There is currently a big blow-up in social media circles about Barnes and Noble cutting back on the new hardcover books they plan to stock—adult, YA and kids—to focus more on proven top bestselling authors, a move that seriously impacts new writers and especially marginal voices. I think the reality is a bit less dire than the reactions online, speaking as someone who worked for Barnes and Noble for 16 years up until 2016, and knows the delicate dance between what corporate buyers send to the stores versus the freedom individual stores have to order titles on their own. Still, at this point Barnes and Noble’s new policy of focusing on top hardcovers at the expense of emerging authors is problematic, especially for under-represented voices. You can read about it HERE. I’ll have to look into it all a bit more deeply, but here is some of the reaction on Twitter:
Here’s the list of notable nonfiction debuting today:
Yes, Jared Kushner’s memoir is out this week. Read the hilarious review by Dwight Garner in the New York Times (the NYT link should be free to all):
- We've Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible, by Beto O’Rourke. Texas gubernatorial candidate O’Rourke shines a spotlight on the heroic life and work of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the west Texas town where he made his stand. The son of an enslaved man, Nixon grew up in the Confederate stronghold of Marshall, Texas before moving to El Paso, becoming a civil rights leader, and helping to win one of the most significant civil and voting rights victories in American history: the defeat of the all-white primary. His fight for the ballot spanned 20 years and twice took him to the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Electable: Why America Hasn't Put a Woman in the White House . . . Yet, by Ali Vitale. The former MSNBC “Road Warrior” and now NBC Capitol Hill correspondent, who covered the 2020 campaign trail every step of the way—investigates the gendered double standards placed on women presidential candidates of that cycle and those who came before, and what it will take for a woman to finally break the glass ceiling and win the White House.
- Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, by Dan Bouk. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy’s Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today.
- Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, by Brad Snyder. The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter—Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice—is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court’s principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true. A pro-government, pro-civil rights liberal who rejected shifting political labels, Frankfurter advocated for judicial restraint—he believed that people should seek change not from the courts but through the democratic political process.
- The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now, by Anya Kamenetz. The onset of COVID broke a 150-year social contract between America and its children. Tens of millions of students lost what little support they had from the government—not just school but food, heat, and physical and emotional safety. The cost was enormous. But this crisis began much earlier than 2020. In The Stolen Year, Anya Kamenetz exposes a long-running indifference to the plight of children and families in American life and calls for a reckoning.
- Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, by Gary Weiss. A biography of the spectacular rise and fall of Eddie Antar, better known as "Crazy Eddie," whose home electronics empire based in New York City crystallized the vibe of 1970s NYC, changed retailing, and ended up being one of the biggest business scams of all time, still taught in business schools today. I was gonna offer a 20% sale on the book on Twitter, using that iconic “His Prices Are Insaaaaaane!” tagline from his famous TV commercials, but then I saw the author’s Twitter feed is a right-wing sewer, and changed my mind.
- Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII, by Lauren Young. A timely, riveting book that reveals how, in the 1930s, authoritarianism nearly took hold in Great Britain as it did in Italy and Germany. Drawing on recently declassified intelligence files, Lauren Young details the pervasiveness of Nazi sympathies among the British aristocracy, as significant factions of the upper class methodically pursued an actively pro-German agenda. She reveals how these aristocrats formed a murky Fifth Column to Nazi Germany, which depended on the complacence and complicity of the English to topple its proud and long-standing democratic tradition—and very nearly succeeded.
- A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955, by Ronald H. Spector. The end of World War II led to the United States’ emergence as a global superpower. For war-ravaged Western Europe it marked the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and prosperity that one historian has labeled “the long peace.” Yet half a world away, in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, and Malaya—the fighting never really stopped, as these regions sought to completely sever the yoke of imperialism and colonialism with all-too-violent consequences. Far from being simply offshoots of the Cold War, as they have often been portrayed, these shockingly violent conflicts forever changed the shape of Asia, and the world as we know it today.
- Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II, by Catherine Musemeche. This book weaves together science, biography, and military history in the compelling story of an unsung woman who had a dramatic effect on the U.S. Navy’s success against Japan in WWII, creating an intelligence-gathering juggernaut based on the new science of oceanography.
- Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, by Gaia Vince. In this deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.
- Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, by Andrew Nagorski. A dramatic true story about Sigmund Freud’s last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and the group of friends who made it possible. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger. But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon’s great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud’s devoted youngest daughter Anna, and his personal doctor.
- Eliot After "The Waste Land", by Robert Crawford. After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After “The Waste Land”, the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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