Collection: Politics

A bold and brightly colored illustrated biography of Wangari Maathai who founded the Green Belt Movement and was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

This picture book tells the inspiring story of Wangari Maathai, women's rights activist and one of the first environmental warriors. Wangari began the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in the 1960s, which focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. She inspired thousands across Africa to plant 30 million trees in 30 years and was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

"A literary experience unlike any I've had in recent memory . . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going."--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?

Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work--images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more--to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics.

In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.

Newbery Honoree Carole Boston Weatherford and award-winning illustrator Eric Velasquez--the team behind Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library--reunite to take full measure of an iconic performer and political activist.

Paul Robeson rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, known for his extraordinary vocal, dramatic, and oratory skills. But he was a true Renaissance man: an accomplished athlete, a bright intellect, and a passionate supporter for humanitarian causes. He displayed his talents on many stages: the pulpit where he filled in for his minister father; on debate, football, baseball, basketball, and track teams; in college and law school classrooms; on the theatrical stage and the silver screen; and behind the podium. Paul Robeson became internationally renowned as a singer and actor, and as his fame grew, so did his unflinching activism against racial injustice. He used the power of his voice to speak out as America's conscience, but when his nation was not yet willing to listen, he found a more-supportive reception in the USSR. In this moving birth-to-death biography, Carole Boston Weatherford's poetic first-person narrative, interlaced with excerpts from African American spirituals, pairs with dynamic illustrations by Eric Velasquez capturing Paul Robeson's commanding presence. Back matter includes a time line, source notes, and bibliography for readers inspired to learn more.

A series of personal stories from some of the non-Jews, including gypsies, political and religious activists, the physically challenged, and other "undesirables," who were persecuted but escaped the fate of the five million Gentiles murdered by the Nazis.

Critics of war are often labeled treasonous lunatics. Even those who are critical of the government are scrutinized and dragged through the mud. Young men and women volunteer to fight wars on their nation's behalf, and we should commend them for their actions, but we should question the steps to board ships and planes bound for foreign soil before their military service is required.

Major General Smedley Butler was a 2x Medal of Honor recipient and an advocate for those he lead to war. His legacy is rich with valor in combat but also the bureaucratic fight on the homefront. From exposing war-profiteering to campaigning for veterans benefits that provide returning US troops with rich opportunities in the present day, "Old Gimlet Eye" was an American hero you surely did not read about in school.

"War is a racket, it always has been," and it still is.

The bestselling coauthor of The Moscow Rules and Argo tells her riveting, courageous story of being a female spy at the height of the Cold War

Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife" performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment. Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA. Often underestimated, occasionally undermined, she lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, rising first to become an international spy and ultimately to Chief of Disguise at CIA's Office of Technical Service.

In True Face recounts not only the drama of Mendez's high-stakes work--how this savvy operator parlayed her "everywoman" appeal into incredible subterfuge--but also the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical--and accessible--plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.

Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.

He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions--suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise.

As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New York Times Editor's Choice A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

The Inspiration for the HBO Original Documentary South to Black Power

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action, "a must-read in the effort to dismantle deep-seated poisons of systemic racism and white supremacy" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.

Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a "race book." But as violence against Black people--both physical and psychological--seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.

So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It's going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

White Fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning--and today, it's more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it.

For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel--of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular "way of life"--has been the driving force behind American politics and culture.
White Fear enabled the rise of Donald Trump. It's behind the recent flood of restrictive voting laws disproportionately impacting people of color. It's why reactions to movements like Black Lives Matter and football players taking a knee have been so negative and so strong.

As we approach a future where White people will become a racial the minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country's inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?

Nationally renowned journalist and award-winning author Roland Martin has been sounding this alarm for more than a decade. In White Fear, he provides a primer on how White Fear has shaped, and continues to shape, our democracy and our culture. He connects the separate puzzle pieces, from the Tea Party Movement to the decline of White American optimism to the diminishing blue-collar workforce, to illuminate the larger picture of what will unfold in America over the next decade-plus, and offers a better way forward.

If we want to create the kind of country that we're all welcome in and proud to live in, we can no longer ignore White Fear. We must learn to recognize, understand, and dismantle it.

And as the last few years have shown, we don't have any time to lose.

"I am an ordinary person with an extraordinary past."

In this true and moving story, Alter Wiener, a teen Holocaust survivor of five Nazi prison camps during World War II, transports young readers back in time when an unexpected person demonstrated moral courage in repeated acts of kindness toward him.

From nationally acclaimed author and speaker Trudy Ludwig and award-winning illustrator Craig Orback, Gifts from the Enemy shows how acts of social justice and kindness can change lives. Parents and teachers will find this story a valuable and timely resource to help children understand in an age-appropriate way about the Holocaust and the dangers of hatred, stereotyping, and prejudice. The back matter includes a note from Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener to readers, discussion questions, activities to promote kindness, and more!

Gifts from the Enemy is based on From a Name to a Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography self-published by Alter Wiener in 2007.

In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the true story of Helen Keller.

