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Recent and Upcoming Titles
Enid Shomer
Simon & Schuster, August 2012
Before she became the nineteenth-century’s heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled up the Nile at the very same time. In reality, they never met. But in New Yorker contributor and Iowa Fiction Prize-winner Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they ignite a friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that alters both their destinies. On the surface, Nightingale and Flaubert would seem to have little in common: She is a highly privileged woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men; he is a notorious womanizer, involved with innumerable prostitutes. But both are at painful crossroads in their lives and burn with unfulfilled ambition, and in Enid Shomer’s deft hands, these two most unlikely soulmates come together to share their darkest torments and fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing debut novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth century Egypt.
"The meeting in 1849 of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert in Egypt, an unlikely but immensely satisfying confluence, is deftly imagined in this brilliant book. The louche Flaubert and the sober Miss Nightingale are fitting representations of ourselves as life’s travelers—alternately lazy and alert, sensuous and restrained, complacent and curious."
Susanna Moore, author of The Big Girls
"I could not imagine it...but Enid Shomer could and did, putting two unforgettable faces on the clash between erotic decadence and reforming zeal in Victorian Europe....As brilliantly sensual as it is finely psychological, this novel is a tour de force of twenty-first century storytelling."
Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales
Catherine Chung
Riverhead, March 2012
When Janie’s sister Hannah is born, Janie is warned that their family has lost a daughter in every generation since the Japanese occupation of Korea, and so she is charged with keeping Hannah safe forever. Years later, when Hannah cuts ties with her family and inexplicably disappears, it falls to Janie to comfort her parents. In the midst of this crisis their father is diagnosed with a grave illness, and decides to return to Korea seeking experimental treatment. Sent to find Hannah and reunite her family, Janie instead finds herself sabotaging her mission at the critical moment, abandoning her sister and going to Korea to join their parents, alone. There, as she watches her father struggle to survive against grim odds, Janie begins to explore a family history that has long been kept hidden from her. What she discovers forces her to confront the choices her parents have made, their sudden move to America 20 years ago, and ultimately her conflicted feelings towards her sister and her own role in the forces that threaten to tear her family apart. Forgotten Country the story of a family struggling to escape a history filled with violence and loss, and Janie’s personal quest to navigate the entangled obligations to family and self, duty and freedom.
"[A] beautiful debut novel...woven with tender reflections, sharp renderings of isolation, and beautiful prose....Chung simultaneously shines light on the violence of Korean history, the chill of American xenophobia, and the impossibility of home in either country."
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"A riveting, brutal portrait of two sisters in crisis, Catherine Chung's unforgettable debut is a work of enormous talent and heart. Written with compassion and insight, Forgotten Country examines the unspoken complexities of familial love and forgiveness, loyalty and betrayal, and renders an indelible, haunting image of Korea, past and present."
Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women
"A heartbreaking debut novel that will leave you quietly shattered in its wake. Forgotten Country is an exquisitely rendered account of a Korean immigrant family divided by two sisters, two countries and a curse that spans generations. Catherine Chung has written a haunting meditation on family loyalty and the lingering legacy of war."
Julie Otsuka, author of When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic
"I was left utterly devastated by the wonder and heartbreak captured in these pages. Forgotten Country is overflowing with folktales and family secrets, with American and Korean traditions, with haunting prose and mathematical beauty. Here is a book to cherish, and to celebrate. When I finished the last page I made a promise to myself to be more fearless and fierce with my love; it's that kind of book.”
Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"It is a rare novel -- debut or otherwise -- that can sing at once with such tenderness and ferocity, with such intense feeling and exquisite restraint. Forgotten Country is just that book, poetically crafted, shimmering with hard-won emotion, and wholly absorbing. A superb performance."
Chang-rae Lee, author of The Surrendered and Native Speaker
"Forgotten Country is so immediately and consistently engaging that it took a while for me to realize how artfully and beautifully it is conceived and composed. Catherine Chung may be a fledgling novelist, but she writes with the confidence and the devastatingly-honed skill of a master."
Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You and The City of Your Final Destination
"Catherine Chung is a writer whose first novel I've been waiting for, and her debut, Forgotten Country, more than fulfills what I hoped for. Chillingly beautiful and magnetic, unforgettable."
Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh
"Forgotten Country is a richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one. Catherine Chung’s beautiful and wise novel will haunt me for years to come."
Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Torch
"Catherine Chung's wonderful first novel is a moving and deeply personal story of a family caught between two very different countries and very different lives."
Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs
Eileen Pollack
Four Way Books, January 2012
Set against the tragic events of the Oklahoma City bombings, Breaking and Entering follows Christian/Jewish couple Louise and Richard Shapiro as they move from California to rural Michigan with their daughter Molly in an attempt to save their marriage. They find their core beliefs about life and love tested as school counselor Louise's students blame Satan for their homosexuality while Richard's new buddies gather arms to defend themselves against enemies at home and abroad. Pollack's America is divided and splintered, yet she writes with hope and humor...Breaking and Entering challenges the stereotypes we hold about our fellow Americans, reminding us of the unexpected bonds that can form across the divide between so-called Red and Blue states.
"A compassionate, humorous new novel about the ambiguities of modern life. After his patient commits suicide, a shattered Richard Shapiro and his wife, Louise, both therapists, move from upscale, liberal Marin County, California, to a rural Michigan village in 1995. But so much for the great escape: Louise takes up with a magnetic married minister, and Richard befriends members of the local militia, which has ties to the Oklahoma City bomber. Set against the backdrop of a divided America, Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack is a novel laced with compassion, humor and wisdom about the ambiguities of modern life."
Lynn Schnurnberger, More Magazine
"Louise Shapiro is thoroughly beset in this thorny, lucid novel. Her bad luck begins in California, where her husband abandons his psychology practice and takes a job in a rural Michigan prison. Louise struggles to adjust to the heartland, which seems overpopulated with religious nuts and militia members. Her husband drifts away into a rebellious, gun-toting fugue, and the lover she takes becomes remote in his own way. ... Her increasingly nuanced view of the sociopolitical divide is reflected in Pollack's sensitive portrayals of both liberal Louise and her ilk, and their conservative counterparts. Weaving the personal with the political, Pollack... creates an encompassing haze of dissatisfaction and misdirected passion. Despite the unrelenting misfortune, though, the tone is more solemn than dark; there's a beautiful contemplativeness, and a believable sense of redemption in the end."
Publisher's Weekly
"An exploration of Tolstoy's dictum about unhappy families....A rich and satisfying novel that explores in a significant way contemporary issues of family, religion and politics."
Kirkus
Lydia Millet
W. W. Norton, October 2011
Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan's employer, T.—the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream—who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous descent into strange and unpredictable terrain.
Salon raved that Millet's "writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself." In Ghost Lights, she combines her characteristic wit and a sharp eye for the weirdness that governs human (and nonhuman) interactions. With the scathing satire and tender honesty of Sam Lipsyte and a dark, quirky, absurdist style reminiscent of Joy Williams, Millet has created a comic, startling, and surprisingly philosophical story about idealism and disillusionment, home and not home, and the singular, heartbreaking devotion of parenthood.
