Politics and Prose Presents

From the author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Hitler in Los Angeles, the definitive story of the intrepid activists and spies who fought against a resurgent movement of hate in America-a book that "should be read by every American who wants to know how courageous men and women can resist hatred." (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.
Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Southern California.

Ross is in conversation with Dr. Robert J. Williams, a CEO and Finci-Viterbi Chair of the USC Shoah Foundation, UNESCO Chair on Antisemitism and Holocaust Research, and the Advisor to the 35-nation International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). His recent book is the coedited Routledge History of Antisemitism (2023). He is currently writing a much-delayed monograph on efforts to whitewash and rehabilitate the reputations of fascists and Holocaust perpetrators in North America and Europe and a separate book on US and Soviet media policy in occupied Germany.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635578003?ic_referral=y-zXNl3TAvd0bwaVgn1i-YXSfU5v9KMO34q8SQ6bMKAwM48Dkd_cxfFSao44zJaii15Ap-R5L8Nysc30cQN12x2A_K-w4CvUYGq752hdnnrRZGIMSZgUPhPxtoAMelrM56_QIo0

From the cofounder of the Amazon Labor Union, a definitive how-to guide to workplace organizing told through a David vs. Goliath chronicle for the ages. 
On April 1, 2022, the Amazon warehouse known as JFK8, in Staten Island, notched an improbable victory when its workers voted to become the company’s first unionized facility. Miraculously, a completely self-taught and worker-led union had defeated one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. In the aftermath, two of the founders of the Amazon Labor Union, Derrick Palmer and Chris Smalls, began traveling across the country to help workers at Amazon and other corporations form their own unions. Unsurprisingly, nearly everyone they met had the same question: How did they do it? 
In Handbook for the Revolution, Derrick Palmer, who continues to work at JFK8, provides the answer in the form of a how-to guide to organizing in today’s workplace while providing gripping, never before-told anecdotes from the ALU's fight and its plans for the future. Practical, philosophical, and full of personality, Palmer’s manual-cum-manifesto is an accessible step-by-step playbook for the often contentious and complex process of unionization, and a powerful call for equality—and greater understanding—through worker solidarity. 
Full of hard-won lessons and personal experience, and written in the context of mass consolidation, fluctuating labor laws, and an ever widening wealth gap, Handbook for the Revolution is an invaluable resource for the modern labor movement, a thrilling chronicle of persistence, and an inspiring push for change in the workplace—and beyond.

Derrick Palmer is the cofounder of the Amazon Labor Union, which in 2022 successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse for the first time in the company’s history. In 2022, he and union cofounder Christian Smalls were honored with placement on Time's 100 Most Influential People list and as one of the Dynamic Duos on Ebony's Power 100 list. He continues to work at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, where he lives.

Palmer is in conversation with Afeni Evans, an activist and organizer, a Movement 4 Black Lives Electoral Justice Table member, former regional field lead for The Green Party and forever frontline from the George Floyd Uprising. Afeni's passion for advocacy and her voice is lended to all marginalized people from our Palestinian siblings to protesters being brutalized in Nigeria, Afeni's voice knows no border. Afeni is passionate about equity, anti-racism and leadership development.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374613716?ic_referral=6h7UDIKDMGWASJnwBoTNzCG4U1VrHUqiN3S4MG3OVZQwMzGPGPOztdo2heEYQD5rpyuAeKUHwqALgdV4sH0Ll9ZPcWhAhRmt2ju8PgBVj4oxRYp0V4lN50yxeUMofQ9AqYg4z4c

The DC punk scene meets Little Free Libraries.

Hilarious, vibrant, magically drawing cohesion between divergent themes, brimming with endorsements of the best music and books you haven't heard or read yet. J. Hunter Bennett, author of The Prodigal Rogerson and Upside-Down Punks, started a little free punk rock bookstore during the pandemic outside his house on a well-trafficked corner of Chevy Chase, D.C., and published a companion newsletter. It began as a way to offload his excess music books and noir novels, but swiftly grew into a neighborhood fixture and underground punk zine for the modern era. 

