Selected New Books in Ekstrom Library: April 2018

The Black Arts Movement (1965-76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers examines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers demonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields.

Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world's most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of racial harmony, to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression--including the economic injustice that "takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes." Phase one of King's agenda led to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But King also questioned what good it does a man to "eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?" In phase two of his activism, King organized poor people and demonstrated for union rights, while also seeking a "moral revolution" to replace the self-seeking individualism of the rich along with an overriding concern for the common good. "Either we go up together or we go down together," King cautioned, a message just as urgent in America today as then. To the Promised Land challenges us to think about what it would mean to truly fulfill King's legacy and move toward his vision of "the Promised Land" in our own time.

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass rose to become one of the nation's foremost intellectuals--a statesman, author, lecturer, and scholar who helped lead the fight against slavery and racial oppression. Unlike other leading abolitionists, however, Douglass embraced the U.S. Constitution, insisting that it was an essentially anti-slavery document and that its guarantees for individual rights belonged to all Americans, of whatever race. Douglass spoke in his most popular lecture, "Self-Made Men," of people who rise through their own effort and devotion rather than circumstances of privilege. "If they have traveled far, they have made the road on which they have travelled. If they have ascended high, they have built their own ladder." In this fast-paced biography, lawyer and author Timothy Sandefur examines the life and ideas of the nation's foremost "self-made man"--from his horrific experiences in slavery and his heroic escape to his eloquent demands for equal treatment by the federal government and his later career as statesman and intellectual. Throughout it all Douglass was guided by his belief in the sanctity of the individual. "There is no Negro problem," Douglass insisted. "The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution." Led by his dream of an America where all people would be free to make the most of themselves without hindrance, Douglass ultimately transformed the United States. As the nation pauses to remember Douglass on his bicentennial, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man gives us an insightful glimpse into the mind of one of America's greatest thinkers.

Martin Luther King Jr today is an uncontroversial figure, and we tend to see him as a saint whose legacy is entirely uncomplicated. But in 1968, King was a polarizing figure, and his assassination was met with uncomfortably mixed reactions. At the time of his death, King was scorned by many white Americans, worshiped by a segment of African Americans and liberal whites, deemed irrelevant by the younger generation of African Americans, and beloved overseas. He was a hero to many. But to some, he was part of an old guard that was no longer relevant, and to others he was nothing more than a troublemaker and a threat to the Southern way of life. In The Heavens Might Crack, historian Jason Sokol traces the diverse range of reactions to King's death, exploring how Americans - as well as others across the globe--experienced King's assassination, in the days, weeks, and months afterward. He looks at everything from rioting in inner cities to turbulence in Germany, from celebrations in many parts of the South to the growing gun control movement. Across all these responses, we see one clear trend: with King gone and the cities exploding, it felt like a gear in the machinery of the universe had shifted. Just a few years prior, with the enactment of landmark civil rights laws, interracial harmony appeared conceivable; peaceful progress toward civil rights even seemed probable. In an instant, such optimism had vanished. For many, King's death extinguished that final flicker of hope for a multiracial America. With that hope gone, King's assassination would have an indelible impact on American sentiments about race, and the civil rights landscape. The Heavens Might Crack is a deeply empathetic portrait of country grappling with the death of a complicated man. By highlighting how this moment was perceived across the nation, Sokol reveals the enduring consequences King's assassination had for the shape of his own legacy, the course of the Civil Rights Movement, and race relations in America.

This much-needed book will help schools, and by extension society, better understand and identify the promise, potential, and possibilities of Black boys. Drawing from their wealth of experience in early childhood education, the authors present an assest- and strengths-based view of educating young African American males. This positive approach enables practitioners and school leaders to recognize, understand, and cultivate the diversity of social skills of African American boys in the early grades (pre-K - 3rd grade). Each chapter begins with a vignette to illustrate what is lost when African American boys are preventd from participating freely in boyhood, having to instead attend to adult and peer interactions and attitudes that view them as "bad boys" and "troublemakers." This accessible book provides teachers with classsroom strategies to help young African American boys achieve their highest potential, along with other resources for supporting their social-emotional development, such as a reading list of authentic, multicultural children's books with Black boys as protagonist.

Winner of the 2017 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections. As Sherod Santos wrote when selecting the book for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, "These are not the journeys of a tourist, but of a wandering solitaire whose purpose is not to maintain a travelogue, but to lose herself in the otherness of her surroundings." Doubt is itself a driving force here, an engine of both questing and questioning. As exact as Anderson's eye is, her poems draw energy from ambiguity as she renders interior and exterior landscapes--foreign and domestic, lovely and littered, familiar and strange.

