An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.
Over the course of the 18th century, Christianity began to loosen its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological speculation were not cast aside. Instead, this raw material was increasingly reworked by secularly minded thinkers intent on redefining what it meant to be human. By 1800, Enlightenment naturalists and classifiers had sorted humanity into rigid racial categories for the first time in history.
Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this misunderstood history through the lives and ideas of 13 pivotal figures. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Jefferson’s Monticello, this sweeping narrative reveals how the Enlightenment’s audacious quest for knowledge became entangled with systems of empire and oppression—while offering a bold new reassessment of the era’s most celebrated luminaries.

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Who’s Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635422245?ic_referral=ROUtAeeKQODHzoHFiXsezOoQ4_Q7Lw9RVayxBFudPlAwM0smo1RwzJg7GBDFuT5gF3r_4kbyONUp7NspQFdPi0EUnIGbSJ9YdxKtCBBAxyfGLwI_HBGtAoEJHUQBcAGIsKbw-HA

The renowned legal experts behind Say the Right Thing return with this clarion call for reimagining the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in a divided nation.
Equality in America is under siege. Corporations and universities are abandoning the DEI programs they previously championed. The tools Americans had for advancing fairness are facing a relentless political and legal assault. So how do we build a more just nation when the old playbook is no longer viable?
In this groundbreaking manifesto, Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, candidly unpack where DEI went wrong and offer a roadmap to rebuild equality for the new era.
Drawing on their peerless legal expertise and extensive experience advising leaders in corporate America, academia, and the non-profit sector, Yoshino and Glasgow share tangible strategies to put this nation back on a more inclusive path, such as by fostering free speech and dissent, reclaiming the concept of merit, and welcoming groups that felt neglected by DEI. In doing so, they provide an urgently needed blueprint to ensure the work of equality can overcome the backlash and emerge stronger on the other side. 
In an era when equality is imperiled, How Equality Wins provides a bracing critique and hopeful call to action for anyone committed to creating a fairer society.

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the faculty director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. 
David Glasgow is the executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law.

Yoshino and Glasgow are in conversation with Kelley Robinson, who is a trailblazing advocate and leader in the fight for human rights. As the President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), she is the first Black, queer woman to hold this position. HRC is the largest civil rights organization in the United States, dedicated to achieving equality and liberation for LGBTQ+ individuals. With over 15 years of experience, Robinson has spearheaded numerous successful campaigns for LGBTQ+, racial, and gender equity.

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From the literary agent behind some of today’s most successful authors comes a narrative guide geared specifically to the needs of aspiring and working nonfiction writers, demystifying the world of publishing and offering a practical roadmap to getting your book published.
Alia Hanna Habib remembers what it was like to be on the outside of the publishing world, looking in. Arriving in New York, a first-generation college student with a love of reading and loads of ambition, she had no idea how to break into the business of books. Now, years later, in her career as an agent, she hears from prospective clients who, whether they’re experts at the top of their fields or wholly new to the writing game, consider finding success in publishing to be a mysterious and daunting endeavor. Ever determined to flout the stereotype of agent as gatekeeper, however, Habib is prepared to hand emerging writers the key.
Drawing on wisdom from her star-studded list of clients, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Judy Batalion, Merve Emre, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Clint Smith, Habib provides context and clarity to each step of the publishing process, from the germination of a book idea to finding an agent to represent it, from crafting an engaging proposal to navigating the perils of publicity. Readers will find real-life samples of her authors' pitch letters and book proposals, as well as templates writers can use when querying agents or promoting their work on social media. She also incorporates the advice of trusted industry colleagues—attorneys, accountants, editors, publishers, publicists, and more—gifting readers with a full team of experts to answer all the questions they’ve had about the publishing world, but were too afraid, or didn’t know, to ask.
Essential for both the aspiring novice and the seasoned professional, Take It from Me is a guidebook writers will return to again and again. At times laugh-out-loud funny, at others brutally honest about her own experiences in publishing and in life, Habib offers a clear-eyed look at the challenges facing today’s aspiring nonfiction writers and then gives them the comprehensive, expert guidance they need to put those roadblocks in the rearview mirror.

Alia Hanna Habib is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, where she represents MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, National Book Award finalists, and numerous New York Times bestselling authors. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Habib is in conversation with Nicole Chung, the author of the award-winning memoir A Living Remedy, which was named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen other outlets. Her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chung has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, The Guardian, and many other publications.

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From the award-winning composer/co-lyricist behind such iconic projects as Hairspray, Sister Act, Mary Poppins Returns, and Smash comes a wickedly funny, no-holds-barred memoir.
In Never Mind the Happy, musical dynamo Marc Shaiman looks back on five decades of Broadway triumphs, Hollywood hijinks, and unforgettable collaborations. Along the way, he charts the personal highs and heartbreaks that have shaped him—spending his teenage years in community theater, starting a decades-long collaboration with Bette Midler in the ’70s, surviving the AIDS crisis of the ’80s, his award-winning film music career in the Hollywood of the ’90s, right up to the peaks (and valleys) of creating Broadway musicals from 2000 on.
Candid, hilarious, and deeply human, Shaiman’s story is a tribute to the power of music, the pull of the spotlight, and the beat that never stops.
Part showbiz tell-all, part love letter to the melancholy that fuels creativity, told with perfect comic timing—along with a few wrong notes, and plenty of standing ovations.

Marc Shaiman is a renowned American composer, lyricist, arranger, and music producer known for his work across film, television, and theater. Shaiman began his career as a musical director and arranger for Bette Midler before expanding into film scoring. He gained prominence with his work on films such as When Harry Met Sally, The Addams Family, Sister Act, City Slickers, A Few Good Men, Sleepless in Seattle, The American President, and South Park, on television with SNL, and on his recordings with Harry Connick Jr. and Mariah Carey. Shaiman earned widespread acclaim for co-writing the Broadway musical Hairspray alongside his longtime co-lyricist Scott Wittman. The duo has also co-created the musicals Catch Me If You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Some Like It Hot, and Smash. He has been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and has won a Tony, two Emmys, and two Grammys. Marc Shaiman is celebrated for his versatile, emotionally resonant music and his ability to blend classic musical theater sensibilities with modern storytelling. Born and raised in New Jersey, he currently lives in New York with his husband, Lieutenant Commander (ret) Lou Mirabal.

Shaiman is in conversation with Murray Horwitz, a Tony Award-winning playwright, lyricist, and broadcaster. Called “my first mentor” by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, his accomplishments include co-authoring the hit Broadway musical Ain't Misbehavin’, writing popular song lyrics for John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby at the Metropolitan Opera, originating the NPR comedy quiz, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, and co-creating the Mark Twain Prize In American Humor at the Kennedy Center.  He collaborated with Marc Shaiman on the 1984 musical, Haarlem Nocturne, starring André De Shields, off and on Broadway.  As an NPR broadcaster, he received three Peabody Awards, and the Order of Arts and Letters from the government of France.  Currently the host and co-producer of WAMU’s Sunday night vintage radio program, The Big Broadcast, Horwitz began his career as a Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus clown.  

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From the renowned former president of Columbia, an account of the university in the age of authoritarianism and a new case for its place in the American system.

In this thrilling work, Lee C. Bollinger, perhaps the most consequential university leader of our time, argues that the university is an institution vital to the maintenance of democracy—and thus it is no surprise that it is coming under fierce attack from an authoritarian administration. Drawing on his years as president of the University of Michigan and then Columbia University, as well as his expertise on the First Amendment, Bollinger reveals how the structure of the university contributes to the success of the American system, and why that structure is both impossible to recreate and vulnerable to outside attack. The mission of the university—to preserve and enhance knowledge—is not merely a high–minded idea, but one rooted in the First Amendment, the basis of our shared political and social life. With the press fractured and diminished, it is the university that remains the only source of truth–seeking left to those who still believe in democracy. As Bollinger ultimately demonstrates, the university must be defended if the American experiment is to continue.

Lee C. Bollinger is an American legal scholar and educator who served as the 19th president of Columbia University, from 2002 to 2023. He is currently President Emeritus and the Seth Low Professor of the University. He also served as the president of the University of Michigan from 1997 to 2002. He is a renowned expert on the First Amendment and freedom of speech and press. He lives in New York City.

Bollinger is in conversation with Adam Liptak, he covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times's news staff in 2002. In 2007, he began writing "Sidebar," a column on legal affairs. In 2008, he became the paper's Supreme Court correspondent. Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught courses on the Supreme Court and the First Amendment at the University of Chicago Law School, New York University School of Law and Yale Law School.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324124313?ic_referral=2e2yvBwqzuil3_HlYQ7Ol7MKV9uALKmbVDlXQrhuPBowM6lmPXHyiVPeNlPRX5rDDcAWj2_ltrZx6zQRHD-RTOrBEDEdOJcJ-5ZReGUSPinxRwF9qOPbdcaClfXg4hLb-LzBTcM

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians--Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class--gathered in public to feed the city.

In Nourishing Networks, historian Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs.

Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future.

