What’s New – Non-Fiction
In Levittown's Shadow
There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow tells us there’s more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation—and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.
Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. Keogh explores how policymakers ignored suburban inequality, addressing housing segregation between cities and suburbs rather than suburbanites’ demands for decent jobs, housing, and schools.
By turning our attention to the suburban poor, Keogh reveals poverty wasn’t just an urban problem but a suburban one, too. In Levittown’s Shadow deepens our understanding of suburbia’s history—and points us toward more effective ways to combat poverty today.
Miles Davis and the Search For The Sound
Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound is a synesthesia-inducing graphic novel that follows the many lives of music legend Miles Davis.
With narration adapted from Davis’ own words and an innovative visual style that shifts to reflect Davis’ constant musical changes, this 150-page graphic novel follows Davis through four decades of musical innovation, all centered around his quest to find a mysterious sound he heard on a moonlit country road as a child.
Meticulously researched and expertly crafted by writer/artist Dave Chisholm—a doctorate holder in jazz trumpet from the Eastman School of Music—Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound deftly explores the often volatile journey of Miles Davis and his world-renowned music.
Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound is a graphic novel you’ll have to hear to believe–it’ll make you SEE music in a whole new light.
Worm
From “America’s illustrator in chief” (Fast Company), a stunning graphic memoir of a childhood in Cuba, coming to America on the Mariel boatlift, and a defense of democracy, here and there
Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age. Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba and his family’s passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift.
When Edel was nine, Fidel Castro announced his surprising decision to let 125,000 traitors of the revolution, or “worms,” leave the country. The faltering economy and Edel’s family’s vocal discomfort with government surveillance had made their daily lives on a farm outside Havana precarious, and they secretly planned to leave. But before that happened, a dozen soldiers confiscated their home and property and imprisoned them in a detention center near the port of Mariel, where they were held with dissidents and criminals before being marched to a flotilla that miraculously deposited them, overnight, in Florida.
Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells a story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family’s displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and activist, who, witnessing American’s turn from democracy to extremism, struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom.
Charlie Chaplin vs. America
The remarkable, must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.
Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War Two, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.
Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US from a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland, and made his last two films in London
In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, bestselling author Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. This is a perceptive, insightful portrait of Chaplin and of an America consumed by political turmoil.
What The Taliban Told Me
A powerful, timely memoir of a young Air Force linguist coming-of-age in a war that is lost.
When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn’t been accepted into college thanks to an indifferent high school career. He’d too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida.
But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. By 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians. This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people’s most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz’s fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause.
Both proud of his service and in despair that he is instrumental in destroying the voices that he hears, What the Taliban Told Me is a brilliant, intimate coming-of-age memoir and a reckoning with our twenty years of war in Afghanistan.
Thank You
Not many memoirs are generational events. But when Sly Stone, one of the few true musical geniuses of the last century, decides to finally tell hislife story, it can’t be called anything else.
As the front man for the sixties pop-rock-funk band Sly and the Family Stone, a songwriter who created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s (“Everyday People,” “Family Affair”), and a performer who electrified audiences at Woodstock and elsewhere, Sly Stone’s influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But as much as people know the music, the man remains a mystery. After a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the grips of addiction.
Now he is ready to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life in his memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). The book moves from Sly’s early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles. Set on stages and in mansions, in the company of family and of other celebrities, it’s a story about flawed humanity and flawless artistry.
Written with Ben Greenman, who has also worked on memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson, and in collaboration with Arlene Hirschkowitz, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly’s life and career. Like Sly, it’s honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional and analytical, always moving and never standing still.
Speaking While Female
The first anthology to put a spotlight on American women speakers from 1637 to the present and explain how each contributed to the making of the nation.
Women have not been silent in US history, but you’d hardly know it from the history books. Speaking While Female challenges long-held notions by showing that in every period, at every historic juncture, women have contributed decisively to American ideals, institutions, and culture by stepping up and delivering powerful speeches, sermons, lectures, and testimony. Even when denied access to education, excluded from political life and the professions, and forbidden to speak from the pulpit, women have still found ways to come forward and use their public voices.
