Politics and Prose Presents

Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world's dominant currency have echoed for decades--and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China's renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar's value to the point of irrelevancy.

Contra the doomsayers, Paul Blustein shows that the dollar's standing atop the world's currency pyramid is impregnable, barring catastrophic policy missteps by the US government. Recounting how the United States has wielded the dollar to impose devastating sanctions against adversaries, Blustein explains that although targets such as Russia have found ways to limit the damage, Washington's financial weaponry will retain potency long into the future. His message, however, is that America must not be complacent about the dollar; the great power that its supremacy confers comes with commensurate responsibility.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300270969?ic_referral=THUvAOR4SSoJ4tvQqNW4smMjm1R7hl9COZKRR4aWw3cwMzdn4t0GmZIPK9P_K4qTF1RAHF2-ksf9F9cRmtg8Ij_WP6iCmX04ijLmVRsqK7tpr4dTTTrelN2JVE8bSyJnSkO4dQ

Paul Blustein is the author of several critically acclaimed books about global economic affairs. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he spent much of his career as a reporter at the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. He lives in Kamakura, Japan.

*recorded 3/28/2025

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago--outside Dixie--was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.

In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people's struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who--despite his flaws--depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.

King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks's central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King's life and work--a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781620979310?ic_referral=x3xjh6kkbxPJTziN692VKFnfDCgoYQjOh9mB8SPA8j0wM6g6KYHWRMgGH_3pOd_UZRnk1nG1VAGOg-FOHDE1UpJb-3qAmXRrn6A5yAUTjVzz1kAfxDwOsYFqGHeNKm1TEVMf_w

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Her book has been adapted into a documentary of the same name, executive produced by Soledad O'Brien for Peacock where Theoharis served as a consulting producer. Her young adult adaptation with Brandy Colbert, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks for Young People, was included in the Best Books of 2021 by the Chicago Public Library and Kirkus Reviews. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction and was named one of the best Black history books of 2018 by Black Perspectives. Theoharis's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, Slate, The Atlantic, and many more. She is also the author of King of the North (The New Press) and lives in Brooklyn.

Theoharis is in conversation with Quito J. Swan. Swan is Professor of Africana Studies and History at The George Washington University. A public facing scholar of Black internationalism and the African Diaspora, he has single authored three books—Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism and the African World (New York University Press, 2022), Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) and Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Pasifika Black received the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s 2023 Best Book in African American History Award. Pauulu’s Diaspora won the African American Intellectual History Society’s 2022 Pauli Murray Book Prize.

*recorded 3/27/2025

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there - and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression.

In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back. They include a Uyghur family, separated as China detains hundreds of thousands of their fellow Uyghurs in camps; human rights lawyers fighting to defend civil liberties in the face of mammoth odds; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to make hard choices because of his support of his mother tongue; and a Hong Kong fugitive trying to find a new home and live in freedom.

Reporting despite the personal risks, journalist Emily Feng reveals dramatic human stories of resistance and survival in a country that is increasingly closing itself off to the world. Feng illustrates what it is like to run against the grain in China, and the myriad ways people are trying to survive, with dignity.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593594223?ic_referral=xD5CwU-U59psyWr8PnIbN3vjaTTwJIWuS7maSSJfCk0wM32ip4eSatDMvtA4vno5m67t0It9q-54b-qwWyvxcZPgQnaj2r5ArGEBEJcLj1wfzVZoUvM8M_st_RN4oImcgxGqvQ

Emily Feng is an award-winning international correspondent for NPR. She's a regular contributor to NPR podcasts and member stations and she is also a frequent guest on U.S. and BBC radio and television programs. Previously based in Beijing, China for NPR, she now lives in Taipei, Taiwan.

Feng is in conversation with Frank Langfitt. Langfitt is NPR's Roving National Correspondent, covering lesser-known stories, including those about democracy, economics, politics and culture, that illuminate a changing America.

*recorded 3/27/2025

In the Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress--for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life.

Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience tells the story of these musicians and athletes who have used their skills and their determination to achieve success in the face of discrimination. Jackson begins with pioneers such as James Reese Europe, who formed the first musicians' union and fought as a member of the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, and ends with giants of the twentieth century, such as Duke Ellington and Georgetown University basketball coaching legend John Thompson Jr.

Readers interested in the history of Washington, DC, the civil rights movement, racial justice, music, and sports will draw important lessons from these stories of the Black men and women who found in sports and music spaces to combat racial prejudice and bring people in the District of Columbia together.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781647125219?ic_referral=Cfgwx6xT87FjS3-OJEv8QztW4lLnVz6M7ZVdGzHLvx4wM6KYTukUphoDquVLJPn1HJXLvJoic20NR6kFNMM4CWFFGOMvuyjeNm1TZ3FxRrpMMvJQmcdrN2k9pcf5EwD-t8WgRpA

Maurice Jackson teaches Atlantic world and African American history at Georgetown University. He is author of Let This Voice Be Heard, and coeditor of African Americans and the Haitian Revolution and DC Jazz (Georgetown University Press, 2018). He was the inaugural chair of the Washington, DC, Commission on African American Affairs, appointed by the mayor.

*3/26/2025

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780802163622?ic_referral=GaNOr0NC82ettJNqkAeIJe8G0Vk4yyXvMBj43rOqMT8wM4HEwWmy5gLcyGv2OkD1lIW6rxl_TOr1McniCBGbt8URHuOTL4WWSHWbVLmGTVNOf1q8GkzVFhEdw_jV0mxpJu5Yng

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Harvey is in conversation with Jamie Quatro. Quatro is the author of Two-Step Devil, winner of the Willie Morries Award for Southern Fiction, and is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Review of Books and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Maison Dora Maar, and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

*recorded 3/26/2025

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only "We the Men". A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential scene setters have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, powerful Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.
Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality-and forgetting the work America still has to do-perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with powerful opponents.
America needs more conflict over women's status, rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still not won, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/product/we-men-how-forgetting-womens-struggles-equality-perpetuates-inequality-jill-elaine-hasday?v=344679&ic_referral=QGl7XoD0STQduVCt6IG4bgyE-bd0QotmFAfa6px6_jgwM87UkECH_YnlkL_dvLX9Xon8N-X1AaxjCDVRfwi7wdh20zdFmvoGXJjOLs51B_Q0H-JqPvbMXFQK-b4f6UsypsUK-g

Jill Elaine Hasday is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She teaches and writes about antidiscrimination law, constitutional law, family law, and legal history.

Hasday is in conversation with Michele Goodwin. Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy. She is the Co-Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Professor Goodwin previously was a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She was the Abraham Pinanski Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

*recorded 3/25/2025

From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians--a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell's mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and turned to prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and into the professional world of letters.

As the decades passed, Paul's connection to Mitchell's artistry only deepened. Joni's music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist's manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni's songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.

Song So Wild and Blue is a gorgeously written, beautifully intimate, and unique tribute to the woman who shaped generations of creators and thinkers. Lisicky offers his own coming-of-adulthood as testimony to the power of songwriting and staying true to your creative vision. A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063280373?ic_referral=e2QgcSGGhDwKvpvsTY6sqJoCeaaIcYI5IaOvf41k7iUwM6beKzbcTjJfEOf6dofDC2LlrPw7QguTYULKrY0hKOehpko3VqoZHY3-PCkeIOIS8SrlWHBKLEdsjHYQQewMxK9Xvw

Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books, including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, the New York Times, Ploughshares, and in many other publications. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Antioch University Los Angeles, Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently a Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Lisicky is in conversation with Martha Anne Toll. Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her next novel, Duet for One, will appear on May 6, with a launch at Politics & Prose. Toll is a recipient of numerous writing fellowships, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. Degree in Music, and her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. Degree from Boston University School of Law, and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice.

*recorded 3/24/2025

It's been ten years. In case you're out there somewhere. In case you're listening, I'm here. And I have so much to tell you.

It's been nearly ten years since Gabe's been gone when Lucy finds a tiny piece of paper in a box of his old photos. An address in Rome. Why did Gabe keep it, and what was he doing in Italy? Lucy buys a last-minute plane ticket. Impulsive, but Gabe always brought that out in her.

Lucy's jouney to uncover Gabe's secret leads her to Dr. Dax Amstrong, a New Yorker in Italy working with an NGO. His broad shoulders and sad, intense eyes draw Lucy in. His touch reaches her in a forgotten place--one that no one has neared since Gabe.

But her old life awaits, along with an earth-shattering decision--whether she and Darren should tell their son Samuel the truth about his father. How can Lucy move forward while she's rooted in the past? Fate broke her heart once. Can finding new love set her free?

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593419205?ic_referral=T4EPtQtHA2K9ADL-moSlFxnJxuXlRgEBpWrxD9DjFFowM6DJg76WhUzW8Vv428_wSaz5tZD9hNpsZgqQZ_hUT8i5AHOHDSMjMFyyzEEu8PThe2IpOUMc2vu79qHeX2aF6DZobA

Jill Santopolo is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Stars in an Italian Sky, More Than Words, Everything After, and The Light We Lost, which was also a Reese's Book Club pick. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and has appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Apple, Amazon, and Indiebound bestseller lists. She received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also the author of three successful children's and young-adult series and works as the publisher of Philomel Books. Santopolo travels the world to speak about writing and storytelling. She lives in New York City with her family.

Santopolo is in conversation with Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads NewsHour’s daily foreign coverage and has created weeklong series for the NewsHour from nearly a dozen countries. Prior to PBS NewsHour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America's Middle East correspondent. Schifrin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. 

*recorded 3/23/2025

As snappy as a dinner jacket's red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser's robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It's also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as with deft care Leithauser easily, often unexpectedly, juggles off-rhymes and old forms and new.

The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements. In the collection's two "Darker" sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-old's cry "I love you so loud" ("A Young Farewell") to a reckoning with words formed "Forty-Five Years On." Time presses in continually. In "Abroad" and "At Home," the author shows us himself, in younger form: sixty-six, then twenty-seven, catapulted back in memory to Tokyo by a single bite of food ("The Old Current"). Then, eight, and awed to remember the beauty of a lone jet overhead. With Updikean wordplay he recalls: "Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom. / Behind me, five lives: two parents plus the three / Brothers with whom I share my room" ("A Single Flight").

As Leithauser takes the measure of a world expanding behind him, he manages to become weightless, freer, wild again. He also refuses to give up second chances. In the "Lighter" interlude, we chance upon "Icarus and His Kid Brother." We're treated to dactyls and lively quatrains, a sloppy kiss that's not quite bliss, musings on sobriety, and what comes to pass when "life turns lickerish and liquory" ("Double Dactyls," "Six Quatrains," "The Muses," and "Kisses After Novocaine"). The energies yoked within Leithauser's formalism overflow formality.

Often elegiac and yet packed with humor, contemplative, consoling, and informed by the soul of a storyteller, Brad Leithauser's latest book of poetry is a warming, enrapturing read that returns us to the ebbs and flows of life's shores. "I'm sixty-six," the author writes, "and could anything / Reliably be more heartening / Than stray hints that life's brightest events. / Are, however far-flung, strung / Along a long old current?"

Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen previous books, most recently Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

*recorded 3/22/2025

It was one of history's great vanishing acts.

Around 3,400 BCE--as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements--a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia's mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then...the meaning of the characters was lost.

London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public's imagination. Yet Europe's best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.

Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668015445?ic_referral=s0XTgtxUSR_maI4Gu2uqkYjezJxRXpg-MzCoJzphhV8wM_vBxhA1RgoH3DdOplBYKRGiA8I6BM2NpYoEaloqFMrTqAf8IT7sdbPmqfCzvwX9I8Lq8HHohJlAOwjDQCON5tVXDw

Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and The Mesopotamian Riddle. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside. He lives in Berlin.

*recorded 3/22/2025