Great book recommendations for the Dissenter Reader Type
This fall, we invite our Dissenter reader type to peruse our provocative selection, created to rekindle your commitment to social justice, broaden your horizons, and give yourself the confidence to keep pushing for change.
December new releases
Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel
by Shahnaz Habib
The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.
The color of one's skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.
Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism--but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.
What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas
by James Patterson - Mark Seal
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas--until now. James Patterson shows the real Vegas in a dazzling journey through "lively tales of those who labor and dream in Sin City" (Kirkus).
In What Really Happens in Vegas, full of surprises for both newcomers and Las Vegas regulars, James Patterson and Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal transport readers from the thrill of adrenaline-fueled vice to the glitter of A-list celebrity and entertainment.
Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South
by Corey J Miles
Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to account for the ways Black people have built the South while being simultaneously excluded from it. Drawing from the different ways Black artists in the 2-5-2 area code in North Carolina use "vibe" as a mode of knowing and communication, author Corey J. Miles illustrates how Black feeling and unfeeling offer entry points into the contemporary South that challenge static and monolithic notions of the region. Placing the local artists in conversation with other southern cultural creators such as 2 Chainz, Rod Wave, and Rapsody, these ethnographic narratives demonstrate that there are multiple Souths, with overlapping and distinct commitments to working through pain, sound, and belonging.
In Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South, Miles narrates how southern Black sound, feeling, and being is constantly policed, surveilled, and criminalized. In doing so, he re-narrates the region as the "carceral South," to capture the ways people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. Pain music, a subgenre of trap music, is used to take the listener to moments of violence to allow them to hear the desires, anger, and silences that bind Black life in community. Through conceptions of ratchet, hood, and ghetto, Black artists turn away from respectable images and unmap the South. In trap music, they move the South to a space where multiple modes of being find respect and care.
The Hunger of Women
by Marosia Castaldi - Jamie Richards
Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself--by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.
November new releases
Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
BREAKING TWITTER takes readers inside the darkly comic battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time--Elon Musk--and the company that represents our culture's dearest hope for a shared global conversation. From employee accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with, this is the full story from all sides. Can Musk miraculously succeed or will he spectacularly fail? What will that mean to the global town hall that is Twitter? What, really, is Elon's end goal? The whole world is watching. BREAKING TWITTER will provide ringside seats.
Elon Musk didn't break Twitter. Twitter broke Elon Musk.
UFO: The Inside Story of the Us Government's Search for Alien Life Here--And Out There
by Garrett M Graff
For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs--and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life--is told by bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff in a deeply reported and researched history.
It begins in 1947, when two headline-making sightings of strange flying objects--the first near Mount Rainier, Washington, involving a pilot named Kenneth Arnold, and the second a ranch on the outskirts of a New Mexico town called Roswell--prompt the US Air Force's newly formed Department of Defense to create a series of secret programs to determine how unidentified phenomena may pose a threat to national security. Over the next half-century, as the atomic age gives way to the space race and the Cold War, the search continues, bringing together an unexpected group of astronomers, military officials, civilian contactees, and true believers who bring us closer, then further, then closer again, to answering one of our most enduring questions: What exactly is out there?
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence--and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.
October NEW RELEASES
Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business
by Roxane Gay
Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society--state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women's rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy--alongside more individually personalized matters: can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting? In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication's "Work Friend" columnist, she reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights.
Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gay's best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics--politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more--with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay's devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.
Endangered Eating: America's Vanishing Foods
by Sarah Lohman
Apples, a common New England crop, have been called the United States' "most endangered food." The iconic Texas Longhorn cattle is categorized at "critical" risk for extinction. Unique date palms, found nowhere else on the planet, grow in California's Coachella Valley--but the family farms that caretake them are shutting down. Apples, cattle, dates--these are foods that carry significant cultural weight. But they're disappearing.
In Endangered Eating, culinary historian Sarah Lohman draws inspiration from the Ark of Taste, a list compiled by Slow Food International that catalogues important regional foods. Lohman travels the country learning about the distinct ingredients at risk of being lost. Readers follow Lohman to Hawaii, as she walks alongside farmers to learn the stories behind heirloom sugarcane. In the Navajo Nation, she assists in the traditional butchering of a Navajo Churro ram. Lohman heads to the Upper Midwest, to harvest wild rice; to the Pacific Northwest, to spend a day wild salmon reefnet fishing; to the Gulf Coast, to devour gumbo made thick and green with filé powder; and to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, to taste America's oldest peanut--long thought to be extinct.
Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream
by David Leonhardt
Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world's most powerful country? And what happened to the "American dream"--the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future--which was once such an inextricable part of our national identity?
Drawing on decades of writing about the economy for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today's Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.