Root Science

It’s 1963, and things are changing for Jezebel Turner. Her beloved grandmother has just passed away. The local police deputy won’t stop harassing her family. With school integration arriving in South Carolina, Jez and her twin brother, Jay, are about to begin the school year with a bunch of new kids. But the biggest change comes when Jez and Jay turn 11 - and their uncle, Doc, tells them he’s going to train them in rootwork. And Jez soon finds out that her family’s true power goes far beyond small charms and elixirs…and not a moment too soon.

In a world bursting with magic, Jak’s ill-chosen powers seem worthless. When she needed them most, her enchantments were nothing compared to the horde of demons that raided her village and murdered her father. Determined to fulfill his dying wish and prove her worth, she sets off on a desperate quest to find her long-lost mother. Knowing she wouldn’t last a day alone in the dangerous wilds, she joins a roving band of warriors and throws her full weight into training under the tutelage of a young man who saved her life during the demon attack.

National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth's tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and '80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth all white well into the 1990s.

Written with wit and narrative force, Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels is an enriching excursion into the world of folk medicine. The award-winning team of Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein provide a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of medical traditions. In addition to the honey, mud, and maggots used in wound therapy, the Root-Bernsteins unearth cures that range from ancient Egypt to the rain forests of contemporary Latin America.

It's Homecoming season at Caiman University, and all 17-year-old Malik Baron wants to do is be a regular college student…or as regular as he can get at a magical HCBU for young, Black Conjurers. He’s ready to go to parties, hang out with his new friends, choose a major, and talk to girls. Instead, he's reeling from a summer of revelations, heartbreak and betrayal, and still uncovering the truth about his powers and his legacy.

Magic and politics seem like unlikely bedfellows, but in The King in Orange, author John Michael Greer goes beyond superficial memes and extreme partisanship to reveal the unmentionable realities that spawned the unexpected presidential victory of an elderly real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star and which continue to drive the deepening divide that is now the defining characteristic of American society.

The job was simple: decapitate the zombie, get paid, get out. Warlock Marcus Shifter followed the plan perfectly. The corpse, however, did not. Now there's a body on the loose, accusations of illegal necromancy are flying, and the answers are waiting in the perilous alleys between the mortal and paranormal worlds. They're no place for someone who mostly gave up magic after a childhood accident. And given his tendency to shoot off his mouth and his Glock, Marcus is having a hell of a time digging up more than just bodies. When an apocalypse-minded megalomaniac threatens Marcus's family, things get personal.

Like 75% of American women, Ronnie Citron-Fink dyed her hair, visiting the salon every few weeks to hide gray roots in her signature dark brown mane. She wanted to look attractive, professional, and most of all, young. Yet as a journalist covering health and the environment, she knew something wasn’t right. All those unpronounceable chemical names on the back of the hair dye box were far from natural. Were her recurring headaches and allergies telltale signs that the dye offered the illusion of health, all the while undermining it? Ronnie took a leap and decided to ditch the dye.

Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies-from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture.

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 2013 uproar over an Ohio school that banned Afro puffs, the issues surrounding Black hair continue to linger as we move through the 21stst century.

The fundamental drive to answer these questions is at the heart of Finding Your Roots, the companion book to the hit PBS documentary series. As Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. shows us, the tools ofcutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research now allow us to learn more about our roots, looking further back in time than ever before. Gates' investigations take on the personal and genealogical histories of more than twenty luminaries.

Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, Black feminism, visual culture, film studies and political economy to explore the history of Black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.

In July 2012, aged 30, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery and felt for the first time that her body matched the person she felt she had been since childhood. Through university and then in a series of dead end clerical jobs, Jacques felt out of place with her surroundings, and with who she really was. Living in Brighton, trying to launch a career as a writer, she navigates the hostilities and misunderstandings of growing up in a time when the mainstream media - and even feminism - fail to acknowledge transgender identity.

The left and right will always have strong policy disagreements, but constructive debate and negotiation are not possible when each side demonizes the other. In this book, social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman provides a new framework for understanding why and how we disagree. Janoff-Bulman asks listeners to consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based and reflect genuine concern for the country. Understanding that our political differences are rooted in two natural forms of morality can help us begin to detoxify our politics.

A spirited collection of essays by cutting-edge neuroscientists that irreverently explores the quirky and counter intuitive aspects of brain function. Neuroscientist David J. Linden approached leading brain researchers and asked each the same question: "What idea about brain function would you most like to explain to the world?" Their responses make up this one-of-a-kind collection of popular science essays that seeks to expand our knowledge of the human mind and its possibilities.

Roslyn is still healing from her losses of the past couple of months, and is finally accepting what her ancestors and the gods have in store for her: being Queen of Jay'Al. There is much to be done though, from dealing with werewolves and the Tribes of the Archipelago, to bringing the orcs into the Clans. Things get more complicated though when Roslyn learns of trouble back home, and more earthquakes bring forth even more mysteries to be solved.

As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end.

After the harrowing events of The Acrid Sky, Anika Lawson flees from her grief, burdened by a prophecy she doesn’t yet fully understand. With no sense of belonging, her newfound powers carry her into the heart of Karrane, where the truth of her birth hides within the intricate web of a foreign kingdom’s politics. Anika must navigate a dark, winding path to uncover her true heritage. Meanwhile, her brother Gage battles the encroaching Shadow, a darkness eager to fill the void left by a brutal assassination attempt by the Light.

Ewan Forbes was born to a wealthy, landowning family, holders of a baronetcy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1912. Assigned female at birth, his true identity was nevertheless clear even in childhood - and so, with the support of his mother, he was taken to European specialists and eventually treated with early preparations of synthetic testosterone. Socially obliged to present himself as a girl in public until his official coming out to the Queen, Ewan lived a quiet life as a husband, doctor, and a pillar of the local community.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement.