Politics and Prose Presents

From "brainrot" memes and incel slang to the trend of adding "-core" to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues. As a social media influencer, Aleksic is also intimately familiar with the internet's reach and how social media impacts the way we engage with one another. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know it. Our interactions, social norms, and habits--both online and in person--shift into something completely different.

As Aleksic uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape, he also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unexpected ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see unalive in English and desvivirse in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology. Algospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593804070?ic_referral=eM41ndgbrkFKSEn3bwBEP98XB33-6GEJOVMlzCKB1wkwM0EigURV-HSZAdD_2uYsagSkgck06HnvrtZLRqc88cNFacIXKDgHPnmYXGEc4Fp02oPuaOdG9xn_zd5hlYe3U0FJCVI

Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the "Etymology Nerd" to an audience of more than two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He's discussed online language on NPR and repeatedly contributed to The Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He's lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Aleksic is based in New York City, where he spends a lot of time scrolling TikTok for "research."

Aleksic is in conversation with Aidan Walker. Aidan Walker (@aidanetcetera) is a content creator and internet culture journalist whose work has been published with the BBC, Know Your Meme, and other outlets. 

Michael Ansara was on the front lines. In this fascinating memoir, he traces an arc of discovery: from the hope and moral clarity of the Civil Rights Movement to the ten-year struggle to end the war in Vietnam, with its sit-ins, marches, confrontations, and antiwar riots.

Ansara takes the reader into the minds of the activists detailing their successes as well as their mistakes. The Hard Work of Hope shows how he learned to become a more effective organizer and build the Massachusetts Fair Share organization. The book explores issues that remain urgent. How does a movement build support when large parts of the country are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree with you? How do you build organizations that unite across racial lines? How can we make progress on the unfinished business of the hard work of hope?

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781501782145?ic_referral=BY9hCHabIyAz89NHXx-lXE45bbAFB8tQqgWH7EmiC9MwM4q9EJYkrLRV-pE7g78Wk0iOw5iU4c7RfbJ-3vNdDu4fwAjusyVTY1Jw-Oik025EsOkIkqm_g5ZFONsnfN9czAbPSac

Michael Ansara has been a dedicated activist and organizer since the 1960s, starting with the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements. His poetry and essays have been featured in numerous journals.

Ansara is in conversation with Heather Booth, is one of the country's leading strategists about progressive issue campaigns and driving issues in elections. She started organizing in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and women's movements of the 1960s. She started JANE, an underground abortion service in 1965, before Roe. She was the founding Director and is now President of the Midwest Academy, training social change leaders and organizers. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the Training Director of the Democratic National Committee. Booth has been a consultant on many other issues and with many other organizations.  She is a member of the consulting firm Democracy Partners.

Grant's Enforcer offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Grant's attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations.

In 1871 Akerman and his allies brought the KKK to trial in South Carolina, choosing York County as their principal target. They believed that if they could break the Ku Klux in one small corner of the former Confederacy, they could break it everywhere. Within six months, the prosecutions and convictions in federal court of key Klan leaders and foot soldiers effectively eradicated the Klan for half a century.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Guy Gugliotta tells the story in real time through the voices of those who bravely resisted the Klan in York County and those who perpetrated its crimes, and through the fierce congressional debates in Washington, D.C., and Akerman's efforts to overcome infighting within the Grant administration. Grant's Enforcer rides with the Ku Klux on its way to a lynching, feels what it's like to be lied to, beaten, spat at, and betrayed by white neighbors you have known all your life, and exults with York's black citizens when the tormenters are finally brought to justice.

Gugliotta uses newspapers, documents, and first-person stories, including thousands of pages of testimony under oath taken by a Congressional joint committee tasked in 1871 to study the Ku Klux Klan, a breathtaking compilation of accounts by Ku Klux targets, their attackers, local and national politicians, public officials and private citizens. The result is a vivid portrait of the Reconstruction South through the career of this surprising man.

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780820373362?ic_referral=Ji_eMXGobbVrhCFCeYqsePgQ90P6jWcJ7FIcVKzx7ScwMwhLgpgetCr_vTtPi6aGCJddqrS0P4ZChIEGEhRIQk9nDDUgUD3O7SN0YBlSkLYxz5BCq6fsC133vlDB4EblvMmtFa0

Guy Gugliotta is a prizewinning journalist and author with a long career as a national reporter for the Washington Post and as a foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald. His book Freedom's Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War was awarded starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and named one of the year's best books by the Washington Post. He lives in New York City.

Charles Lane is a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and the author of three books. He is the former deputy opinion editor at the Washington Post and also spent time as a foreign correspondent for and editor of The New Republic; his action against a notorious journalistic fraud at that magazine became the subject of the acclaimed film "Shattered Glass."

Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. She was Alexander Hamilton's "saucy" sister-in-law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson's "charming coterie" of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time and place, and her astute eye and brilliant letters kept them well informed.

A woman of great influence in a time of influential women (Catherine the Great and Marie-Antoinette were contemporaries), Angelica was at the red-hot center of American history at its birth: in Boston, when General Burgoyne surrendered to the revolutionaries; in Newport, receiving French troops under the command of her soon-to-be dear friend Marquis de Lafayette; in Yorktown, just after the decisive battle; in Paris and London, helping to determine the standing of the new nation on the world stage.

She was born as Engeltje, a Dutch-speaking, slave-owning colonial girl who witnessed the Stamp Act riots in the Royal British Province of New York. She came of age under English rule as Angelica, the eldest daughter of the most important family on the northern part of Hudson's River, raised to be a domestic diplomat responsible for hosting indigenous chiefs and enemy British generals at dinner. She was Madame Church, wife of a privateer turned merchant banker, whose London house was a refuge for veterans of the American war fleeing the guillotine in France. Across nationalities, languages, and cultures, across the divides of war, grievance, and geography, Angelica wove a web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States

In this enthralling and revealing woman's-eye view of a revolutionary era, Molly Beer breathes vibrant new life into a period usually dominated by masculine themes and often dulled by familiarity. In telling Angelica's story, she illuminates how American women have always plied influence and networks for political ends, including the making of a new nation.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324050216?ic_referral=7XTF2UP-WsDfQ34VrDcpmJLQ3AmJXaV9eEi4LkC6abcwM_8QgxQKdmkrhdDsUNVhrtho-T2p2gbJznW0ptty-MNn42Bhm0YtZvKEKd3pVrlCljeeJF43EwmZxI4nDqTo4kqKLIc

Raised on a farm in the town of Angelica, New York, Molly Beer is an award-winning nonfiction writer interested in history, women, politics, and place. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

For the teenaged Luc, his days are preoccupied with the daily dramas of high school. President John F. Kennedy's assassination seems a world away. But the winds of history find their way to his small Montana town as marijuana clouds rise in the hallways and the notices of neighborhood young men "Killed in Action" in Vietnam keep arriving at an increasing rate.

Acclaimed novelist James Grady's American Sky brings to life the world of a young man who is caught in the nexus of vast social change. From blue-collar life in the heartland to Kent State and the Civil Rights movement, American Sky is a sweeping narrative that builds to a crime that threatens to tear Luc's world apart. Previously compared to Larry McMurtry, George Orwell, Harper Lee, and Bob Dylan, James Grady explores Bruce Springsteen's generation and has crafted an action-filled and timeless story destined to become a classic.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639369218?ic_referral=MPab76b16iQrCF2SnwBXYxxem6hAqbgdMpjQngx2Mf0wM74cnxZ6gHLGZflHRq4k-1n-ACoC2LH-313A-qfRQyS0Ai3cF4_th-vuKcCSpeHFbQ6vD7-tyy5NpF_bKwmOXL6ubuQ

James Grady's first novel Six Days Of The Condor became the classic Robert Redford movie Three Days Of The Condor and the current Max Irons TV series Condor. Grady has received Italy's Raymond Chandler Award, France's Grand Prix Du Roman Noir, Japan's Baka-Misu literature award, two Regardie's magazine short story awards, and been a Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist. He's published more than a dozen novels and three times that many short stories, been a muckraker journalist, and a scriptwriter for film and television. In 2008, London's Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of the "50 crime writers to read before you die." In 2015, The Washington Post compared his prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan.

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets--Moscow, Beijing, Tehran--while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance.

A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063270183?ic_referral=xiuF0o6DNGXMKxUDl8sbja4dyHKj3rtbWFDnooA_hIQwM1tOf-kaIsyTigUxtAD0w0OfcGU2mdIVCu6IDmZBvyezBc1oIUsiTdeYcj_LJtIeUxpuSuT_IJVnjrm3-t4PE09WGAU

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on American national security and the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. At the New York Times, he covered the CIA in Washington and conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other nations. Legacy of Ashes was acclaimed as one of the year's best books by The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, Time, and many other publications. His five other books include the national bestseller Enemies: A History of the FBI. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Kate Doyle, an expert in human rights and freedom of information.

Weiner is in conversation with Dana Priest. Dana is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at The Washington Post where she has worked on national security issues for more than three decades. She is also the Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and on the board of the Fauquier Times in Warrenton, Va. Dana worked with PBS FRONTLINE on “The Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus” in 2023, which won a George Polk Award and “The Facebook Dilemma” in 2018 which won a Peabody and Emmy Award. She also authored two best-selling books: Top Secret America: The Rise of the Security State in 2011 and The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military, which was a Pulitzer Finalist in Non-Fiction. 

In the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace and toppled Argentina's leader. The country was now under the control of a military junta, with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla at the helm. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from Argentina's people, who were tired of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta swiftly launched the National Reorganization Process or El Proceso--a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with "Western, Christian" values. The junta held power until 1983 and decimated a generation.

One of the military's most diabolical acts was disappearing hundreds of pregnant women. Patricia Roisinblit was among them, a mother and leftist revolutionary labeled "subversive" and abducted while eight months pregnant with her second child. She gave birth in captivity, making one last call to her mother, Rosa, before she was never heard from again. Her newborn son was one of hundreds of babies secretly given to other families, many of them headed by police or military officers. For Rosa and other mothers of pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, their grief was twofold--the disappearances of their children, and the theft of their grandchildren. A group of fierce grandmothers formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood is Rosa and the Abuelas' extraordinary story, told by a journalist with unique access. With authority and compassion, Haley Cohen Gilliland brings this tale to life, tracing the lives of young mother Patricia, grandmother Rosa, and stolen newborn, Guillermo. At a time when speaking out meant death, the Abuelas confronted military officers and launched protests to reach international diplomats and journalists. They became detectives, adopting disguises to see suspected grandchildren, and even working alongside an American scientist to pioneer groundbreaking genetics tests.

A compelling mystery and deeply researched account of a pivotal era in world history, A Flower Traveled in My Blood takes readers on a journey of love, resilience, and redemption, revealing new truths about memory, identity, and family.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668017142?ic_referral=yWzUQqmYGNWVuoTt8u3GMQZKOLezPQd-JuZ0zR-WtFQwM8FcwttLBYD51jqT5BTRlOUIHx-dvBkLw_6RNjaQg0VAY-KXydXSJ6r4NM5DlxaE-yxgET6G5Ak77iNvqMoqTR2-jEw

Haley Cohen Gilliland is a journalist and the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. She previously worked at The Economist for seven years , four of which were spent in Buenos Aires as the paper's Argentina correspondent. Following her time at The Economist, she has focused on narrative nonfiction--bringing history and current events to life through fact-based storytelling. She has published long-form feature articles in The New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, dogs, and two children. A Flower Traveled in My Blood is her first book.

Cohen Gilliland ise in conversation with Bradley Graham, co-ower of Politics & Prose Bookstore.

When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion, and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying and to attend her mother's funeral.

Now, with a poet's eye for detail and a novelist's flair for storytelling, Jill presents a profoundly moving elegy unlike any other. Starting with her mother's end and the physical/cognitive decline that led her to a care home, The End Is the Beginning explores Iris's battle with depression, the tragedy of a daughter's suicide, a failed second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband only five years into their young marriage, her joyful teenage years, and the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old. Compounding her challenges of raising four daughters without a livelihood or partner, Iris's life coincided with an age of unstoppable social change and reinvention, when the roles of wife and mother she was raised to inhabit ceased to be the guarantors of stability and happiness.

As we see Iris become younger and younger, we learn how we are all the sum of our experiences. Iris becomes a multi-dimensional, fascinating woman. We come to understand her difficulties and shortcomings, her neediness and her generosity, her pride and her despair. The End Is the Beginning is not just a family memoir, it is a brave and compassionate celebration of a woman's life and death and a window into a daughter's inextricable bond to her mother.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781451677928?ic_referral=JBDsW__H_OFkxXgFQpuQUuTjDQp-X9lV8GgkJO7H1mswMxX_s4Sl-p-VyjuKC5DGt6ktIKkq6tze_DsinA8azIu8CJljLBZpVLVucBPA4VxV_Sq9l9xPYPMttftHmrbUgHDsl3E

Jill Bialosky is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Asylum. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among others. She is the author of many novels including, The Deceptions, and several works of nonfiction including The End Is the Beginning, History of a Suicide, and Poetry Will Save Your Life. In 2015, Jill was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to the field of poetry. She lives in New York City. Find out more at JillBialosky.com.

Bialosky is in conversation with Marion Winik. Winik is the author of nine books, including The Big Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2019) and First Comes Love (Pantheon, 1996). Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere; her column at BaltimoreFishbowl.com has been running since 2011. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she reviews books for The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and People, among others, and hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader. She was a commentator on All Things Considered for fifteen years. She is the recipient of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Service Award.  

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593595091?ic_referral=P8fEUycnbAKfddmrcT-KINBkQHvd8-mx-stIDDrRysQwM6tT8xxUayID0bARxmCcAp0dT4AwHF_luIToRR7Xx6_LZpm5z7O9bUOrjhLMdJQsT7nB6y17LWeirEtUGlIc4yC9fpc

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was one of the The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year . His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller Our Country Friends. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Shteyngart is in conversation with Angie Kim, the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a GMA and B&N book club pick, Virginia Literary Award winner, Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023, and accordingly to Gary Shteyngart, is "what Dostoevsky might have written if he had been an American and also not a jerk". Her debut, Miracle Creek, was an Edgar winner and one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  

A revolution has been ignited in women's sports. Much like Tiger Woods's arrival on the golf scene, what Clark has brought to women's basketball is without precedent. Prior to entering the WNBA, she was the highest-scoring college basketball player--male or female--in NCAA Division I history, and her last college game with Iowa was the first women's national championship final to outdraw that of the men. In her rookie season as the WNBA's No. 1 pick, league sales are up nearly 100% and Clark's team, the Indiana Fever, has emerged as the WNBA's top-trending team with ticket sales more than ten times higher than last year, sold-out arenas coast to coast, and historic TV ratings.

Now, in On Her Game, we get an all-access pass to one of the most exciting and important young athletes our nation has produced. Drawing on extensive interviews and exclusive, behind-the-scenes reporting, national sports columnist Christine Brennan recounts the highlights of Clark's magnificent rookie year as the Fever star sets social media ablaze with her stunning must-see feats. A supremely confident performer, Clark has stayed serene amid the whirlwind of attention, simultaneously handling rival players eager to challenge her as well as nonstop questions from reporters about the many issues that have swirled around her and the WNBA.

If there was any doubt before, there is none now: the Clark phenomenon is proving that female athletes can garner as much media attention as their male counterparts-- and lucrative endorsement deals. Clark arrived as a sports and cultural icon fifty years after Title IX opened the floodgates for girls and women to play sports in America. Now, the historic interest she has received from journalists and fans of all ages is paving the way for female athletes across all sports for the next fifty years.

Christine Brennan is an award-winning national sports columnist for USA TODAY; a commentator for ABC News, CNN, and PBS NewsHour; a nationally known speaker; and the bestselling author of Inside Edge, named one of the top 100 sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated. She has been named one of the country's top 10 sports columnists multiple times by the Associated Press Sports Editors and has covered the last twenty-one Olympic Games, summer and winter.

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668090190?ic_referral=dGZUy64FP1biX8itxVbZZN4TzrH8R6V-sLYjZtu8TcMwMwn2YzcspbUB6tEDb7t_tmJomN6l9CGo3pEkTJjALFAWXMUu4uIPkQwnRUCoRZU3EoFiXXUF3ZXqHp7nrzmM2-H58iI