Many voices, including perhaps that of God, can be heard in the title poem of Stephen Bluestone's The Painted Clock, a dramatic meditation on the journey to Treblinka, the death camp itself, and the ultimate destination within the camp, the death chamber. Within the camp, history comes to an end and Nature as we know it is abolished. Using Treblinka as a setting, Bluestone examines man's relationship with God. Having granted man the power of moral choice, can God, too, become a victim of the Holocaust? The title poem of this volume is a powerful exploration of the covenant, if any, between the Creator and the created. As Michael Waters has written: ""'To pray is to go in all directions at once,' Stephen Bluestone acknowledges, and in poems that are prayerful and therefore formidably allusive, historical, and ambitious in their formalities, the poet relates 'stupendous tales...begging to be told.'"" There are poems in this volume in which Lorca, Tolstoy, Kerouac, and Rilke's angelic orders hover over its pages. The title poem of The Painted Clock stands in the tradition of Elie Wiesel and the Book of Psalms while recalling Paul Celan in its attempt to comprehend the Holocaust: 'Ashes, ashes, ashes, ashes, ashes, / the more we seek to know, the less we learn."" In a reflection on the muses Bluestone adds that ""I still can't say exactly what they do."" But in poem after poem, Bluestone manages to keep their company and learn what they have to teach. Offering consolation through a modest but persistent faith, the author of The Painted Clock struggles to name the light and darkness suffusing the world.

How can one reconcile the irreconcilable? In this masterful companion to Day Unto Day, Martha Collins finds common ground between contradictions--beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. Like its predecessor, the daybook of Night Unto Night begins with time. Its six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years, bring together the natural and the all-too-human. Red-winged blackbirds and the death of a friend. The green leaves of a maple tree and drones overseas. A February spent in Italy and the persistence of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dissonance is a permanent state, Collins suggests, something to be occupied rather than solved. And so this collection approaches its transcendence in the space between these seeming contrasts--and in the space between stanzas, sequences, days, and months. These poems are powerfully alive, speaking to and revising each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end. We are doomed to repeat mistakes, seasons, wars, words. Yet redemption beckons, too, in the persistence of empathy and love.

In urgent new poems, Mitchell L. H. Douglas depicts the assault on people of color in America's increasingly divided Heartland. A devotee of American popular culture, from rock 'n' roll to Star Wars to Marvel comic books, Douglas now wonders whether we will withstand its most odious, self-destructive elements in this searing collection.

Love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. The journey from girl to womanhood is brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters. These are the memories that haunt the dreams of what was and what could have been in Girl with Death Mask. In four rich and imaginative movements of poems, Jennifer Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl and then mother coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions and protect the next generation of women with a fierceness she must find within. Givhan exploits changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world. Girl with Death Mask is a cathartic and gripping confession of the trials of adolescence and womanhood.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger's identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill. Carol Adams's Burger is a fast-paced and eclectic exploration of the history, business, cultural dynamics, and gender politics of the ordinary hamburger. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

In his book, former FBI director James Comey shares his never-before-told experiences from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career in the past two decades of American government, exploring what good, ethical leadership looks like, and how it drives sound decisions. His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader. Mr. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama. He previously served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. deputy attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush. From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administration's policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history.

Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley are forced to confront the past as they try to solve a crime that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of a quiet, historic medieval town in England The cozy, bucolic town of Ludlow is stunned when one of its most revered and respected citizens--Ian Druitt, the local deacon--is accused of a serious crime. Then, while in police custody, Ian is found dead. Did he kill himself? Or was he murdered? When Barbara Havers is sent to Ludlow to investigate the chain of events that led to Ian's death, all the evidence points to suicide. But Barbara can't shake the feeling that she's missing something. She decides to take a closer look at the seemingly ordinary inhabitants of Ludlow--mainly elderly retirees and college students--and discovers that almost everyone in town has something to hide. A masterful work of suspense, The Punishment She Deserves sets Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Inspector Thomas Lynley against one of their most intricate cases. Fans of the longtime series will love the many characters from Elizabeth George's previous novels who join Lynley and Havers, and readers new to the series will quickly see why she is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of our time. Both a page-turner and a deeply complex story about the lies we tell, the lies we believe, and the redemption we need, this novel will be remembered as one of George's best.

From entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America, an eye-opening look at how new technologies are erasing millions of jobs before our eyes-and a rallying cry for the urgent steps America must take, including Universal Basic Income, to stabilize our economy. The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future--now. One recent estimate predicts 45 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next twelve years--jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant. The consequences of these trends are already being felt across our communities in the form of political unrest, drug use, and other social ills. The future looks dire-but is it unavoidable? In The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future -- one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism."

