A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.
Yale University Press
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9780300244052
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Hardcover
South to America
By Perry, Imani
An essential journey through the American South - and the way it defines American identity - from one our most extraordinary writers on race and culture at work today We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there, who have never even been there, can rattle off a list of signifiers that define the South for them: Gone with the Wind, the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, cotillions, plantations, football, Jim Crow, and, of course, slavery. For those who live outside the region, the South is very much about the profound difference between "us" and "them." In South to America, Imani Perry shows in detail by infinitely careful detail that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and if we are American, we are all at least a little bit Southern.
Ecco
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9780062977403
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Hardcover
All That She Carried
By Miles, Tiya
In a display case in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture sits a rough cotton bag, called Ashley's Sack, embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gave this sack filled with a few precious items to her daughter, Ashley, as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival as well. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language - including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives - and the lives of so many women like them - to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
Random House
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9781984854995
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Hardcover
The Dead Are Arising
By Payne, Les
An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Beginning in 1990 on a quest that would consume him for the rest of his life, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Les Payne started interviewing all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to create a portrait of Malcolm X that would separate fact from fiction. Interweaving unknown details of Malcolm X's life -- from harrowing vignettes culled from his Depression-era Nebraska and Michigan youth; to his Massachusetts prison years and religious conversion; to his recruitment for Elijah Muhammad; and, finally, to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination -- Payne has written a groundbreaking biography that brings to vivid life the story of one of the most politically relevant figures in twentieth-century American history.
Liveright
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9781631491665
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Hardcover
The Yellow House
By Broom, Sarah M.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant -- the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
Grove Press
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9780802125088
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Hardcover
yellow house
By Broom, Sarah H.
Publisher: n/a
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9780802125088
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Book
The New Negro
By Stewart, Jeffrey C
A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University.
Oxford University Press, USA
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9780195089578
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Hardcover
The Future Is History
By Gessen, Masha
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTIONThe essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (TheWall Street Journal) , award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Riverhead Books
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9781594634536
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Hardcover
Stamped from the Beginning
By Kendi, Ibram X
WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IN RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTSFINALIST FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTIONTHE MOST AMBITIOUS BOOK OF 2016 - The Washington PostA BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2016A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2016A CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016A ROOT BEST BOOK OF 2016A BUZZFEED BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016A BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF 2016NOMINATED FOR 2016 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK OF NONFICTIONFINALIST FOR THE 2017 HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD IN NONFICTIONA KIRKUS BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2016A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2016 TO EXPLAIN CURRENT POLITICSA KIRKUS BEST HEARTRENDING NONFICTION BOOK of 2016AN ENTROPY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016THE WASHINGTON POST 2016 SUMMER READING LIST"ENGROSSING AND RELENTLESS" - The Washington Post"THIS DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING" - The Root"NOVELISTIC FLAIR" - The Stranger"AMBITIOUS, MAGISTERIAL" - Starred Kirkus Review"MUST FOR SERIOUS READERS" - Library Journal"HEAVILY RESEARCHED YET READABLE" - BOOKLIST "WORTH THE TIME OF ANYONE WHO WANTS TO UNDERSTAND RACISM" - The Seattle Times"EVER-RELEVANT CONTEXT FOR THE WHITE SUPREMACIST MOMENT" - The Dallas Morning News"A COMPELLING, THOROUGHLY ENLIGTENING, UNSETTLING, AND NECESSARY READ" - Vox"GRACEFUL, ENGAGING PROSE" - Tampa Bay TimesSome Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
Nation Books
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9781568584638
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Hardcover
Between the World and Me
By Coates, Ta-nehisi
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER | PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST | NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * O: The Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * People * Entertainment Weekly * Vogue * Los Angeles Times * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * New York * Newsday * Library Journal * Publishers WeeklyHailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer) "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son - and readers - the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.Praise for Between the World and Me"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory." - Toni Morrison "Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Really powerful and emotional." - John Legend, The Wall Street Journal "Extraordinary." - David Remnick, The New Yorker "Brilliant . . . a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers." - The Washington Post "An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir." - The Boston Globe "[Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America." - Los Angeles Times "A work that's both titanic and timely . . . the latest essential reading in America's social canon." - Entertainment Weekly
Spiegel & Grau
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9780812993547
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Print book
Age of Ambition
By Osnos, Evan
Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalistWinner of the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction.An Economist Best Book of 2014.A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformationFrom abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy-or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don't see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes. As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; F First Edition edition
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9780374280741
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Hardcover
The Unwinding
By Packer, George
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR BEST BOOKSelected by New York Times critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite BookA Washington Post Best Political BookA New Republic Best BookA riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation. American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internets significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the eras leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packers novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition
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9780374102418
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Audiobook
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
By Boo, Katherine
In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams.
Random House; 1st edition
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9781400067558
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Hardcover
The Swerve
By Greenblatt, Stephen
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction * Winner of the National Book Award * New York Times Bestseller Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word.In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to circulation changed the course of history. The poems vision would shape the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and - in the hands of Thomas Jefferson - leave its trace on the Declaration of Independence. From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggios search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now. "An intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown-like mystery-in-the-archives thriller." - Boston Globe 16 pages of color illustrations
W. W. Norton & Company
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9780393343403
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Paperback
Just Kids
By Smith, Patti
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-Second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Maxs Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous, the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists ascent, a prelude to fame.
Ecco; First Edition edition
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9780066211312
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Hardcover
The First Tycoon
By Stiles, T J
NATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDIn this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilts humble birth during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American history. In between we see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.
Knopf; First Edition edition
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9780375415425
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Audiobook
The Hemingses of Monticello
By Gordon-reed, Annette
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book AwardNew York Times Bestseller #1 on Esquires List of the 50 Best Biographies of All Time. "[A] commanding and important book." -- Jill Lepore, The New YorkerThis epic work -- named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times -- tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the familys dispersal after Jeffersons death in 1826. 37 illustrations
W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition
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9780393064773
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Hardcover
Legacy of Ashes
By Weiner, Tim
For the last sixty years the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record burying its blunders in top-secret archives Its mission was to know the world When it did not succeed it set out to change the world Its failures have handed us in the words of President Eisenhower a legacy of ashesNow Pulitzer Prizewinning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIAand everything is on the record LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than documents primarily from the archives of the CIA itself and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans including ten Directors of Central Intelligence It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror to its near-collapse after llTim Weiners past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as impressively reported and immensely entertaining in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal called it truly extraordinary the best book ever written on a case of espionage Here is the hidden history of the CIA why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
Doubleday; First Edition edition
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9780385514453
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Hardcover
The Worst Hard Time
By Egan, Timothy
This National Book Award-winning story, a tour de force of historical reportage, rescues an iconic chapter of American history - the Dust Bowl that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression - from the shadows.. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times) .. In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is "arguably the best nonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.
Mariner Books; Reprint edition
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9780618773473
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Paperback
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Didion, Joan
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * From one of Americas iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Years Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion s attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
Alfred A. Knopf; 1 edition
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9781400043149
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Audiobook
Arc of Justice
By Boyle, Kevin
An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggleIn 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought Americas greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweets murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet familys journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweets story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his eras changing times.Arc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition
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9780805071450
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Hardcover
Waiting for Snow in Havana
By Eire, Carlos M N
"Have mercy on me, Lord, I am Cuban." In 1962, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Havana - exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by Fidel Castros revolution. Winner of the National Book Award, this stunning memoir is a vibrant and evocative look at Latin America from a childs unforgettable experience.Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carloss youth - with its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas - becomes an island of condemnation once a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1, 1959. Suddenly the music in the streets sounds like gunfire. Christmas is made illegal, political dissent leads to imprisonment, and too many of Carloss friends are leaving Cuba for a place as far away and unthinkable as the United States. Carlos will end up there, too, and fulfill his mothers dreams by becoming a modern American man - even if his soul remains in the country he left behind. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a eulogy for a native land and a loving testament to the collective spirit of Cubans everywhere.
Free Press
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9780743219655
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Paperback
Master of the Senate
By Caro, Robert A
Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnsons story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnsons experience - from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine - came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senates hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the "unchangeable" Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnsons political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust - or at least the cooperation - of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnsons ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnsons amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caros peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself - the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing - and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.
Knopf
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9780394528366
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Hardcover
The Noonday Demon
By Solomon, Andrew
The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomons National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression - "the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening" (Time) - now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations - around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.