Here you'll find book reviews, band interviews, neighborhood gossip, and praise from at least two members of Fugazi. A touching testament to the DIY spirit, a treasure trove of literary and punk rock recommendations, and a low-key how-to guide for building something unique with your own network of like-minded weirdos. C'mon, where else you gonna find Millions of Dead Cops and James Salter in the same place? 

This riot of a book is graced with an introduction by Jim Spellman of Velocity Girl and a foreword by Anton Bogomazov of the neighborhood's more official bookstore, Politics and Prose.

J. Hunter Bennett writes for the music magazine Ugly Things and plays bass guitar in the band Dot Dash. Because neither of these jobs pays very well--okay, at all--he also practices government contracts law at a large law firm in Washington, DC. He previously served as a Trial Attorney for the United States Department of Justice, and an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia. He considers himself a connoisseur of orange soda.

Bennett is in conversation with Kim Coletta, who plays bass in the local band Jawbox and runs the independent record label DeSoto Records, pursuits that keep her closely tied to the creative side of music. She is also a long-time humanities teacher at a local private school, where she brings the same curiosity and passion to the classroom. Kim doesn’t enjoy orange soda at all, yet somehow she and Hunter are friends.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781648414268?ic_referral=LTNiMp2GxWZtcm8BDqOGza5VB6oUgdziUUoCFz6Tg78wMxvjUI1SiRF2R8HLa3jjv5KsIl4x_fJPyDle4xlxyBaC7KDa5k5klPYScb7TlJRtjTqQkd3KKq_HauVf653V-nYOZdA

A police detective in Hong Kong races to solve a vicious murder, while the city around him teeters on the brink of destruction.
Hong Kong is a city ablaze—its streets filled with protesters, its government in crisis, its people torn between rage and fear of what defiance might cost. At the center stands Superintendent Killian Tong, once a rising star in the police, now disgraced and haunted by a tragic accident at a protest. Exiled to a remote post, Killian is called back when a dismembered body is uncovered in a landfill. The gruesome murder could be his path to redemption—if he can withstand mounting pressure from superiors desperate to bury the truth, and the even more dangerous fractures within his own family.
His beloved younger sister Jun refuses to speak to him, devoting herself to the protest movement. Once inseparable, the siblings now face each other across barricades, Jun’s fierce commitment pulling her closer to arrest and ruin.
As Killian follows the murder trail into Hong Kong’s highest corridors of power, he must confront not only the city’s corruption, but the searing question at his heart: When politics ignites a family war, can love survive the flames?
City on Fire is both a taut thriller and a deeply human story of loyalty, betrayal, and the search for redemption in a city under siege.

Simon Elegant is China bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Taiwan. Previously, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Asia including Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Elegant was the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, which won the 2019 readers’ choice award from TripAdvisor as the world’s best restaurant. He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), about China’s greatest poet, Li Bai, a novel that succeeded “in summoning up the man and his age in ways that are both deliciously foreign and all too familiar,” according to the New York Times. 

Elegant is in conversation with Kurt Campbell, a veteran U.S. diplomat and strategic strategist widely regarded as a chief architect of Washington’s “pivot to Asia.” He served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Barack Obama and later as the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator—often described as the administration’s “Asia czar”—under Joe Biden. Across these roles, he has been central to shaping U.S. policy toward China, blending engagement with strategic competition.

Campbell co-founded the Center for a New American Security and has held senior positions at the U.S. Department of State and White House National Security Council. His long experience in Asia policy has made him one of Washington’s most influential voices on China’s rise. Since leaving government in January 2025, Campbell has returned to The Asia Group South China Morning Post — the strategic advisory firm focused on the Asia-Pacific region that he co-founded in 2013 Wikipedia — resuming its chairmanship and making Hong Kong his first overseas stop, where he warned that US China policy under Trump risks dangerous miscalculation.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798897100958?ic_referral=PHHzD_tx5BzoQD7Lh6XdIfNqN7N8hfRsZDWZ3CQQKUQwMz0zqSh8qsoyCoLjZCaLy3zZ6G7oxAta-TIpaMaovAYuaMK-r2NM1Brxb2vkuQMS1hhC5Y3tvbZBABUVsGqkqAif0gU

From the author of the acclaimed As Close to Us as Breathing, a captivating novel steeped in history, revealing the bonds of family and community, and the healing powers hidden inside broken hearts.

