American High

The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, and the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories - and with the American Dream itself - and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats.

Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as pundits argue over whether we should bother empathizing with our political opposites at all. Meanwhile, we are inundated with the buzzily termed "empathic marketing" - which may very well be a contradiction in terms. In I Feel You, Cris Beam carves through the noise with a revelatory exploration of how we perform empathy, how it is learned, what it can do - indeed, what empathy is in the first place.

Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries' attempts at democracy.

This is a love story like no other: Elinor Powell was an African-American nurse in the US military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler’s army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Eleanor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked - and segregated - Western town. Brought together by unlikely circumstances and racist assumptions, Elinor and Frederick should have been bitter enemies; but instead, at the height of World War II, they fell in love.

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, 11-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an "all-American boy".

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, Don Shula remains the winningest coach of all time with 347 career victories and the only undefeated season in NFL history. But before he became the architect of the Dolphins dynasty, Shula was a hardworking kid selling fish on the banks of Lake Erie. As acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky shows, Shula met serious resistance at home when he asked to play high school football, but when his parents finally relented, they discovered that their son had an unmatched mind for the game's strategy and a stomach for its brutality.

Long before their country officially joined the war, American aid workers were active in rescue efforts across Europe. Two such Americans were Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who were originally sent to Prague as part of a relief effort but turned immediately to helping Jews and dissidents after the 1939 invasion by Germany. They were not the only ones. Renowned historian Debórah Dwork follows the story of rescue workers in five major cities as the refugee crisis expanded to Vilna, Shanghai, Marseille, and Lisbon. Followed by Nazi agents, spiriting people across borders, they learned secrecy.

When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother - or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru. Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself first.

From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would be pushed to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory.

Seventeen-year-old Bucky Yi knows nothing about his birth country of South Korea or his bio-dad's disappearance; he can't even pronounce his Korean name correctly. Running through the woods of rural Washington State with a tire tied to his waist, his sights are set on one all-American goal: to become a college football player. So when a misadventure with his adoptive family leads the US government to deport him to South Korea, he's forced to navigate an entirely foreign version of his life.

Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality.

The daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I., Rachel survives a family tragedy only to face new challenges. Sent to live with her strict African-American grandmother in a racially divided Northwest city, she must suppress her grief and reinvent herself in a mostly black community. A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, she attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that's not how she sees herself.

Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.

Seeing Red breaks new ground in investigating the scope of Russian disinformation, arguing that key politicians and media outlets in the United States have facilitated the dissemination of Russian propaganda. From the 2020 elections to the Capitol Insurrection to the war in Ukraine, Sarah Oates and Gordon Neil Ramsay examine the penetration of key Kremlin strategic narratives that attempt to project Russian power, blame NATO for Russian aggression, and attack democracy via the US news.

Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself - from an author who has received the California Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, among other literary honors.

In his reflections on God, Jesus, suffering, and liberation, James H. Cone relates the gospel message to the experience of the Black community. But a wider theme of the book is the role that social and historical context plays in framing the questions we address to God as well as the mode of the answers provided.

Written by Daniel Nettle - author of the popular book Happiness - this brief volume takes the listener on an exhilarating tour of what modern science can tell us about human personality. Revealing that our personalities stem from our biological makeup, Nettle looks at the latest findings from genetics and brain science, and considers the evolutionary origins and consequences of different personalities. The heart of the book sheds light on the "big five": Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientious, Agreeableness, and Openness.

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.

The incredible, untold story of the men who risked their lives in the first transcontinental air contest—and put American aviation on the map.