"revelatory…heart-breaking…Millet is operating at high level in ‘Ghost Lights,’ and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken. We should be grateful that such an interesting writer has turned her attention to this rich, terrifying subject…"
New York Times Book Review
"[Lydia Millet] takes aim at the metaphysical jugular...her gorgeous narration...exists in some extraordinary place, at once discursive, editorial, and ruminative…. If literature can under the best circumstances transport, then Millet's extraordinary vision brings us in on the float."
BookForum
"Millet can be sublimely droll, and with Hal she finds a perfect vehicle for that. Nevertheless, ‘Ghost Lights’ isn’t a comedy of manners. Millet’s ongoing theme in this and her previous novel is the obliviousness of the Western individual to the price his or her existence exacts from the world."
Salon.com
"[A] whip-smart, funny novel…. A yarn about marriage, fatherhood, and idealism, its every page idiosyncratically entertaining, amusing, and insightful. Millet proves she might have Jonathan Franzen beat at expertly mixing the political and domestic.”
Martha Stewart Whole Living
"Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"...when Millet announced that two more books would follow [How the Dead Dream], fans and critics were thrilled to see where the darkly cerebral trilogy would lead. The second novel, Ghost Lights, does not disappoint…. simultaneously honest, funny and sad.”
Book Page
"By being honest about her flawed protagonist, she forces the reader to accept the flaws as part of understanding what makes a complicated person worth understanding in the first place. That is, by making us see the flaws, Millet makes us see how flawed people compel our understanding and love."
The Boston Globe
"surreal, darkly hilarious and profound...Millet… is adept at juggling absurdity, large existential questions and dark humor.”
San Francisco Chronicle
"Millet, I feel, is always really smart and really funny, and her vivid writing is obviously the product of a fascinating mind. And that's not something you can say about many popular writers today."
Creative Loafing Charlotte
James Reich
Soft Skull Press, October 2011
Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? I, Judas reimagines Iscariot’s relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity of Jesus Christ, subverting the legend of Judas as he inhabits some of our most notorious literary and historic figures in their darkest hours. Custer, Sexton, Van Gogh: These famous suicides converge through the figure of Judas in a cutting-edge piece of fiction that exposes the dangers of seeking universal truths in myth.
"Reading I, Judas, I found myself often provoked, occasionally disgusted or even enraged, and always riveted. It's not often that a book or a writer not only confounds my expectations, but makes me question a set of assumptions I didn't even know I held."
Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
"If you grokk the kreep factor, this one'll have you clenched in a foetal position for a century, relieved only by the occasional orgasms of its melliflous prose. You have to be strong to read this book: it rains fireballs."
Andrei Codrescu, author of Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
Tom Perrotta
St. Martin's Press, September 2011
A startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection, and loss from The New York Times bestselling author of The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children
What if the Rapture happened and you got left behind? Or what if it wasn’t the Rapture at all, but something murkier, a burst of mysterious, apparently random disappearances that shattered the world in a single moment, dividing history into Before and After, leaving no one unscathed? How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event?
This is the question confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family falls apart. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the streets of town as “living reminders” of God’s judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet by the name of Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet A student she used to be.
Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. The Leftovers is a powerful and deeply moving book about people struggling to hold onto a belief in their own futures.
"his most ambitious book to date....Though the tone is more comic than tragic, it is mainly empathic, never drawing a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' characters, but recognizing all as merely human—ordinary people dealing with an extraordinary situation. There’s even a happy ending of sorts, as characters adapt and keep going, fortified by the knowledge that they ‘were more than the sum of what had been taken from’ them. "
Kirkus (starred review)
Toby Ball
St. Martin's Press, September 2011
The dazzling follow-up to Toby Ball's acclaimed period thriller, The Vaults, takes us back to his dystopian City, fifteen years later...
Journalist Frank Frings rouses Lieutenant Piet Westermann in the middle of the night with an unusual request: move the body of a dead blonde from where she was found on the bank of a river near the utopian Uhuru Community, a Negro shantytown under threat from a deadly coalition of racists and anti-communists -- and find out how the body actually got there. As the investigation deepens, complicated by a string of possibly related deaths and disappearances, and ever-more-heated racial, religious and political factors come to bear, Westermann’s rationalist worldview is challenged by the ecstatic religious experiences he encounters in the Community, led by the charismatic Father Wome. All the while, Frank Frings works to stay ahead of a more venal journalist competitor to salvage the Uhuru Community’s reputation before its enemies can achieve its final destruction.
"Ball's worthy follow-up to The Vaults presents Lt. Piet Westermann, an honest police officer, with an awkward moral choice. On the eve of a heated mayoral race with the challenger vowing to end the Communist threat, journalist Frank Frings persuades Westermann to move the body of a dead white woman, found one night on a riverbank within the City's successful African-American Uhuru Community, and pretend to discover it elsewhere....Ball deftly blends the corrupt politics of the City with Westermann's efforts to solve the murder and preserve his own secrets."
Publisher's Weekly
"Ball’s riveting debut, The Vaults (2010), was set in the 1930s in an alternate, dystopian version of America. This sequel, which also features newspaper reporter Frank Frings, takes place about 15 years later...Ball does a very nice job of transferring some of the key social elements of the 1950s—racial unrest and the Communist witch hunts—to his alternate-history U.S. and then expanding on them. A treat for fans of noir and science fiction—and pretty much anyone in between."
Booklist
Nikolai Grozni
Free Press, September, 2011
Following the exploits and travails of the fifteen-year-old Konstantin, a pianist of exceptional sensitivity and accomplishment, 1Wunderkind offers a vividly observed, tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain between 1987 and 1989, just before it all came crashing down. Graced by unparalleled explorations of the beauty and freedom of music, even as he is cursed by all the cant and numbing mind controls of the party members and apparachiks it seems are running his life, Konstanin struggles to come to terms with becoming an adult in an environment where expression of any kind can, and often does, come at terrible cost. Through it all, the piano is at once Konstantin’s refuge and the thing tethering him to a world he cannot abide. Nor is it at all certain which, in the end, will prove stronger, his self-destructiveness or his ability as an artist to tap straight into the beauty of the world.
"Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visual and visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter."
Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award-winning Just Kids
"In this fine portrait of a suffocating society, especially remarkable are the vitality—Konstantin is a rebel with a cause, his anger contagious—and the way Grozni writes about music. Rapturous and insightful . . .a real adrenaline rush. . . . [T]his passionate novel should be pushed on anyone interested in music, politics, or energized coming-of-age tales.”
Library Journal
"Nikolai Grozni's WUNDERKIND captures not only the power and beauty of music, but the stifling oppression of life in a totalitarian state. The novel sings and howls, and in its finest moments, takes the reader's breath away."
Dinaw Menegstu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air
"Grozni's writing is colorful and strong -- his passages describing music and the musical temperament particularly...."
Publisher's Weekly
"A literary triumph!, This in-depth and highly emotional look at life behind the Iron Curtain for a piano prodigy is beyond outstanding, and one novel readers will never forget!."
The Feathered Quill
"Shrewd, rhapsodic, Nikolai Grozni’s WUNDERKIND fuses high romanticism with hard-edged humor. A love-hate letter to a Bulgaria that no longer exists, it contains some of the most vivid, celebratory writing about music I’ve ever read."
Zachary Lazar, author of Sway
"With heartbreaking insight, WUNDERKIND portrays the searing brutalities of life in Communist Eastern Europe -- and the power of music to provide solace and redemption. I found myself astonished, amazed, and moved by this remarkable first novel."
Lauren Belfer, author of A Fierce Radiance and City of Light
William Dobson
Inside the Global Battle for Democracy
Doubleday, June 2012
Dictators are making a comeback. And they are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble today than the West has given them credit for being. For a handful of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity, and cunning. These autocrats have successfully honed new techniques, methods, and formulas for preserving power, refashioning dictatorship for the modern age. But if dictators have become more nimble, so have those who threaten their rule. Across the globe, there is a struggle being fought to determine the balance of power between dictatorships and democracies. It is no longer a static, two-sided conflict between the world’s most powerful democracy and dictatorship, circa the Cold War. Instead, the contest has fractured in a thousand directions, with new rapidly modernizing regimes squaring off against a rag-tag army of dissidents, philanthropists, students, ideologues, bloggers, lawyers, environmentalists, and millionaires. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will tell the story of the hidden, unconventional war between 21st century authoritarians and the brave people who are targeting their tyranny. Traveling across China, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, and many places in between, it introduces readers to the dictators and how these modern day despots are constantly honing new strategies to oppress their people and preserve their power. And it brings to life the stories of the men and women in the trenches, who dedicate themselves to combating tyrants around the globe. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will be the first book to reveal the dramatic, behind-the-headlines struggle between these warring camps, as the future of democracy and dictatorship hangs in the balance.
Linda Killian
The Untapped Power of Independents
St. Martin's Press, January 2012
As our country’s politicians engage in bitter partisan battles, focused on protecting their own jobs but not on doing the nation’s business, and political pundits shout louder and shriller to improve their ratings, it’s no wonder that Americans have little faith in their government. But is America as divided as the politicians and talking heads would have us believe? Do half of Americans stand on the right and the other half on the left with a no-man’s-land between them?
Hardly. Forty percent of all American voters are Independents who occupy the ample political and ideological space in the center. These Americans are anything but divided, and they’re being ignored. These Independents make up the largest voting bloc in the nation and have determined the outcome of every election since World War II. Every year their numbers grow, as does the unconscionable disconnect between them and the officials who are supposed to represent them.
The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents tells the story of how our polarized political system is not only misrepresenting America but failing it. Linda Killian looks beyond the polls and the headlines and talks with the frustrated citizens who are raising the alarm about the acute bi-polarity, special interest-influence, and gridlock in Congress, asking why Obama’s postpartisan presidency is anything but, and demanding realism, honest negotiation, and a sense of responsibility from their elected officials.
Killian paints a vivid portrait of the swing voters around the country and presents a new model that reveals who they are and what they want from their government and elected officials. She also offers a way forward, including solutions for fixing our broken political system. This is not only a timely shot across the bows of both parties but an impassioned call to Independents to bring America back into balance.
“Linda Killian helps us understand who the swing voters who decide elections are and what they are looking for. Killian's analysis provides a valuable guide on harnessing their collective energy into a new way of thinking about politics.”
Eleanor Clift, contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast
“Linda Killian has written a lively and insightful book about the current state of American politics, melding the best skills of a journalist, a social scientist, a pollster, and a passionate citizen.…With Congress’s disapproval rating at an all-time high, and a ‘plague on both houses’ sentiment exploding in the country, it is hard to imagine a more timely book.”
Norman J. Ornstein, author of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track
“Linda Killian does a great job of not only examining the importance and historic role of those Independent and moderate swing voters who live between the partisan and ideological forty-yard lines, but she examines their mind-sets as well. What makes swing voters tick, what swings them and why? An understanding of swing voters leads to an understanding of the volatility and the turbulence that drove the 2006, 2008, and 2010 elections and will likely drive 2012 as well.”
Charlie Cook, editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report and political analyst for NBC News
Media Matters for America
How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine
Anchor, February 2012
Based on the meticulous research of the news watchdog organization Media Matters for America, David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt show how Fox News, under its president Roger Ailes, changed from a right-leaning news network into a partisan advocate for the Republican Party.
The Fox Effect follows the career of Ailes from his early work as a television producer and media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Consequently, when he was hired in 1996 as the president of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship conservative cable news network, Ailes had little journalism experience, but brought to the job the mindset of a political operative. As Brock and Rabin-Havt demonstrate through numerous examples, Ailes used his extraordinary power and influence to spread a partisan political agenda that is at odds with long-established, widely held standards of fairness and objectivity in news reporting.
Featuring transcripts of leaked audio and memos from Fox News reporters and executives, The Fox Effect is a damning indictment of how the network’s news coverage and commentators have biased reporting, drummed up marginal stories, and even consciously manipulated established facts in their efforts to attack the Obama administration.
"David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt have spent years in the trenches of the old and new media, from conservative journalism to the blossoming netroots movement, and together they share a keen understanding of how misinformation and political smears are systematically elevated in our national political dialogue. As we enter a new campaign season, this pointed study of modern politics is both a must-read and a cautionary tale."
Senator John F. Kerry
Ellis Cose
Renewing America's Dream of Racial Equality
Ecco, June 2011
From a venerated and bestselling voice on American life comes a contemporary look at the decline of black rage; the demise of white guilt; and the intergenerational shifts in how blacks and whites view, and interact with, each other.
In the heady aftermath of President Obama's election, conventional wisdom suggested that the bitter, angry, and destructive elements of discrimination were ebbing at last and America was becoming a postracial nation. But with this dawning age that promised so much came shifting demographics and a newfound seat of rage in the polarizing Tea Party movement, even as black optimism gained ground, giving rise to questions about assumed truths concerning race in America.
Combining the talents earned from a lifetime in journalism with the insights and thoughtfulness of a close observer of the American experience, renowned author Ellis Cose offers a fresh, original appraisal of our nation at this extraordinary time, tracking the diminishment of black anger and investigating the "generational shifting of the American mind." Weaving material from myriad interviews as well as two large and ambitious surveys that he conducted—one of black Harvard MBAs and the other of graduates of A Better Chance, a program offering elite educational opportunities to thousands of young people of color since 1963—Cose offers an invaluable portrait of contemporary America that attempts to make sense of what a people do when the dream, for some, is finally within reach as one historical era ends and another begins.
In short, The End of Anger is not just about blacks but about America—its past and its hoped-for future—and may well be the most important book dealing with race to be published in recent decades.
Kevin Young
On the Blackness of Blackness
Graywolf Press, March 2012
Winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
Taking its title from Danger Mouse’s pioneering mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album, Kevin Young’s encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical chorus to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily lives. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.
"Kevin Young’s The Grey Album is a page-turning dynamo. Here’s a surge that nudges the reader into a bluesy terrain; its panoramic wit and critical certainty cut through the hokum and reveal a timbre of endurance. The Grey Album resonates like a spasm band, generating waves of intimate discourse on black music, literature, entertainment, culture, folklore, and American history. The collection of essays is propelled by a kinetic passion that’s heroic, tessellating on the page into its postmodern shape. This poet-critic has created an unforgettable, robust trove of insights and lyrical gestures for us to query and embrace."
