A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.
Instant Bestseller A sweeping history of the Mississippi River--and the centuries of human meddling that have transformed both it and America.
In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats-the essential tool kit for psychological warfare-have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America's deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War-era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America's secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there's a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace.Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds-and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.
Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnès Varda (1928-2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era, from her tour de force Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a classic of modernist cinema, to the beloved documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) four decades later. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards.In this lively biography, former Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey explores the "complicated passions" that informed Varda's charmed life and indelible work. Rickey traces Varda's three remarkable careers-as still photographer, as filmmaker, and as installation artist. She explains how Varda was a pioneer in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, using the latest digital technology and carving a path for women in the movie industry. She demonstrates how Varda was years ahead of her time in addressing sexism, abortion, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor and incisiveness. She makes clear Varda's impact on contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, and Martin Scorsese, who called her one of the Gods of cinema. And she delves into Varda's incredibly rich social life with figures such as Harrison Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol, and her nearly forty-year marriage to the celebrated director Jacques Demy.A Complicated Passion is the vibrant biography that Varda, regarded by many as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, has long deserved.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity.
A nuanced, passionate exploration of the life and work of one of the most misunderstood writers of the twentieth century.
How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? From playboy billionaires avoiding taxes on private islands to Russian oligarchs sailing away from sanctions on their superyachts, the ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world's ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way.In Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, sociologist Brooke Harrington reveals how this system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend. Harrington spent eight years infiltrating this secretive world by training as a wealth manager, traveling from glossy European and North American capitals to developing countries in South America and Africa, to islands in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South Pacific regions. Through interviews with dozens of wealth managers in nineteen countries, Harrington uncovered how this global network of offshore financial centers arose from the remnants of colonialism and has created a new, hidden imperial classThis engrossing deep dive reveals what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world-not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires, who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington's exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.
Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title "explorers," including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world's first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition.As Lockwood makes clear, people of every background imagine new worlds. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.
One of the most pernicious and persistent myths in the United States is the association of Black skin with poverty. Though there are forty million more poor white people than Black people, most Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to think of poverty-along with issues like welfare, unemployment, and food stamps-as solely a Black problem. Why is this so? What are the historical causes? And what are the political consequences that result?These are among the questions that the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a leading advocate for the rights of the poor and the "closest person we have to Dr. King" (Cornel West), addresses in White Poverty, a groundbreaking work that exposes a legacy of historical myths that continue to define both white and Black people, creating in the process what might seem like an insuperable divide. Analyzing what has changed since the 1930s, when the face of American poverty was white, Barber, along with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.Thus challenging the very definition of who is poor in America, Barber writes about the lies that prevent us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than their "whiteness" and angry social media posts to sustain them in an economy where the costs of housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for all but the very rich. Asserting in Biblically inspired language that there should never be shame in being poor, White Poverty lifts the hope for a new "moral fusion movement" that seeks to unite people "who have been pitted against one another by politicians (and billionaires) who depend on the poorest of us not being here."Ultimately, White Poverty, a ringing work that braids poignant autobiographical recollections with astute historical analysis, contends that tens of millions of America's poorest earners, the majority of whom don't vote, have much in common, thus providing us with one of the most empathetic and visionary approaches to American poverty in decades.
The founding epic of Rome, rendered in a fluid, metrical translation that sings Virgil's stately verse in a vivid, contemporary idiom.
Following his "brisk, readable, accurate" (Gregory R. Beabout) translations of Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, Bruce H. Kirmmse presents a new translation of Kierkegaard's discourses on love.
This inaugural novel in the Well-Read Black Girl × Liveright series is a darkly whimsical debut about women daring to live and create with impunity.
"Howard French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head." --David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.
The fascinating history of a daring team of sexologists who built the first trans clinic in the shadow of the Third Reich.
Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them.
A thrilling new history of the late Roman Republic, told through one woman's quest for justice.
The little-known story of the man who sparked a groundswell of gay activism with a wrongly decided Supreme Court decision.
Newbery Medalist Tae Keller's debut picture book is a resplendent account of humankind's relationship with our most precious resource: the sun.
A myth-busting guide to the ins and outs of inflation from two leading political economists.
Three people--two enslaved, one indentured--live beside each other, fighting, and sometimes failing, to be more than their pasts say they should be.
The definitive collection of one of the most celebrated poets of his generation and a master of the lyric poem in its richest, most flexible registers.
A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson's transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes: his Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning debut, Leaving Saturn (2002), which captures the spirit of resilience in the Philadelphia neighborhoods of the poet's youth; Hoops (2006), which finds transcendence in the solemn marvels of ordinary lives; Holding Company (2010), which shifts away from narrative to explore the seductive force of art, literature, and music; Roll Deep (2015), which addresses human intimacy, war, and the spirit of aesthetic travel; and his vulnerable, philosophical latest, The Absurd Man (2020). The volume opens with over three dozen new poems that erupt into full-throated song in the face of indignity and invite us into a passionate experience of the world.Taken together, these two decades of writing offer a sustained portrait of a poet "bound up in the ecstatic," whose buoyant lyricism confronts the social and political forces that would demean humanity. Equally attuned to sensuous connection, metaphysical inquiries, the natural world, and ever-changing urban landscapes, Jackson possesses a sensibility at once global and personal, driven by an enduring conviction in the possibilities of art and language to mark our lives with meaning.Whether addressing racial conflict and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in America, bearing witness to the plight of refugees, or grieving the contradictory nature of humankind, these dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice, and accountability.
A revelatory account of the wave of arson-for-profit that hit American cities in the 1970s, and of the tenants who put out the fires and reclaimed their neighborhoods.
A rare biographical portrait of the philosopher Plato, showing how the ideas in his masterwork, Republic, were tested amid a bloody civil war.
Three lifelong friends confront restless ghosts and malevolent family secrets in this fierce, propulsive debut young adult horror novel.
A journey into the power of conscious breathing for therapy and everyday life.
A lively dual biography of the two great English orators of the eighteenth century, who cultivated a friendship across their political differences.
A practical guide to treating children suffering from early attachment trauma--now updated and revised.
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