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Nonfiction

Migration ID
136

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

Dorian
Lynskey

As Dorian Lynskey writes, "People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia." In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.

Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith

Phil
Hanley

When Phil Hanley was in first grade, he realized something that would forever set him apart from his peers: he couldn't read. His teachers were ill-equipped to assist him, and he slipped through the school's cracks, year by year falling further and further behind his friends. Finally, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that would shape the rest of his life.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Eve L.
Ewing

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour-de-force makes it clear that the opposite is true- the educational system has played an instrumental role in creating racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. 

A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19

Edna
Bonhomme

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme's examination of humanity's disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease. Based on in-depth research and cultural analysis, Bonhomme explores Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 amidst the backdrop of unequal public policy.

Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America

Will
Bardenwerper

A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what's right and wrong with modern America-written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark in Batavia, New York.

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence

Zeinab
Badawi

For too long, Africa's history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Eve L.
Ewing

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

Poverty, by America

Matthew
Desmond

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author reimagines the debate on poverty, making a "provocative and compelling" (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The Asking: New and Selected Poems

Jane Hirshfield,
read by the author

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that

Aflame: Learning From Silence

Pico Iyer,
read by the author

Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.