PublicAffairs & Bold Type Books – Ebook Deals – June 2024
June eBOOK DEALS
Monthly Deals
LeBron James is the hero in two very American tales: one, a success story the nation loves; the other, the latest installment in an ongoing chronicle of American antiblackness. He’s the poor boy from a “broken” home who makes good. He’s also the poor Black boy from a “broken” home who makes good, then at the apex of his career finds “n*****” spray-painted across the gate to his home.
James has lived in the public eye ever since high school when his extraordinary athletic skills subjected his every action, every statement, every fashion choice to intense public scrutiny that tells us less about James himself and more about a nation still wrestling with many social inequities. He uses his celebrity not to transcend Blackness, but to give it a place of cultural prominence, and the backlash he receives exposes the frictions between Blackness and a country not fully comfortable with its presence. As a result, James’s story is a revelatory narrative of how much Blackness is loved, hated, misunderstood, and just plain cool in an America that has changed and yet not changed at all.
By the end of January 1945, it was clear to Germany that the war was lost. The Third Reich was in freefall, and its leaders, apart from those clustered around Hitler in his Berlin bunker, sought to abscond before they were besieged. But they wanted to take their wealth with them.
Their escape routes were diverse: Sweden and Switzerland boasted proximity, banking, and industrial closeness, while Spain and Portugal offered an inviting Atlantic coastline and shipping routes to South America. And in various ways, each of these so-called neutral nations welcomed the Nazi escapees, along with the clandestine wealth they carried.
Cashing Out tells the riveting history of the race to intercept the stolen assets before they disappeared, and before the will to punish Germany was replaced by the political considerations of the fast-approaching Cold War. Bestselling author Neill Lochery here brilliantly recounts the flight of the Nazi-looted riches—the last great escape of World War II—and the Allied quest for justice.
America’s food system is broken, harming family farmers, workers, the environment, and our health. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here, brilliant innovators, scientists, journalists and activists explain how we can create a hopeful new future for food, if we have the courage to seize the moment.
In 2008, the award-winning documentary Food, Inc. shook up our perceptions of what we ate. Now, the movie’s timely sequel and this new companion book will address the remarkable developments in the world of food—from lab-grown meat to the burgeoning food sovereignty movement—that have unfolded since then.
Featuring thought-provoking original essays from:
Michael Pollan • Eric Schlosser • David E. Kelley and Andrew Zimmern • Senator Cory Booker • Sarah E. Lloyd • Carlos A. Monteiro and Geoffrey Cannon • Lisa Elaine Held • Larissa Zimberoff • Saru Jayaraman • Christiana Musk • Nancy Easton • Leah Penniman • David LeZaks and Lauren Manning • The Coalition of Immokalee Workers • Michiel Bakker • Danielle Nierenberg
This book is the perfect roadmap to understanding not only our current dysfunctional food system, but also what each of us can do to help reform it.
The Rest Is History podcast brilliantly distills major moments in human history, covering everything from the Trojan War to a historical ranking of the greatest dogs. Now, this official tie-in book brings the chart-topping podcast’s charms to the page, offering readers a fresh, wide-ranging tour of humanity’s essential, and essentially weird, moments, including:
– Did the Trojan War actually happen?
– What was the most disastrous party in history?
– Was Richard Nixon more like Caligula or Claudius?
– How did a hair appointment almost blow Churchill’s cover?
– Why did the Nazis believe they were descended from Atlantis?
Featuring an introduction from podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, this book cleverly demonstrates that the past—from modern to ancient and every time in between—is both closer to us than we might realize and bafflingly strange, all at once. So run your Egyptian milk bath, strap up your best Spartan sandals, and prepare for a journey down the highways and byways of the human past.
“You’re mad at me, but I am killing you.”—NBA star Gary Payton
“Find the hate.”—NFL star Warren Sapp
“Why can’t you be more like Rafi Kohan?”—your mom, probably
Whether in basketball, football, or MMA, athletes talk trash to each other—and sometimes to fans—like it’s their job. And in some ways, it is: sports only matter if we decide to care about them. And insulting your opponent, or playing the heel, is probably the fastest route to making someone care. Talking smack is as old as the bible; it’s perhaps the original sport.
But until now, there’s never been a book about it.
In this lively, often hilarious history, Rafi Kohan interviews some of the world’s top competitors—on the petty rivalries and mind games that fuel them. He talks to point guards and soccer strikers, cricketers and insult comedians, forming a theory along the way about the surprising and influential role that name-calling plays in our world.
Brilliantly original and wide-ranging, Trash Talk is a book for sports fans, culture mavens, or anyone looking to get an edge.
We live in a period of leadership in crisis. At home, and across the globe, we sense that unqualified and irresponsible individuals are being elevated to positions of power, strong men and autocrats are consolidating their hold on governance, and the people are losing faith in the prospect of a better future. How have we arrived at this point? And how can we correct our course?
For the past decade, Moshik Temkin has challenged his students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and around the world to grapple with the nature of leadership as part of his wildly popular course “Leaders and Leadership in History.” Now, in Warriors, Rebels, and Saints, Temkin refashions the classroom for a wider audience.
Using art, film, and literature to illustrate the drama of the past, Temkin considers how leaders have made decisions in the most difficult circumstances—from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and from the anticolonial wars of the 20th century to the civil rights struggle—and how, in a world desperate for good leadership, we can evaluate those decisions and draw lessons for today.
Daily Deals
June 9, 2024
This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.
The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.
Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.
Winner, 2023 Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award
CrimeReads, Best True Crime Books of the Year
“After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!’”
Years later, the Latvian prosecutor general began investigating the possibility of redeeming Cukurs for his past actions. Researching the case, Linda Kinstler discovered that her grandfather, Boris, had served in Cukurs’s killing unit and was rumored to be a double agent for the KGB. The proceedings, which might have resulted in Cukurs’s pardon, threw into question supposed “facts” about the Holocaust at the precise moment its last living survivors—the last legal witnesses—were dying.
Rich with scholarly detective work and personal reflection, Come to This Court and Cry is a fearlessly brave examination of how history can become distorted over time, how easily the innocent are forgotten, and how carelessly the guilty are sometimes reprieved.