Donald Trump took office in January 2017 under mostly favorable conditions. He inherited neither a war nor an economic depression, and his party controlled both houses of Congress. He leveraged this successfully in some ways by delivering on his campaign promises to roll back regulations on business, and he saw his nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, approved swiftly and with little controversy. Many more actions, however, have been perceived as failures or even threats to a safe, functional democracy, from immigration policies defied by state and local governments and volatile dealings with North Korea to unsuccessful attempts to pass major legislation and the inability to fill government positions or maintain consistent White House staff. In Trump's First Year, Michael Nelson, one of our finest and most objective presidential scholars, provides a thorough account and scholarly assessment of Donald Trump's first year as president, starting with his election and transition in 2016. The analysis is grounded in the modern history of the presidency as well as in the larger constitutional and political order. Nelson considers the dramatic election itself, the forming and reforming of the administration, congressional relations, executive actions, bureaucratic politics, judicial appointments and decisions, media relations and public communications, and public opinion. Published on the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration, Nelson's book offers the most complete and up-to-date assessment of this still-unfolding story. Miller Center Studies on the Presidency

I Am Enough is the picture book everyone needs, and it's now a New York Times bestseller! This is a gorgeous, lyrical ode to loving who you are, respecting others, and being kind to one another--from Empire actor and activist Grace Byers and talented newcomer artist Keturah A. Bobo. This is the perfect gift for mothers and daughters, baby showers, and graduation. We are all here for a purpose. We are more than enough. We just need to believe it.

From New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz comes a debut picture book about the magic of memory and the infinite power of the imagination.   Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else. Hers was a school of faraway places.   So when Lola's teacher asks the students to draw a picture of where their families immigrated from, all the kids are excited. Except Lola. She can't remember The Island--she left when she was just a baby. But with the help of her family and friends, and their memories--joyous, fantastical, heartbreaking, and frightening--Lola's imagination takes her on an extraordinary journey back to The Island.  As she draws closer to the heart of her family's story, Lola comes to understand the truth of her abuela's words: "Just because you don't remember a place doesn't mean it's not in you."   Gloriously illustrated and lyrically written, Islandborn is a celebration of creativity, diversity, and our imagination's boundless ability to connect us--to our families, to our past and to ourselves.

Natsumi is small but full of big exuberance, and puts her girl-power to good use when she discovers a Japanese tradition as energetic as she is. When Natsumi's family practices for their town's Japanese arts festival, Natsumi tries everything. But her stirring is way too vigorous for the tea ceremony, her dancing is just too imaginative, and flower arranging doesn't go any better. Can she find just the right way to put her exuberance to good use? This heartwarming tale about being true to yourself is perfect for readers who march to their own beat.

Children riding the school bus learn from their driver, Nimoshom ("my grandfather"), who speaks to them in their own language--Cree. Nimoshom and His Busis a welcoming, simple story with inviting illustrations.

When the Creator gave the Cherokee people a beautiful island with everything they could ever need, it came with only one rule - to take care of the land and the animals living there. But, what happens when the children decide to play instead of taking care of their responsibilities? The Land of the Great Turtles is a colorful and fun retelling of a well-known Cherokee story, meant to be read aloud - to continue the age-old tradition of sharing between generations.

"Many people seek help because they feel dragged down by a sense of inner deadness that persists in an otherwise full and meaningful life. These individuals who seem filled with emotions somehow remain untouched by even their own inner experiences. This is a deadness that persists in the midst of plenty, a deadness that can cripple their entire life or part of it." "This book portrays attempts to fathom psychic deadness, but more important, it shows what is involved in enduring and working with deadness on a day-to-day, session-by-session basis. Often, the therapy relationship becomes a laboratory in which varying states of deadness-aliveness can be tied to what is going on between patient and therapist, as well as in the patient's life. In many cases, according to Eigen, the emotional tone of the therapy can be the most important element. Patient and therapist work to discover what the patient is looking for, that is, the precise combination of psychic nutrients, responses, attitudes, and tones required for a given individual, or even a given moment, so that a person can begin to open, and the deadness can lift."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Bring the War Home is a tour de force. An utterly engrossing and piercingly argued history that tracks how the seismic aftershocks of the Vietnam War gave rise to a white power movement whose toxic admixture of violent bigotry, antigovernmental hostility, and racial terrorism helped set the stage for Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and, yes, the presidency of Donald Trump."--Junot Díaz The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out--with military precision--an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Returning to an America ripped apart by a war that, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and giving birth to future recruits. Belew's disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.

A bestselling economist tells us what both politicians and economists must learn to fix America's failing economic policies American economic policy ranks as something between bad and disgraceful. As leading economist Alan S. Blinder argues, a crucial cultural divide separates economic and political civilizations. Economists and politicians often talk--and act--at cross purposes: politicians typically seek economists' "advice" only to support preconceived notions, not to learn what economists actually know or believe. Politicians naturally worry about keeping constituents happy and winning elections. Some are devoted to an ideology. Economists sometimes overlook the real human costs of what may seem to be the obviously best policy--to a calculating machine. In Advice and Dissent, Blinder shows how both sides can shrink the yawning gap between good politics and good economics and encourage the hardheaded but softhearted policies our country so desperately needs.

