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New Adult 000 - 300s Nonfiction 000 - Computer Science, Knowledge, and Systems 100 - Philosophy and Psychology 200 - Religion 300- Social Science, Law, and Education |
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All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning
by S. E. Smith
Have you suffered a loss? How was your life changed by the grief you experienced? Mourning is a personal experience and shouldn't be judged. There are no do-overs in death, but there are do-betters. All
My Dead Cats is not a book about pet loss. You will meet award-winning journalist and debut author s.e. smith's cats and read small slices of
their stories. Their vignettes serve as an opening to scary conversations about loss, so grief can feel less intimidating and more relatable. This is a book about grief and mourning as collective activities best undertaken in community. S.e. interviews dozens of experts--from death doulas to funeral home directors to therapists and psychologists--and discusses
the different stages of grief. The shared perspectives help us
understand that grief is not fixable but it can be livable. They teach us that if we have the courage, which begins with honest conversations about how we navigate grief, then we can learn how to do better. After reading you'll better understand: Disenfranchised grief and how you can be part of the solution and not the problem. How to be an advocate for people subjected to trauma and violence. The stages of grief and how
to process your experiences. Grief is not over once the body is neatly disposed of, the rubble of the house has been taken away in dumpsters, the final fit on the prosthesis is done, the law is passed and withstands legal challenges, or when the permanent peace is brokered. It is an ongoing shift in our relationship to the world, and one that deserves attention and care as well as time and space to be amongst fellow mourners, to whom we do not need to justify or explain, because they understand where we are. Readers will feel seen rather than being chastised for how they grieve and better understand how to process mourning--and how to help others. All My Dead Cats provides an entry point, by beginning the conversation about a beloved pet, so readers
can think about the larger stakes of death and live a more fulfilled life.
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Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance
by Maggie Helwig
An activist priest's sermons remind us that one of the first social justice frameworks was the Bible. When lifelong activist and celebrated author Maggie Helwig became an Anglican priest, she brought both her hard-earned social justice wisdom and her incomparable literary prowess to the role. Where the homily - the weekly act of taking biblical texts and making them speak to one's time, place, and community - can easily become a rote exercise, Helwig takes the language and narrative very seriously. The homilies in this book, selected from those presented to
her congregation over the last five years, talk about the Bible, and by extension, the world, through both an activist and a literary lens. 'Instructions for the End of the World' is how Helwig describes the gospels. As we live through the climate crisis and the rise of fascism around the world, Helwig's responses to the ancient texts feel urgent and necessary, reminders of hope and meaning during a time of great anxiety and fear. Whether you're religious or not, these homilies offer a basis for resistance and resources for building communities that may sustain us all.
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Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives
by Darby Saxbe
A groundbreaking exploration of the science and significance of fatherhood that shows great dads are made, not born. Over the last decade, we've learned more about the transformative power of parenthood--biologically, psychologically, and socially--than ever before. But while the experience of motherhood has attracted well-deserved attention, fatherhood has remained overlooked and, often, misunderstood. Now, in Dad Brain, field-leading psychologist Darby Saxbe, PhD, explains how becoming a father changes men, from their bodies and brain architecture to their hormones and sense of purpose. Inspired by her relationship with her dad, Saxbe has studied fathers
and families for over twenty years. In her first book, she takes readers behind the scenes of her new research and around the world, from hunter-gatherers in the Congo to contemporary suburban dads, and
into her pioneering studies of how parenthood shapes men's brains and
lives. Ultimately, fatherhood can help men discover a richer, more connected, and more meaningful life. For fans of science-based storytelling that is also irreverent, funny, and personal, Dad Brain
offers an illuminating, empowering, and optimistic new understanding
of fatherhood that will become a must-read for every parent.
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How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University
by Theo Baker
From Theo Baker, winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford's president, comes a revelatory and
gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris. Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley's favored teenagers. Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at
Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior. Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was
nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, pre-idea funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling
elite. At the helm of this business was Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a superstar neuroscientist and wealthy biotech executive. But when Baker joined the student newspaper and started poking around the Stanford president's record, he discovered never-reported allegations of research misconduct in studies published across two decades bearing Tessier-Lavigne's name. Only one month into college and thousands of miles from home, Baker began receiving anonymous letters, going on stakeouts, and tracking down confidential sources. High-powered lawyers and public relations teams were hired to attack his reporting. Stanford opened an investigation into its own leader. And by the end of the year, Tessier-Lavigne was out as president. This is the incredible journey of a
reluctant teenage reporter who uncovered a story that shook the scientific world and became front-page news across the country. It is also an unprecedented inside view of the students learning to rule the world--and what they're learning from those who already do.