For much of her adult life Ruth Pearl has lived in the small New England town of Wells, Connecticut, on the shore of Lake Topaqua. Decades back, when she was fourteen, she and her parents fled German-occupied Amsterdam after the murder of her beloved older sister Sophia, and in the wake of such loss, Ruth has long taken comfort in the natural beauty of her lake view.
But in the winter of 2000, Ruth’s neighbor builds an addition to his home that blocks Ruth’s view, a disruption of her peace that sparks fear that her tumultuous past is happening again.

One day, seeking solace, Ruth heads out for a cathartic skate on the lake only to spot a boy in the distance falling through the ice. Also witnessing this event is Judge Arthur Cantrell, by chance in Wells that day to avoid the consequences of a failed romance.
Together, Ruth and Arthur save Ian Lima, a despairing sixteen-year-old, and over the days to come, as Ruth and Arthur help Ian heal, they find themselves healing too. Soon enough, this turn of events begins to impact Ruth’s daughter, Ian’s mother, and even Arthur’s love interest.

In Spinning at the Edges, Elizabeth Poliner, a masterful storyteller, seamlessly interweaves the lives of a rich cast of characters living in two historical time periods—America 2000, marked by a controversial presidential election, and Netherlands 1941, marked by rising fascism—to tell an unforgettable story about how the past haunts the present, how sharing pain heals, and how love—and even democracy—are fragile concepts in a changing, spinning world.

Elizabeth Poliner is the author of the novel As Close to Us as Breathing, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award in Fiction and the Ribalow Prize. She has also published a poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands, and a novel-in-stories, Mutual Life & Casualty. Her stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Story, and Colorado Review, among other journals. She lives in Virginia.

Poliner is in conversation with Alice McDermott, her ninth novel, Absolution, was an instant New York Times bestseller, winner of the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.  Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her novels have been short-listed for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award. She is also the author of an essay collection, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. For two decades, she was the Richard A. Mackey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She has been named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her tenth novel, Herself, Of Course, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2027.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063434530?ic_referral=xISjBneqS_OmEeurIns8aRRybgokyko8QBSWoNVYjEIwMx08pGbefD9kmdUnBrLgwv7jKL0jSdqX-DDsUGlsxmavhnowXwBI1gIpC9Mw-r1dZcyu4MiQI7W5JsJDDqPuqGtG-YQ

A guide to dealing with uncertainty at a time when our lives have never felt less certain.

From our careers to our politics to our personal lives, the future is unknown. And yet, our capacity to tolerate this uncertainty is in decline. How to Not Know will help you prepare for—and even appreciate—the uncertainty that surrounds us.

Through gripping stories of people grappling with big problems without easy answers—from an economist trying to predict the next market crash to an island nation reckoning with the existential impact of climate change—acclaimed journalist Simone Stolzoff shows how to develop comfort with ambiguity and build tolerance for the unknown.

Blending engrossing storytelling, research, and practical insights, How to Not Know is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty with courage and clarity.

Simone Stolzoff is a journalist and author from San Francisco. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and on the TED stage. His debut book, The Good Enough Job, was translated into more than a dozen languages.

Stolzoff will be in conversation with Rhaina Cohen, the bestselling author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. She's an award-winning producer and editor for NPR's Embedded podcast. Her writing about social connection has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and published by The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post and is forthcoming in the anthology Living, Together. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324089452?ic_referral=D9pjmwHndtx4CQefcKf0Lr2mIGCgwy72wtGzyi-S9xowM4KJrX0NORIOPgdmZEz-qF_NvbGZ9knR7ESa4f-Oqoj20isuzZ_o1mF8sXVuysrogE4ukZRjYn7gM3d2dT1b6Odv3g4

New York Times bestselling author Isaac Fitzgerald sets off to the heart of America, following the path of the legendary Johnny Appleseed on an epic journey that both takes him far from home and brings him closer to it.
“It’s a difficult thing, to separate legend from story from memory from fact.”
As a child, Isaac Fitzgerald was always captivated by Johnny Appleseed, drawn by family ties to the legend, his father’s larger-than-life stories, and a shared restlessness to leave home and discover what lies beyond. In American Rambler, he sets out, walking from Massachusetts to Indiana on a year-long journey to follow Appleseed’s path, turning a childhood fascination into a profound reckoning of loss and grief, ritual and faith, grimy gas-station bathrooms and scenic apple picking. A moving blend of memoir, history, and travelogue, American Rambler is at once an ode to the American heartland and an antidote to the breakneck pace of modern life.