This monumental collection assembles speeches by 75 American women, some whose names are recognized and others who are barely known. Some of the speeches in this collection have never been published; others not in more than a century. Arranged chronologically, from the Puritan era to the present, they demonstrate the crucial role women have played in the nation’s long struggle to live up to its ideals. To know American history, we must hear these women speak.
Speaking While Female presents an entirely new lens through which to view our country’s history, and asks the question: Whose voices should define who we are?
Glitter and Concrete
*The Millions Most Anticipated List of 2023*
*A Vogue Best LGBTQ+ Book of 2023*
From journalist and drag historian Elyssa Maxx Goodman, an intimate, evocative history of drag in New York City exploring its dynamic role, from the Jazz Age to Drag Race, in queer liberation and urban life
From the lush feather boas that adorned early female impersonators to the sequined lip syncs of barroom queens to the drag kings that have us laughing in stitches, drag has played a vital role in the creative life of New York City. But the evolution of drag in the city—as an art form, a community and a mode of liberation—has never before been fully chronicled.
Now, for the first time, Elyssa Goodman unearths the dramatic, provocative untold story of drag in New York City in all its glistening glory. Glitter and Concrete ducks beneath the velvet ropes of Harlem Renaissance balls, examines drag’s crucial role in the Stonewall Uprising, traces drag’s influence on disco and punk rock as well as its unifying power during the AIDS crisis and 9/11, and culminates with the modern-day drag queen in the era of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Including original interviews with high-profile performers, as well as glamorous color photos from exclusive sources and the author herself, Glitter and Concrete is a significant contribution to queer history and an essential read for anyone curious about the story that echoes beneath the heels.
“Deeply researched and featuring a cast of characters who can truly be described as fabulous, Glitter and Concrete is urban history on fire.” —Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York
Family Reins
The story of the iconic Anheuser-Busch dynasty, written — for the first time — by a Busch heir.
As an heir to the Anheuser-Busch company and fortune, Billy Busch was raised on the real stories of how his family built one of America’s oldest and most iconic brands. Since the company was formed almost 150 years ago, the Busch family, their beer, the famous Clydesdales in their advertising, and even their style of business have become a symbol of the American dream — that not-so-outdated belief that hard work, grit, and a positive can-do attitude make anything possible.
Growing up on the family’s ancestral estate as a prince to the King of Beers, Billy lived a life only kids could dream up — living in an amusement park, traveling by private rail car and yacht, and playing with his pet elephant, Tessie. But as he grew up, he realized that the Busch family legacy was not just wealth and privilege. With no separation between family and business, Billy’s father — more boss than dad — continued the tradition of preparing the next generation for corporate leadership, with high and exacting standards for his children. For Billy, all of this, combined with a dysfunctional family environment, was all too normal.
Family Reins tells the story of a legendary American family, their rise to power, and their fall from grace through poisonous infighting, succession struggles, and a seemingly endless string of tragedies, scandals, and loss.
A Memoir of My Former Self
THE FINAL BOOK FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST WRITERS
In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels―revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,” on our endless fascination with the current royal family.
From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.” Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.
The Last Yakuza
The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before in this gripping, true crime story by the author of Tokyo Vice.
Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese, living in small-town Japan. He has two talents: playing guitar and picking fights. When his dream of being a rock star fails to materialize, he turns to the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer performance, loyalty, and brute force―the yakuza.
Saigo, nicknamed Tsunami, quickly realizes that even within the organization, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.
The internal politics of the yakuza are dizzyingly complex, and between the ever-shifting web of alliances and the encroaching hand of the law that pushes them further and further underground, Saigo finds himself in the middle of a defining decades-long battle that will determine the future of the yakuza.
