Aarathi Prasad’s entertaining and enlightening history of silk brims with story and scientific detail, revealing a surprising history well worth knowing.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s passionate and compelling The Black Box documents the ways in which American writers have illustrated the rich diversity of the Black experience.
Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.
In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Laron crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
In 1911, 12 Black men were delivered to the forest in rural Maryland and began building their new residence, the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. During its near century of existence, the hospital (re-named Crownsville) held patients in prisonlike conditions without offering them adequate medical attention, food, space or safety. In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, Emmy-winning journalist Antonia Hylton summoned extensive archival research and conducted dozens of interviews with former patients and staff, as well as their descendants, to offer an unsparing reckoning with history.
Benjamin Breen’s smart, entertaining Tripping on Utopia brings the history of psychedelic science vividly to life.
In the meticulously researched and enlightening American Patriots, Ralph Young illustrates the crucial role of dissent in our democracy.
Deborah G. Plant’s indictment of America’s criminal justice system, Of Greed and Glory, has the power of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.
Benjamin E. Park’s absorbing history of Mormonism, American Zion, effectively argues that the faith’s evolution mirrors the struggle of American society.
Marcia A. Zug’s You’ll Do is an illuminating and informative cultural history of marriage.
With intellectual rigor and contagious enthusiasm, Natalie Haynes urges readers to take a more enlightened look at Greek goddesses.
Elizabeth R. Varon’s commanding biography of James Longstreet charts the Confederate general’s reinvention as a passionate advocate of Reconstruction.
Peter Englund’s November 1942 chronicles World War II through the lives of 39 people in a single month, creating a significant contribution to our understanding of war.
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