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Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics
by Micki McElya
A sweeping, definitive work of history exploring the road to the September 1968 protests of the Miss American Pageant--one led by women's liberationists and the other organized by the emergent Miss Black America Pageant--and the birth of a new politics of beauty. A revolution was brewing. In the dying days of the summer of 1968,
during one unprecedented Pageant weekend, Atlantic City played host not only to the fifty young contestants and thousands of eager visitors who had arrived in town for the Miss America crowning, but also to the first Miss Black America Pageant, mounted to protest its lily-white sister competition, as well as raucous actions from women's liberationists. For just a few hours, the boardwalk became a site of vigorously contested ideas--ideas that would redefine the women's movement and
reverberate across American culture. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Micki McElya unfolds the full scope of this history, detailing the shocking injustices and passionate debates that led to the demonstrations, as
well as the broader social and political landscape that gave rise to some of the most iconic women on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Here, we find complex portraits of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Florynce Kennedy, Phyllis Schlafly, and Anita Bryant as well as glimpses of Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Lewis, Vanessa Williams, and Donald Trump years before they became the public figures we know them as today.
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Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
by Pamela Colloff
For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-
rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married nine women--some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida, he became a frequent witness for the state, thinking nothing of exaggerating men's
wrongdoing or implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, fueling his growing sense of invincibility. Soon he was not just committing
fraud; he was preying on girls in their teens or barely into adolescence. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik's account of his confession helped put Dailey on death row. Skalnik, meanwhile, walked free. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Pamela Colloff, reporting for the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused. By then, Skalnik had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he exploited, to the dozens of men he helped imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who went on to receive an execution date. In this mesmerizing debut, Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than
finding the truth.
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Sisters of the Midnight Sun: A Murder in Arctic Alaska
by Rebecca Wright Stevens
Rebecca Wright is a defense attorney living in the Lower 48 when she suddenly finds herself a widow and an empty nester. In need of a radical change, she accepts a public defender position in Utqiagvik on Alaska's North Slope, an oil-rich area the size of Wyoming where the Inupiat community holds great cultural, political, and economic power. Though she'll always be a tanik--an outsider--she works hard to gain the trust and friendship of the folks who call this singular place home. When two well-known sisters, Bernice and Wanda Ipalook, are found murdered, Wright is tasked with representing Amos Lane, a drifter on the short-list of murder suspects. Criminal charges are looming. But this is summer in northern Alaska, the season of the midnight sun, when twenty-four-hour sunlight makes it difficult for witnesses to confirm the time--or even the day--they last saw the sisters, Amos, or anyone else. Wright must navigate an unreliable client, a prosecution willing to entrap her to get a conviction, a budding romance, and a community that believes Amos might deserve a different form of justice from what the tanik legal system can provide. Weaving a detailed portrait of Utqiagvik alongside Wright's complex self-portrait of an outsider in an isolated community, Sisters of the Midnight Sun is a riveting true account that brings to vivid life a land at the edge of the habitable world.
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Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey
Inside Today's Supreme Court
by Sarah Isgur
The ultimate insider, Isgur takes readers on a deep dive inside the Supreme Court: how cases land at the Court’s doorstep, which justices attend clerk happy hours (and which ones even bother showing up to the office), why conservatives already have buyer’s remorse about Amy Coney Barrett, and how the whole judicial system is kind of a constitutional anomaly. She’ll even help you decide whether you should throw your hat in the ring and go to law school! Blending irreverent humor and incisive commentary, Isgur goes underneath the robes—and shows us what we need to do to preserve the rule of law amid dicey times in this little self-governing experiment we’ve been running for the last 250 years.
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Shameful Silence: What You Don't Know about Domestic Violence
by Alexandra Lozano
In Shameful Silence, Human Rights attorney Alexandra Lozano exposes the hidden epidemic of male domestic abuse. With unflinching honesty, legal precision, and deep compassion, Lozano draws on sixteen years of frontline experience to advocate for vulnerable individuals in complex legal systems. She reveals a vital truth few confront: abuse can devastate without leaving bruises. Through survivor accounts and rigorous research, this book reveals sophisticated, often invisible tactics used against men, including gaslighting, financial control, parental alienation, false allegations, and using custody battles and immigration status as weapons. These abuses leave no visible scars yet dismantle identity, isolate victims, and destroy lives. Blending legal insight, psychological research, and deeply human storytelling, Shameful
Silence challenges entrenched stereotypes about victimhood and masculinity. Lozano reframes strength not as silence but as truth. Shameful Silence is essential reading for male survivors seeking validation and a way forward. It is also vital for legal, healthcare, and education professionals, as well as social workers and advocates
seeking deeper insight into non-physical abuse and institutional blind spots. This book expands our definition of abuse and challenges
societal beliefs. It offers a blueprint for a world where every survivor
is seen, heard, and protected.
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American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda
by Ru Marshall
Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American
life, American Trickster defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academia's complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse. Carlos Castaneda, born
in Peru in 1925, fled to the U.S. in 1951, escaping responsibility for a child he fathered with a thirteen-year-old girl. He changed his name repeatedly, worked as a taxi driver, studied creative writing, and eventually enrolled in anthropology at UCLA in 1959. In 1968, the University of California Press published his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a Westerner.
Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality--despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices. For a time, his truth went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing expose revealing that Castaneda wasn't who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive spiritual group that blurred the line between fiction and reality.
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Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age
by James M. Tabor
In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. In 1866, after enduring over a decade of global scorn, catastrophic
failures, staggering losses, and brushes with death, he would finally lay his great cable, ushering in the global information age.
