woman—smarter than me, anyway—wouldn’t jump out of that same frying pan and return to Cape Discovery, a seaside village where her family is the nuttiest of all the nut-ball residents.I’m a former high school counsellor, middle-child peacemaker, and current curator of lots of squishy/fuzzy goodness at my granddad’s little yarn store. Temporary assistant. Until I decide what to do with the rest my life. There’s only one knotty problem to untangle first. The knife sticking out of the most unpopular man in town, and the police detective trying to pin the murder on the donkey—otherwise known as my younger brother. With a pair mischievous cats determined to be underfoot and a craft group of Serial Knitters and Happy Hookers wanting the inside scoop, a girl could lose her mind. And if the killer has their way, maybe even my life...Tessa Wakefield has her hands full juggling a cozy craft store, her crazy family, and two men who’d rather poke out their eyes than describe themselves as cute. Which they totally are. Cute, charismatic, and occasionally on her mind when she’s not stumbling over dead bodies and using her newfound sleuthing skills to track down murderers. Lucky she’s an excellent multi-tasker because digging beneath Cape Discovery’s surface can unearth secrets that kill.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic


Scott Gottlieb - 2021
    As the pandemic unfolded, Gottlieb was in regular contact with all the key players in Congress, the Trump administration, and the drug and diagnostic industries. He provides an inside account of how level after level of American government crumbled as the COVID-19 crisis advanced.A system-wide failure across government institutions left the nation blind to the threat, and unable to mount an effective response. We’d prepared for the wrong virus. We failed to identify the contagion early enough and became overly reliant on costly and sometimes divisive tactics that couldn’t fully slow the spread. We never considered asymptomatic transmission and we assumed people would follow public health guidance. Key bureaucracies like the CDC were hidebound and outmatched. Weak political leadership aggravated these woes. We didn’t view a public health disaster as a threat to our national security.Many of the woes sprung from the CDC, which has very little real-time reporting capability to inform us of Covid’s twists and turns or assess our defenses. The agency lacked an operational capacity and mindset to mobilize the kind of national response that was needed. To guard against future pandemic risks, we must remake the CDC and properly equip it to better confront crises. We must also get our intelligence services more engaged in the global public health mission, to gather information and uncover emerging risks before they hit our shores so we can head them off. For this role, our clandestine agencies have tools and capabilities that the CDC lacks.Uncontrolled Spread argues we must fix our systems and prepare for a deadlier coronavirus variant, a flu pandemic, or whatever else nature -- or those wishing us harm -- may threaten us with. Gottlieb outlines policies and investments that are essential to prepare the United States and the world for future threats.

Jungalow: Decorate Wild


Justina Blakeney - 2021
    In each chapter, Justina shares her distinctive point of view on everything design fans want to know—how to make bold choices with color and pattern, how to take cues from nature, how to authentically glean inspiration from their heritage and travels, how to break rules, and all the other paths to truly begin to decorate wild. Along the way, Justina also shares personal narratives, practical advice, and nuanced insight into how she lives in her own space—how she reconnects with nature, how she plays and stays inspired, how she gives herself permission to feel free and wild, and how readers can do the same. Jungalow is the term coined by Justina for the brand that embodies her wild, but cozy and homey, style. Copycats abound, but there is no other book like this one—offering Justina’s authentic, encouraging voice and approachable, signature style.

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town


Charles L. Marohn Jr. - 2021
    Marohn Jr. delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America's transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.You'll discover real-world examples of poor design choices and how those choices have dramatic and tragic effects on the lives of the people who use them. You'll also find case studies and examples of design improvements that have revitalized communities and improved safety.This important book shows you:The values of the transportation professions, how they are applied in the design process, and how those priorities differ from those of the public. How the standard approach to transportation ensures the maximum amount of traffic congestion possible is created each day, and how to fight that congestion on a budget. Bottom-up techniques for spending less and getting higher returns on transportation projects, all while improving quality of life for residents. Perfect for anyone interested in why transportation systems work - and fail to work - the way they do, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer is a fascinating insider's peek behind the scenes of America's transportation systems.

Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals


James Altucher - 2021
    But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people’s interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what’s next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most important, to pursue the things that interest you.In Skip the Line, he reveals how he went from struggling and depressed to making his personal, financial, and creative dreams come true, despite—and perhaps due to—his many failures along the way. Altucher combines his personal story with concrete—and unorthodox—insights that work. But Skip the Line isn’t about hacks and shortcuts—it’s about transforming the way you think, work, and live, letting your interests guide your learning, time, and resources. It’s about allowing yourself to do what comes naturally; the more you do what you love, the better you do it. While showing you how to approach change and crisis, Altucher gives you tools to help easily execute ideas, become an expert negotiator, attract the attention of those around you, scale promising ideas, and improve leadership—all of which will catapult you higher than you ever thought possible and at a speed that everyone will tell you is impossible.

QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults


Van Badham - 2021
    In this daring investigation, Van exposes some of the internet’s most extreme communities to understand conspiracy cults from the inside. QAnon and On is the story of the modern internet, the farscape of political belief and a disinformation pipeline built between the two that poses an ongoing threat to democracy itself. Shocking and mesmerising in equal measure, this book will open our eyes to the dangers of partisan belief.

The Man Who Lived Underground


Richard Wright - 2021
    Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes--or is permitted to escape--from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other ("I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration"), is published in full, in the form that he intended.

Like Dust, I Rise


Ginny Rorby - 2021
    When he quits his job in the Chicago stockyards to join other homesteaders settling the Great Plains, Nona finds herself torn between supporting her father's vision for their future and her mother's struggle to adjust to life on a desolate prairie.Initially, things look up for the family as they settle into life in Dalhart, Texas. The wheat boom is in full swing, and it appears her father's dream of providing his family with a home of their own is coming true. Too soon the effects of the depression impact her family. Then the rains stop. Before long, Dalhart is the epicenter of the Dust Bowl.Like Dust, I Rise transforms poverty into pride and reflects the heroism of endurance.

How to Be a Moonflower


Katie Daisy - 2021
    In this lavishly illustrated book, New York Times-bestselling artist Katie Daisy explores the mystery and magic of the nighttime. Join her on a journey from dusk to dawn, complete with quotes, poems, meditations, field guides to different nocturnal flora and fauna, and charts that map out the cosmos. From night-blooming flowers to cozy campfires, from moon baths to meteor showers, Katie Daisy's lush illustrations capture the beauty that comes to life in the darkness.BELOVED AUTHOR: Known for her lush, painterly artwork and love of the natural world, NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling author Katie Daisy has 112K followers on Instagram, where you will find frequent posts featuring her vibrant illustrations.A CELEBRATION OF NATURE: Nature-lovers and plant-appreciators will find much to admire in this book. Illustrating everything from the phases of the moon to fluttering moths, Katie Daisy has a knack for capturing the very best this magical world has to offer.EXPLORE THE WONDERS OF NIGHT TIME: The nighttime offers time for reflection, exploration, and adventure. This book will help you make the most of those mystical, after-dark hours and observe the hidden wonders that come to life at nightDELUXE PACKAGE: Featuring a tactile two-piece case with silver metallic ink on the spine and back cover, How to Be a Moonflower makes a beautiful gift for the people in your life who look to art and illustration for creative encouragement, self-exploration, and mindfulness.Perfect for:• Fans of Katie Daisy's artwork and previous book HOW TO BE A WILDFLOWER• free spirits• art and nature lovers• tarot readers and moon worshippers

Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion


Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - 2021
    In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US's history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity--founded and built by immigrants--was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good--but inaccurate--story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics


Marc Lamont Hill - 2021
    policy in the region In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.