Ashley Rose Young is the American History Curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. She is also a Smithsonian Research Associate and was formerly the Historian of the Smithsonian Food History Project at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A curator and public historian, she has written for the New York Times and Washington Post, among other outlets.

Young is in conversation with Corby Kummer, who is executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute, a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science, and a senior editor of The Atlantic, for which he was a longtime food columnist and originated a vertical on food, sustainability, policy, and food justice. He attended the Loomis-Chafee School and received a BA from Yale College.

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9780197794036?ic_referral=tVJ47dgoa3v1TNDpD7mFmzhIICsOcPTnwn83tvCK0p0wM_5Kqse1aYm3gPPxUst4erxrW6i32bITzfXObgLosvnxUS6eBwiKZ_7_VC4a8aJ-dkFGrY9-zszWzzIK3_xh_14L7ng

Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.
After fleeing a war-torn Afghanistan, the Sharaf family resettles as refugees in Northern Virginia. After many years of hard work, the father has become a successful businessman. Now they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.
When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American Dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?
A kaleidoscopic, urgent narrative, told through the perspectives of those who know the family best, and those who only think they do, Good People is a riveting, provocative, and unforgettable story of community, family, and identity in our increasingly divided times.

Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When she was a month old, her family fled the conflict and became refugees in Pakistan, joining the millions of other Afghans that had sought refuge there. They later moved to the United States and she grew up in Virginia. She currently lives in Toronto.

Sabit is in conversation with Donna Hemans, the author of three novels, River Woman, Tea by the Sea, and The House of Plain Truth. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She earned an MFA from American University and an undergraduate degree from Fordham University. She serves on the PEN/Faulkner Foundation board and is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C.

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An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora
 
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature—bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou—Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.
 
Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma—Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior—that Washington draws out. Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

Mary Helen Washington began her effort to recover the work of Black writers with four landmark collections of African American literature: Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories of Black Women (1975); Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women (1980); Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, (1987); and Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991). Washington continued this recovery of “forgotten histories” with her 2014 book, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, which received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. Recognizing Washington’s pioneering role in African American literary studies, scholar Ann du Cille wrote, “Mary Helen Washington…has been a key player in efforts to define and institutionalize the fields of African American literature and feminist studies for more than twenty years.”

Washington will be in conversation with Soyica Diggs Colbert, the interim Provost and Idol Family Professor in Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and the author of the award-winning book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.

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From Well–Read Black Girl Books, a "wise and witty, unflinchingly honest and insightful" (Maaza Mengiste) novel that delves into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s tight-knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace after decades of war might mean for their future, just as they welcome Berekhet—a distant cousin newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school in the States. With him comes a barrage of new ideas Lydia must confront for the first time, about the stories of nationhood and family she was raised on.

Meanwhile her mother, Elsa, a former rebel fighter, and the family matriarch, Mama Zewdi, must grapple with regrets long buried in the time their country has been at war. Elsa’s path from Eritrea to D.C. was paved with courage and loss, and figures from her past on the front lines of battle begin to resurface. Mama Zewdi, who runs a successful injera business out of her apartment, finds herself reexamining her place in their little family for the first time, while Lydia, emboldened by Berekhet, becomes committed to uncovering the secrets of her and her mother’s past—including the truth about her father, who was martyred in the war.

A loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For boldly asks: How does our past define our present? And what stories must we let go of to be truly free?

Bsrat Mezghebe received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review, and the anthology Well–Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Mezghebe is in conversation with Glory Edim, a literary tastemaker, entrepreneur, and advocate for diverse voices in literature. In 2015, she founded Well-Read Black Girl (WRBG), an online platform and book club dedicated to celebrating the works of Black women authors and creating a supportive online community for readers. Under Edim's leadership, WRBG has grown into a nonprofit organization, hosting events, book festivals, and author conversations that highlight the richness and diversity of Black literature. Her efforts have earned her accolades such as the 2017 Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and the Madam C.J. Walker Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. As an author herself, Edim has contributed to the literary landscape with her bestselling anthologies Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, and On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library and her recently published book Gather Me.

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In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens,  Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans. 
Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.

Thompson is in conversation with E.J. Dionne, Jr.,  a bestselling author, a syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post and nearly a hundred other newspapers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. His Why Americans Hate Politics won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and on other radio and television programs. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Mary Boyle, and their three children

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593702093?ic_referral=9t-wxz5omgqjYl7OvUWKeIVABhvdnauq4YXMAzJR4xUwM-F0LfG-8gg2YdPg477ItY55uDPjXRL__I9PQmv5gbcwYWeDt3_FAfnSCxSF6Yk-2JQ8-l6V0sFbz3ZXgHaV4U-O08I