Politics and Prose Presents

The first major biography of Jeannette Rankin, a groundbreaking suffragist, activist, and the first American woman to hold federal office.
“Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty.”
—President John F. Kennedy on Jeannette Rankin
Born on a Montana ranch in 1880, Jeannette Rankin knew how to ride a horse, make a fire, and read the sky for weather. But, most of all, she knew how to talk to people and unite them around a shared vision for America. It was this rare skill that led her to become the first woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. As her first act, Rankin put forth the legislation that would become the Nineteenth Amendment. 
During her two terms, beginning in 1917 and in 1941, she introduced and lobbied for legislation strengthening women’s rights, protecting workers, supporting democratic electoral reform, and promoting peace through disarmament. As Congress’s fiercest pacifist, she used her vote to oppose the declaration of war against the German Empire in 1917 and the Japanese Empire in 1941, holding fast to her belief that “you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” 
A suffragist, peace activist, workers’ rights advocate, and champion of democratic reform who ran as a Republican, Rankin remained ever faithful to her beliefs, no matter the price she had to pay personally. Despite overcoming the entrenched boys’ club of oligarchic capitalists and career politicians to make enormous strides for women in politics, Rankin has been largely overlooked. In Winning the Earthquake, Lorissa Rinehart expertly recovers the compelling history behind this singular American hero, bringing her story back to life.

Lorissa Rinehart is a women’s historian, author, and speaker who brings the past to life with fresh urgency. Her work dives into the powerful crossroads of women’s history, politics, and war, uncovering the stories that have too often been left out of the spotlight. She’s the author of First to the Front and Winning the Earthquake. Each week on her Substack and podcast, The Female Body Politic, Lorissa unpacks today’s headlines through the lens of 250 years of women’s political power in America. She holds an MA in Experimental Humanities from NYU and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz, and is passionate about making history feel prescient, inclusive, and impossible to ignore.

Rinehart is in conversation with Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen and an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States. Terrell and her husband Rob Richie helped to found FairVote - a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice, and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women's representation, democracy, and voting system reform in the United States and has worked to help parliamentarians around the globe meet UN goals for women’s representation and leadership.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250353047?ic_referral=AeCrAbYyGmC5h43-T0Q_nuwva03TQopHravwjFvvpJMwMy8NifiriTZVNv0gP0OQ1VcokQzgjkLC-KXLpRnwWVt7KPA1dAHfuIkzSHtQ_4b21CBCOU4kpv_nAm28cY1Nd5k8UiI

A beloved schoolteacher chronicles the meteoric rise of his most dazzling student in this ambitious, big-hearted work of literary fiction, perfect for fans of Nathan Hill, Susan Choi, and Tess Gunty.  
Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading.  He’s a magician able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature.  Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower.  Over the course of three decades, Clara is a kindergarten thief, a high school genius, a Silicon Valley celebrity, and an animal rights activist turned terrorist.
To tell Clara’s story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan along with the rivalry and friendship with his Head of School, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows.
The Optimists is a love story, a joke book, and a meditation on the meaning of life and death. But mostly it’s a fiercely original novel for anyone who has ever had a teacher or student profoundly affect their life. 

Brian Platzer was the education columnist for The Atlantic and has written frequently for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and many other publications.  He currently teaches and lives with his family in Brooklyn and Paris. The Optimists is his latest novel.

Platzer is in conversation with Matthew Yglesias, New York Times opinion contributing writer and the author of the Slow Boring newsletter.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780316607599?ic_referral=ivTTvZ2BbWffBOLv5oq_PuHLaA2uE1_ow-P2nNnFurMwMxYLU6VjbFYTb6qYYVtTg8KwnJJtM_KZL8BqGb4ATidpR9fW9Y-2qQudBiVJZE_o6E6XeG02S3ecEdzKcOPrAlJ43FA

An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress—by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist—offering lessons from the rest of the world.
What if the mainstay of mental health care involved cancelling onerous debt, giving poor people free housing, and paying reparations to the descendants of slavery and colonialism? In Empire of Madness, Dr. Khameer Kidia re-evaluates the Western approach to mental health, which medicates symptoms instead of changing the structures that harm the human psyche. A physician and researcher whose own family suffers from the psychological effects of colonialism, Kidia highlights the limitations of the Western mental health model by reporting from the front lines of mental health crises at home, in the clinic, and during a decade of fieldwork.
Clear-eyed and openhearted, Kidia asks the nuanced questions unaddressed by our current mental health model: How do history, culture, and politics shape mental distress? Are hoarding and burnout medical diagnoses or social problems? Why are schizophrenia outcomes sometimes better in poor countries without antipsychotics? Can a traditional healer treat mental illness better than a Western-trained clinician? For those living in poverty, can cash replace pills?
With rigorous research, cutting analysis, and illuminating prose, Kidia invites us to reimagine mental health as a global idea where our wellbeing is mutual and everyone’s voice—patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers alike—matters.

Khameer Kidia is a writer, physician, and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School and University of Zimbabwe. A Rhodes Scholar and 2023 New America Fellow, Kidia has worked on global mental health research, practice, and advocacy for the last decade. His writing has been published in New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet Psychiatry, The New York Times, Slate, Yale Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in Zimbabwe, Kidia lives between Harare and Washington, D.C.

Kidia is in conversation Bina Venkataraman, an executive leader, journalist, and science & innovation policy strategist who has led mission-driven teams at The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT, and in The White House. She is the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (Riverhead, 2019), named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by National Public Radio.  Her work has been motivated by a deep commitment to public service and an ethic to mentor and uplift talented people around her. She has also taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT and at Harvard. An alumna of Brown University and the Harvard Kennedy School, Venkataraman grew up in a small town in Ohio and has since lived on three continents.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593594285?ic_referral=bSTUiHiQZ8HKsHcDU4sBNwi7BbM-T6vGuAdCybOBfgAwMx2qF9MzvtnsYcUQPmNdMU99dAP3L7ZvEcGPmvh6aQSxQ5zwFJ9SpF1QgxCkbQb56ftiM8NtSqR7CWbeK3XTzL-BraU

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland family’s untold history, the merger of three churches—one Black, two white—and how a radical embrace of community became their salvation, and his.
Jason G. Green was raised on fellowship—literally. Fellowship Lane, the once unpaved road he grew up on, served as a spiritual metaphor throughout his coming of age. A precocious preacher’s kid, Green felt a call to the ministry but ultimately devoted himself to the people in a different way—through public service. After working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he spent four and a half years working in the White House as special assistant to President Obama.
However, Green’s government career was cut short by a devastating call that it appeared his ninety-five-year-old grandmother was on her presumptive deathbed. At her side, he listened while she detailed her life story dating back to her 1918 birth in Quince Orchard, a town that no longer exists. He was preoccupied with disbelief; how could he have never known the true legacy of his tiny community? How could a whole town’s existence be erased but for the memory of a few surviving elders? Green’s historical research uncovered a surprising trove of tales about the determination of his newly freed ancestors to build an African American house of worship, and how generations later, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, their progeny would be at the center of a brave decision to create an integrated church. Quince Orchard’s lost story is part of what Green calls the texture in the American fabric: the moral leadership of the Black church, the longstanding resilience of the Black community, and the transformative love of the Black family.
Fueled by a new understanding of where he comes from, Green traces one family through a century of life in a single community, asking deeply personal questions about belonging and finding answers from the compassionate, communal-led lives of his forebears.

Jason G. Green is a Maryland-born community organizer turned attorney, tech entrepreneur, public speaker, and film director. Green previously served as special assistant to the president, and associate White House counsel to President Obama, where he provided legal counsel on economic and domestic policy matters. Green serves as a trustee for the Pleasant View Historic Association supporting its fundraising campaign to preserve the Pleasant View Historic Site and is a founding commissioner and former chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation. His award-winning documentary Finding Fellowship, available on PBS, explores the rich history of Quince Orchard. He currently serves as CEO of EverGreen Labs, is a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Research to Action Lab and is the co-founder of the pioneering economic impact measurement company SkillSmart.

Green is in conversation with Joshua DuBois, a nationally recognized strategist, entrepreneur, and cultural leader working at the intersection of values, community, media, and influence. He is the Founder and CEO of Values Partnerships, a social impact and cultural strategy firm that helps leading brands, institutions, and storytellers engage communities with authenticity, trust, and purpose. He is also the Co-Founder of Gauge, an AI-powered consumer insights platform that blends ethnography, cultural intelligence, and artificial intelligence to help organizations understand how people actually think and decide.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593731710?ic_referral=oRJcsG64N23zH1onabI5KuNiKPjZoKz0Us_nNYQxbFcwM9EvYWnwRBgCLCInnJ1ZgPTeYPaRqwZdi_vHMe8zco1-ZtOEF35aiygk9ybtGfCSvkJ2RyNBadLDjRnr0AZyCjJleKc

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal.
Over the past decade, Camonghne Felix has been at the center of American politics, working in strategy, communications, and as a speechwriter. Throughout it all, she has maintained her unwavering belief in language’s foundational revolutionary potential, outside of its deployment for legislative and political ends. In this groundbreaking work of nonfiction, she argues that Black radical poetic traditions model an ethical code and overcome entrenched structures of patriarchy and paternalism, inventing a new form that examines the historical and legislative, and the personal and poetic.
Felix draws on stories from her life in campaigns and the decisions she has had to make: preparing speeches for candidates, responding to harassment, recruiting staff. She recounts her moving personal history—accompanying her mother, a lawyer, to court, and her father, a participant in the Grenadian revolution of 1983, to protests—as well as her coming-of-age being schooled in a wider tradition of Black radical thinkers, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Audre Lorde.
Through rupture, rhythm, and a refusal of politics as usual, Let the Poets Govern encourages us to hold ourselves to the standards of our highest ideals and embraces our shared humanity.

Camonghne Felix, poet, essayist and former political communications strategist, is the author of Dyscalculia (One World) and Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books), which was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, Poetry Magazine, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and elsewhere.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593242148?ic_referral=W5ojRPgGpgv2PKQq1VtGtOGtwAQVu_2DYbbnXVsoNtwwM1Ji_Y0ApzoD80azT5Q04MfeqTiYoJTRmBF2otWfh4KF3q5AJabVZBEdOz5yIx3i5cq_nN1IWdZJ11oz3WkmAbNoeFs

"A powerful story of faith, perseverance, and resilience." — Anthony Fauci, M.D., #1 New York Times bestselling author and former Director of the NIAID

Faith Over Fear isn’t just Michael Leach’s story; it’s yours too. Each decision leads to victory or regret. What will you choose?

Michael Leach—the first-ever Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer of the White House, former League Office official at NFL headquarters, and former Assistant to Head Coach for the Chicago Bears—unpacks the defining choice of our time: to shrink in fear or rise in faith.

Faith Over Fear is more than one man’s story. It’s a wake-up call, a roadmap, and a rally cry for a generation seeking clarity, courage, and conviction in a world full of uncertainty. With sharp insight and spiritual depth, Leach illuminates the gap between what we aspire to and what we often settle for—as individuals, institutions, and a nation. He sheds light on the hidden dynamics of power, purpose, and privilege, and reimagines leadership as an act rooted not in ego, but in empathy and integrity.

Whether you're navigating life’s uncertainties or leading others through them, this book will meet you where you are—equipping you with the clarity, strength, and hope to move forward—more resilient than ever before, and ready for whatever comes next.

Michael Leach is a seasoned leader with a unique background in both the NFL and the White House. With a decade of NFL experience, he served as Assistant to the Head Coach for the Chicago Bears and managed Labor Operations at NFL Headquarters. His journey took a bold turn into the world of politics, where he shaped historic initiatives as the Chief People Officer and Head of DEI for a successful Presidential Campaign in 2020, later making history as the first-ever Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for the White House. Now, as the founder and CEO of BridgeTrust Partners, a pioneering consulting firm specializing in tailored advisory services, strategic relationship development, and public speaking, Michael is also entering the media and entertainment industry as a creator and the literary world as an author, aiming to impact, empower, and inspire people through speaking, content creation, and storytelling.

Leach is in conversation with Marcus Goodwin, a Senior Vice President at Walton Global, where he leads real estate acquisitions and development across the Mid-Atlantic region. With a background spanning real estate investment, development, and advisory roles at firms including Cushman & Wakefield, Redbrick, JBG, and Morgan Stanley, Marcus brings a deep understanding of leadership, strategy, and execution across complex public- and private-sector environments. Based in Washington, DC, he is actively involved in civic and nonprofit work and is a trusted voice among the city’s business, creative, and policy-adjacent communities. Marcus holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063442962?ic_referral=GW-z_FkDWsSWlcEkBIuwW8OeNXfxuDcIkOR3HXetYYQwM1hCF2Ml_EaK-KW55il-_xLEmsU7v7YF41IHWjasZAXNIEZkvumiIhTN-YnyS9eV6-hfxeBudT5hvxUzIRCZImyBBtw

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.

Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival, an NBCC Award finalist. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Brown is in conversation with Tom Philpott, a senior research associate at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University. He worked for nearly 30 years in journalism, most recently as the former food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones (2011-2022). Back in 2006, the environmental magazine Grist became the first national publication to assign a regular staffer to the food politics beat when it hired Tom as a columnist. His work has won numerous awards, including a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His 2020 book Perilous Bounty was named an “editor’s pick” by the New York Times Book Review and shortlisted for a New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. It came out in paperback in June 2022. Perilous Bounty has received in-depth reviews in the New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. Over the decades, Tom has held jobs as a janitor, a dishwasher, a steakhouse grill cook, a teacher of remedial math and writing at a community college, a community gardener, and a farmer—experiences that shape his view of the food system to this day. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324105831?ic_referral=U4rXnxQFV0EcwfwcxuIh_2eaNfJSGB5XaJCPTvgW-dowM3JyM_tPBSG5Ec5CkiRVgrcedcRC7nRTxlIBcXV73tY86dZe6htbU85OdAtCpLRT6jb7JvXhzCjJLfAqM5hUQz8gJdA

An extraordinary chronicle of youth that evokes the paradoxes of modern Africa—complex, contradictory, and full of conflict, tragedy, and joy. 
Patrice Nganang, the acclaimed author of Dog Days, Mount Pleasant, and, most recently, A Trail of Crab Tracks, which was a 2022 New Yorker Book of the Year, writes about his vibrant, animated youth in Cameroon, a period of upheaval and change in the country’s history and in his life. 
Scale Boy is a memoir that brings great brightness and joy to the tumultuous years of discovering oneself and one’s community; though there are moments of danger and confusion in his story, Nganang aims to present a new vision of a young Black African man’s coming-of-age.

Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Dog Days received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire. He is also the author of Mount Pleasant (FSG, 2016), When the Plums Are Ripe (FSG, 2019), and A Trail of Crab Tracks (FSG, 2022). He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University in New York.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374614515?ic_referral=d9PIAO31sd0ZN-QcqrhJwFsgtr5rc6gpifHLkOo42LkwMwJGIQHrf3VVVQas_XMi9SKstkOe0udnGYer9VBoBf8PfX8NncdreNxA3TzjRwKT436ctc6pWQPGvuO5sLEsZm8fuTo

A page-turning suspense debut about a woman infamous for escaping a cult as a teenager, whose future is threatened when dangerous secrets come back to haunt her—perfect for fans of Jessica Knoll and The Girls.

Lucy Golden is a true-crime icon, infamous for the murder she committed while escaping a California cult twenty years ago. But as everyone in Los Angeles knows, fame is fleeting, and Lucy and her story are always just one news cycle away from obscurity. Not to mention, she’s fending off a stalker and moderating an icy feud between her acclaimed photographer mother and her scandalous rock star sister. Worst of all, online trolls are asking increasingly threatening questions about the legendary crime. Questions that could tear her life apart.

So when a hotshot documentarian makes her case the subject of his next film, Lucy sees a chance to silence any doubters once and for all. But as filming begins, she must return to the California desert and come face-to-face with a cast of players from her torrid history. Of course, the past is never what it seems, and long-buried secrets soon collide with present-day threats. Can Lucy stop her doubters from digging up the truth before it’s too late? And how far will she go to protect the story she’s been telling—and selling—all along?

Told in a narrative split between the present day and Lucy’s hit memoir about her fated summer in the cult, Paper Cut combines psychological suspense with coming-of-age Californian cult noir and a sharp examination of the true-crime phenomenon. As incisive as it is propulsive, this mesmerizing debut will keep readers hooked until the last page.

Rachel Taff is an author and television producer. Most recently, Rachel was the Director of Development at Dynamic Television, known for Ginny and Georgia, where she sold projects to Amazon and Hallmark. Previously, Rachel worked for Emmy-winning director Thomas Schlamme’s Shoe Money Productions, where she developed projects for FX and managed a production slate including Snowfall and The Plot Against America. Additional credits include SMILF, American Dad, and Fresh Off the Boat. Rachel earned a Media Arts & Entertainment degree at Elon University. After a decade in Los Angeles, she now lives in Atlanta with her husband and their Portuguese water dog. Paper Cut is her first novel.

Taff is in conversation with Brittany Kerfoot, she received a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Currently, she manages events for Planned Parenthood, teaches virtual classes for Politics and Prose, and co-produces a storytelling series for women and non-binary people called Generation Women DC. She is also on the advisory board for the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. She is at work on her first novel.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063380394?ic_referral=2ygdq2-xM8F4pe8_dwbu_dODPZP0YdsfujBeFyM8WQ8wM6Jyg4UM13iozflXqRhUAgO4Fzk-GD09ofWdbPWHGTcDjd7iZMwtw__xDyExiz1kj2D_kV6VXBKS0nTC9XwsV0NzM7s

The early days and inexorable rise of the young Bernie Sanders, the one-of-a-kind visionary who changed American politics forever, told by a son of the People’s Republic of Burlington, Vermont.
In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of an American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, Chiasson tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hardluck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the town meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington, D.C., to transform our national political landscape.
Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, defied a corrupt Democratic machine to find his coalition among Burlington’s often feuding communities: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose grandparents and great-grandparents—including Chiasson’s own—had worked in the mills; the puppeteers, hippies, and NYC transplants who’d moved to Vermont to find land and authenticity; the anti-nukers, activist nuns, baseball fans, developers, cops, and small businessmen like Ben and Jerry, who became Ben & Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington Is Not for Sale” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets plowed but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

DAN CHIASSON is the author of five books of poetry, including Bicentennial (2014) and The Math Campers (2020), and a book of literary criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Chiasson is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Wellesley College.

Chiasson is in conversation with Kevin Ellis, who is a communications consultant, writer, radio host, and podcaster working at the nexus of politics, journalism, and culture. He explores all of this on his Conflict of Interest podcast, Substack, and a live radio show Vermont Viewpoint - in Vermont.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593317495?ic_referral=vhamFT0eiL_SP0o9fbWCZ-txtvttcTMYsD7i2CODhGkwM7oh1bfRYbY65hzxoyo9zXWZ7CXH-iccGujw37nHphuOa_BSOjLR3BFYGNow1TKwI-aZ-hFI4LhF0oAgk4AmYT2JaVY