The Scrying Game


Christine Zane Thomas - 2021
    Her death played out like a movie. Her second vision came along shortly after that when she predicted her father’s cancer diagnosis.Her mother always wanted her to hide her gift away. That’s what she called it, a gift.It was never a gift.In one of Willow’s more recent visions, she saw her great aunt dying peacefully. What she couldn’t predicate was that Aunt Cora would leave her a house in Florida and a cat, forcing Willow to go back to her hometown to sort out affairs.But it turns out Aunt Cora is a little less dead than anyone thought. The old psychic inhabits the body and mind of the cat—and she’s hellbent on teaching Willow how to properly use her psychic gifts.When Willow’s childhood best friend is murdered, she has no choice but to get involved, putting her on a collision course with the vision she’s been running away from all her life.The Scrying Game is the first in an all-new paranormal mystery series, Witching Hour: Psychics. Great for fans of cozy mystery and Paranormal Women's Fiction.

Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide


Abdul El-Sayed - 2021
    Every single American will interact with the healthcare system at some point in their lives, and most people will find that interaction less than satisfactory. And yet for every dollar spent in our economy, 18 cents go to healthcare. What are we paying for, exactly?Healthcare policy is notoriously complex, but what Americans want is simple: good healthcare that's easy to use and doesn't break the bank. Polls show that a majority of Americans want the government to provide universal health coverage to all Americans.What's less clear is how to get there.Medicare for All is the leading proposal to achieve universal health coverage in America. But what is it exactly? How would it work? More importantly, is it practical or practicable?This book goes beyond partisan talking points to offer a serious examination of how Medicare for All would transform the way we give, receive, and pay for healthcare in America.

How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Identifying 29 Wild, Edible Mushrooms


Frank Hyman - 2021
    But for beginner foragers who just want to answer the question “Can it eat it?”, most of the books on the subject are dry, dense, and written by mycologists for other mycologists. Frank Hyman to the rescue! How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying is the book for anyone who walks in the woods and would like to learn how to identify just the 21 edible mushrooms they’re likely to come across. In it, Hyman offers his expert mushroom foraging advice, distilling down the most important information for the reader in colorful, folksy language that’s easy to remember when in the field. Want an easy way to determine if a mushroom is a delicious morel or a toxic false morel? Slice it in half – “if it’s hollow, you can swallow,” Hyman says. With Frank Hyman’s expert advice and easy-to-follow guidelines, readers will be confident in identifying which mushrooms they can safely eat and which ones they should definitely avoid.

The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution


Nils Melzer - 2021
    In July 2010, Wikileaks published Cablegate, one of the biggest leaks in the history of the US military, including evidence for war crimes and torture. In the aftermath Julian Assange, the founder and spokesman of Wikileaks, found himself at the centre of a media storm, accused of hacking and later sexual assault. He spent the next seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fearful that he would be extradited to Sweden to face the accusations of assault and then sent to US. In 2019, Assange was handed over to the British police and, on the same day, the U.S. demanded his extradition. They threatened him with up to 175 years in prison for alleged espionage and computer fraud.At this point, Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, started his investigation into how the US and UK governments were working together to ensure a conviction. His findings are explosive, revealing that Assange has faced grave and systematic due process violations, judicial bias, collusion and manipulated evidence. He has been the victim of constant surveillance, defamation and threats. Melzer also gathered together consolidated medical evidence that proves that the prison has suffered prolonged psychological torture.Melzer's compelling investigation puts the UK state into the dock, showing how, through secrecy, impunity and, crucially, public indifference, unchecked power reveals a deeply undemocratic system. Furthermore, the Assange case sets a dangerous precedent: once telling the truth becomes a crime, censorship and tyranny will inevitably follow.

The Resistance Training Revolution: Why Lifting Weights Is the Exercise Solution for Our Modern Health Problems


Sal Di Stefano - 2021
    This is the first authoritative, comprehensive guidebook from Mind Pump Media, one of the fastest-growing brands in the health and fitness industry.Building muscle and burning body fat is often one focus and overall health & wellness is often another. The Resistance Training Revolution brings both of those elements together. Mind Pump co-founder Sal Di Stefano blows the lid off the same old "30 minutes of cardio a day" advice, revealing how to optimize your time spent in the gym--at least 2-3 days a week for the average person, following Mind Pump's Muscular Adaptation Programming System (MAPS)--to transform your health in a way that cardio alone cannot. The book draws on the many recent studies and expert advice from MDs and other health experts (including many guests featured on the Mind Pump podcast) to show the superiority of resistance training for all aspects of health including injury prevention and anti-aging.

Calhoun: American Heretic


Robert Elder - 2021
    Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union -- and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as the strain of radical politics he developed has found expression once again in the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising him from the mainstream of American history, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.

State of Emergency: How We Win in the Country We Built


Tamika D. Mallory - 2021
    Mallory states her case for action in this searing indictment of America’s historical, deadly, and continuing assault on Black and brown lives.Drawn from a lifetime of frontline culture-shifting advocacy, organizing, and fighting for equal justice, State of Emergency makes Mallory’s demand for change and shares the keys to effective activism both for those new to and long-committed to the defense of Black lives.From Minneapolis to Louisville, to Portland, Kenosha, and Washington, DC, America’s reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. While conversations around pathways to progress take place on social media and cable TV, history tells us that meaningful change only comes with radical legislation and boots-on-the-ground activism. Here, Mallory shares her unique personal experience building coalitions, speaking truth to power, and winning over hearts and minds in the struggle for shared prosperity and safety.Forward-looking, steeped in history, and rich with stories from life on the margins of American life, State of Emergency is a revelatory examination of the challenges we face, of the forces we must overcome, and a blueprint for all who maintain hope for social equity and a better tomorrow.

Kindred / Fledgling / Collected Stories


Octavia E. Butler - 2021
    Butler used the conventions of science fiction to explore the dangerous legacy of racism in America in harrowingly personal terms. She broke new ground with books that featured complex Black female protagonists—“I wrote myself in,” she would later recall—establishing herself as one of the pioneers of the Afrofuturist aesthetic. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her achievement in creating new aspirations for the genre and for American literature. This first volume in the Library of America edition of Butler’s collected works gathers her 1979 masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century; her final novel, Fledgling; and her collected short stories.In Kindred, Dana, a Black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre–Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own. Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.A woman wakes up covered in burns in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened to her. In time she discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her. Among the long-lived Ina, though, Shori is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her brown skin and the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Part murder mystery, part fantasy thriller, Fledgling is Butler’s incomparable take on the vampire novel.This Library of America volume also includes eight short stories and five essays—including two previously uncollected—as well as a newly researched chronology of Butler’s life and career and helpful explanatory notes by scholar Gerry Canavan. Butler’s friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.

The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921


Mary E. Jones Parrish - 2021
    Parrish’s daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. “Mother,” she said, “I see men with guns.”The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history.Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman’s foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known nationally as Black Wall Street. The murdered were buried in mass graves, thousands were left homeless, and millions of dollars worth of Black-owned property was burned to the ground. The incident, which was hidden from history for decades, is now recognized as one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the United States.

A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism


Daniel A. Sjursen - 2021
    . . . Fluid, readable, strongly written, and thought-provoking--a must read for nonhistorians seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history. --Kirkus (starred review) In vivid, engaging prose, Sjursen shifts the lens and challenges readers to think critically and to apply common sense to their understanding of our nation's past--and present--so we can view history as never before.Written by a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, A True History of the United States grew out of a course that Daniel A. Sjursen taught to cadets at West Point, his alma mater. With chapter titles such as Patriots or Insurgents? and The Decade That Roared and Wept, A True History is accurate with respect to the facts and intellectually honest in its presentation and analysis.Sjursen exposes the dominant historical narrative as at best myth, and at times a lie . . . He brings out from the shadows those who struggled, often at the cost of their own lives, for equality and justice. Their stories, so often ignored or trivialized, give us examples of who we should emulate and who we must become. --Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion and America: The Farewell Tour

The Lost Language


Claudia Mills - 2021
    But it is Lizard who, gripped by the magnitude of this loss, challenges Betsy, What if, instead of WRITING about dying languages, like your mom, you and I SAVED one instead?As the girls embark on their quest to learn as much as possible of the near-extinct language of Guern�siais (spoken on the Isle of Guernsey, off the coast of France), their friendship faces unexpected strains. With Lizard increasingly obsessed with the language project, Betsy begins to seek greater independence from her controlling and charismatic friend, as well as from her controlling and charismatic mother. Then tragedy threatens Betsy's life beyond what any words can express, and Lizard does something unthinkable.Maybe lost friendships, like lost languages, can never be completely saved.A Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Blue Ribbon Book!A Charlotte Huck Recommended BookAn NCTE Notable Verse NovelA Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors


Amber Share - 2021
     Subpar Parks, both on the popular Instagram page and in this humorous, informative, and collectible book, combines two things that seem like they might not work together yet somehow harmonize perfectly: beautiful illustrations and informative, amusing text celebrating each national park paired with the one-star reviews disappointed tourists have left online. Millions of visitors each year enjoy Glacier National Park, but for one visitor, it was simply Too cold for me! Another saw the mind-boggling vistas of Bryce Canyon as Too spiky! Never mind the person who visited the thermal pools at Yellowstone National Park and left thinking, "Save yourself some money, boil some water at home."Featuring more than 50 percent new material, the book will include more depth and insight into the most popular parks, such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Acadia National Parks; anecdotes and tips from rangers; and much more about author Amber Share's personal love and connection to the outdoors. Equal parts humor and love for the national parks and the great outdoors, it's the perfect gift for anyone who loves to spend time outside as well as have a good read (and laugh) once they come indoors.

Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels


Ioan Grillo - 2021
    But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico's powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren't often connected in our heated discussions of gun control-but they should be. In Ioan Grillo's groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.Grillo travels to gun manufacturers, strolls the aisles of gun shows and gun shops, talks to FBI agents who have infiltrated biker gangs, hangs out on Baltimore street corners, and visits the ATF gun tracing center in West Virginia. Along the way, he details the many ways that legal guns can cross over into the black market and into the hands of criminals, fueling violence here and south of the border. Simple legislative measures would help close these loopholes, but America's powerful gun lobby is uncompromising in its defense of the hallowed Second Amendment. Perhaps, however, if guns were seen not as symbols of freedom, but as key accessories in our epidemics of addiction, the conversation would shift. Blood Gun Money is that conversation shifter.

The Cotillion Brigade: A Novel of the Civil War and the Most Famous Female Militia in American History


Glen Craney - 2021
    Sherman's Yankees are closing in. Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?Based on the true story of the celebrated Nancy Hart Rifles, The Cotillion Brigade is a sweeping epic of the Civil War's ravages on family and love, the resilient bonds of sisterhood amid devastation, and the miracle of reconciliation between bitter enemies. "Gone With The Wind meets A League Of Their Own." 1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.Five years later, secession and total war against the homefronts of Dixie hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history. *** Military Writers Society of America Gold Medal Winner *** *** Historical Novel Society Editor's Choice Award *** *** InD'tale Magazine Crowned Heart for Excellence Award *** Nannie defies the traditions of Southern gentility by forming a women's militia and drilling it to prepare for Northern invaders. With their men dead, wounded, or retreating with the Confederate armies, only Captain Nannie and her Fighting Nancies stand between their beloved homes and the Yankee torches.Hardened into a slashing Union cavalry colonel, Hugh duels Rebel generals Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest across Tennessee and Alabama. As the war churns to a bloody climax, he is ordered to drive a burning stake deep into the heart of the Confederacy.Yet one Georgia town-which by mocking coincidence bears Hugh's last name-stands defiant in his path.Read the remarkable story of the Southern women who formed America's most famous female militia and the Union officer whose life they changed forever.

Julian Bond's Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement


Julian Bond - 2021
    For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the civil rights movement.Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists, some very young, who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.Beginning with the movement's origins in the early twentieth century, Bond tackles key events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, Freedom Rides, sit-ins, Mississippi voter registration, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Freedom Summer, and Selma. He explains the youth activism, community ties, and strategizing required to build strenuous and successful movements. With these firsthand accounts of the civil rights movement and original photos from Danny Lyon, Julian Bond's Time to Teach makes history come alive.

Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War


Brendan Simms - 2021
    Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked—and the United States remained at peace.Hitler’s American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler’s intervention was not the foolhardy decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.

Betty White: 100 Remarkable Moments in an Extraordinary Life


Ray Richmond - 2021
    The volume also vividly illustrates the beloved White’s lifelong advocacy for animals as well as the masterful comic versatility she displayed even as she closed in on the century mark.Revel in Betty White’s talent, elegance, and spunk with this photographic retrospective of her life.

How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned about Love and LGBTQ Parenthood


Trystan Reese - 2021
    Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect.   From this unexpected start, the young couple built a loving marriage and happy home—learning to parent on the job. They adopted Hailey and Lucas, tied the knot, and soon decided to try for a baby that Trystan, who is transgender, would carry. Trystan’s groundbreaking pregnancy attracted media fanfare, and the family welcomed baby Leo in 2017.   In this inspiring memoir, Trystan shares his unique story alongside universal lessons that will help all parents through the trials of raising children. How We Do Family is a refreshing new take on family life for the LGBTQ community and beyond. Through every tough moment and touching memory, Trystan shows that more important than getting things right is doing them with love.

The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker


Jelani Cobb - 2021
    It reaches back across a century, with Rebecca West’s classic account of a 1947 lynching trial and James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time), and yet it also explores our current moment, from the classroom to the prison cell and the upheavals of what Jelani Cobb calls “the American Spring”. Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir, and criticism from writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Vinson Cunningham, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, Kelefa Sanneh, Doreen St. Félix, and others, the collection offers startling insights about this country’s relationship with race. The Matter of Black Lives reveals the weight of a singular history and challenges us to envision the future anew.

My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris


Alexander Lobrano - 2021
    An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power


Zachary Karabell - 2021
    Throughout the nineteenth century, when America was convulsed by a devastating financial panic essentially every twenty years, Brown Brothers quietly went from strength to strength, propping up the U.S. financial system at crucial moments and catalyzing successive booms, from the cotton trade and the steamship to the railroad, while largely managing to avoid the unwelcome attention that plagued some of its competitors. By the turn of the twentieth century, Brown Brothers was unquestionably at the heart of what was meant by an American Establishment. As America's reach extended beyond its shores, Brown Brothers worked hand in glove with the State Department, notably in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century, where the firm essentially took over the country's economy. To the Brown family, the virtue of their dealings was a given; their form of muscular Protestantism, forged on the playing fields of Groton and Yale, was the acme of civilization, and it was their duty to import that civilization to the world. When, during the Great Depression, Brown Brothers ensured their strength by merging with Averell Harriman's investment bank to form Brown Brothers Harriman, the die was cast for the role the firm would play on the global stage during World War II and thereafter, as its partners served at the highest levels of government to shape the international system that defines the world to this day.In Inside Money, acclaimed historian, commentator, and former financial executive Zachary Karabell offers the first full and frank look inside this institution against the backdrop of American history. Blessed with complete access to the company's archives, as well as a thrilling understanding of the larger forces at play, Karabell has created an X-ray of American power--financial, political, cultural--as it has evolved from the early 1800s to the present. Today, unlike many of its competitors, Brown Brothers Harriman remains a private partnership and a beacon of sustainable capitalism, having forgone the heady speculative upsides of the past thirty years but also having avoided any role in the devastating downsides. The firm is no longer in the command capsule of the American economy, but, arguably, that is to its credit. If its partners cleaved to any one adage over the generations, it is that a relentless pursuit of more can destroy more than it creates.