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The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers
by Carlos Barragán
When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragan came face to face with the human toll of online
romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother's scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. There, in a crowded and
impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa's largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves Yahoo Boys, and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones. In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragan takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos.
We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor's apprentice caught between the lure of
crime and Nigeria's economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he's responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years. Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they make, while others
become dependent on drugs and cash out--successfully scam a victim--only to lose it all. Through the Yahoo Boys' twisting fortunes, Barragan discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront. A work of radical empathy, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.
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The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness
by Andrew Moore
Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are, in fact, native to what was once a kind of Eden--towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter. Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina's coastal marshes, and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of
the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster--but not without controversy. In The Beasts of the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists, and nature lovers as they confront herculean challenges: How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness?
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Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future
by Rye Barcott
When most Americans think of acts of courage, elected office is rarely the first place they look. And while more Americans than ever reject party labels, the political arena remains dominated by the loudest
voices at each extreme. This moment demands leaders willing to
govern across party lines, resist the incentives of modern politics, and choose courage over outrage. One group is uniquely suited to meet that challenge: America's veterans. Courage Can Save US follows nine veterans and a former FBI agent - five Democrats and five
Republicans - who have carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into public life. Ambitious and altruistic, forthright and flawed, they confront the moral and personal costs of leadership in an unsettled age: public attacks, private doubt, and the risk of losing everything they
have worked for in service of the common good. More than a collection of political profiles, Courage Can Save US is a portrait of a bipartisan generation of post-9/11 leaders striving to rise above polarization and a culture of contempt. It is an examination of courage in its many forms-and a challenge to all of us to consider how courage can strengthen our democracy, and our own lives.
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Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body
by Erin Maglaque
Today, we understand the mind and the body to be distinct; that the mind exercises control over the flesh. But as Erin Maglaque experienced the transformations of pregnancy, abortion, birth, and care-giving, she began to doubt the truth of that dichotomy. In an effort to better understand her experiences, she found herself reaching to the premodern past, a period when the strange rubbed up against the strikingly recognizable: when people accepted both levitation and the smallpox vaccine, witchcraft and universal gravitation; a time when understandings of the body and its capacity for thought were more expansive, and more unruly. Structured as a biography of the author's own body, from girlhood and adolescence, to sex and abortion, to feeding and caring for an infant, to her experience caring for someone
as they were dying, Erin places her personal history into a deep
dialogue with the premodern past. She explores the relation between imagination and gender, between maternal and historical subjectivity; she positions female desire as a practice with a past, and offers gentler and more forgiving understandings of housekeeping, pregnancy, early miscarriage, abortion, birth, sleeplessness, and breastfeeding.
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America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
by Eddie S. Glaude
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and
the country's enduring refusal to face its true nature--especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth. America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching
exploration of America's legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices--from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.--that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude's is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches,
calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present. Centered around the major celebrations of America's milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive
for the better angels of our future.
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How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy
by Soumaya Keynes
We used to take trade for granted. Trillions of dollars of goods and services crossed borders each year, made possible by a global, rules-based system. Nobody paid too much attention to supply chains: they just worked. Now we are in an era of trade conflict and can no longer avoid the fight. Trump's latest tariff announcement can jolt markets, push prices up, and sour decades-long alliances. China's export restrictions on rare earths could bring the West's car production to a
halt. Curbs on trade in cutting-edge chips could determine who wins
the AI race. Keynes and Bown argue that the rules of the game have been abandoned, and a different strategy is needed. Yearning for the
old approach to start working again isn't an option. Countries must adapt, which means learning from history, economics, and from each other--including China. The stakes couldn't be higher. The authors explore the history, the players, and the rules of trade, and consider
how we can prepare for what the future might hold. What would all-out economic warfare look like? Could trade wars lead to hot wars? What
can the West learn from China? How to Win a Trade War is the guide to one of the global economy's biggest challenges.
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The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money
by Brendan Greeley
America's money is global money--nearly every nation in the world
writes international contracts in dollars, and in 2023, central banks around the world held nearly $6.7 trillion in dollar reserves, three times any other currency. Today, the United States' global hegemony rests largely on its ability to produce unlimited treasury bonds that are sold around the world, dollars that supported America's explosive growth in the twentieth century and funded its massive wars in the twenty-first. American power and the American dollar have become synonymous.
Yet in this brilliant 500-year history, Brendan Greeley argues that America's sovereignty over the dollar is an illusion--that the dollar had already empowered and destroyed nations long before it washed up on colonial shores, and that no country or king has or can ever truly
control it. At every surprising turn, Greeley upends assumptions about global currencies and draws out the centuries-old tension between how dollars are manufactured and whom they actually serve. Singular in its breadth, The Almighty Dollar dismantles the myth that America created or has ever truly controlled the dollar.
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1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family--the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century's
most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments. With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into
a precipitous remaking of the global currency system--exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. 1873
is a bird's-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian's grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a
global narrative with thrilling explanatory power.
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Backtalker: An American Memoir
by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn't as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of
a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother's Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it. In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with
extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America--at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.
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