Yusef Komunyakaa
"The prolific brilliance of Kevin Young's poetry is well-known. But with The Grey Album the secret is out: Young is one of the finest critics writing today. His fierce intellect moves deftly across genres and time periods. The guiding sensibilities that have made him such a smart and wide-ranging editor are only his starting points in these essays. This book is more than ambitious: it realizes its gigantic aims and does justice to the tragic, hilarious, gorgeous, and mighty American culture he writes about. The work is undergirded by the greatness of the music he so reveres; blues and jazz and hip-hop culture are his business here, not only the music itself. He seems to have gobbled up everything but sounds like no one but himself. Young bridges generations and moves nimbly between art forms. Look sharp so as not to miss a single insight; each essay contains revelations. Young sees the world from a totally fresh perspective, and every page of this book shimmers."
Elizabeth Alexander
"Veering across many vernaculars, from literature into music, theory into autobiography, Kevin Young writes cultural criticism of the most audacious, skillful, and ultimately touching sort."
Robert Polito, Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize judge
Phil White
PublicAffairs, March 2012
The year 1945 was chaotic—both for the world, of course, and for Winston Churchill. Out of power, Churchill was keenly aware of the perils of the postwar world. One moment he was sitting across the negotiating table from Stalin at Potsdam, and the next found him voted out of office and back in England. Communism was on the march and the people of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland all found themselves in the grip of the Soviets. The Red Army occupied a large German territory, and the Kremlin was manipulating post-war food shortages, labor disputes, and social unrest in Greece, France, and Italy. Having spent his “wilderness years” in the late 1930s warning of the dangers of diplomatic and military weakness and the growing menace of Nazism, Churchill once again required a platform from which to make his views known, and he soon found it. In 1946 he made a trip to the unlikely venue of Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a speech entitled “The Sinews of Peace”—now known as the Iron Curtain Speech—which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism. This is the story of this pivotal speech, and a portrait of the irrepressible man who delivered it.
"Philip White has lovingly produced a detailed yet eminently readable account of Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. White shows not only how the great British statesman crystallized in word and image the perilous divide between democratic west and communist east, but also how one speech defined an era, and how it continues to inspire today."
Nile Gardiner, Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom
"Winston Churchill thought his Iron Curtain speech the most important of a long and stormy career that was studded with vital speeches; it was certainly one of his bravest. Philip White has recreated the eight months between the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II and the world-changing events in Fulton, Missouri, with impressive scholarship, a sure narrative skill and a fine eye for telling detail."
Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War
"I read Our Supreme Task with considerable care and recommend it emphatically. There is now an enormous literature about the Cold War but very little about how it actually came about and almost nothing about this address. This book fills the gap."
John Lukacs, author of A New Republic: A History Of The United States In The Twentieth Century
Jonathan Lyons
Columbia University Press, January 2012
Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East-West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics it cannot afford.
Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse’s corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations.
Through the intellectual "archaeology" of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers—Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women—and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.
"Jonathan Lyons joins the wisdom of a scholar with the knowledge of a journalist in a timely and necessary book. A much-needed light unto the gentiles wishing to understand the truth and consequences of the Arab Spring."
Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly
"Islam Through Western Eyes is as timely as it is informative, helping us understand the history of understanding—and misunderstanding—between Muslims and non-Muslims over the centuries, patterns that continue today. This is a book that should be read by people of all faiths, not only for edification but also for healing in a religiously fractured world."
Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State
"This is a first class book: original, significant, and a very timely contribution. Despite the importance of the topic, especially today, I can think of no other study that offers so comprehensive, persuasive, and engaging an analysis."
John L. Esposito, Georgetown University, author of What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam
Adam Jortner
Oxford University Press, December 2011
It began with an eclipse. In 1806, the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa ("The Open Door") declared himself to be in direct contact with the Master of Life, and therefore, the supreme religious authority for all Native Americans. Those who disbelieved him, he warned, "would see darkness come over the sun." William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory and future American president, scoffed at Tenskwatawa. If he was truly a prophet, Harrison taunted, let him perform a miracle. And Tenskwatawa did just that, making the sun go dark at midday.
In The Gods of Prophetstown, Adam Jortner provides a gripping account of the conflict between Tenskwatawa and Harrison, who finally collided in 1811 at a place called Tippecanoe. Though largely forgotten today, their rivalry determined the future of westward expansion and shaped the War of 1812. Jortner weaves together dual biographies of the opposing leaders. In the five years between the eclipse and the battle, Tenskwatawa used his spiritual leadership to forge a political pseudo-state with his brother Tecumseh. Harrison, meanwhile, built a power base in Indiana, rigging elections and maneuvering for higher position. Rejecting received wisdom, Jortner sees nothing as preordained-Native Americans were not inexorably falling toward dispossession and destruction. Deeply rooting his account in a generation of scholarship that has revolutionized Indian history, Jortner places the religious dimension of the struggle at the fore, recreating the spiritual landscapes trod by each side. The climactic battle, he writes, was as much a clash of gods as of men.
Written with profound insight and narrative verve, The Gods of Prophetstown recaptures a forgotten turning point in American history in time for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe.
"Jortner fashions a vivid and probing narrative of this chapter in American history with the entwined tales of Harrison and Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee spiritual leader, whose rival visions for the western frontier fatefully collided at Tippecanoe."
Boston Globe
"Engaging and provocative, THE GODS OF PROPHETSTOWN is a major contribution to our understanding of American religious and political history, casting new light on the conquest of the Old Northwest by showing how the encounter of William Henry Harrison and his rival Tenskwatawa at Tippecanoe initiated a struggle for the heart-and soul-of a continent. For them the War of 1812 was a "holy war," a continuation of the fragile new republic's quest for independence and dominance. No one until now has so fully captured the confusion and contingency of this defining period in American history."
Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia, author of Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
"Adam Jortner imaginatively revisits one of the most well-known episodes in American history. Finding surprising parallels in the routes to the Battle Tippecanoe taken by William Henry Harrison and "the Shawnee Prophet," Tenskwatawa, and combining an irreverent and a truly serious engagement with both men's religious beliefs, THE GODS OF PROPHETSTOWN yields provocative insights on nearly every page. The War of 1812 will never look the same again."
Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts
"Jortner makes a solid case that the outcome was not inevitable. The battle of Tippecanoe was indecisive; but Harrison’s spin machine transformed it into a triumph of civilization over superstition. And Jortner’s hypothesis that a different outcome could have led to an Indian state, underwritten by British Canada and shaped by the Prophet’s doctrines, is a provocative might-have-been.
Publisher's Weekly
"Tenskwatawa's Indian Country and William Henry Harrison's Old Northwest, interconnected realms animated by miracles, spiritual power, political intrigue, and historical contingency, are brought vividly to life in this enthralling work. Jortner's original and well-researched dual biography explores the lives of Tenskwatawa and Harrison, their collisions at Prophetstown and the Thames, and the resonating political and religious consequences for Indian nations and the United States."
Christina Snyder, Indiana University, author of Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America
David O. Stewart
Simon & Schuster, October 2011
In 1805, the United States was not twenty years old, an unformed infant. The government consisted of a few hundred people. The immense frontier swallowed up a tiny army of 3,300 soldiers. Following the Louisiana Purchase, no one even knew where the nation’s western border lay. Secessionist sentiment flared in New England and beyond the Appalachians.