Isaac Fitzgerald is the New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts. He is also the author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). He appears frequently on The Today Show, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives with his wife on the North Fork of Long Island.

Fitzgerald is in conversation with Ben Smith, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, where he oversees the production of Semafor’s weekly Media newsletter. Prior to Semafor, he served as a media columnist for The New York Times and was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. With over a decade of experience, Ben has covered American politics, media, and technology at Politico, the New York Daily News, and other outlets. He is the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593537794?ic_referral=M6djFilqiyD_IYgZVIMHArjlOuN3cLTUFUIZW5E8VLcwM0S7EimxkXjVIV05HoFwgBCdXRQMUt9BSpH60ObdSWP9PS6IFGLwoL-1uKdpfAHPjEZ8fZwpbC6CzEbd8f0QKtNrDMA

Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, but heard around the world: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters around the world—in Oslo and Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface of this ascendant idea: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have been expressing some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change and restoring national greatness.

What is great replacement theory? Variations on the theory have existed for centuries, but it was given this name by a French novelist in 2011 who believed Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” Europe’s White population. From there, politicians and theorists—whether in the United States or the United Kingdom, Germany or Chile, Hungary or Australia—repackaged the conspiracy as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and diversity initiatives to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and the very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded the threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India. All are targeted with the message that they are under an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.

In our fast-shifting political landscape, most people are unfamiliar with this theory’s origins and its spread, which isn’t a coincidence. In Chain of Ideas, international bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi uses exacting and clear prose to uncover the roots of great replacement theory and its various mutations around the world. It is an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is one of the world’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. His books have been translated into multiple languages and republished throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Dr. Kendi is Professor of History and the founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research enterprise examining global racism. He is author of many highly acclaimed bestsellers including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the author of the international bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.

Dr. Kendi is in conversation with Leah Greenberg. Greenberg is a co-founder and co-Executive Director of the Indivisible Project. Prior to founding the Indivisible Project, Leah served as Policy Director for the Tom Perriello for Governor of Virginia campaign. She has managed human trafficking grants and programs as an Investments Manager for Humanity United, served as an Advisor to the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, and worked on Capitol Hill for Congressman Tom Perriello (D-VA).

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/ibram-x-kendi

Two writers show you how to turn a worthy sentence into a memorable one. Starting where The Elements of Style leaves off, Good Writing can improve your book, your essay, your memo, your blog post, speech, or script. These essential rules for persuasive language work on any type of writing, and anyone can learn them quickly.
Each rule is accompanied by examples and a lively pair of essays, the first by Neal Allen, who developed the list of tips over the course of his journalism and corporate careers; the second by his wife, Anne Lamott, acclaimed author of Bird by Bird and nineteen other nonfiction works and novels. The authors don’t always agree on the specifics, but they are passionate about making better sentences.

Neal Allen is a writer, spiritual coach, and speaker. He is the author of Shapes of Truth and Better Days. A former journalist and corporate executive, he holds master’s degrees in Political Science and Eastern Classics.

Anne Lamott is the author of twenty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Help, Thanks, Wow; Dusk, Night, Dawn; Traveling Mercies; and Bird by Bird, as well as seven novels. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California with her family.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/neal-allen-anne-lamott

Named one of the 30 most anticipated books of 2026 by Foreign Policy, The Criminal State offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights.
Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His many books include The Right Wrong Man (Princeton) and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

Douglas is in conversation with Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691180410?ic_referral=O9vkk_LstN1f_MwL_9abiTAv-naU-W1eCAAzu9y6SRQwM6_CLzHXdsdAGF5QdctoUdAjfFdF7VCUzB0BdJmUl1WV9GUSgai8JAvJPwWx99Z8j3OrvDTQ2u7MSqtsd2xjYqmmb4c