Collection: Politics

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing--one of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father's disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.

The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as "a first-person elegy for home and father." Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Guardian - Financial Times

"A tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read."--The Spectator (U.K.)

"Wise and agonizing and thrilling to read."--Zadie Smith

"[An] eloquent memoir . . . at once a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father's fate . . . and a son's efforts to come to terms with his father's ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"This outstanding book . . . roves back and forth in time with a freedom that conceals the intricate precision of its art."--The Wall Street Journal

"Truly remarkable . . . a book with a profound faith in the consolations of storytelling . . . a testament to [Matar's] father, his family and his country."--The Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

"The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. . . . Likely to become a classic."--Colm Tóibín

"Matar's evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov."--The Washington Post

"Utterly riveting."--The Boston Globe

"A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart."--Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian

"Beautiful . . . The Return, for all the questions it cannot answer, leaves a deep emotional imprint."--Newsday

"A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging, and above all, family. It is, as well, a study of the shaping--and breaking--of the bonds between fathers and sons. . . . This is writing of the highest quality."--The Sunday Times (U.K.)

A celebrated historian recounts Hubert Humphrey's role as a liberal hero of twentieth-century America

Hubert Humphrey was liberalism's most dedicated defender, and its most public and tragic sacrifice. As a young politician in 1948, he defied segregationists and forced the Democratic Party to commit itself to civil rights. As a senator in 1964, he made good on that commitment by helping pass the Civil Rights Act. But as Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, his support for the war in Vietnam made him a target for both Right and Left, and he suffered a shattering loss in the presidential election of 1968.

Though Humphrey's defeat was widely seen as the end of America's era of liberal optimism, he never gave up. Even after his humiliation on the most public stage, he crafted a new vision of economic justice to counter the yawning political divisions consuming American politics. This biography reveals a deep-dyed idealist willing to compromise and even fight ugly in pursuit of a better society. Elegantly crafted and strikingly relevant to the present, True Believer celebrates Hubert Humphrey's long struggle for justice for all.

A surprise New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race--collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation--are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopef

Help your little one dream big with a Little Golden Book biography about body-builder, movie star, and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger. Little Golden Book biographies are the perfect introduction to nonfiction for young readers--as well as fans of all ages!

This Little Golden Book about Arnold Schwarzenegger--an immigrant from Austria who achieved the American dream and became Mr. Universe, an action movie icon, and the governor of California--is an inspiring read-aloud for young children and Terminator fans of any age.

Look for more Little Golden Book biographies:
- Betty White
- Carol Burnett
- Lucille Ball
- Harry Belafonte
- Julie Andrews
- Dwayne Johnson

How we arrived in a post-truth era, when "alternative facts" replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.

Are we living in a post-truth world, where "alternative facts" replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of "fake news," from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into "information silos."

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples--claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote--and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism--specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth--in its attacks on science and facts.

McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

"David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."--Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline

Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning--for everyone!

Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation.

How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results.

Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert.

Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like:

• ending homelessness
• improving public health
• strengthening education
• designing a system for early childhood development
• protecting child welfare
• developing rural economies
• facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society
• resolving identity-based conflicts
• and more!

The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.

The epic story of an enormous Soviet apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction

The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the chilling true story of an enormous Moscow apartment building where Soviet leaders and their families lived until hundreds of these Bolshevik true believers were led, one by one, to prison or to their deaths in Stalin's purges. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews with survivors, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, this epic story weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

This "sparkling" and world-famous work examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations--revealing the surprising origins and development of nationalism (The Guardian).

The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson's intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe's recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.

An ordinary Gazan's "devastating contemporary war journal" that chronicles his struggle to survive Israel's invasion of Gaza (Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient)

The Drone Eats with Me is an unforgettable rendering of everyday civilian life shattered by the realities of twenty-first-century warfare. Israel's 2014 invasion of Gaza lasted 51 days, killed 2,145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injured over 11,000 people, and demolished more than 17,000 homes.

Atef Abu Saif, a young father and novelist, puts an indelibly human face on these statistics, providing a rare window into the texture of a community and the realities of a conflict that is too often obscured by politics.

Powerful, body-based practices to help you reclaim confidence, dignity, and self-worth.

As a woman of color, you are more likely to experience oppression, discrimination, and physical or sexual violence in your lifetime. In addition, your family may have experienced generational trauma and systemic racism going back for centuries. This old and new trauma can manifest in both the mind and body. However, there are ways you can free yourself from this trauma, build confidence in yourself and your abilities, and restore your powerful sense of self.

Written by a woman of color for women of color, Decolonizing the Body offers proven-effective somatic, body-centered practices to help you heal from systemic oppression, trust the profound wisdom of your own body, and reconnect with your true self. And by slowing down, cultivating a daily ritual, and setting strong boundaries, you can reclaim your inherent dignity and worth--as well as those aspects of yourself that you may have cast aside in an effort to survive.

With this empowering guide, you'll discover:

• How bodies are colonized through systems of oppression
• Why slowing down is essential for healing
• How to listen to what your body needs
• How to create a space for ritual in your daily life
• How to strengthen feelings of capability
• How to cultivate community--starting with yourself

To decolonize the body is to become whole again, and to come home again. Let this book be your guide on this crucial journey.

The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members. A compelling testament to a woman's most essential freedom--control over her own body--and to the power of women helping women. - Also the subject of the acclaimed HBO documentary The Janes.

The Story of Jane recounts the evolution of the Abortion Counseling Service, code name Jane, the underground group of heroic women that provided low-cost abortion services in Chicago in the years before the procedure was legalized. Organized in 1969 and active until the opening of the first legal abortion clinics in 1973, Jane initially counseled women and referred them to abortion providers who set prices and conditions. As Jane grew, so did the group's capacity to protect its clients. Eventually, determined to reclaim women's reproductive power in any way they were able, many members of Jane learned to perform abortions themselves.

An extraordinary history by one of Jane's members, The Story of Jane is an urgent account of the organization's development, the conflicts within the group, and the impact its work had on both the women it helped and the members themselves.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is Sungju Lee's intense memoir about being forced at age 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself.

"Presents North Korea as a horrifying real-life dystopia. The book, the first of its kind aimed at young adults, is a first-person account of what it is like to be born and raised in a terrifying environment." --The Guardian

Dedicating his book to those he left behind in North Korea, Sungju Lee writes, "North Korea is indeed a Hermit Kingdom; a true-to-life dystopian nation. It's against this backdrop that my story takes place."

To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, "his brothers," to daily be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution.

The book starts with a brief, never-before-told history of modern North Korea that puts Sungju's personal story into context. Then he and coauthor Susan Elizabeth McClelland describe the four years of danger and desperation he endured after being abandoned by his parents. You may not believe the things that he was forced to endure at such a young age. You may not want to believe the horrors of the modern state of North Korea. But this true story of survival and determination allows young readers to learn about another culture where the freedoms they take for granted do not exist.

WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR

The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.

Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.

Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong?

These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home.

hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link of the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.

With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.

A collection of key dissenting and majority opinions from U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

During her 27 years as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became well known for her strongly worded dissenting opinions against the decisions of the conservative majority. Ginsburg was a fierce supporter of women's rights whose personal experiences helped shape her into a feminist icon who employed logical, well-presented arguments to show that gender discrimination was harmful to all members of society. Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dissents features 15 legal opinions and briefs, including majority and dissenting opinions that Ginsburg drafted during her time on the U.S. Supreme Court and briefs from her career before she was appointed to the court in 1993.