Burr had challenged Jefferson, his own running mate, in the presidential election of 1800. Indicted for murder in the dueling death of Alexander Hamilton in 1804, he dreamt huge dreams. He imagined an insurrection in New Orleans, a private invasion of Spanish Mexico and Florida, and a great empire rising on the Gulf of Mexico, which would swell when America’s western lands seceded from the Union. For two years, Burr pursued this audacious dream, enlisting support from the General-in-Chief of the Army, a paid agent of the Spanish king, and from other western leaders, including Andrew Jackson. When the army chief double-crossed Burr, Jefferson finally roused himself and ordered Burr prosecuted for treason.
The trial featured the nation’s finest lawyers before the greatest judge in our history, Chief Justice John Marshall, Jefferson’s distant cousin and determined adversary. It became a contest over the nation’s identity: Should individual rights be sacrificed to punish a political apostate who challenged the nation’s very existence? In a revealing reversal of political philosophies, Jefferson championed government power over individual rights, while Marshall shielded the nation’s most notorious defendant. By concealing evidence, appealing to the rule of law, and exploiting the weaknesses of the government’s case, Burr won his freedom.
Afterwards Burr left for Europe to pursue an equally outrageous scheme to liberate Spain’s American colonies, but finding no European sponsor, he returned to America and lived to an unrepentant old age.
Stewart’s vivid account of Burr’s tumultuous life offers a rare and eye-opening description of the brand-new nation struggling to define itself.
"A fresh, vivid exploration of the exploits and trial of Aaron Burr (1756–1836), the most notorious figure of the early American republic…. A practicing attorney, Stewart works the miracle of making even early-19th-century legal opinions and argument accessible and vital to modern readers….and lays out this complicated story with admirable clarity, while also explaining the long-term significance of its outcome for individual rights, the judiciary and the stability of the young nation. A persuasive, engaging examination of the post-political career of a shadowy and much-maligned figure from the era of the Founders."
Kirkus (starred review)
"Stewart’s sympathetic but unapologetic study of the enigmatic Burr…transcends its subject in exposing the frailty of early America’s westward ambitions. Highly recommended for readers of Revolutionary-era biographies and early U.S. history."
Library Journal
"Great men behaving badly makes for entertaining reading…[this book] will keep [readers] turning the pages of this meticulous, almost day-by-day account of a plot so bizarre that it’s hard to believe it actually happened."
Publisher's Weekly
"Stewart strives admirably to sort through the maze of facts and speculations about the nature of the conspiracy and Burr’s place in it. This is also a personality study of Burr, in whom Stewart sees an extraordinary combination of talent, vision, arrogance, and insatiable ambition….readers should enjoy this account of a dangerous episode that threatened our young republic.”
Booklist
George Daughan
Basic Books, October 2011
At the outbreak of the War of 1812, America’s prospects looked dismal. It was clear that the primary battlefield would be the open ocean—but America’s war fleet, only twenty ships strong, faced a practiced British navy of more than a thousand men-of-war. Still, through a combination of nautical deftness and sheer bravado, the American navy managed to take the fight to the British and turn the tide of the war: on the Great Lakes, in the Atlantic, and even in the eastern Pacific.
In 1812: The Navy’s War, prizewinning historian George C. Daughan tells the thrilling story of how a handful of heroic captains and their stalwart crews overcame spectacular odds to lead the country to victory against the world’s greatest imperial power. A stunning contribution to military and national history, 1812: The Navy’s War is the first complete account in more than a century of how the U.S. Navy rescued the fledgling nation and secured America’s future.
"[A] richly detailed, well-documented, and compelling account.... Daughan’s is a history that expands our understanding, debunking several popular myths…. In the end, this history of an oft-forgotten war holds value for all. The reader who is curious as to just what the coming bicentennial commemorates will find that curiosity thoroughly satisfied. Readers who have been eagerly awaiting the bicentennial will find in Daughan’s 1812 an account that confirms why the conflict merits remembrance—and celebration.”
Boston Globe
"With the bicentennial of the War of 1812 soon upon us, a plethora of books on the subject are in the market. Some treat individual actions or single theaters. Some deal with politics, and some deal with diplomacy, but 1812: The Navy’s War deals with it all. The full panoply is described in detail with charts, diagrams and references enough to please the most demanding scholar, yet it is pleasantly readable to amateur and professional alike. In the end, the reader will know full well why some scholars call the War of 1812, “America’s Second War of Independence”....Mr. Daughan sums it up nicely in the book’s Chapter 34: 'America’s newfound unity and her commitment to a strong military forced Europe to take her more seriously. She was an incipient power that Britain and other European imperialists could no longer treat lightly'....Other authors in the recent past have covered various aspects of the War of 1812, but George C. Daughan has put it all together in one well-written and most interesting volume. It’s a book hard to put down and is most highly recommended as a good read. Its coverage of an important time in the history of the United States will make it a worthy reference for years to come."
Vice Adm. Robert F. Dunn, The Washington Times
"[A] deep and detailed page-turner of a book. With crystal clear maps and unadorned prose, [Daughan] gives new life to the personalities, strategies and desperate struggles of the consequential, yet ultimately unproductive War of 1812…. Daughan narrates the story of the all-important naval war with a palpable sense of expectancy on nearly every page – with the clock ticking and the battle at hand."
The Baton Rouge Advocate
"Frequently [the War of 1812] is seen as a sequence of freestanding, intensely dramatic events rather than as the tightly intertwined series of battles, military campaigns, diplomacy, and domestic politics that it was. But if a compulsion to concentrate excessively on the more spectacular bits and pieces of the conflict has been an endemic problem among academics and writers, this volume is an antidote. Daughan not only thoroughly illuminates the emotion-triggering events of the conflict; he also adds the background that connects the highlights. That background includes, for example, the American and British domestic politics and diplomacy, which were continuously both cause and effect in the process."
The Weekly Standard
"This finely researched volume...unravels the story of a nation that, without allies, sundered by the partisan politics and sporting a military establishment that barely qualified as third-rate, managed to hold its own against the greatest power of the day....Complementing the well-written and exciting narratives of naval action are concise analyses of the Americans' abortive land campaigns along the Canadian border (necessary toward a full understanding of hte conflict along the Great Lakes), the burning of Washington and the final redemption of the U.S. military at New Orleans....Readers are unlikely to find a more engaging or stirring recounting of the conflict and its place in the rebirth of the U.S. Navy."
Military History
This vivid edition carries un back to the era of Madison when our nation quibbled over whether or not having a navy was a waste of money. Daughan depicts the political climate influenced by the Napoleonic wars, British impressment, and impreialistic ambitions for Canada's porous borders which blended into the tinder box that ignited our second war with England....With a sailor's heart, Daughan follows the action of blue water battles on the Great Lakes, deep water fusillades, besieged ports, the razing of our nation's capitol, and the victory at New Orleans that forever earned international respect for American resolve. Expertly researched and illustrated, Daughan recounts the courage and skill of the men who gave birth to the United States Navy."
San Francisco Book Review
"Every American should read George C. Daughan’s riveting 1812: The Navy's War. Daughan masterfully breaks down complicated naval battles to tell how the U.S. thwarted the British armada on the Great Lakes and the high seas. Highly recommended!"
Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History, Rice University
"In 1812: The Navy’s War, George C. Daughan does a terrific job of explaining [the war’s] origins in the British policy of boarding United States merchant ships and impressing sailors, and in its general treatment of America as an upstart challenging its supremacy on the high seas…. With painstaking attention to detail and the ability to make complex naval confrontations understandable, even gripping, Daughan pursues the war north to the St. Lawrence River, east to the British coast where American privateers harassed British shipping, and south to New Orleans."
The Providence Journal
"Based on 15-plus years of archival research of the era, [1812: The Navy’s War] incorporates political, diplomatic, economic, and military history to examine ways that the War of 1812 changed the shape of the world. Daughan examines how the War of 1812 — dubbed our ‘Second War of Independence’ — led to the development of a strong military, renewed America’s confidence as a unified nation, and forced Europe to recognize the country as a strong power."
Book News
"Daughan, author of several previous books including “If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy – From the Revolution to the War of 1812,” has written a concise, invaluable history of the War of 1812, placing it in context and making it accessible for modern readers. The War of 1812 was America’s first great naval war and Daughan’s crisp writing and extraordinary research helps breathe life into this defining moment of our national history."
Tucson Citizen
"Scores of books on the American Revolution, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Vietnam War cross our desk each year. But a history of the War of 1812 is a rarity, yet as author George C. Daughan writes, it 'changed the shape of the world.' Given that its bicentennial is next year, expect to hear a great deal more about this war that, unlike most of the others, concentrated on naval forces much more than infantry. In fact, Daughan argues, the War of 1812 was not only waged -- but won -- on the high seas and caused Britain to develop newfound respect for the United States. Few if any would give odds to America at the beginning of the war, with its puny 20 ships against Britain's fleet of more than 1,000 men-of-war. The author credits America's victory to a mixture of "keen strategizing, nautical deftness, and sheer bravado...."
History Wire
"In his new book, George Daughan provides vivid and detailed recreations of the U.S. navy’s significant battles during the War of 1812. In an era when the British Navy supposedly ruled the world, the U.S. navy successfully challenged British supremacy....1812: The Navy’s War is an important, well-researched and timely book –– next year marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 –– which scholars and lay persons alike will enjoy for its descriptions of the battles and Daughan’s analysis of the domestic and international dimensions of the war....
At first blush, the War of 1812 looked like a waste of blood and treasure. However, Daughan convincingly argues that the navy’s performance, a bipartisan belief that the U.S. needed a permanent defense capability, and British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh’s realpolitik calculations led to a lasting peace between the United States and Great Britain. Castlereagh realized that the United States could no longer be pushed around, and the impressments and free trade disputes quietly disappeared.
Colorful descriptions of the battles, the American sailors such as Captain Stephen Decatur and Commodores William Bainbridge and Oliver Perry who waged them, as well as the famous ships they commanded such as the U.S. Constitution, dominate this book. The glossary of naval terms that Daughan included at the end of the book –– I finally know what a jib and a mizzenmast really are –– helped a landlubber like me understand their tactics and really brought long-ago battles, in particular the Constitution versus the H.M.S. Java, to life. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in (re)learning about the 'Second War for American Independence.'"
Washington Independent Review of Books
"1812: The Navy’s War is a sparkling effort. It tells more than the naval history of the war, for there is much in it about the politics and diplomacy of the war years. The stories of ship-to-ship battles and of the officers and men who sailed and fought form the wonderful heart of the book. These accounts are told in a handsome prose that conveys the strategy, high feeling, and courage of both British and Americans. In every way this is a marvelous book.”
Robert Middlekauff, author of The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789
“At last, a history of the War of 1812 that Americans can read without wincing. By focusing on our small but incredibly courageous Navy, George Daughan has told a story of victories against awful odds that makes for a memorable book.”
Thomas Fleming, author of Liberty!: The American Revolution
"In this vitally important and extraordinarily well researched work, award-winning historian George Daughan demonstrates the often overlooked impact of the 20 ship U.S. Navy’s performance against the 1,000 ship British Navy in the War of 1812. Daughan makes a compelling case that the Navy’s performance in the war forced Europe to take the U.S. more seriously, initiated a fundamental change in the British-American relationship, and enabled us to maintain a robust Navy even in peacetime.”
Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Assistant Secretary of Defense
"Awarded the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award in 2008 for his previous book, If By Sea, George C. Daughan again has penned a contributory history that is at once enjoyable to read and informative in its disclosures....With considerable skill, the author has interwoven the political strife with the naval actions to form a coherent and well-written story of that important transitional time in American history."
Charleston Post and Courier
"In a compelling sequel to his award-winning If By Sea...Daughan offers a rousing retelling of the war, strongly recommended for general readers..."
Library Journal
"A naval expert’s readable take on the U.S. Navy’s surprising performance in the war that finally reconciled the British to America’s independence…. A smart salute to a defining moment in the history of the U.S. Navy.”
Kirkus
"The War of 1812 was a difficult test for the United States, still wobbly on the world stage nearly two decades after formal independence. That Americans received a passing grade was due in no small part to the exceptional performance of the U.S. Navy, which humiliated the legendary British Navy time and time again. With verve and deep research, George Daughan has brought those gripping naval battles back to life. For military historians and general historians alike, 1812: The Navy's War restores an important missing chapter to our national narrative.”
Edward L. Widmer, author of Ark of the Liberties: America and the World
“The War of 1812 was America's first great naval war, and George Daughan tells the story, from the coast of Brazil to the Great Lakes, from election campaigns to grand strategy to ship-to-ship combat. Sweeping, exciting and detailed.”
Richard Brookhiser, author of James Madison
Jean-Vincent Blanchard
Walker & Company, September 2011
Chief Minister to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a new France in the 17th century, and the force behind the nation's rise as a European power. One of the first statesmen to clearly understand the necessity of a balance of powers, he was one of the early realist politicians, practicing in the wake of Niccolo Machiavelli. (A notable advocate of realpolitik in our own time, Henry Kissinger, credits Richelieu with introducing a modern approach to international relations). Forging a nation-state amidst the swirl of unruly, grasping nobles, widespread corruption, wars of religion, and an ambitious Habsburg empire, Richelieu's hands were full. Serving his king, however, and mastering the politics of absolute power provided Richelieu with his greatest challenge and ultimately determined his legacy to France and to all those who practice statecraft. Jean-Vincent Blanchard's rich and insightful new biography brings Richelieu fully to life, at court, on the battlefield, at times cruel and ruthless, always devoted to creating a lasting central authority vested in the power of monarchy, a power essential to the hegemony of France on the European stage for the next two centuries. Especially interesting to contemporary readers will be Richelieu's careful understanding of politics as spectacle; much of what he accomplished was promoted strategically through the arts, through a "style," or romance of power. Richelieu's story offers us a keener understanding of the dark arts of politics.
"Blanchard's captivating biography vividly captures the rise to power of a seminal figure who was instrumental in creating France as we know it.”