As the world becomes more navigable, opportunities arise for people to live in different countries and for students to study internationally. Such capabilities require universities and other institutions of higher learning to accommodate cultural diversity. Promoting Ethnic Diversity and Multiculturalism in Higher Education is an essential scholarly publication that examines the interaction between culture and learning in academic environments and the efforts to mediate it through various educational venues. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including intercultural competence, microaggressions, and student diversity, this book is geared towards educators, professionals, school administrators, researchers, and practitioners in the field of education.

This book narrates the development of science, sci/tech, and intelligence information systems and technologies in the United States from the beginning of World War II to the second decade of our century. The story ranges from a description of the information systems and machines of the 1940s created at Wild Bill Donovan's predecessors of the Central Intelligence Agency, to the rise of a huge international science information industry, and to the 1990's Open Access-Open Culture reformers' reactions to the commercialization of science information. Necessarily, there is much about the people, cultures, and politics that shaped the methods, systems, machines and protests. The reason for that is simple: The histories of technologies and methods are human histories. Science information's many lives were shaped by idiosyncrasies and chance, as well as by social, economic, political and technical 'forces'. The varied motives, personalities and beliefs of unique and extraordinary people fashioned science information's past. The important players ranged from a gentleman scholar who led the Office of Strategic Services' information work, to an ill-fated Hollywood movie director, to life-mavericks like the science information legend Eugene Garfield, to international financial wheeler-dealers such as Robert Maxwell, and to youthful ultra-liberal ideologically-driven Silicon Valley internet millionaires. However, although there are no determining laws of information history, social, political, legal and economic factors were important. After 1940, science information's tools and policies, as well as America's universities, were being molded by the nation's wealth, its role in international affairs, the stand-off between left and right politics, and by the intensifying conflict between Soviet and Western interests.

National Book Award-winning poet and author of the internationally best-sellingIron John, Robert Bly revisits a selection of fairy tales and examines how these enduring narratives capture the essence of human nature. Few forms of storytelling have greater power to captivate the human mind than fairy tales, but where do these tales originate from, and what do they mean? Celebrated poet and bestselling author Robert Bly has been asking these questions throughout his career. Here Bly looks at six tales that have stood the test of time and have captivated the poet for decades, from "The Six Swans" to "The Frog Prince." Drawing on his own creative genius, and the work of a range of thinkers from Kirkegaard and Yeats to Freud and Jung, Bly turns these stories over in his mind to bring new meaning and illumination to these timeless tales. Along with illustrations of each story, the book features some of Bly's unpublished poetry, which peppers his lyric prose and offers a look inside the mind of an American master of letters in the twilight of his singular career.

Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region's relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of "scale" that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom's journey, explicating the novel's significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway characters' landing points; nineteenth-century French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Dutch colonizers and Filipino nationalists in Southeast Asia; Eastern European Cold War communists; Muslim readers and spectators in the Middle East; Brazilian television audiences; and twentieth-century German holidaymakers. Throughout these encounters, Stowe's story of American slavery serves as a paradigm for understanding oppression, selectively and strategically refracting the African American slave onto other iconic victims and freedom fighters. The book brings together performance historians, literary critics, and media theorists to demonstrate how the myriad cultural and political effects of Stowe's enduring story has transformed it into a global metanarrative with national, regional, and local specificity.

The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work. These ten women--Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm--are united by what Dean calls "sharpness," the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.

When Galileo dropped cannon-balls from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he did more than overturn centuries of scientific orthodoxy. At a stroke, he established a new conception of the scientific method based upon careful experimentation and rigorous observation - and also laid the groundwork for an ongoing conflict between the critical open-mindedness of science and the recalcitrant dogmatism of religion that would continue to the modern day. The problem is that Galileo never performed his most celebrated experiment in Pisa. In fact, he rarely conducted any experiments at all. The Church publicly celebrated his work, and Galileo enjoyed patronage from the great and the powerful; his ecclesiastical difficulties only began when disgruntled colleagues launched a campaign to discredit their academic rival. But what does this tell us about modern science if its own foundation myth turns out to be nothing more than political propaganda? Getting Science Wrong discusses some of the most popular misconceptions about science, and their continuing role in the public imagination. Drawing upon the history and philosophy of science it challenges wide-spread assumptions and misunderstandings, from creationism and climate change to the use of statistics and computer modelling. The result is an engaging introduction to contentious issues in the philosophy of science and a new way of looking at the role of science in society.