Elinor: A Riveting Story Based on the Lost Colony of Roanoke (Daughters of the Lost Colony)


Shannon McNear - 2021
    Escape into a riveting story based on the mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.Author Shannon McNear portrays history with vivid authenticity. In 1587, Elinor White Dare sailed from England heavy with her first child but full of hopes. Her father, a renowned artist and experienced traveler, has convinced her and her bricklayer husband Ananias to make the journey to the New World. Land, they are promised, more goodly and beautiful than they can ever imagine. But nothing goes as planned from landing at the wrong location, to facing starvation, to the endless wait for help to arrive. And, beyond her comprehension, Elinor finds herself utterly alone. . . . The colony at Roanoke disappeared into the shadows of history. But, what if one survived to leave a lasting legacy?

How to Be a Girl: A Mother's Memoir of Raising Her Transgender Daughter


Marlo Mack - 2021
    And it made me come out as a boy instead of a girl. When Marlo Mack’s three-year-old utters these words, her world splits wide open. Friends and family, experts, and Marlo herself had long downplayed her “son’s” requests for pretty dresses and long hair as experimentation—as a phase—but that time is over. When little “M” begs, weeping, to be reborn, Marlo knows she has to start listening to her kid.How to Be a Girl is Mack’s unflinching memoir of M’s coming out—to her father, grandparents, classmates, and the world. Fearful of the prejudice that menaces M’s future, Mack finds her liberal values surprisingly challenged: Why can’t M just be a boy who wears skirts and loves fairies? But M doesn’t give up: She’s a girl! As mother and daughter teach one another How to Be a Girl, Mack realizes it’s really the world that has a lot to learn—from her sparkly, spectacular M.

Unearthing The Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett


Marta McDowell - 2021
    In her latest, she shares a moving account of how gardening deeply inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of the beloved children's classic The Secret Garden.   In Unearthing The Secret Garden, best-selling author Marta McDowell delves into the professional and gardening life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Complementing her fascinating account with charming period photographs and illustrations, McDowell paints an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and reminds us why The Secret Garden continues to touch readers after more than a century. This deeply moving and gift-worthy book is a must-read for fans of The Secret Garden and anyone who loves the story behind the story.

Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith


Obery M. Hendricks Jr. - 2021
    In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers.He scathingly indicts the religious leaders who helped facilitate the rise of the notoriously unchristian Donald Trump, likening them to the "court jesters" and hypocritical priestly sycophants of bygone eras who unquestioningly supported their sovereigns' every act, no matter how hateful or destructive to those they were supposed to serve.In the wake of the deadly insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol, Christians Against Christianity is a clarion call to stand up to the hypocrisy of the evangelical Right, as well as a guide for Christians to return their faith to the life-affirming message that Jesus brought and died for. What Hendricks offers is a provocative diagnosis, an urgent warning that right-wing evangelicals' aspirations for Christian nationalist supremacy are a looming threat, not only to Christian decency but to democracy itself. What they offer to America is anything but good news.

The Devil's Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation


Lauren Etter - 2021
    "The best business book I've read since Bad Blood."--Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of Ali: A LifeHoward Willard lusted after Juul. As the CEO of tobacco giant Philip Morris's parent company and a veteran of the industry's long fight to avoid being regulated out of existence, he grew obsessed with a prize he believed could save his company--the e-cigarette, a product with all the addictive upside of the original without the same apparent health risks and bad press. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, Adam Bowen and James Monsees began working on a device that was meant to save lives and destroy Big Tobacco, but they ended up baking the industry's DNA into their invention's science and marketing. Ultimately, Juul's e-cigarette was so effective and so market-dominating that it put the company on a collision course with Philip Morris and sparked one of the most explosive public health crises in recent memory.In a deeply reported account, award-winning journalist Lauren Etter tells a riveting story of greed and deception in one of the biggest botched deals in business history. Etter shows how Philip Morris's struggle to innovate left Willard desperate to acquire Juul, even as his own team sounded alarms about the startup's reliance on underage customers. And she shows how Juul's executives negotiated a lavish deal that let them pocket the lion's share of Philip Morris's $12.8 billion investment while government regulators and furious parents mounted a campaign to hold the company's feet to the fire.The Devil's Playbook is the inside story of how Juul's embodiment of Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos wrought havoc on American health, and how a beleaguered tobacco company was seduced by the promise of a new generation of addicted customers. With both companies' eyes on the financial prize, neither anticipated the sudden outbreak of vaping-linked deaths that would terrorize a nation, crater Juul's value, end Willard's career, and show the costs in human life of the rush to riches--while Juul's founders, board members, and employees walked away with a windfall.

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction


Kate Masur - 2021
    Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement.Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice


Carey Gillam - 2021
    All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.  The Monsanto Papers is the inside story of Lee Johnson’s landmark lawsuit against Monsanto. For Lee, the case was a race against the clock, with doctors predicting he wouldn’t survive long enough to take the witness stand. For the eclectic band of young, ambitious lawyers representing him, it was a matter of professional pride and personal risk, with millions of dollars and hard-earned reputations on the line. For the public at large, the lawsuit presented a question of corporate accountability. With enough money and influence, could a company endanger its customers, hide evidence, manipulate regulators, and get away with it all—for decades?   Readers will be astounded by the depth of corruption uncovered, captivated by the shocking twists, and moved by Lee’s quiet determination to see justice served. With gripping narrative force that reads like fiction, The Monsanto Papers takes readers behind the scenes of a grueling legal battle, pulling back the curtain on the frailties of the American court system and the lengths to which lawyers will go to fight corporate wrongdoing.

If or When I Call


Will Johnson - 2021
    Parker and Melinda are searching for themselves in the hollows of their estranged marriage. Parker, haunted by the demons of addiction, lives every moment at the edge of an undiagnosed disorder - a darkness that steals his awareness and throws him into convulsions. Melinda, on an odyssey of her own, knows Parker's struggles all too well, and as they try to help their teenage son come to terms with their lives apart, they have only their memories of a brighter life to get by.Haunting and lyrical, Johnson's powerful debut is a hymn to the lives we overlook in the quiet places around us. And how close we are to living them ourselves.Will Johnson is a musician and songwriter who has played in the bands Centro-matic, South San Gabriel, Marie/Lepanto, Overseas, New Multitudes, and Monsters of Folk. He also releases records under his own name, and makes paintings centering on the subject of baseball and its history. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction. He was born in Kennett, Missouri, and currently lives in Austin, Texas. If or When I Call is his first novel.

My Life in Dire Straits: The Inside Story of One of the Biggest Bands in Rock History


John Illsley - 2021
    Their album sold hundreds of millions of copies and their music--classics like "Sultans of Swing," "Romeo and Juliet," "Money for Nothing," and "Brothers in Arms"--is still played on every continent today. There was, quite simply, no bigger band on the planet throughout the eighties.In this powerful and entertaining memoir, founding member John Illsley gives the inside track on the most successful rock band of their time. From playing gigs in the spit-and-sawdust pubs of south London, to hanging out with Bob Dylan in LA, Illsley tells the story of the band with searching honesty, soulful reflection, and wry humor. Starting with his own unlikely beginnings in Middle England, he recounts the band's rise from humble origins to the best-known venues in the world, the working man's clubs to Madison Square Garden, sharing gigs with wild punk bands to rocking the Live Aid stage at Wembley. And woven throughout is an intimate portrait and tribute to his great friend Mark Knopfler, the band's lead singer, songwriter, and remarkable guitarist.Tracing an idea that created a phenomenal musical legacy, an extraordinary journey of joy and pain, companionship and surprises, this is John Illsley's life in Dire Straits.

Fitness for Every Body: Strong, Confident, and Empowered at Any Size


Meg Boggs - 2021
    But when Meg became a mom, she decided to rethink her preconceived notions and embrace her body for what it is, not what diet culture said it should be. In Fitness for Every Body, Meg shares her personal story and inspires you to celebrate your own body for all its capabilities. Featuring a dozen step-by-step, full-body workouts, this book is more than a workout guide or a training manual. It’s a reminder that you’re more than just your weight, that you are stronger than you believe, and that just because you might not be thin, doesn’t mean that you can’t be an athlete. Your body is capable of doing incredible things—you just have to let it. Equally uplifting and enlightening, this body-positive fitness guide will inspire you to love your body no matter your size and to approach food and exercise in a way that benefits both mental and physical health and wellbeing.