Little Helen was curious and eager to learn about the world. After contracting an illness during childhood, she became deaf and blind at the age of one and was unable to talk. Helen and her family found ways to connect with each other, such as hand-signing.

But when Anne Sullivan, a teacher, came into her life, Helen discovered more ways to communicate with the wider world, learning finger-spelling and how to talk. This saw her become the first deaf-blind person to earn a university degree, and led her to tour the world advocating for the rights of disabled people.

This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of this amazing woman's life.

Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Travels with George . . . is quintessential Philbrick--a lively, courageous, and masterful achievement." --The Boston Globe

Does George Washington still matter? Bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick argues for Washington's unique contribution to the forging of America by retracing his journey as a new president through all thirteen former colonies, which were now an unsure nation. Travels with George marks a new first-person voice for Philbrick, weaving history and personal reflection into a single narrative.

When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing--Americans.

In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called "the infant woody country" to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington's presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington's and Philbrick's eyes.

Written at a moment when America's founding figures are under increasing scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington's legacy as a man of the people, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner who held people in slavery. At historic houses and landmarks, Philbrick reports on the reinterpretations at work as he meets reenactors, tour guides, and other keepers of history's flame. He paints a picture of eighteenth-century America as divided and fraught as it is today, and he comes to understand how Washington compelled, enticed, stood up to, and listened to the many different people he met along the way--and how his all-consuming belief in the union helped to forge a nation.

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race--and promises to change the way we read American literature--from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it--an urgent work of literary journalism.

"I don't know a more complicated, original protagonist in literature than Lissa Yellow Bird, or a more dogged reporter in American journalism than Sierra Crane Murdoch."--William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days

In development as a Paramount+ original series

WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARD - NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR(R) AWARD - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - NPR - Publishers Weekly

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher "KC" Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him.

Yellow Bird traces Lissa's steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke's disappearance. She navigates two worlds--that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma. Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and--when it serves her cause--manipulative. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.

From young Afghani activist and Amnesty International Global Youth Ambassador Pashtana Durrani, a deeply inspiring memoir about the power of learning and the value of educators in their many forms - from teachers, mentors, and role models, to fathers, mothers, and any one of us with the drive to stand against ignorance...

A Ms. Magazine Pick for Most Anticipated Feminist Books


"Pashtana's story highlights the resourcefulness and bravery of young women in Afghanistan. I hope readers will be inspired by her mission to give every girl the education she deserves and the opportunity to pursue her dreams."--Malala Yousafzai

Inspired by generations of her family's unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan's girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden. In a country devastated by war and violence, where girls are often married off before reaching their teenage years and prohibited from leaving their homes, heeding that call seemed both impossible and dangerous.

Pashtana was raised in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school for girls within their home. Fueled by his insistence that despite being a girl, she mattered and deserved an education, Pashtana was sixteen when, against impossible odds, she was granted a path out of the refugee camp: admittance to a preparatory program at Oxford. Unthinkably and to her parents' horror, she chose a different path. She chose Afghanistan.

Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls in remote areas of the country, training teachers in digital literacy. Her commitment to education has made her a target of the Taliban. Still, she continues to fight for women's education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.

Courageous and inspiring, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is the story of how just one person can transform a family, a tribe, a country. It reminds us of the emancipatory power of learning and the transformational potential that lies within each of us.

A portion of proceeds from Last to Eat, Last to Learn will be donated to LEARN (LearnAfghan.org), the NGO dedicated to providing quality education and healthcare to communities in conflict zones.

From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan comes a dramatic and powerful new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace--a perspective that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War.

Henry Wallace is the most important, and certainly the most fascinating, almost-president in American history. As FDR's third-term vice president, and a hero to many progressives, he lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in a wild open convention, as a result of which Harry Truman became president on FDR's death. Books, films, and even plays have since portrayed the circumstances surrounding Wallace's defeat as corrupt, and the results catastrophic. Filmmaker Oliver Stone, among others, has claimed that Wallace's loss ushered in four decades of devastating and unnecessary Cold War.

Now, based on striking new finds from Russian, FBI, and other archives, Benn Steil's The World That Wasn't paints a decidedly less heroic portrait of the man, of the events surrounding his fall, and of the world that might have been under his presidency. Though a brilliant geneticist, Henry Wallace was a self-obsessed political figure, blind to the manipulations of aides--many of whom were Soviet agents and assets.

From 1933 to 1949, Wallace undertook a series of remarkable interventions abroad, each aimed at remaking the world order according to his evolving spiritual blueprint. As agriculture secretary, he fell under the spell of Russian mystics, and used the cover of a plant-gathering mission to aid their doomed effort to forge a new theocratic state in Central Asia. As vice president, he toured a Potemkin Siberian continent, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book, together with an American NKGB journalist source, hailing the region's renaissance under Bolshevik leadership. In China, the Soviets uncovered his private efforts to coax concessions to Moscow from Chiang Kai-shek, fueling their ambitions to dominate Manchuria. Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government's foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that he began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin's aims and conduct.

Meticulously researched and deftly written, The World That Wasn't is a spellbinding work of political biography and narrative history that will upend how we see the making of the early Cold War.