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
Susan Roy
Pointed Leaf Press, June 2011
Conceived by a misguided government seeking to quiet the fears of an anxious public, the concept of the Family Fallout Shelter was Cold War paranoia at its finest, a massive bit of propaganda by architecture that has no more truth behind it than the absurd notion of duck and cover. Inundated with government-sponsored films, posters, booklets, traveling caravans and exhibitions, the American family bought into the idea, investing millions of dollars in home shelters of every conceivable material and design. Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack lays bare the buried truths of America's family fallout shelter obsession. Author Susan Roy charts the panic-fueled evolution of the shelter from a well-stocked basement pantry to a full-fledged (and often completely decorated) home addition, revealing through extensive archival photography, nuclear-era memorabilia, and previously unpublished media, a government and people in the grip of self-delusion. Fastidiously researched and sharply written, Bomboozled captures the absurdity and uncertainty of a culture that knew no better than to trust its government's message.
Paul Douglas Lockhart
Harper, June 2011
On June 17, 1775, New England colonists faced off against the British in what has become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill the first major clash of the American Revolution. Though it is one of the most famous battles in history, it is so clouded in patriotic myth that everything about it — the men who fought it, the commanders who led them, even the ebb and flow of the fighting — has been consistently misunderstood.
The Whites of Their Eyes dispels dearly held myths, revealing how this battle was not a heroic struggle between a band of resourceful American amateurs and a disciplined professional army of veteran led by haughty, overconfident British generals. Nor was it a clash between Old World and New, and their two very different ways of fighting war.
Historian Paul Lockhart argues that in reality, Bunker Hill was a clumsy engagement pitting one inexperienced army against another. He tells the rest of the story, too: how a mob of armed civilians became America’s first army; how George Washington put aside his comfortable patrician life to take command of the veterans of Bunker Hill, shaping them into his army; and how the true heroes of 1775—overshadowed by the more famous Founding Fathers—kept the notion of American liberty alive against all odds—making independence ultimately possible.
"The strengths and weaknesses of the early Revolutionary War effort are illuminated in this stimulating history…Historian Lockhart (The Drillmaster of Valley Forge) skillfully explains the factors that shaped it…Lockhart’s shrewd, well-judged interpretation corrects myths about the battle and the men who fought it while doing full justice to their achievement in creating an army—and a nation—out of chaos.”
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"...he peels away the mythology and leads the reader carefully toward a revelation of the real importance of the battle….Paul Lockhart’s study, The Whites of their Eyes, is a fascinating exposé of the true importance of the battle of Bunker Hill. It deserves a prominent place in the library of anyone interested in understanding the American Revolutionary War."
New York Journal of Books
Michael Levy
Holt paperbacks, July 2011
An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux.
In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.
While reveling in the peculiarities of life in China's interior, the author also discovered that the "other billion" (people living far from the coastal cities covered by the American media) have a complex relationship with both their own traditions and the rapid changes of modernization. Lagging behind in China's economic boom, they experience the darker side of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," daily facing the schizophrenia of conflicting ideologies.
Kosher Chinese is an illuminating account of the lives of the residents of Guiyang, particularly the young people who will soon control the fate of the world.
“With intelligence and zesty good humor, Levy tells the story of his sojourn as an ESL teacher in Guiyang… A rollicking, thoroughly refreshing debut.”
Kirkus
"“As in Peter Hessler’s River Town… and Peter J. Vernezze’s Socrates in Sichuan…, Peace Corps experience is the inspiration for Levy’s cheekier and freewheeling but insightful adventure story.”
Library Journal
"A funny and informative account of life in Guizhou province, deep in the heart of China. As a Peace Corps volunteer, Michael Levy came to know and love a part of the country that few visitors see, a world away from Beijing and Shanghai.”
Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Oracle Bones
T.J. Wray
Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, September 2011
The Bible is the foundational text for Jews and Christians, but most people, having little knowledge of what it actually says, feel less than uncomfortable navigating its pages. What the Bible Really Tells Us solves this problem, providing a thorough, yet accessible, guide to the Good Book and the ways in which it can enrich one’s life.
Opening with a 60-Second Super-Easy Bible Quiz to test your knowledge, author T. J. Wray then provides essential background information to arm readers with tools necessary to read and interpret passages on their own. And, with these tools in hand, Wray helps readers explore what the Bible really says about key issues today, including:
- Suffering
- Heaven and hell
- Gender and sexuality
- The environment
What the Bible Really Tells Us is an indispensable guide for individuals and groups interested in gaining a fuller understanding of the Bible and the timeless lessons it imparts.
"...engaging and excellent...Wray succeeds in sharing the wisdom of the Bible by making it accessible, interesting, and fun."
BookList
"Her fresh approach allows her to hopscotch around biblical books and point out many internal disagreements and distinctions. While good for the classroom, readers who like the brisk tone of an assured lecturer will also enjoy this competent book."
Publisher's Weekly
"T.J. Wray's What the Bible Really Tells Us provides the general public and undergraduates in Bible and Religion courses everywhere with a step by step introductory level text in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that is perfect for the present crop of readers. Her wry sense of humor and years of teaching expertise come through and the book also untangles some of the most vexing problems of theology, ethics, and society in an easily readable style. A great addition to a personal or institutional library!"
Richard Freund, director, Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, University of Hartford
"T. J. Wray has done it again! With a remarkable blend of biblical knowledge, human insight, and literary skill, she has hit a '10' on the scale in interpreting the Bible for people who have great interest yet relatively little knowledge. How can anyone forget what the Bible has to say about our future, money, sex, the world in which we live, what is fair, and our relationship with God? Perhaps no one but What the Bible Really Tells Us comes to remind us about realities that we dare not forget."
Raymond F. Collins, visiting scholar, Brown University
"Honed from years of excellent teaching, TJ Wray's clarifying guide to biblical literacy is both witty and profound. Now, her readers get the benefit of her compelling classroom instruction and will love her as much as those students do!"
Robin M. Jensen, Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship, Vanderbilt University
"TJ Wray's What the Bible Really Tells Us is a fascinating, trip through all the basics of Biblical scholarship. Wray writes in an engaging accessible style that is perfect for the average reader who knows something about the Bible but little about the mysteries of what Bible scholars have uncovered in their work over the past two centuries. Wray makes the critical, academic, study of the Scriptures an enlightening but always enjoyable journey. She pulls the readers in from the first chapter and never lets them go with practical stories and examples but plenty of solid content. This book is perfect for the average reader as well as ideal for basic courses in the Bible at the college level."
James A. Tabor, chair, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; author of The Jesus Dynasty
Magdy El-Shafee
Metropolitan Books, May 2012
Metro, Egypt’s first graphic novel, was originally published in 2008. It was quickly declared an "offense to public morals" by Egyptian authorities and destroyed by the police. Metro follows one young man in Cairo as he comes face-to-face with the corruption ingrained at every level of Egyptian society. Plagued by debt, Shihab is determined to make a new start with the help of one of his neighbors. However, before he can get Shihab the connections and money he needs, the neighbor is murdered by a group mysteriously referred to as “the Cavalry.” Disgusted with the corruption and violence, Shihab decides to take radical action—robbing a bank with his close friend Mustafa. Once at the bank, however, Shihab and Mustafa find themselves beat to the punch by a corrupt politician awaiting a massive, unsecured “loan.” Enraged, Shihab threatens the politician, takes the money, and forces him to face the anger of the citizens out on the street. As his journalist friend-turned-lover Dina uncovers the identity of the Cavalry, the city erupts into demonstrations pitting friend-against-friend as hired government forces beat and murder protesters.