Their Surprise Amish Marriage


Jocelyn McClay - 2021
    Now Rachel’s unexpectedly pregnant and married to a hardworking husband who feels like a stranger. It's not the marriage she hoped for…but can they turn this rocky beginning into a happy ending?From Love Inspired: Uplifting stories of faith, forgiveness and hope.

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg


Emily Rapp Black - 2021
    Since adolescence, Emily Rapp, herself an amputee since the age of four, felt that there were many things she had in common with Frida Kahlo. From the first sight of Kahlo's painting of the devastating bus crash that almost killed her, Rapp felt a sense of kinship with the artist. They both endured numerous operations; both alternately hid and revealed their altered bodies; and both found a way to live and create despite physical and emotional pain.In this riveting read, Rapp gets to the essence of Frida Kahlo through her art, her letters and her diaries. She tells her own story of losing a child to Tay-Sachs; finding love, and becoming pregnant with her daughter; and of how Kahlo's life and work helped her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.Containing several full colour images of Kahlo's art and clothing, Rapp offers a unique perspective on the artist and the challenges she faced."I want to know and remember what it was like to walk as Frida once walked: before polio at six years old shrunk her right leg; before the infamous bus crash on September 17, 1925 when the pole pierced her pelvis; then the casts, the saws, the stitches woven into the skin and then carefully twisted out, the scars gone white and silent and sealed. I am one-legged, like Frida, but I am also unlike her, and there in our essential difference is where my fascination lies, and there lies also my devotion, my despair, my revulsion, my resentment, my desire." --Emily Rapp

Accused: My Story of Injustice


Adama Bah - 2021
    But as a thirteen-year-old after the events of September 11, 2001, she began experiencing discrimination and dehumanization as prejudice toward Muslim people grew. Then, on March 24, 2005, FBI agents arrested Adama and her father. Falsely accused of being a potential suicide bomber, Adama spent weeks in a detention center being questioned under suspicion of terrorism.With sharp and engaging writing, Adama recounts the events surrounding her arrest and its impact on her life—the harassment, humiliation, and persecution she faced for crimes she didn’t commit. Accused brings forward a crucial and unparalleled first-person perspective of American culture post-9/11 and the country’s discrimination against Muslim Americans, and heralds the start of a new series of compelling narrative nonfiction by young people, for young people.

Killing Season: A Paramedic's Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic


Peter Canning - 2021
    Canning began asking his patients how they had gotten started on their perilous journeys. And while no two tales were the same, their heartrending similarities changed Canning's view and moved him to educate himself about the science of addiction. Armed with that understanding, he began his fight against the stigmatization of users.In Killing Season, we ride along with Canning through the streets of Hartford as he tells stories of opioid overdose from a street-level vantage point. A first responder to hundreds of overdoses throughout the rise of America's epidemic, Canning has seen the impact of prescription painkillers, heroin, and the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl firsthand. Bringing us into the room (or the car, or the portable toilet) with the victims of this epidemic, Canning explains how he came to favor harm reduction, which advocates for needle exchange, community naloxone, and safe-injection sites.Stripping away the stigma of addiction through stories that are hard-hitting, poignant, sad, confessional, funny, and overall, human, Killing Season aims to change minds about the epidemic, help obliterate stigma, and save lives.

The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America


Noah Feldman - 2021
    He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution--a system he regarded as the "last best hope of mankind." But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution?In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States' founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution's place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact--a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text--a transcendent statement of the nation's highest ideals.The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them--and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln's Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues.Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism


Frank Chapman - 2021
    Published by Freedom Road Socialist Organization - frso.org. About the Author: Frank Chapman is a community organizer, Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Field Organizer of the Chicago Alliance Against Political Repression, and part of the Central Committee of Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He is also a published writer, with articles on Truthout and Freedomways. In 2019, Frank published his first book, a memoir entitled The Damned Don't Cry: Pages from the Life of a Black Prisoner and Organizer.

After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed


Andrew J. Bacevich - 2021
    foreign policy has, at least theoretically, been to keep Americans safe. Yet as we confront a radically changed world, it has become indisputably clear that the terms of that policy have failed. Washington’s insistence that a market economy is compatible with the common good, its faith in the idea of the “West” and its “special relationships,” its conviction that global military primacy is the key to a stable and sustainable world order—these have brought endless wars and a succession of moral and material disasters.In a bold reconception of America’s place in the world, informed by thinking from across the political spectrum, Andrew J. Bacevich—founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a bipartisan Washington think tank dedicated to foreign policy—lays down a new approach—one that is based on moral pragmatism, mutual coexistence, and war as a last resort. Confronting the threats of the future—accelerating climate change, a shift in the international balance of power, and the ascendance of information technology over brute weapons of war—his vision calls for nothing less than a profound overhaul of our understanding of national security.Crucial and provocative, After the Apocalypse sets out new principles to guide the once-but-no-longer sole superpower as it navigates a transformed world.

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice


Karen L. Cox - 2021
    Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and heritage laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Anatomy of a Witch: A Map to the Magical Body


Laura Tempest Zakroff - 2021
    Not just your physical flesh-and-blood body, but also your symbolic Witch body, the conduit for bringing the material and metaphysical worlds together. Within these pages, you will explore hands-on magical practices, exercises, and sigils related to your Witch Lungs, Heart, Bones, Mind, and the spiraling path of your inner Serpent.Magic flows most freely when you are in tune with your intuition and the power of your true self. Through dozens of activities, prompts, spells, and rituals, Anatomy of a Witch helps you connect with the seen and unseen worlds, your ancestors, and your living community. Discover the profound correspondences between your body, the mythos of tarot, and the five elements. Practice rituals and activities for protection, warding, rebalancing your home, and embracing your body, despite the limiting beliefs that society foists upon us. This book teaches you how to tap into your personal power as you make a pilgrimage to the inner workings of your true self.Includes a foreword by Christopher Penczak, bestselling author of The Temple of Witchcraft series

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America


Gabriel Winant - 2021
    What does this shift portend for our future?Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy--particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color.Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.

We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy


Robert Tracy McKenzie - 2021
    Political polarization, presidential eccentricities, the trustworthiness of government, and the prejudices of the voting majority have waxed and waned ever since the time of the Founders, and there are no fail-safe solutions to secure the benefits of a democratic future. What we must do, argues the historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, is take an unflinching look at the very nature of democracy--its strengths and weaknesses, what it can promise, and where it overreaches. And this means we must take an unflinching look at ourselves. We the Fallen People presents a close look at the ideas of human nature to be found in the history of American democratic thought, from the nation's Founders through the Jacksonian Era and Alexis de Tocqueville. McKenzie, following C. S. Lewis, claims there are only two reasons to believe in majority rule: because we have confidence in human nature--or because we don't. The Founders subscribed to the biblical principle that humans are fallen and their virtue is always doubtful, and they wrote the US Constitution to frame a republic intended to handle our weaknesses. But by the presidency of Andrew Jackson, contrary ideas about humanity's inherent goodness were already taking deep root among Americans, bearing fruit in such perils as we now face for the future of democracy. Focusing on the careful reasoning of the Founders, the seismic shifts of the Jacksonian Era, and the often misunderstood but still piercing analysis of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, McKenzie guides us in a conversation with the past that can help us see the present--and ourselves--with new insight.

Blades Falling Softly


Sarah Lin - 2021
    Two species. One destiny.Anyinn and Canumon are old warriors long past the adventures of youth, but destiny is coming for them all the same. One seeks to protect her ancestral homeland, the other to enter it. As they each become the representative of their nation and species, the conflict will draw their families together in a way they never imagined. Can their friendship survive the tides of history?

Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West


Blaine Harden - 2021
    Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries. But Spalding would succeed as a propagandist, inventing a story that recast his friend as a hero, and helped to fuel the massive westward migration that would eventually lead to the devastation of those they had purportedly set out to save.As Spalding told it, after uncovering a British and Catholic plot to steal the Oregon Territory from the United States, Whitman undertook a heroic solo ride across the country to alert the President. In fact, he had traveled to Washington to save his own job. Soon after his return, Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were massacred by a group of Cayuse. Though they had ample reason - Whitman supported the explosion of white migration that was encroaching on their territory, and seemed to blame for a deadly measles outbreak - the Cayuse were portrayed as murderous savages. Five were executed.This fascinating, impeccably researched narrative traces the ripple effect of these events across the century that followed. While the Cayuse eventually lost the vast majority of their territory, thanks to the efforts of Spalding and others who turned the story to their own purposes, Whitman was celebrated well into the middle of the 20th century for having saved Oregon. Accounts of his heroic exploits appeared in congressional documents, The New York Times, and Life magazine, and became a central founding myth of the Pacific Northwest.Exposing the hucksterism and self-interest at the root of American myth-making, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the cost of American expansion, and of the problems that can arise when history is told only by the victors.

Bringing Up Race: How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World


Uju Asika - 2021
    In the looks Black kids get in certain spaces, the manner in which some people speak to them, the stuff that goes over their heads. Stuff that makes them cry even when they don't know why. How do you bring up your kids to be kind and happy when there is so much out there trying to break them down? Bringing Up Race is an important book, for all families whatever their race or ethnicity. It's for everyone who wants to instil a sense of open-minded inclusivity in their kids, and those who want to discuss difference instead of shying away from tough questions. Uju Asika draws on often shocking personal stories of prejudice along with opinions of experts, influencers, and fellow parents to give prescriptive advice in this invaluable guide. Bringing Up Race explores: When children start noticing ethnic differences (hint: much earlier than you think)What to do if your child says something racist (try not to freak out)How to have open, honest, age-appropriate conversations about raceHow children and parents can handle racial bullyingHow to recognize and challenge everyday racism, aka microaggressionsBringing Up Race is a call to arms for all parents as our society works to combat white supremacy and dismantle the systemic racism that has existed for hundreds of years.

Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Fostered Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System


Erwin Chemerinsky - 2021
    The fact that police are nine times more likely to kill Black men than other Americans is no accident; it is the result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and courts to presume that suspects are guilty before being charged.Demonstrating how the pro-defendant Warren Court was a brief historical aberration, Erwin Chemerinsky shows how this more liberal era ended with Nixon’s presidency and the ascendance of conservative justices, whose rulings―like Terry v. Ohio and Los Angeles v. Lyons―have permitted stops and frisks, limited suits to reform police departments, and even abetted the use of choke holds. Presumed Guilty concludes that an approach to policing that continues to exalt “Dirty Harry” can be transformed only by a robust court system committed to civil rights.

Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching


Jarvis R. Givens - 2021
    African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage.There is perhaps no better exemplar of this heritage than Carter G. Woodson—groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged: Woodson’s first teachers were his formerly enslaved uncles; he himself taught for nearly thirty years; and he spent his life partnering with educators to transform the lives of Black students. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today.

Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation


David Correia - 2021
    Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities. The difference is that these settlements get their name from their location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which separates the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed by the United States. Bordertowns came into existence when the first US military forts and trading posts were strategically placed along expanding imperial frontiers to extinguish indigenous resistance and incorporate captured indigenous territories into the burgeoning nation-state. To this day, the US settler state continues to wage violence on Native life and land in these spaces out of desperation to eliminate the threat of Native presence and complete its vision of national consolidation “from sea to shining sea.” This explains why some of the most important Native-led rebellions in US history originated in bordertowns and why they are zones of ongoing confrontation between Native nations and their colonial occupier, the

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance


Mia Bay - 2021
    Traveling Black reveals how travel discrimination transformed over time from segregated trains to buses and Uber rides. Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle."--Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an AntiracistA riveting, character-rich account of racial segregation in America that reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws--and why "traveling Black" has been at the heart of the quest for racial justice ever since.Why have white supremacists and Black activists been so focused on Black mobility? From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought for over a century to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of "separate but equal" involved trains and buses, Mia Bay went back to the sources with some basic questions: How did travel segregation begin? Why were so many of those who challenged it in court women? How did it move from one form of transport to another, and what was it like to be caught up in this web of contradictory rules?From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. "There is not in the world a more disgraceful denial of human brotherhood than the 'Jim Crow' car of the southern United States," W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored.Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations and insisting on justice in the courts. Traveling Black upends our understanding of Black resistance, documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A masterpiece of scholarly and human insight, this book helps explain why the long, unfinished journey to racial equality so often takes place on the road.

Gallery of Clouds


Rachel Eisendrath - 2021
    Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at proud sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change.”Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. She holds out her manuscript to her—an infinite moment passes—and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne’s practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African-American librarian in the Chicago public library system; a fragment of Spenser; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Benjamin’s “scholarly romance” The Arcades. Eisendrath’s wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and bounding grace.

Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America


Keith Boykin - 2021
    At the heart of this national crisis is the fear of a darkening America—a country in which there is no longer a predominant white majority.As the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, its leaders have incited white Americans in a last-ditch race against time to stop the advance of a new, multiracial emerging majority. Keith Boykin, long time political commentator, has watched this white resentment consume the GOP over the course of a life in politics, activism, and journalism. He has also observed the divisions among Democrats, as white progressives have postponed demands for full racial equity, while Black voters have often been too forgiving of party leaders who have failed to deliver. America can no longer avoid its long overdue reckoning with the past, Boykin argues. With the familiarity of personal experience and the acuity of historical insight, Boykin urges us to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and save the union, not just by making Black lives matter, but by making Black lives equal.

Hillbilly Queer: A Memoir


J.R. Jamison - 2021
    . . One of the most humane and challenging memoirs to come out of the Midwest . . . Indeed, we are all more than heroes and villains, and Jamison does a great job of showing how and where our humanity gets lost between the two.”-- Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody’s Daughter and host of the HBO podcast Lovecraft Country Radio J.R. Jamison spends his days in a world of trigger warnings and safe spaces, while his trigger-happy dad, Dave, spends his questioning why Americans have become so sensitive. Yet at the height of the 2016 election, the two decide to put political differences aside and travel to rural Missouri for Dave’s fifty-five year class reunion. But with the constant backdrop of the Trump vs. Clinton battle at every turn, they are forced to explore one formidable question: Will the trip push them further apart or bring them closer together? Traveling through the rural, sun-beaten landscapes of Missouri the two meet people along the way who challenge their concepts of right and wrong, and together they uncover truths about their family’s past that reveals more than political differences, they discover a lesson on the human condition that lands them on the international pages of The Guardian.Hillbilly Queer is an enduring love story between a dad and son who find that sometimes the differences between us aren't really that different at all.“One of those rare books that finds beauty in the irreconcilable. In an age when our politics and our nation can feel broken, Hillbilly Queer shows us the messy glue of love that still holds families together.”-- Samantha Allen, author of Real Queer America

Frost & Raine


K.L. Noone - 2021
    A Cupid who works as a divorce lawyer. And magic in the air ...Raine’s never been a conventional Cupid. He likes organization, his job as a successful lawyer, and black coffee, and he dislikes messiness, physical and emotional. He tries hard not to use his powers, because he’d rather not manipulate anyone’s desires, and he’s not planning to fall in love himself -- and he wouldn’t trust it if someone fell in love with him. But the owner of Raine’s favorite coffee shop is endlessly patient, kind even in the face of sarcasm, and an artist with flavors and window decorations ... and he could even challenge Raine’s resolutions about love.Don enjoys his life. Even though he’s a Frost, he finds comfort in giving people warmth: good coffee, a cozy refuge from the rain, holiday decorations, and overall cheer. But one gorgeous Cupid seems immune to Don’s cheerfulness -- and he keeps coming back, day after day. Fortunately, Don’s always liked a challenge, and now he’s determined to make Raine smile at least once ... and he’s discovering that Raine’s sarcasm hides a generous and lonely heart, keeping the world at bay.And if Don and Raine can learn to trust each other -- with new coffee flavors, with their hopes for the future, and with their hearts -- the Frost and the Cupid just might find their own magical happy ending.

Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy


Gayle Jessup White - 2021
    For four decades the acclaimed journalist and genealogy enthusiast researched her connection to Thomas Jefferson, to confirm its truth once and for all. After she was named a Jefferson Studies Fellow, Jessup White discovered her family lore was correct. Poring through photos and documents and pursuing DNA evidence, she learned that not only was she a descendant of Jefferson on his father’s side; she was also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Peter Hemings, Sally Hemings’s brother.In Reclamation she chronicles her remarkable journey to definitively understand her heritage and reclaim it, and offers a compelling portrait of what it means to be a black woman in America, to pursue the American dream, to reconcile the legacy of racism, and to ensure the nation lives up to the ideals advocated by her legendary ancestor.

Magnified


Minnie Bruce Pratt - 2021
    With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.Oh DeathSomeone sang, Oh death! Oh death! Won't youpass me over for another day? Someone said, I dreamed of you last night. I dreamed youwere telling me your whole life story.Whole. Whorled. Welkin, winkle, wrinkle.The loop of time holds us all together.The pile of laundry on the bed. Youfolding socks one inside the other. Wehave had this day, and now this night.The clothes are put away, and from the bed we seethe moon folding light into darkness, not death.

The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness


David Roberts - 2021
    It’s also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s.In The Bears Ears, acclaimed adventure writer David Roberts takes readers on a tour of his favorite place on earth as he unfolds the rich and contradictory human history of the 1.35 million acres of the Bears Ears domain. Weaving personal memoir with archival research, Roberts sings the praises of the outback he’s explored for the last twenty-five years.

You're Paid What You're Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy


Jake Rosenfeld - 2021
    If you earn roughly the same as others in your job, with the precise level determined by your performance, then you're paid market value. And who can question something as objective and impersonal as the market? That, at least, is how many of us tend to think. But according to Jake Rosenfeld, we need to think again.Job performance and occupational characteristics do play a role in determining pay, but judgments of productivity and value are also highly subjective. What makes a lawyer more valuable than a teacher? How do you measure the output of a police officer, a professor, or a reporter? Why, in the past few decades, did CEOs suddenly become hundreds of times more valuable than their employees? The answers lie not in objective criteria but in battles over interests and ideals. In this contest four dynamics are paramount: power, inertia, mimicry, and demands for equity. Power struggles legitimize pay for particular jobs, and organizational inertia makes that pay seem natural. Mimicry encourages employers to do what peers are doing. And workers are on the lookout for practices that seem unfair. Rosenfeld shows us how these dynamics play out in real-world settings, drawing on cutting-edge economics, original survey data, and a journalistic eye for compelling stories and revealing details.At a time when unions and bargaining power are declining and inequality is rising, You're Paid What You're Worth is a crucial resource for understanding that most basic of social questions: Who gets what and why?

To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change


Alfred W. McCoy - 2021
    In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries.After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.

Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts


Blake Scott Ball - 2021
    It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years, Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table.Most people have come to associate Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, not the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some have even argued that Peanuts was so beloved because it was apolitical. The truth, as Blake Scott Ball shows, is that Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of a nuclear world, Peanuts was a daily conversation about very real hopes and fears and the political realities of the Cold War world. As thousands of fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents reveal, Charles Schulz used his comic strip to project his ideas to a mass audience and comment on the rapidly changing politics of America.Charlie Brown's America covers all of these debates and much more in a historical journey through the tumultuous decades of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.

A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community


Adam Russell Taylor - 2021
    The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward.In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the beloved community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the beloved community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the beloved community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the beloved community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy


Martin S. Indyk - 2021
    In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk--a former United States Ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013--has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand. Now, in an attempt to understand the arc of American diplomatic influence in the Middle East, he returns to the origins of American-led peace efforts and the man who created the Middle East peace process--Henry Kissinger. Based on newly available documents from American and Israeli archives, extensive interviews with Kissinger, and Indyk's own interactions with some of the main characters, the author takes readers inside the negotiations. Here is a roster of larger-than-life characters--Anwar Sadat, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Hafez al-Assad, and Kissinger himself. Indyk's account is both that of a historian poring over the records of these events, as well as an inside player seeking to glean lessons for Middle East peacemaking. He makes clear that understanding Kissinger's design for Middle East peacemaking is key to comprehending how to--and how not to--make peace.

China's Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices


John M Ross - 2021
    For years, Ross has provided English-language readers with an in-depth analysis of China's economic and foreign relations policies, the history of its socialist project, and China's position in the global economy. More importantly, Ross has cut through the anti-Communist and Sinophobic narrative of China perpetuated by Western media to give readers a clear view of what is possible for socialist countries around the world.

The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America


Bill Bratton - 2021
    . . a remarkably candid account. . . Succeeding as a centrist in public life these days can be an almost impossible task. But centrism in law enforcement may be the most delicate challenge of all. Bratton's ability to practice it was a startling phenomenon." -New York Times Book Review The epic, transformative career of Bill Bratton, legendary police commissioner and police reformer, in Boston, Los Angeles, and New YorkWhen Bill Bratton became a Boston street cop after his return from serving in Vietnam, he was dismayed by the corrupt old guard, and it is fair to say the old guard was dismayed by him, too. But his success fighting crime could not be denied. Propelled by extraordinary results, Bratton had a dazzling rise, and ultimately a dazzling career, becoming the most famous police commissioner of modern times. The Profession is the story of that career in full.Everywhere he went, Bratton slashed crime rates and professionalized the vocation of the cop. He and his team created the revolutionary program CompStat, the Big Bang of modern data-driven policing. But his career has not been without controversy, and central to the reckoning of The Profession is the fundamental crisis of relations between the Black community and law enforcement; a crisis he now believes has been inflamed by the unforeseen consequences of some well-intentioned policies. Building trust between a police force and the community it is sworn to protect is in many ways, Bratton argues, the first task--without genuine trust in law enforcement to do what is right, little else is possible.The Profession is both a searching examination of the path of policing over the past fifty years, for good and also for ill, and a master class in transformative leadership. Bill Bratton was never brought into a police department to maintain the status quo; wherever he went--from Boston in the '80s to the New York Police Department in the '90s to Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King to New York again in the era of unchecked stop-and-frisk--root-and-branch reinvention was the order of the day and he met the challenge. There are few other positions on Earth in which life-and-death stakes combine with intense public scrutiny and turbulent political crosswinds as they do for the police chief of a major American city, even more so after counterterrorism entered the mix in the twenty-first century. Now more than ever, when the role of the police in society is under a microscope like never before, Bill Bratton's authority on the subject of improving law enforcement is profoundly useful. A riveting combination of cop stories and community involvement, The Profession presents not only a fascinating and colorful life at the heights of law-enforcement leadership, but the vision for the future of American policing that we sorely need.

The Seer


Eva Shaw - 2021
    War grips the world. Asian hate runs rampant, and New Orleans is a dangerous place for Chinese-English scientist Thomas Ling as he collides with self-proclaimed psychic Beatrix Patterson. She's a good liar with an excellent memory, which in truth is her only gift—well, that and conning the well-heeled out of their money and secrets.Hired by the US Army to use her connections to expose Nazi saboteurs and sympathizers, Beatrix recruits the reluctant Thomas. Together, they pit their skills against a government conspiracy, terrorist cells, kidnappings, and murderous plots. As Beatrix grapples with the truth of her own past, she must come to terms with her ruse. Exposing the Nazi war machine about to invade the country could cost Beatrix everything she's worked so hard to build. But the information she and Thomas uncover could change the outcome of the war.The question remains: will anyone believe a liar and a suspected traitor?

Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution


Woody Holton - 2021
    Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

The Most Costly Journey: Stories of Migrant Farmworkers in Vermont Drawn by New England Cartoonists


Marek Bennett - 2021
    Originally distributed to farm workers as individual Spanish language comic books, this collected edition brings the lives and voices-as well as the challenges and hardships-of these workers to an English-language audience, granting insight into the experiences and lives of the people vital to producing the food we eat.Featuring a foreword by Julia Alvarez (Afterlife), introduction by Stephen R. Bissette (Swamp Thing) and preface by project founder, nurse Julia Doucet, these inspiring stories grapple with issues encountered by migrant workers everywhere-isolation, separation, depression, substance abuse-even as they celebrate resilience, family, community, and the ability of each storyteller to direct their own healing narrative. The Most Costly Journey is a gripping work that draws together non-fiction cartooning, graphic medicine and ethnography, channeling the skills of health care practitioners, artists and ethnographers into helping alleviate the pain of others.EDITED BY: Marek Bennett, Julia Grand Doucet, Andy Kolovos, & Teresa MaresFEATURED ARTISTS: Tillie Walden / Marek Bennett / Kevin Kite / Iona Fox / Kane Lynch / Teppi Zuppo / John Carvajal / Michael Tonn / Angela Boyle / Rick Veitch / Glynnis Fawkes / Greg Giordano / Ezra Veitch / Shashwat Mishra / Michelle SaylesFOREWORD: Julia AlvarezPREFACE: Julia Grand DoucetINTRODUCTION: Stephen R. BissetteAFTERWORD: Teresa Mares & Andy KolovosPAGES: 252 / DIMENSIONS: 5.5"x8.5"INTERIOR: B&W / COVER: ColorBINDING: Paperback / LANGUAGE: EnglishPRINT ISBN: 978-0-916718-00-8LCCN: 2021932606

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics


Mae M. Ngai - 2021
    But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over “the Chinese Question”: would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold, and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world. Out of their encounters with whites, and the emigrants’ assertion of autonomy and humanity, arose the pernicious western myth of the “coolie” laborer, a racist stereotype used to drive anti-Chinese sentiment.By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and the British Empire had answered “the Chinese Question” with laws that excluded Chinese people from immigration and citizenship. Ngai explains how this happened and argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it. The Chinese Question masterfully links important themes in world history and economics, from Europe’s subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that persist to this day.

After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort


Eric Dean Wilson - 2021
    As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm. Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture—in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values—combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. “Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” (New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face.

Soul of the Hurricane: The Perfect Storm and an Accidental Sailor


Nelson Simón - 2021
    But one thing led to another, and there he was. He told himself that it would be a sort of pleasure cruise: a week in the Gulf Stream with a gourmet chef on board, some down time on a tropical island, then a quick flight home. What did it matter that he had practically no sailing experience? The eight other crew members had plenty—they just needed an extra pair of hands. What could possibly go wrong?   It was October 1991, and the ship was Anne Kristine, the oldest continuously sailing vessel in the world. What awaited them was Hurricane Grace, the southern end of what came to be known as the “Perfect Storm.”Soul of the Hurricane tells an unlikely tale that begins with an unexpected invitation and ends in the dead of night somewhere far from home, with a Coast Guard helicopter above and a dark, angry sea below.

Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America


Curtis Bunn - 2021
    It is a simple story, wherein white America finally witnessed enough brutality to move their collective consciousness. The only problem is that it isn't true. George Floyd was not the first Black man to be killed by police—he wasn’t even the first to inspire nation-wide protests—yet his death came at a time when America was already at a tipping point. In SAY THEIR NAMES, five seasoned journalists probe this critical shift. With a piercing examination of how inequality has been propagated throughout history, from Black imprisonment and the Convict Leasing program to long-standing predatory medical practices to over-policing, the authors highlight the disparities that have long characterized the dangers of being Black in America. They examine the many moderate attempts to counteract these inequalities, from the modern Civil Rights movement to Ferguson, and how the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others pushed compliance with an unjust system to its breaking point. Finally, they outline the momentous changes that have resulted from this movement, while at the same time proposing necessary next steps to move forward. With a combination of penetrating, focused journalism and affecting personal insight, the authors bring together their collective years of reporting, creating a cohesive and comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in America.

Leaving California


Mark Lanegan - 2021
    There are amends and curses amongst stories that one can only tell once they’ve seen everything and everything collapse. In many ways this is part two of Lanegan's best selling 2020 novel, Sing Backwards and Weep, where loose ends are tied and others left for dead.A brilliant work of true transformation, these poems also chronicle Lanegan's exit from California for the literal greener pastures of Ireland. As someone who has survived it all, he must have known this move was the next level of perseverance. There’s a pacing anxiety leading up to the move, turbulence in the transition, and a calm consideration once he’s settled.Perfect bound with felt cover.

Transformations: A Collection


Alexander Michael - 2021
    Why should death be any different?Abandoned mansions boasting mysteries. Dark liaisons conducted post-midnight. The dangers of love and addiction. Karma. Passion. Dread. Revelations abound - if only they can be survived. 'Transformations: A Collection' depicts a multitude of windows onto the world's mysteries.Reality is a kaleidoscope. Taste the dark. Be transformed.

White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa


Susan Williams - 2021
    This is the untold story of how, over a few vital years, African Independence was strangled at birth.In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. It was inspired by the example of Ghana itself which, under the charismatic leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, had just thrown off the British colonial yoke - the first African nation to do so. It was moment heady with promise for independence movements across Africa, and for all those who believed colonialism was a moral aberration.Among the supporters of African independence were some of the leading figures of the American Civil Rights movement. Malcolm X was in Accra and Martin Luther King used Nkrumah's speech as the basis for his own "Free At Last" speech, so clear were the parallels between their own struggle for political equality in the US with that of the African nations. W. E. B. Du Bois moved to Ghana, inspired by the future of independent Africa. Yet among the many official messages of support received by the conference the United States was conspicuously quiet, despite its historic and public opposition to colonialism. Vice President Nixon did attend the celebrations in Ghana and asked a group of black people, "How does it feel to be free?"They answered: "We wouldn't know. We're from Alabama".The conference was also attended by a slew of strange societies, many of which were fronts, and behind them was the CIA. The CIA was in favor of the end of the British Empire but a pan-African independence movement, one susceptible to Soviet entreaties, looked like a security threat. Through original research and unparalleled insight, Susan Williams reveals how the CIA's baleful influence was felt from South Africa to the Congo as the agency prepared to move in as Africa's colonizers moved out.

The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson


Robert S. Levine - 2021
    Johnson, seemingly more progressive than Lincoln, looked like the ideal person to lead the country. He had already cast himself as a “Moses” for the Black community, and African Americans were optimistic that he would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality.Despite this early promise, Frederick Douglass, the country’s most influential Black leader, soon grew disillusioned with Johnson’s policies and increasingly doubted the president was sincere in supporting Black citizenship. In a dramatic and pivotal meeting between Johnson and a Black delegation at the White House, the president and Douglass came to verbal blows over the course of Reconstruction.As he lectured across the country, Douglass continued to attack Johnson’s policies, while raising questions about the Radical Republicans’ hesitancy to grant African Americans the vote. Johnson meanwhile kept his eye on Douglass, eventually making a surprising effort to appoint him to a key position in his administration.Levine grippingly portrays the conflicts that brought Douglass and the wider Black community to reject Johnson and call for a guilty verdict in his impeachment trial. He brings fresh insight by turning to letters between Douglass and his sons, speeches by Douglass and other major Black figures like Frances E. W. Harper, and articles and letters in the Christian Recorder, the most important African American newspaper of the time. In counterpointing the lives and careers of Douglass and Johnson, Levine offers a distinctive vision of the lost promise and dire failure of Reconstruction, the effects of which still reverberate today.