Written with the insight of an expert on Japanese organized crime and the compassion of a longtime friend, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein presents a sprawling biography of a yakuza, through postwar desperation, to bubble-era optimism, to the present. Including a cast of memorable yakuza bosses―Coach, the Buddha, and more―this is a story about the rise and fall of a man, a country, and a dishonest but sometimes honorable way of life on the brink of being lost.
A Myriad of Tongues
A sweeping exploration of the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.
We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.
Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms―in English, for example, we speak of time “passing us by”―speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.
Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.
Eighteen Days in October
“Pacy and enthralling.” ―Financial Times
“Tells the story brilliantly.” ―Senator Joseph I. Lieberman
“Stimulating and insightful…will no doubt find a permanent place on the Arab-Israeli bookshelf.” ―Michael Oren, New York Times bestselling author of Six Days of War
October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the “debacle.”
But, argues Uri Kaufman, from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel. After nearly being routed, the Israeli Defense Force clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. In the war’s aftermath both sides had to accept unwelcome truths: Israel could no longer take military superiority for granted―but the Arabs could no longer hope to wipe Israel off the map. A straight line leads from the battlefields of 1973 to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and all the treaties since. Like Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, this is the definitive account of a critical moment in history.
To Infinity and Beyond
This enlightening illustrated narrative by the world’s most celebrated astrophysicist explains the universe from the solar system to the farthest reaches of space with authority and humor.
No one can make the mysteries of the universe more comprehensible and fun than Neil deGrasse Tyson. Drawing on mythology, history, and literature—alongside his trademark wit and charm—Tyson and StarTalk senior producer Lindsey Nyx Walker bring planetary science down to Earth and principles of astrophysics within reach. In this entertaining book, illustrated with vivid photographs and art, readers travel through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and voyaging to the far reaches of the universe and beyond. Along the way, science greets pop culture as Tyson explains the triumphs—and bloopers—in Hollywood’s blockbusters: all part of an entertaining ride through the cosmos.
The book begins as we leave Earth, encountering new truths about our planet’s atmosphere, the nature of sunlight, and the many missions that have demystified our galactic neighbors. But the farther out we travel, the weirder things get. What’s a void and what’s a vacuum? How can light be a wave and a particle at the same time? When we finally arrive in the blackness of outer space, Tyson takes on the spookiest phenomena of the cosmos: parallel worlds, black holes, time travel, and more.
For science junkies and fans of the conundrums that astrophysicists often ponder, To Infinity and Beyond is an enlightening adventure into the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
Seafood Simple
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The definitive seafood guide from the three-Michelin-starred chef of Le Bernardin, featuring gorgeous photography and step-by-step techniques alongside 85 accessible recipes that “will have you cooking fillets with pro-level precision on a Tuesday” (Epicurious)
“I hope that this book is a source of inspiration and education, encouraging you to cook with confidence and approach seafood with joy, and even love. The secret to Seafood Simple is to trust the process, and yourself.”
In its three decades at the top of New York City’s restaurant scene, Le Bernardin has been celebrated as one of the finest seafood restaurants in the world and its iconic chef Eric Ripert as the expert in fish cookery. Now, in Seafood Simple, Ripert demystifies his signature cuisine, making delectable fish dishes achievable for home cooks of all skill levels—yet still with elegance and panache.
Breaking down cooking techniques into their building blocks, along with images to illustrate each step in the process, Seafood Simple teaches readers how to master core skills, from poaching and deep frying to filleting a fish and shucking an oyster. These techniques are then applied to eighty-five straightforward, delicious recipes, many of which include substitutions for maximum ease. Dishes like Tuna Carpaccio, Crispy Fish Tacos, Shrimp Tempura, Miso Cod, and Spaghetti Vongole show us how to bring out the vibrant flavor and incredible versatility of seafood. Each recipe is accompanied by a gorgeous image by renowned photographer Nigel Parry, as well as step-by-step photos for each of the twenty techniques taught in the book.
Stunning, delectable, and above all, actually doable, Seafood Simple is a master class from one of the world’s greatest chefs, created especially for the home cook.