Sociology Memoirs

In 1973, Roseann Quinn, an Irish-Catholic teacher at a school for deaf children, was killed in New York City after bringing a man home to her apartment from an Upper West Side pub. The crime made headlines and the ensuing case quickly evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In this groundbreaking true crime tale, Lacey Fosburgh, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story, utilizes an inventive dramatization technique to veer between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty details of its aftermath.

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, touching on questions such as: What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.

Ann Wroe, obituaries editor for The Economist, reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and through people she has known, studied, or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after in this breathtaking combination of poetry, memoir, and observation.

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of Black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

From its beginnings in the 1890s, Miami Beach has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach was the training ground for half a million army recruits, even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar boom, the city's luck gave out. But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans arrived by the boatload.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression

"The Old Man and the Gun" is the incredible story of a bank robber and prison escape artist who modeled himself after figures like Pretty Boy Floyd and who, even in his 70s, refuses to retire. "True Crime" follows the twisting investigation of a Polish detective who suspects that a novelist planted clues in his fiction to an actual murder. And "The Chameleon" recounts how a French impostor assumes the identity of a missing boy from Texas and infiltrates the boy's family, only to soon wonder whether he is the one being conned.

Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California - bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges - seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer; D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture; and Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist.

Dr. Kwane Stewart was questioning his career as a veterinarian when he saw a homeless man with a flea-infested dog outside of a convenience store. In a moment of spontaneous generosity, he offered to examine the dog and treat him for free. It was the first step in a now nine-year journey that has taken Dr. Kwane from Skid Row to San Francisco and beyond to care for pets and their humans who are living on the streets.

This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture - its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists - but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another.

Alejandro Valverde - the 'Green Bullet' - was a symbol of Spanish sport. Supremely talented, hard-working beyond belief, he was ranked no.1 in the world four times before retiring in 2022. He is a champion of undeniable charisma and immense achievement - and yet also a convicted doping cheat. Appearing in a list of encoded names, Valverde was one of many at the heart of a doping ring for elite sportsmen. Discovered by Spanish police in the infamous Operacion Puerto, the revelations contained in the operation threatened to rip cycling apart.

For decades, osteopathic physician Larry Nassar built a sterling reputation as the go-to doctor for America's Olympians while treating countless others at his office on Michigan State University's campus. It was largely within the high-pressure world of competitive gymnastics that Nassar exploited young girls, sexually assaulting hundreds of them under the guise of medical treatment. In Start by Believing, John Barr and Dan Murphy confront Nassar's acts, which represent the largest sex abuse scandal to impact the sporting world.

All hail Queen Elizabeth! She's a “queen" but not a monarch who's spent her life fighting to create a more equal society. Now one of the most recognizable women in politics, Warren took a winding road to become the badass senator from Massachusetts - the first woman senator ever elected from the state. Day-to-day struggle to make ends meet? Check. Single motherhood? Check. Law degree? Check. Tenured Harvard Law professor? You bet!

During the course of his life, Malachy McCourt practically invented the singles bar and was a pioneer in talk radio, a soap opera star, a best-selling author, a gold smuggler, a political activist, and a candidate for governor of the state of New York. It seems that the only two things he hasn't done are stick his head into a lion's mouth and die. Since he is allergic to cats, he decided to write about the great hereafter and answer the question on most minds: What's so great about it anyhow?

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the best-selling author of Claire of the Sea Light. Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is an audiobook that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.