Scribner
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9780684854663
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Paperback
In the Heart of the Sea
By Philbrick, Nathaniel
From the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricanes Eye, the riveting and critically acclaimed bestseller and a major motion picture starring Chris Hemsworth, directed by Ron Howard "With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed--at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow. . ."In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ships cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and mans relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.
The Rediscovery of America
By Blackhawk, Ned
A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century.
South to America
By Perry, Imani
An essential journey through the American South - and the way it defines American identity - from one our most extraordinary writers on race and culture at work today We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there, who have never even been there, can rattle off a list of signifiers that define the South for them: Gone with the Wind, the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, cotillions, plantations, football, Jim Crow, and, of course, slavery. For those who live outside the region, the South is very much about the profound difference between "us" and "them." In South to America, Imani Perry shows in detail by infinitely careful detail that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and if we are American, we are all at least a little bit Southern.
All That She Carried
By Miles, Tiya
In a display case in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture sits a rough cotton bag, called Ashley's Sack, embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gave this sack filled with a few precious items to her daughter, Ashley, as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival as well. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language - including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives - and the lives of so many women like them - to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
The Dead Are Arising
By Payne, Les
An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Beginning in 1990 on a quest that would consume him for the rest of his life, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Les Payne started interviewing all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to create a portrait of Malcolm X that would separate fact from fiction. Interweaving unknown details of Malcolm X's life -- from harrowing vignettes culled from his Depression-era Nebraska and Michigan youth; to his Massachusetts prison years and religious conversion; to his recruitment for Elijah Muhammad; and, finally, to a moment-by-moment retelling of the 1965 assassination -- Payne has written a groundbreaking biography that brings to vivid life the story of one of the most politically relevant figures in twentieth-century American history.
The Yellow House
By Broom, Sarah M.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant -- the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
yellow house
By Broom, Sarah H.
The New Negro
By Stewart, Jeffrey C
A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University.
The Future Is History
By Gessen, Masha
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTIONThe essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Hailed for her "fearless indictment of the most powerful man in Russia" (The Wall Street Journal) , award-winning journalist Masha Gessen is unparalleled in her understanding of the events and forces that have wracked her native country in recent times. In The Future Is History, she follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own - as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Stamped from the Beginning
By Kendi, Ibram X
WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IN RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTSFINALIST FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTIONTHE MOST AMBITIOUS BOOK OF 2016 - The Washington PostA BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2016A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2016A CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016A ROOT BEST BOOK OF 2016A BUZZFEED BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016A BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF 2016NOMINATED FOR 2016 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK OF NONFICTIONFINALIST FOR THE 2017 HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD IN NONFICTIONA KIRKUS BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2016A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2016 TO EXPLAIN CURRENT POLITICSA KIRKUS BEST HEARTRENDING NONFICTION BOOK of 2016AN ENTROPY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2016THE WASHINGTON POST 2016 SUMMER READING LIST"ENGROSSING AND RELENTLESS" - The Washington Post"THIS DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING" - The Root"NOVELISTIC FLAIR" - The Stranger"AMBITIOUS, MAGISTERIAL" - Starred Kirkus Review"MUST FOR SERIOUS READERS" - Library Journal"HEAVILY RESEARCHED YET READABLE" - BOOKLIST "WORTH THE TIME OF ANYONE WHO WANTS TO UNDERSTAND RACISM" - The Seattle Times"EVER-RELEVANT CONTEXT FOR THE WHITE SUPREMACIST MOMENT" - The Dallas Morning News"A COMPELLING, THOROUGHLY ENLIGTENING, UNSETTLING, AND NECESSARY READ" - Vox"GRACEFUL, ENGAGING PROSE" - Tampa Bay TimesSome Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
Between the World and Me
By Coates, Ta-nehisi
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER | PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST | NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * O: The Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * People * Entertainment Weekly * Vogue * Los Angeles Times * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * New York * Newsday * Library Journal * Publishers WeeklyHailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer) "This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son - and readers - the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.Praise for Between the World and Me"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory." - Toni Morrison "Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Really powerful and emotional." - John Legend, The Wall Street Journal "Extraordinary." - David Remnick, The New Yorker "Brilliant . . . a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers." - The Washington Post "An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir." - The Boston Globe "[Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America." - Los Angeles Times "A work that's both titanic and timely . . . the latest essential reading in America's social canon." - Entertainment Weekly
Age of Ambition
By Osnos, Evan
Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalistWinner of the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction.An Economist Best Book of 2014.A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformationFrom abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy-or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don't see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes. As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control.
The Unwinding
By Packer, George
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR BEST BOOKSelected by New York Times critic Dwight Garner as a Favorite BookA Washington Post Best Political BookA New Republic Best BookA riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation. American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internets significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the eras leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packers novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
By Boo, Katherine
In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams.
The Swerve
By Greenblatt, Stephen
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction * Winner of the National Book Award * New York Times Bestseller Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word.In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to circulation changed the course of history. The poems vision would shape the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and - in the hands of Thomas Jefferson - leave its trace on the Declaration of Independence. From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggios search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now. "An intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown-like mystery-in-the-archives thriller." - Boston Globe 16 pages of color illustrations
Just Kids
By Smith, Patti
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-Second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Maxs Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous, the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists ascent, a prelude to fame.
The First Tycoon
By Stiles, T J
NATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDIn this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilts humble birth during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American history. In between we see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.
The Hemingses of Monticello
By Gordon-reed, Annette
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book AwardNew York Times Bestseller #1 on Esquires List of the 50 Best Biographies of All Time. "[A] commanding and important book." -- Jill Lepore, The New YorkerThis epic work -- named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times -- tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the familys dispersal after Jeffersons death in 1826. 37 illustrations
Legacy of Ashes
By Weiner, Tim
For the last sixty years the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record burying its blunders in top-secret archives Its mission was to know the world When it did not succeed it set out to change the world Its failures have handed us in the words of President Eisenhower a legacy of ashesNow Pulitzer Prizewinning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIAand everything is on the record LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than documents primarily from the archives of the CIA itself and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans including ten Directors of Central Intelligence It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror to its near-collapse after llTim Weiners past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as impressively reported and immensely entertaining in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal called it truly extraordinary the best book ever written on a case of espionage Here is the hidden history of the CIA why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
The Worst Hard Time
By Egan, Timothy
This National Book Award-winning story, a tour de force of historical reportage, rescues an iconic chapter of American history - the Dust Bowl that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression - from the shadows.. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times) .. In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is "arguably the best nonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Didion, Joan
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * From one of Americas iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Years Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion s attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
Arc of Justice
By Boyle, Kevin
An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggleIn 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought Americas greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweets murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet familys journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweets story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his eras changing times.Arc of Justice is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Waiting for Snow in Havana
By Eire, Carlos M N
"Have mercy on me, Lord, I am Cuban." In 1962, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Havana - exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by Fidel Castros revolution. Winner of the National Book Award, this stunning memoir is a vibrant and evocative look at Latin America from a childs unforgettable experience.Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carloss youth - with its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas - becomes an island of condemnation once a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1, 1959. Suddenly the music in the streets sounds like gunfire. Christmas is made illegal, political dissent leads to imprisonment, and too many of Carloss friends are leaving Cuba for a place as far away and unthinkable as the United States. Carlos will end up there, too, and fulfill his mothers dreams by becoming a modern American man - even if his soul remains in the country he left behind. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a eulogy for a native land and a loving testament to the collective spirit of Cubans everywhere.
Master of the Senate
By Caro, Robert A
Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnsons story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnsons experience - from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine - came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senates hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the "unchangeable" Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnsons political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust - or at least the cooperation - of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnsons ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnsons amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caros peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself - the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing - and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.
The Noonday Demon
By Solomon, Andrew
The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomons National Book Award-winning, bestselling, and transformative masterpiece on depression - "the book for a generation, elegantly written, meticulously researched, empathetic, and enlightening" (Time) - now with a major new chapter covering recently introduced and novel treatments, suicide and anti-depressants, pregnancy and depression, and much more.The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations - around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning.
In the Heart of the Sea
By Philbrick, Nathaniel
From the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricanes Eye, the riveting and critically acclaimed bestseller and a major motion picture starring Chris Hemsworth, directed by Ron Howard "With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed--at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow. . ."In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ships cabin boy. At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and mans relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.