Jane S. Smith
Lyons Press, December 2011
Everywhere, it seems—from urban backyards to latter-day gentleman’s farms in the country—chickens have become a passion for those who love animals, feel strongly about consuming locally, and/or find conventional mechanized alarm clocks somehow insufficient. And here is the book for such people.
What follows is a compact miscellany of chicken wisdom—a lively and amusing collection of quotations from past authorities on all things chicken, interspersed with brief editorial comments and complemented by wonderful illustrations. Whether a single sentence or several paragraphs, selections are all little known and long on charm. In Praise of Chickens can be savored in small pieces or enjoyably devoured all at once. It includes a demonstration of how to hypnotize a chicken; an account of a chicken rodeo; Mark Twain’s sly tips on raising chickens; and a dictionary of the twenty-three-word vocabulary of the domestic chicken.
Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix
Poppy, July 2012
Book two of the Magnolia League series finds our heroine, Alexandria Lee, studying under her grandmother in order to be deemed "suitable" to assume her role as head of the Magnolia League. However, Alex is only trying to learn the Voodoo codes in order to free her mother, Louisa, from her prison in the "haint blue" room of Miss Lee's mansion. Unfortunately, Magnolia sisters Hayes and Madison are unaware of her real intentions. And when Alex changes her image to "Bristol Palin at mega-church," throwing over Thaddeus to spend more time with her grandmother and the boys she recommends, the MG's can only assume that the once refreshingly independent Alex is selling out. What they don't know is that another power-hungry Magnolia has put their new friend's life in grave danger. In fact, Alex herself only becomes aware of this after two mysterious attempts on her life. Soon she realizes she has just one chance to save herself and liberate her mother at last: putting herself under the protection of Sina—by far the least trustworthy of the voodoo-proficient Buzzard family. Moreover, she 's got to do this all while feigning allegiance to Miss Lee as a mysterious and charming new boy, Chad, shows up at the River School with an uncanny level of understanding of all of their lives. Intentionally or not, he soon has all of the MGs working against each other. And,when real tragedy strikes, the bonds of the League are tested. Will Hayes, Madison and Alex be able to unite in order to save not only Alex's mother, but themselves as well?
Ted Goeglein
Putnam Juvenile, March 2012
Jason Bourne meets The Sopranos in this breathtaking adventure. Sara Jane Rispoli is a normal sixteen-year-old coping with school and a budding romance—until her parents and brother are kidnapped and she discovers her family is deeply embedded in the Chicago Outfit (aka the mob). Now on the run from a masked assassin, rogue cops and her turncoat uncle, Sara Jane is chased and attacked at every turn, fighting back with cold fury as she searches for her family. It’s a quest that takes her through concealed doors and forgotten speakeasies — a city hiding in plain sight. Though armed with a .45 and 96k in cash, an old tattered notebook might be her best defense—hidden in its pages the secret to “ultimate power.” It’s why she’s being pursued, why her family was taken, and could be the key to saving all of their lives. Action packed, with fresh, cinematic writing, Cold Fury is a riveting and imaginative adventure readers will devour. This is the first book of the trilogy.
Jen Violi
Poppy, June 2011
It's been four years since Donna Parisi's father passed away, but it might as well have been four days. Donna makes conversation and goes through the motion, but she hasn't really gotten on with life. She's not close with anyone, she doesn't have a boyfriend and she's going to college at the local university with a major that her mother picked. But one day Donna has an epiphany. She wants to work with dead people. She wants to help people say goodbye and she wants to learn to love a whole person--body and soul. She wants to live her life and be exceptional...at loving, at grieving and at embalming and cremating,too. Even as she makes the decision, things start to change. Donna makes friends with the charismatic new student, Liz. She notices the boy, Charlie, at her table and realizes that maybe he's been noticing her, too. And she begins to forgive the rest of her family for living their lives while she's been busy moping.
"In a YA literature dense with irony and camp, Violi bravely tackles this story without the slightest bit of satire and instead dives deep into the meaning of ritual and passage in American life....A natural discussion starter, this will be an obvious choice for book clubs; many readers will be moved by the poignant examination of the passages in and from life, and they’ll be glad of the Donnas who step up to guide us through them."
Bulletin for the Center for Children’s Books (starred review)
"Donna’s focus, and the book’s...[is]...on respecting the dead people and easing the grief of their families....A book that looks at death and reveals much about life."
Kirkus
Katie Crouch
Poppy, May 2011
After the death of her free-spirited mother, sixteen-year-old Alex Lee must leave her home in northern California to live with her wealthy grandmother in Savannah, Georgia. By birth, Alex is a rightful, if unwilling, member of the Magnolia League, Savannah's long-standing debutante society. She quickly discovers that the Magnolias have made a pact with a legendary hoodoo family, the Buzzards. The Magnolias enjoy youth, beauty and power. But at what price?
As in her popular adult novels, Crouch's poignant and humorous voice shines in this seductively atmospheric story about girls growing up in a magical Southern city.
"In this suspenseful YA debut, the death of 16-year-old Alex's mother thrusts the teenager into the rarified corners of Savannah, Ga., high society, far from her former home in a Bay Area commune....Layers of intrigue build as Alex learns more about her grandmother's highly regarded but feared Magnolia League, a coterie of upper-crust beauties....Dreadlocked Alex is a funny, likable, and stubborn outsider, and the cliffhanger ending should leave fans of romantic fantasy eager for more."
Publisher's Weekly
"...offers a compelling story with likable and well-developed characters. Moreover, with the perfect mix of humor, romance, mystery and the supernatural, it provides ample entertainment yet leaves room for a sequel."
School Library Journal
"Katie Crouch’s The Magnolia League is mysterious, magical, and alluring. Crouch’s voice is both humorous and intense, lending itself well to the novel’s darker undercurrents and its richly southern flavor. Part My Fair Lady, part The Stepford Wives, with a dash of Mean Girls for good measure, I was drawn in from the very first page and eagerly a sequel."
Laurie Stolarz, author of the Blue is for Nightmares series
Lydia Millet
Small Beer Press, May 2011
Cara’s mother has disappeared. Her father isn’t talking about it. Her big brother Max is hiding behind his iPod, and her genius little brother Jackson is busy studying the creatures he collects from the beach. But when a watery specter begins to haunt the family’s Cape Cod home, Cara and her brothers realize that their scientist mother may not be who they thought she was—and that the world has much stranger, much older inhabitants than they had imagined.
With help from Cara’s best friend Hayley, the three embark on a quest that will lead them from the Cape’s hidden, ancient places to a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. They’re soon on the front lines of an ancient battle between good and evil, with the terrifying “pouring man” close on their heels.
Packed with memorable characters and thrilling imagery, Lydia Millet weaves a page-turning adventure even as she brings the seaside world of Cape Cod to magical life. The first in a series of books about the Sykes children, The Fires Beneath the Sea is a rip-cracking middle-grade novel that will make perfect beach reading—for readers of any age!
"Millet’s prose is lyrically evocative....A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series."
Kirkus (starred review)
"A thoughtful and thought-provoking beginning to a new fantasy series. The Cape Cod woods, wildlife, and beaches are depicted with loving detail, and the dark forces arrayed against the young protagonists are at once tantalizingly mystifying and alarmingly timely.”
Patricia McKillip
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