Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America


Jonathan Kozol - 1987
    His books, from the National Book Award–winning Death at an Early Age to his most recent, the critically acclaimed Shame of the Nation, are touchstones of the national conscience. First published in 1988 and based on the months the author spent among America’s homeless, Rachel and Her Children is an unforgettable record of the desperate voices of men, women, and especially children caught up in a nightmarish situation that tears at the hearts of readers. With record numbers of homeless children and adults flooding the nation’s shelters, Rachel and Her Children offers a look at homelessness that resonates even louder today.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire


Matt Taibbi - 2008
    A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off--or radicalized--by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedom") that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: • The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq;• The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress;• The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and• The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era."The funniest angry writer and the angriest funny writer since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town." -- James Wolcott"…[A] scabrous, hilarious vivisection of our disintegrating nation. …Taibbi shines a light on the corruption, absurdities, and idiot pieties of modern American politics. Beneath his cynical fury, though, are flashes of surprising compassion for the adrift credulous souls who are taken in by it all." -- Michelle Goldberg

Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties


Kevin M. Schultz - 2015
    Buckley, Jr., were towering personalities who argued publicly and vociferously about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were friends and trusted confidantes. In Buckley and Mailer, historian Kevin M. Schultz delivers a fresh and enlightening chronicle of that tumultuous decade through the rich story of what Mailer called their "difficult friendship." From their public debate before the Floyd Patterson–Sonny Liston heavyweight fight and their confrontation at Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball, to their involvement in cultural milestones like the antiwar rally in Berkeley and the March on the Pentagon, Buckley and Mailer explores these extraordinary figures’ contrasting visions of America.

Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America


Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
    This remarkable book is his odyssey, first written in 1542 as an official report to the king of Spain under the title La Relacion.

The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens


Brooke Hauser - 2011
    Others flew in on planes. One arrived after escaping in a suitcase. And some won’t say how they got here.These are “the new kids”: new to America and all the routines and rituals of an American high school, from lonely first days to prom. They attend International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, which is like most high schools in some ways—its halls are filled with students gossiping, joking, flirting, and pushing the limits of the school’s dress code—but all of the students are recent immigrants learning English. Together, they come from more than forty-five countries and speak more than twenty-eight languages.A singular work of narrative journalism, The New Kids chronicles a year in the life of a remarkable group of these teenage newcomers—a multicultural mosaic that embodies what is truly amazing about America.Hauser’s unforgettable portraits include Jessica, kicked out of her father’s home just days after arriving from China; Ngawang, who spent twenty-four hours folded up in a small suitcase to escape from Tibet; Mohamed, a diamond miner’s son from Sierra Leone whose arrival in New York City is shrouded in mystery; Yasmeen, a recently orphaned Yemeni girl who is torn between pursuing college and marrying so that she can take care of her younger siblings; and Chit Su, a Burmese refugee who is the only person to speak her language in the entire school. The students in this modern-day Babel deal with enormous obstacles: traumas and wars in their countries of origin that haunt them, and pressures from their cultures to marry or drop out and go to work. They aren’t just jostling for their places in the high school pecking order—they are carving out new lives for themselves in America.The New Kids is immersion reporting at its most compelling as Brooke Hauser takes us deep inside the dramas of five International High School students who are at once ordinary and extraordinary in their separate paths to the American Dream. Readers will be rooting for these kids long after reading the stories of where they came from, how they got here, and where they are going next.

The Mexican Revolution


Adolfo Gilly - 1971
    Written during the author’s time as a political prisoner in the famous penitentiary of Lecumberri in Mexico, it sold thousands of copies in its first edition, becoming widely accepted as the official textbook by history faculties in Mexico despite Gilly’s continued incarceration. It has gone through more than thirty editions in Mexico and been translated into French and Greek.This comprehensively revised and updated edition of the original text is now available with a foreword by Latin American history scholar Friedrich Katz and a new preface by the author. A true “people’s history,” The Mexican Revolution is a stirring, bottom-up account of an event whose reverberations are still felt throughout Latin America and the rest of the world.

Diplomacy


Henry Kissinger - 1994
    Moving from a sweeping overview of history to blow-by-blow accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Henry Kissinger describes how the art of diplomacy has created the world in which we live, and how America’s approach to foreign affairs has always differed vastly from that of other nations. Brilliant, controversial, and profoundly incisive, Diplomacy stands as the culmination of a lifetime of diplomatic service and scholarship. It is vital reading for anyone concerned with the forces that have shaped our world today and will impact upon it tomorrow.

Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America


John Charles Chasteen - 2000
    A concise, chronological history of Latin America spans six centuries and encompasses twenty countries as it discusses the people, events, and factors that shaped Latin America--including colonization, revolution, ethnic diversity, and the struggle for economic growth and political and social equality.

Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution


Elena Poniatowska - 1999
    These are the Adelitas and Valentinas celebrated in famous corridos mexicanos, but whose destiny was much more profound and tragic than the idealistic words of ballads. The photographs remind Poniatowska of the trail of women warriors that begins with the Spanish conquest and continues to Mexico’s violent revolution. These women are valiant, furious, loyal, maternal, and hardworking; they wear a mask that is part immaculate virgin, part mother and wife, and part savage warrior; and they are joined together in the cruel hymn of blood and death from which they built their own history of the Revolution.The photographs are culled from the vast Casasola Collection in the Fototeca Nacional of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico.

Napoleon in Egypt


Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti - 1798
    Sheik Al-Jabarti's chronicle is a unique combination of historical narration and reflection combined with daily observations about the atmosphere in Cairo and the mood among the local population. The book is an Arab view of a turning point in modern history. This expanded edition celebrates the 250th anniversary of Al-Jabarti's birth. The French view of these events is described by Napoleon's secretary; Edward W. Said, Columbia University, provides a stinging critique of French preoccupation with Egypt and the resulting cultural "Orientalism"; Robert Tignor (Princeton University) provides a scintillating introduction. An additional chapter by editor Shmuel Moreh examines the Arabic interpretation of Al-Jabarti's writings. Illustrated.

Oil and Ice: A Story of Arctic Disaster and the Rise and Fall of America's Last Whaling Dynasty


Peter Nichols - 2010
    Miraculously, 1,218 men, women and children survived, but the disaster was catastrophic at home. "Oil and Ice" is the story of one fateful whaling season that illuminates the unprecedented rise and devastating fall of America's first oil economy, and the fate of today's petroleum industry.

Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil's Deal


Lehr & O'Neill - 2012
    update of first edition

True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx


Sam Quinones - 2001
    Fox's victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico tracked by Quinones for over six years.This side of Mexico gets very little press. . . . yet it is the best of the country. . . . people who have the spunk to imagine something else and instinctively flee the enfeebling embrace of PRI paternalism. . . . newly realistic telenovellas show the gray government censor that the country is too lively to abide his boss's dictates. . . . Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States. . . . [so] the United States is now part of the Mexican reality and is where this other side of Mexico is often found, reinventing itself.--from the introduction.Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border--about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino S�nchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido--Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself. There a dynamic sector exists. It is made up of those who instinctively shunned the enfeebling embrace of the PRI's paternalism, including scrappy entrepreneurs such as the Popsicle Kings of Tocumbo and Indian migrant farmworkers who found a future in the desert of Baja California. Here, too, are true tales from ignored margins of society, including accounts of drag queens and lynchings. From the fringes of the country, Quinones suggests, emerge some of the most telling and central truths about modern Mexico and how it is changing.This book expands our knowledge of modern Mexico many times over. Quinones unearths a wealth of material that has in fact gone unnoticed or been hidden.--Professor Francisco Lomel�, University of California, Santa Barbara

Revolution of Hope: The Life, Faith, and Dreams of a Mexican President


Vicente Fox - 2007
    A native son of Mexico, grandson of immigrants from the United States and Spain, Fox worked his way from ranch hand and truck driver to the youngest CEO in the history of Coca-Cola. His political rise from precinct worker to world leader was equally swift. As president, Vicente Fox steered Mexico's fragile young democracy through turbulent times, ushering in six years of economic stability and reform in health care, education, and housing, with increased freedom of the press. His presidency also reduced poverty and tackled corruption. Vicente Fox embodies the American Dream in its broadest sense as a vision of the New World, as well as the story of Mexico. Elected as a political outsider with a message of honesty, change, and hope, he is truly a world hero of democracy. This vivid book interweaves his inspiring personal story with his bold ideas for the future of the planet. For the first time, President Fox reveals the ups and downs of his close but rocky relationships with world leaders from President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Ch?vez. In "Revolution of Hope," President Fox outlines a new vision of hope for the future of the Americas. He speaks out forcefully on hot global topics like immigration, the war in Iraq, racism, globalization, the role of the United Nations, free trade, religion, gender equity, indigenous rights and the moral imperative to heal the global divide between rich and poor nations. From the man who brought true democracy to Mexico, "Revolution of Hope" is a personal story of triumph and a political vision for the future.

The Uses of Haiti


Paul Farmer - 1999
    It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the US role in its bitter fate.—Noam Chomsky, from the introductionIn this third edition of the classic The Uses of Haiti, Paul Farmer looks at what has happened to the health of the poor in Haiti since the coup.Winner of a McArthur Genius Award, Paul Farmer is a physician and anthropologist who has worked for 25 years in Haiti, where he serves as medical director of a hospital serving the rural poor. He is the subject of the Tracy Kidder biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains.