Search results for ""the new press""

A frightening but necessary assessment of the threat posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century, edited by the world's leading antinuclear activist

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A groundbreaking examination of how Latinos' new collective racial identity upends the way Americans understand race.

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An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly post-racial era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological conceptrevived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databasescontinues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly post-racial era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and provocative analysis (Nature) of race, science, and politics that is consistently lucid . . . alarmi

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A follow up to the groundbreaking Asian American comics anthology Secret Identities, this volume is bolder, darker and more breathtaking in scope.

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The culmination of extensive research into the history and meaning of America's origins, offering a celebration of the role of the people in the Founding Era.

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A stunning examination of how the United States became the incarceration capital of the world, from one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing policy, race, and the criminal justice systemIn this revised edition of his seminal book on race, class, and the criminal justice system, Marc Mauer, former executive director of one of the United States’ leading criminal justice reform organizations, offers the most up-to-date look available at three decades of prison expansion in America. Race to Incarcerate tells the tragic story of runaway growth in the number of prisons and jails and the overreliance on imprisonment to stem problems of economic and social development. Called “sober and nuanced” by Publishers Weekly, Race to Incarcerate documents the enormous financial and human toll of the “get tough” movement, and argues for more humane—and productive—alternatives.

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Two of our most celebrated intellectuals grapple with the uncertain aftermath of the American collapse in Afghanistan “Through the structure of a deeply engaging conversation between two of our most important contemporary public intellectuals, we are urged to defy the inattention of the media to the disastrous damage inflicted in Afghanistan on life, land, and resources in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal and the connections to the equally avoidable and unnecessary wars on Iraq and Libya.”—from the foreword by Angela Y. Davis Not since the last American troops left Vietnam have we faced such a sudden vacuum in our foreign policy—not only of authority, but also of explanations of what happened, and what the future holds. Few analysts are better poised to address this moment than Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, intellectuals and critics whose work spans generations and continents. Called “the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet” by the New York Times Book Review, Noam Chomsky is the guiding light of dissidents around the world. In The Withdrawal, Chomsky joins with noted scholar Vijay Prashad—who “helps to uncover the shining worlds hidden under official history and dominant media” (Eduardo Galeano)—to get at the roots of this unprecedented time of peril and change. Chomsky and Prashad interrogate key inflection points in America’s downward spiral: from the disastrous Iraq War to the failed Libyan intervention to the descent into chaos in Afghanistan. As the final moments of American power in Afghanistan fade from view, this crucial book argues that we must not take our eyes off the wreckage—and that we need, above all, an unsentimental view of the new world we must build together.

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A New York Timesbestselling author looks at mathematics education in Americawhen it's worthwhile, and when it's not. Why do we inflict a full menu of mathematicsalgebra, geometry, trigonometry, even calculuson all young Americans, regardless of their interests or aptitudes? While Andrew Hacker has been a professor of mathematics himself, and extols the glories of the subject, he also questions some widely held assumptions in this thought-provoking and practical-minded book. Does advanced math really broaden our minds? Is mastery of azimuths and asymptotes needed for success in most jobs? Should the entire Common Core syllabus be required of every student? Hacker worries that our nation's current frenzied emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from other pursuits and even subverting the spirit of the country. Here, he shows how mandating math for everyone prevents other talents from being developed and acts as an irrational barrier to graduation and care

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Powerful and important . . . an instant classic. The Washington Post Book WorldThe award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of sundown townsalmost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren''t welcomethat cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. Written with Loewen''s trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide

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Part of the ongoing series of photobooks published with the Arcus Foundation on queer communities around the world

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The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald TrumpA generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book.Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book ReviewWhen Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild''s ''

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A clarion call for new media to serve the public instead of corporate interests - and what's involved in this high stakes struggle.

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Patrick Chamoiseau first became known to the international literary world with Texaco, the vast and demanding novel that won France's prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1992. Less well known is the fact that Chamoiseau has written a number of extraordinary books about his childhood in Martinique. One of these, Creole Folktales, recreates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child. Folktales with a twist, fairy tales with attitude, these stories are told in a language as savory as the spicy food so lovingly evoked within these pages. The urchins, dowagers, ne'er-do-wells, and gluttons in these tales are filled with longing for the simple things in life: a full plate, a safe journey, a good night's sleep. But their world is haunted, and the material comforts we take for granted are the stuff of dreams for them, for there are always monsters waiting to snatch away their tasty bowl of stew—or even life itself. Some of these monsters are familiar: the wicked hag, the envious neighbor, the deceitful suitor, the devil who gobbles up unwary souls. Others may be surprising, and their casual appearance in these tales makes them all the more frightening—like an unexpected glimpse into a fun-house mirror. But in contrast to these folktales' more fantastic creations, the white plantation owner and the slave ship's captain remind us that these are stories of survival in a colonized land. A marvelous introduction to a world, both real and imaginary, that North Americans have ignored for far too long.

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An attractive new dual edition of two of Chomsky's most popular books on language.

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Tough Cases stands out as a genuine revelation. . . . Our most distinguished judges should follow the lead of this groundbreaking volume.Justin Driver, The Washington PostA rare and illuminating view of how judges decide dramatic legal casesLaw and Order from behind the benchincluding the Elián González, Terri Schiavo, and Scooter Libby cases Prosecutors and defense attorneys have it easyall they have to do is to present the evidence and make arguments. It''s the judges who have the heavy lift: they are the ones who have to make the ultimate decisions, many of which have profound consequences on the lives of the people standing in front of them. In Tough Cases, judges from different kinds of courts in different parts of the country write about the case that proved most difficult for them to decide. Some of these cases received international attention: the Elián González case in which Judge Jennifer Bailey had to decide whethe

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Former Boko Haram captives tell their terrifying and heartbreaking stories to a leading European journalist

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Now a film from Netflix India, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in a changing society through a love triangle between a brother, sister, and their family’s lodger Recently adapted into a stunning Netflix film, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the family’s lives. Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them.

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“A gripping, suspenseful page-turner” (Kirkus Reviews) with a “fast-paced, detailed narrative that moves like a thriller” (International Business Times), Fukushima teams two leading experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum and Edwin Lyman, with award-winning journalist Susan Q. Stranahan to give us the first definitive account of the 2011 disaster that led to the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl. Four years have passed since the day the world watched in horror as an earthquake large enough to shift the Earth’s axis by several inches sent a massive tsunami toward the Japanese coast and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the reactors’ safety systems to fail and explosions to reduce concrete and steel buildings to rubble. Even as the consequences of the 2011 disaster continue to exact their terrible price on the people of Japan and on the world, Fukushima addresses the grim questions at the heart of the nuclear debate: could a similar catastrophe happen again, and—most important of all—how can such a crisis be averted?

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The collapse of Syria into civil war over the past two years has spawned a regional crisis whose reverberations grow louder with each passing month. In this timely account, John McHugo seeks to contextualize the headlines, providing broad historical perspective and a richly layered analysis of a country few in the United States know or understand. McHugo charts the history of Syria from World War I to the tumultuous present, examining the country’s thwarted attempts at independence, the French policies that sowed the seeds of internal strife, and the fragility of its foundations as a nation. He then turns to more recent events: religious and sectarian tensions that have riven Syria, the pressures of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and two generations of rule by the Assads. The result is a fresh and rigorous narrative that explains both the creation and unraveling of the current regime and the roots of the broader Middle East conflict. As the Syrian civil war threatens to draw the U.S. military once again into the Middle East, here is a rare and authoritative guide to a complex nation that demands our attention.

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Imagine if you felt out of step with every other member of the parent association at your kid’s school, your quilting circle, or even your workout group. What if casual conversations revolved around Fox News and the decline of American values? How would you feel if you were afraid to put a political bumper sticker on your car or had to think twice about what liberal posts you liked on Facebook? These are just some of the experiences shared by liberals across twenty states and five time zones who tell their stories with honesty, warmth, and humor. Most of us have to “talk across the aisle” once or twice a year—when we’re seated next to our conservative out-of-town uncle at Thanksgiving, say. But millions of self- identified liberals live in cities and towns—particularly away from the East and West Coasts—where they are regularly outnumbered and outvoted by conservatives. In this uplifting and completely original book, Justin Krebs, the founder of the national Living Liberally network, speaks with and tells the stories of atheists, vegetarians, environmentalists, pacifists, and old-fashioned liberals—a term he is intent on rehabilitating—from Texas to Idaho, South Carolina to Alaska. Krebs weaves these stories together to create a provocative and rollicking taxonomy of strategies for living in a diverse society, with lessons for every participant in our great democratic experiment.

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