American High

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

The army does not want you to listen to this book. It does not want to advertise its detention system that coddles enemy fighters while putting American soldiers at risk. It does not want to reveal the new lawyered-up Pentagon war ethic that prosecutes US soldiers and marines while setting free spies who kill Americans. This very system ambushed Captain Roger Hill and his men.

Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming”, a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces - the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons - in the remote reaches of the American West.

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were "isolated incidents" in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few "bad apples." However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves."

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: The first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university's new colleges.

Arthur Briggs's life was Homeric in scope. Born on the the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the aftermath of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world. During the legendary Jazz Age in Paris, Briggs's trumpet provided the soundtrack while Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Lost Generation got drunk. By the 1930s, Briggs was considered "the Louis Armstrong of Paris," and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt.

In this bold examination of the Israeli-American relationship, Walter Russell Mead demolishes the myths that both pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists have fostered over the years. He makes clear that Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and that American Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state, citing examples from the time of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller to the present day.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

Gunslinger tells Brett Favre's full, definitive story for the first time, drawing on more than 500 interviews, including many from the people closest to Favre. Jeff Pearlman charts Favre's journey, from his rough rural childhood and lackluster high school football career to landing the last roster spot at Southern Mississippi to a late-night car accident that nearly took his life. Favre clawed back, getting drafted into the NFL, first to Atlanta, then to Green Bay, where he restored the Packers to greatness and inspired a fan base as passionate as any in the game.

It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and 33-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother's house, setting her life on a startling new path.

As the crack epidemic swept across inner-city America in the early 1980s, the streets of Baltimore were crime ridden. For poor kids from the housing projects, the future looked bleak. But basketball could provide the quickest ticket out, an opportunity to earn a college scholarship and perhaps even play in the NBA. Dunbar High School had one of the most successful basketball programs, not only in Baltimore but in the entire country, and in the early 1980s, the Dunbar Poets were arguably the best high school team ever.

In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology. Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of US espionage, gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies, and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight.

In The Politics Industry, Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis - and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework - to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change - a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws.

As Paris rediscovers its joie de vivre, Tabitha Knight, recently arrived from Detroit for an extended stay with her French grandfather, is on her own journey of discovery. Thanks to her neighbor and friend Julia Child, another ex-pat who's fallen head over heels for Paris, Tabitha is learning how to cook for her Grandpere and Oncle Rafe and Tabitha's sojourn is proving thoroughly delightful. That is, until the cold December day they return to Julia's building and learn that a body has been found in the cellar.

Here is an entirely new side of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut as a teacher of writing. Of course he's given us glimpses before, with aphorisms and short essays and articles and in his speeches. But never before has an entire book been devoted to Kurt Vonnegut the teacher. Here is pretty much everything Vonnegut ever said or wrote having to do with the writing art and craft, altogether a healing, a nourishing expedition.

The first book ever to explore the relationship between George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, Partners in Command eloquently tackles a subject that has eluded historians for years. As Mark Perry charts the crucial impact of this duo on victory in World War II and later as they lay the foundation for triumph in the Cold War, he shows us an unlikely, complex collaboration at the heart of decades of successful American foreign policy - and shatters many of the myths that have evolved about these two great men and the issues that tested their alliance.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 in the so-called "burned-over district" of upstate New York, which was producing seers and prophets daily. Most of the new creeds flamed out; Smith's would endure, becoming the most significant homegrown religion in American history. In American Zion Benjamin E. Park presents a fresh, sweeping account of the Latter-day Saints.

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today.

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. No one has captured Ali—and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated—with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick.